The Design of Everyday Things (42 page)

       
1.
   
Adding features to match the competition

       
2.
   
Adding some feature driven by a new technology

“Do we look for human needs?” he asked, rhetorically. “No,” he answered himself.

This is typical: market-driven pressures plus an engineering-driven company yield ever-increasing features, complexity, and confusion. But even companies that do intend to search for human needs are thwarted by the severe challenges of the product development process, in particular, the challenges of insufficient time and insufficient money. In fact, having watched many products succumb to these challenges, I propose a “Law of Product Development”:

DON NORMAN'S LAW OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

          
The day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget
.

Product launches are always accompanied by schedules and budgets. Usually the schedule is driven by outside considerations, including holidays, special product announcement opportunities, and even factory schedules. One product I worked on was given the unrealistic timeline of four weeks because the factory in Spain would then go on vacation, and when the workers returned, it would be too late to get the product out in time for the Christmas buying season.

Moreover, product development takes time even to get started. People are never sitting around with nothing to do, waiting to be called for the product. No, they must be recruited, vetted, and then transitioned off their current jobs. This all takes time, time that is seldom scheduled.

So imagine a design team being told that it is about to work on a new product. “Wonderful,” cries the team; “we'll immediately send out our design researchers to study target customers.” “How
long will that take?” asks the product manager. “Oh, we can do it quickly: a week or two to make the arrangements, and then two weeks in the field. Perhaps a week to distill the findings. Four or five weeks.” “Sorry,” says the product manager, “we don't have time. For that matter, we don't have the budget to send a team into the field for two weeks.” “But it's essential if we really want to understand the customer,” argues the design team. “You're absolutely right,” says the product manager, “but we're behind schedule: we can't afford either the time or the money. Next time. Next time we will do it right.” Except there is never a next time, because when the next time comes around, the same arguments get repeated: that product also starts behind schedule and over budget.

Product development involves an incredible mix of disciplines, from designers to engineers and programmers, manufacturing, packaging, sales, marketing, and service. And more. The product has to appeal to the current customer base as well as to expand beyond to new customers. Patents create a minefield for designers and engineers, for today it is almost impossible to design or build anything that doesn't conflict with patents, which means redesign to work one's way through the mines.

Each of the separate disciplines has a different view of the product, each has different but specific requirements to be met. Often the requirements posed by each discipline are contradictory or incompatible with those of the other disciplines. But all of them are correct when viewed from their respective perspective. In most companies, however, the disciplines work separately, design passing its results to engineering and programming, which modify the requirements to fit their needs. They then pass their results to manufacturing, which does further modification, then marketing requests changes. It's a mess.

What is the solution?

The way to handle the time crunch that eliminates the ability to do good up-front design research is to separate that process from the product team: have design researchers always out in the field, always studying potential products and customers. Then, when the product team is launched, the designers can say, “We already
examined this case, so here are our recommendations.” The same argument applies to market researchers.

The clash of disciplines can be resolved by multidisciplinary teams whose participants learn to understand and respect the requirements of one another. Good product development teams work as harmonious groups, with representatives from all the relevant disciplines present at all times. If all the viewpoints and requirements can be understood by all participants, it is often possible to think of creative solutions that satisfy most of the issues. Note that working with these teams is also a challenge. Everyone speaks a different technical language. Each discipline thinks it is the most important part of the process. Quite often, each discipline thinks the others are stupid, that they are making inane requests. It takes a skilled product manager to create mutual understanding and respect. But it can be done.

The design practices described by the double-diamond and the human-centered design process are the ideal. Even though the ideal can seldom be met in practice, it is always good to aim for the ideal, but to be realistic about the time and budgetary challenges. These can be overcome, but only if they are recognized and designed into the process. Multidisciplinary teams allow for enhanced communication and collaboration, often saving both time and money.

The Design Challenge

It is difficult to do good design. That is why it is such a rich, engaging profession with results that can be powerful and effective. Designers are asked to figure out how to manage complex things, to manage the interaction of technology and people. Good designers are quick learners, for today they might be asked to design a camera; tomorrow, to design a transportation system or a company's organizational structure. How can one person work across so many different domains? Because the fundamental principles of designing for people are the same across all domains. People are the same, and so the design principles are the same.

Designers are only one part of the complex chain of processes and different professions involved in producing a product. Although
the theme of this book is the importance of satisfying the needs of the people who will ultimately use the product, other aspects of the product are important; for example, its engineering effectiveness, which includes its capabilities, reliability, and serviceability; its cost; and its financial viability, which usually means profitability. Will people buy it? Each of these aspects poses its own set of requirements, sometimes ones that appear to be in opposition to those of the other aspects. Schedule and budget are often the two most severe constraints.

Designers try hard to determine people's real needs and to fulfill them, whereas marketing is concerned with determining what people will actually buy. What people need and what they buy are two different things, but both are important. It doesn't matter how great the product is if nobody buys it. Similarly, if a company's products are not profitable, the company might very well go out of business. In dysfunctional companies, each division of the company is skeptical of the value added to the product by the other divisions.

