The Usability of Things

Over the years, my work has begun taking on a new direction. I’m still theoretically working in Product Design, but I noticed a while back that my process began shifting. I had less time in front of documentation and more time in front of different groups of people. I’ve seen less and less of my computer as the amount of time I spend teaching clients to think in different ways increases. It’s gotten to the point where the final deliverable may only tangentially be about a product, or not at all.

When I first started out, I remember the thrill of seeing something I designed sitting on a store shelf to be bought by anyone, or catching a glimpse of a billboard or magazine spread I designed as I went through my daily life. I spent a lot of time sitting behind a computer, tweaking details that I would probably be the only one to notice. As I worked on more products, my view began to shift to product families and how they all fit and worked together toward common goals. This soon expanded into how these families interacted with other product families, and the unique ecosystems that people created for themselves. Soon I was thinking about the entire experience a person would go through, from what caused them to look for specific products as solutions to their problems to what caused them to move past that solution when they had gotten their value from it.

I’m sure you see where this is going, but it wasn’t long before I realized that products are rarely the best available solution. There was an interesting shift that happened in my head the first time I was able to say out loud that maybe the world didn’t need an alarm clock with a sleeker, more minimalist design with a gorgeous backlit font and options to play world radio through multiple speakers, it just needed a reasonable way to guarantee someone could get up when they wanted.

There it was, and I couldn’t ignore it. I stopped asking questions like “How can I make this more desirable?”, and started asking questions like “What desire do people have unfulfilled?” to coworkers and clients. In the years following, it became amusing to me how often a client came in confidently asking for a very specific solution, only to walk away thinking about what questions they should be answering to determine which problem they should solve is. After that, it’s business as usual, guiding people through the process of figuring out which problems to solve, and what the best ways to solve those problems are.

My work results in designing less products that are sitting on store shelves these days, instead focusing on getting companies to research holistically to determine if they are asking the right questions to answer. I don’t as often get the thrill of seeing someone grab my design off a shelf, but when I do, I like knowing that it will serve them well for all the right reasons.

This entry was posted Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Daily Experience, Service Design. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.