Product Behavior

I’ve been talking to a friend who’s thinking of launching a startup. One of things he’s considering is how to adapt the principles of the “triple bottom line.” The ideas is that the company is beholden to stockholders, but also other stakeholders, and that it will pay attention to performance not only economically, but also environmentally, and socially. There are many versions of this floating around on the web. One of the interesting things about this kind of thing is the way it mirrors the way “design thinking” considers more than just problem-solving in product design.

Consider: Here’s one way we talk about design to clients:

Companies (and designers) tend to be pretty good at the left side of the chart. Given a particular situation, they can find the problems and invent features to address them. So, if I go into someone’s house and watch him install a garbage disposer, I’ll pick up on some process inefficiencies, some communication issues, and some usability concerns. Then I can go back to my office and design a new process, new communications, and new product details that address the problems. Most products and services are designed that way.

The right half is often missing, though. Why does the consumer feel the way he feels about the disposer? What emotional triggers make the process of installation hard, or easy, or whatever? Much of my work as a design has more to do with this understanding on the right side than the technical aspects of the left side. Most of what the business press talks about (or used to, before they got bored) as “design thinking” is really the consideration of the right side of the chart.

Fine. But what about the company producting the product or service? The model above describes considerations for the design of the thing – but isn’t that just the equivalent of the company’s own “left side of the chart”? If left half is something like “practical” and right half is “emotional,” companies have their own version:

On the left is the practical stuff – is the product something we know how to solve, is interesting to the world, and we can produce in quantity? As with the design of the product itself, a “yes” answer is necessary, but may not be sufficient.

The right side of the company’s picture is well-understood as marketing, but rarely well incorporated into the design of the product itself. What does a product mean to the company? How are the product’s attributes expressing the brand? Setting aside the very general mission statements that litter the walls of most corporate lobbies, and (here’s the hard one) setting aside money, why does the company exist at all?

The “triple bottom line” stuff is, to me, the way to directly link higher level corporate emotion to product design. For my friend, thinking about it before the company is even a company is great: he can bake the values into the strategy into the brand. For established companies looking to take into account more than economic performance, though, there may be a lot of backfilling to do. And it’s about time!

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