In a properly run organization, team members coming from all the various aspects of the product cycle get together to share their requirements and to work harmoniously to design and produce a product that satisfies them, or at least that does so with acceptable compromises. In dysfunctional companies, each team works in isolation, often arguing with the other teams, often watching its designs or specifications get changed by others in what each team considers an unreasonable way. Producing a good product requires a lot more than good technical skills: it requires a harmonious, smoothly functioning, cooperative and respectful organization.

The design process must address numerous constraints. In the sections that follow, I examine these other factors.

PRODUCTS HAVE MULTIPLE, CONFLICTING REQUIREMENTS

Designers must please their clients, who are not always the end users. Consider major household appliances, such as stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers, and clothes washers and dryers; and even faucets and thermostats for heating and air-conditioning systems.
They are often purchased by housing developers or landlords. In businesses, purchasing departments make decisions for large companies; and owners or managers, for small companies. In all these cases, the purchaser is probably interested primarily in price, perhaps in size or appearance, almost certainly not in usability. And once devices are purchased and installed, the purchaser has no further interest in them. The manufacturer has to attend to the requirements of these decision makers, because these are the people who actually buy the product. Yes, the needs of the eventual users are important, but to the business, they seem of secondary importance.

In some situations, cost dominates. Suppose, for example, you are part of a design team for office copiers. In large companies, copying machines are purchased by the Printing and Duplicating Center, then dispersed to the various departments. The copiers are purchased after a formal “request for proposals” has gone out to manufacturers and dealers of machines. The selection is almost always based on price plus a list of required features. Usability? Not considered. Training costs? Not considered. Maintenance? Not considered. There are no requirements regarding understandability or usability of the product, even though in the end those aspects of the product can end up costing the company a lot of money in wasted time, increased need for service calls and training, and even lowered staff morale and lower productivity.

The focus on sales price is one reason we get unusable copying machines and telephone systems in our places of employment. If people complained strongly enough, usability could become a requirement in the purchasing specifications, and that requirement could trickle back to the designers. But without this feedback, designers must often design the cheapest possible products because those are what sell. Designers need to understand their customers, and in many cases, the customer is the person who purchases the product, not the person who actually uses it. It is just as important to study those who do the purchasing as it is to study those who use it.

To make matters even more difficult, yet another set of people needs to be considered: the engineers, developers, manufacturing,
services, sales, and marketing people who have to translate the ideas from the design team into reality, and then sell and support the product after it is shipped. These groups are users, too, not of the product itself, but of the output of the design team. Designers are used to accommodating the needs of the product users, but they seldom consider the needs of the other groups involved in the product process. But if their needs are not considered, then as the product development moves through the process from design to engineering, to marketing, to manufacturing, and so on, each new group will discover that it doesn't meet their needs, so they will change it. But piecemeal, after-the-fact changes invariably weaken the cohesion of the product. If all these requirements were known at the start of the design process, a much more satisfactory resolution could have been devised.

Usually the different company divisions have intelligent people trying to do what is best for the company. When they make changes to a design, it is because their requirements were not suitably served. Their concerns and needs are legitimate, but changes introduced in this way are almost always detrimental. The best way to counteract this is to ensure that representatives from all the divisions are present during the entire design process, starting with the decision to launch the product, continuing all the way through shipment to customers, service requirements, and repairs and returns. This way, all the concerns can be heard as soon as they are discovered. There must be a multidisciplinary team overseeing the entire design, engineering, and manufacturing process that shares all departmental issues and concerns from day one, so that everyone can design to satisfy them, and when conflicts arise, the group together can determine the most satisfactory solution. Sadly, it is the rare company that is organized this way.

Design is a complex activity. But the only way this complex process comes together is if all the relevant parties work together as a team. It isn't design against engineering, against marketing, against manufacturing: it is design together with all these other players. Design must take into account sales and marketing, servicing and help desks, engineering and manufacturing, costs and
schedules. That's why it's so challenging. That's why it's so much fun and rewarding when it all comes together to create a successful product.

DESIGNING FOR SPECIAL PEOPLE

There is no such thing as the average person. This poses a particular problem for the designer, who usually must come up with a single design for everyone. The designer can consult handbooks with tables that show average arm reach and seated height, how far the average person can stretch backward while seated, and how much room is needed for average hips, knees, and elbows.
Physical anthropometry
is what the field is called. With data, the designer can try to meet the size requirements for almost everyone, say for the 90th, 95th, or even the 99th percentile. Suppose the product is designed to accommodate the 95th percentile, that is, for everyone except the 5 percent of people who are smaller or larger. That leaves out a lot of people. The United States has approximately 300 million people, so 5 percent is 15 million. Even if the design aims at the 99th percentile it would still leave out 3 million people. And this is just for the United States: the world has 7 billion people. Design for the 99th percentile of the world and 70 million people are left out.