I must agree.

I read an article a long time ago when I studied industrial design. It talked about some problem in German company and it's relation with marketing and design. Back then, they tough if you made a good, usable and simple design, it would automatically sale well. German company disliked marketing people with there futile ideas. But a slump in the sale around the end of the 80's ( if I remember well ) made them change there mind. Marketing was brought in and design ( and engineering ) were pushed back to a less prominent role. If you remember, that's about when the BMW began to get rounder shape...

So, yes, we are not the only one holding the future of a compagny.

But Peter’s photo is to big. I don’t like been stared like that while I read. Brrr… ( Trying to be funny here. Sorry )

Posted by: Richard Lehoux on August 8, 2002 10:25 AM

 

Naive? Propaganda with little information content? I've been commenting here

Posted by: Ron Zeno on August 8, 2002 11:05 AM

 

I know this is written forma design point of view, and maybe I missed the point of the entire article (it happens sometimes), but to me it has nothing to with design itself, but to do with designing something that customers want.

Design is a component of delivery on what customers want. Even when you are trying to tap into new markets you need to know what customers want and then design for this.

Am I making sense or is this just gibberish?

Posted by: JB on August 8, 2002 01:05 PM

 

Since a product can sell very well even with a bad design, and many time win against better one, we need to prove the value of our work. The question is simple:” Why spend some money to make your design change and perhaps risk reduce profitability if you can't prove it will in fact raise it."

Many designer think it's "morally wrong" to do bad design. Even if it's true, it's not enough for business people.

Posted by: Richard Lehoux on August 8, 2002 01:51 PM

 

Quick and dirty and ready to sell is a million times better to most business people than elegant and usable but not ready to sell. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

Posted by: John S. Rhodes on August 8, 2002 09:59 PM

 

History shows that many products that are category leaders are not necessarily the most usable. People used DOS for 9 years before Windows became a success, despite the fact that Apple has had a GUI since 1983. To this day, Mac users claim that the Mac is easier to use, but close to 90% of the world's computers run some version of Windows. What on earth...?

You can almost never have perfect usability for a product that's new to the market and has never been seen or used before. Wasting your time on perfect usability could be a costly mistake in terms of business. When a product is new, you can only guess at how it's going to be used by regular customers and make it usable by those guesses. More usability can be built into the product as usage patterns are observed and also how the requirements change. I assure you: you can almost never have perfect usability in a version 1.0 product.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the first customers of a product - the "Innovators" as Geoffrey A. Moore calls them in his book, Crossing the Chasm, typically do not care much about usability and want to buy a product just to stay on top of the latest innovations. It is the early majority and the late majority that take a product into the mainstream. By the time this happens, the product will likely be version 3.0 and usability becomes more important (though not to the exclusion of factors like price, positioning, availability etc.)

Let me give you an example. Till the early 90s, people in India didn't have much choice for TV entertainment. There were two boring state-run TV channels and that was it. Then suddenly, the Gulf War happened, and the satellite TV revolution came to India as Indians hungered for CNN coverage of the War. In a few years, there were several cable channels blooming in the country. At the moment, I have about 85 channels on my TV. We're spoiled for choice!

Why is this relevant? Well, consider how this would influence the design of TV remote controls. Till 1992, with only 2 channels, switching between channels was easy: up and down. With 85 TV channels, however, the usage pattern has changed. Now, the usability requirements dictate that you must make it easy for a person to switch from channel 7 to channel 62 quickly. Lots of people channel surf. They also likely to quickly switch to another channel and see a TV show in the same time slot. So now you have to build in a "quick switch" option to help them do that. Also, nobody watches all 85 channels. They typically have perhaps 10 favourite channels. So the remote control must have some kind of "add to favourites" feature that lets a person quickly add a particular channel to their favourites. Some people like to arrange channels so that their favourites are in channel 1 to 10. So you need a "swap channels" feature.

My point is that if an Indian TV manufacturer were designing a TV remote control in 1990, he didn't need to do much. But in 2002, the TV itself may not have changed much, but the use of the remote control has changed, not because of any significant advances in TV technology, but because of an external factor like the flood of satellite TV channels. So the usability requirements of the remote control have also changed drastically. There was no way the 1990 designer could have anticipated this change in how people used the product and made it usable to suit that usage pattern.

Posted by: MadMan on August 9, 2002 02:02 AM

 

Whenever I want to see results from seemingly UNMEASURABLE components or factors that of an entity (whether an organization or an individual or even a project), I adopt and adapt Karl-Erik Sveiby's Intangible Assets Monitor. Check it out.

http://www.sveiby.com/articles/CompanyMonitor.html

You can MONITOR the trends and see if a specific change in design or in a process had any distinct effect on the trends. This way, the VALUE is observable.

I'll try to integrate my notes on how I adapted the monitor for change & design projects.

Posted by: Ari Bancale on August 13, 2002 03:18 AM