Product Behavior

Another simple tool to help calibrate a project team, or elicit interesting information from a consumer: personification.

It couldn’t be more simple. Just ask something like: if this product were a famous actor, who would it be? Pick a product and ask a few people - I guarantee you’ll get interesting responses.

Sometimes, a feature that may never be used is given the “Primary Feature” treatment. Doing this changes the consumer’s perception of the product, on the shelf or in use.

Here’s a tool that we use often both to analyze and plan consumer experience. I’ll talk about it here as a piece of a product design process, but we use it for service design, retail design, even to plan a business model.

What job is your product interviewing for?
The metaphor of the job applicant is powerful and simple to understand. I use it often when working with clients to align the features of a product with the aspirations of the consumer. I first ran across it in The Innovators Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen, and it fits completely [...]

I’ve spent the last few days working on a presentation I’ll be giving at a conference in a few days.
I’ll be speaking about “Resonance,” a design process we use for the development of everything from blenders to businesses. I’m glad to be able to present it, in part because it’s required me to boil the process down to its essence and make a real story out of it.

The gist is this: wait.