Efficiency vs Effectiveness

The old adage of “Efficiency is doing things right; Effectiveness is doing the right things” is particularly relevant here. My “design” version is:

“Designing the right things is more important than Designing things right… To be effective and successful in product development, you have to design the right things”

As product developers, we need to continually ask ourselves if we are designing the right things. Do we know what our customers really need? Are we sure that this concept or idea has the legs to make it in the market?

There are a million of these kinds of questions you can ask to evaluate your projects and decide which to pursue. At some point, you’ll need to take a leap of faith… but with a combination of luck and some objective and quantitative decision-making processes, it will be a calculated risk rather than a speculative “punt”.

Help me to help you

Over the next few months, I will be publishing a series of new product development (NPD) tips which aim to help you implement Design simply and easily into your daily product development and strategic planning processes – to help you design the right things.

However, I can’t do this all by myself…. so I have a humble request:

How do you know you’re designing the right things?

Even though your specific products and projects may be unique to your business and industry, I’m sure there is a range of lessons and insights you have about product development which are universal and could be applied successfully to any problem or new product idea.

So, I’d love to hear your thoughts… and I’ve set up a short survey here which should only take about 5~10 minutes to complete.

Whilst your identity and details will be kept confidential, your answers and insights will be relayed to your fellow readers in the form of future tips and articles. Of course, you will also receive this information through your preferred email and/or RSS feeds.

Complete the survey here and WIN!

Cheesy and cliched I know, but I wanted to reward the most exciting, detailed and insightful survey response with a complementary copy of “Made to Stick“, by Chip and Dan Heath. This is a great book about crafting and executing new ideas for the best impact. It’s equally useful in design, marketing, sales and any industry that relies on fresh ideas, innovation and effective communication.

Survey responses received by 4th December 2009 will be eligible to win a copy of “Made to Stick” – so complete the survey now!

(By the way, I’m not getting any commissions or royalties out of this… I just like the book so much I wanted to give one away!)

I can’t wait to read your survey responses.

Best of luck – and thanks in advance for your time.

Whilst we may be through the worst of the downturn, the business and economic communities are treading carefully and avoiding making any substantial claims of economic recovery. Budgets are being carefully guarded, and money spent cautiously. Projects that may have been a “sure thing” in terms of budget and strategic approvals may now be “discretionary” or just simply put on the back-burner altogether.

This is a good thing. It is fundamentally sound business practice to carefully evaluate and prioritise your product development projects, and only pursue those which add value, growth and sustainability to your business, society and the environment.

Design can be utilised in numerous ways to achieve these aims. Here are five ideas for start:

1. New and improved products: Designing new products can be a risky business, but new product development has the potential to define and differentiate your business because it enables you to leverage your knowledge of your market, your competitors and your customers, and deliver new products and services that your customers want & need, as well as deliver genuine bottom-line profits and growth. Even minor tweaks and enhancements can give your current products a fresh look or functionality and can pay dividends when your competition may be bunkered down and cutting their R&D investments.

1. System improvement: Every successful business continually develops and refines their systems and processes. Design thinking can enable you to objectively analyse and map your systems; develop / prototype / test alternative concepts, and engage staff and management in the ultimate common purpose – the future of your company!

1. Fresh, unrestricted thinking: We all sometimes have the “blinkers” on… you know, when we keep doing and thinking in the same way because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”. Design thinking and processes can help open up new directions and ways of tackling common daily problems – giving your team the ability to capture and develop some fresh ideas and possibilities.

1. Creative focus: As the saying goes: “What you focus on, happens”. Creative design processes can yield exciting and useful results when we commit to them with heart and mind… and in these uncertain times, you may not have the luxury of time to wonder about using Design as a means for protecting your business… you need to act fast, be decisive and enable a designer to focus on your specific problem, whilst you get on with running your business.

1. Virtual prototyping: Modern multi-media and design analysis tools, such as animations, photo-realistic imagery, plastic moulding and structural analysis (FEA) programs – can be particularly useful to visualise new products, processes and operational improvements as well as supporting new marketing and sales initiatives. Industrial and graphic design capabilities can be used to visualise and enhance the look, feel and function of your products and promotional materials, and provide you with a range of options without having to spend a cent on costly printing or production of physical objects… all can be presented electronically.

Remember… nothing changes if nothing changes… so, get thinking about how you can improve, develop, refine and change the way you develop, manufacture, promote and sell your products and use design thinking to identify, investigate and test new ideas and possibilities. Let’s leave the GFC in the past.

If you have any tips or advice for your fellow readers, please add them to the comments below. Thanks!

The premise is simple: Put yourself in the shoes of your product’s end-user, and identify new ways to make their experience of your product more enjoyable, convenient, faster and easier.

Achieving innovation doesn’t always require substantive user-studies and copious research and analysis… stumbling across one simple, innocent, spontaneous user insight or experience may be all you need for your next major product breakthrough.

Loads of ideas don’t always make one great product… but just one great idea might.

So the key is to be open to new, unexpected ideas. They could come from anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Successful HCD focuses on:

1. People participation (be they users, client groups, manufacturers, suppliers and other critical stakeholders)
2. Developing simple and robust human-centred guidelines that assist in idea-selection and decision making
3. Generating ideas rapidly and in volume
4. Creating (fast and inexpensive) idea mockups and testing them with real people to get real feedback
5. Iteratively refining, improving and detailing the best ideas until the one killer solution (that meets all your People, Technical and Business requirements) is ready for launch.

