Product Behavior

Writing last week’s piece about experience got me started thinking about what you can actually build into a product. Products can obviously have Creation Experience - that is, they can come about in an interesting way, and when you buy one, you get to own a piece of that story, tell your friends about it, etc. But can products come with other sorts of stories, like a 3rd Party Experience?

A few years ago, I went out into the world to ask people about the stuff in their kitchens. At one point, sorting through a drawer of silverware, one interviewee came out with two soup spoons, with blue-and-yellow-polka-dotted handles. “I love these spoons. I got them in France and I love them.” Then she moved on to something else.

When we buy something, what are we buying? Are we having an experience? Acquiring someone else’s experience?

Designers like making models - “prototyping” - to judge aspects of a product they’re working on. At Continuum, we have a huge model shop, with several full-time model makers, and pretty much everyone in the company spends time down there at some point carving up a block of foam or hot-gluing some foamcore together to [...]

We like to talk about “the brief” as those instructions we get from a client that tell us what we’re designing: its value to the consumer, what features it needs to be successful, whatever regulatory constraints we’ll be working under, etc. But the reality is we rarely, if ever, get anything so neatly packaged, and more often than not, we don’t really get any real direction at all beyond a generic description of the product.

“The Story of the Product,” a simple tool I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, can be easily altered to help understand and support the issues around a product’s Archetype. Recall the Star, the Hero, and the Genius - your product can be one but can’t be all of them. So use Stories customized [...]