Product Behavior

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]