HCD is all about showing empathy for all who come into contact with your product – anywhere along its lifecycle. The more empathy you can show for your customers, users and stakeholders, the more successful your product will be.

But wait… what is Activity-Centred Design?

Conversely, there is a field of thought that believes that HCD is not all it is cracked up to be.

“Activity-centred Design” (ACD) is thought by some to be superior to HCD, because of a belief that technology does not adapt to people, but people (have and always do) adapt to technology.

Don Norman discusses ACD vs HCD in some depth.

My conclusion from reading Norman’s essay is that if one needs to “learn” how to use a product, then the amount of learning required is directly proportional to that product’s lack of human-centredness!

By way of example, the guitar could be considered a dreadful piece of HCD (if indeed any HCD approach was taken at all) – and yet it is one of the most played and popular musical instruments in history. Significant amounts of time and effort must be invested to learn and master the guitar.

On the other hand, ACD focuses on the design of the technology / object with the view to optimising the hierarchical activities, tasks, actions and operations to improve usability, intuitiveness and in the case of the guitar, playability.

If you ignore a fundamental driver of HCD, that is, if you assume that your customers, end-users and other stakeholders do not really know what they want (even though they think & say they do), you may be able to identify new and improved features and functionality that SHOULD be included in your product in order for it to deliver it’s primary goals and benefits.

I think there is a place for both HCD and ACD in modern product development. Products that have had no human-centred consideration (and thus may be considered poor designs) can certainly benefit from HCD techniques.

Adopting an ACD approach may help you better define, understand and optimise how your product is made, assembled and operated… because in the end, it is the outcome of a product’s function that a user usually looks for, not the product or function itself.

Analogy: You don’t buy a drill bit because you want a drill-bit… you buy a drill bit because you need a hole.

Resources and links:

• Wikipedia definition of User-centred Design (aka HCD): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design
• Don Norman on ACD vs HCD: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered.html
• Tom Kelley (IDEO) discussing HCD (it’s from 2002, but it’s got some interesting insights): http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_kelley_on_human_centered_design.html

If you missed the previous articles, find them here: Part 1 and Part 2

Idea # 3: Get some outside help (a.k.a. Outsource)

We can all have the blinkers on at times. Whether you have implemented Idea 1 or Idea 2 in this series or not, we can still get caught up in the boundaries, limitations and problems of our little worlds.

Whilst many of us are driven to do as much of the hard work ourselves and never contemplate paying someone else to do something we think we can do equally well, engaging some external help can often lift the lid on new opportunities, information and directions. A fresh pair of eyes, if you will!

Let’s face it… whilst we may have an appreciation for various disciplines like sales, marketing, design, intellectual property, manufacturing, distribution, quality, engineering and so on, there is no way we can do it all to a level that will be sustainable in the long term. We must get help.

Here are a few “vocation-specific” questions (in no particular order) that might help you determine what external assistance you need during your product development programs:

Industrial Design: “You’ve got a new product idea, but…”

• How will it look?
• How will it work?
• What will it be made of?
• How will it be made?
• How easy is it to use?
• How big should it be?
• How many do you need?

Graphic Design: “You’ve got a new product idea, but…”

• how do you want to communicate it to the world?
• what visual communications are required (within posters, flyers, brochures, websites, corporate & product identities, instruction manuals and packaging)?

Marketing: “You’ve got a new product idea, but…”

• What is your market?
• Who will buy it?
• Why should they buy it?
• What are the benefits your customers can expect from buying your product?
• What features should be included to deliver those benefits?
• How will you identify, disseminate and differentiate your products unique benefits, features and attributes?

Sales: “You’ve got a new product idea, but…”

• How much should it sell for?
• Who will sell it?
• How many do you need to sell?
• How much margin is there?
• Is this a high-value / low-volume product, or a low-value / high-volume product?

Intellectual Property (IP): “You’ve got a new product idea, but…”

• Has anyone else already done it?
• Is there a patent in place that you need to be aware of
• Does your product look (physically) like another product on the market?
• Does your logo or trademark resemble someone else’s?
• Have you done any research into similar existing inventions or “prior art” to determine if you are in fact “infringing”?
• Do you seek international IP protection for your new product, or just within specific regions / countries?
• Will you get a return on your investment in IP protection?

Prototyping: “You’ve got a new product idea, but…”

• Do you know it actually works?
• How can you mimic or test your idea physically?
• Have you created any mock-ups or rough samples that explain / test / validate your idea?
• Do you know if the material you’ve chosen for your product is correct?
• Have you tried using different materials, finishes, colours?
• Have you checked that this product idea can be comfortably / conveniently used by your end-user?

Manufacturing: “You’ve got a new product idea, but…”

• How many and by-when do you need them?
• What are your quality expectations?
• How easily can this product be assembled?
• How do you want it packaged?
• How many can fit on a pallet?
• Is there tooling required?
• What can you afford?

Although simplistic, these questions are indicative of the type of information your suppliers and outsourced partners will be looking for before and during the development program. Your role may be one (or more!) of the above, or you might assume the role of “project manager” – coordinating all these stakeholders to get the product developed.

When engaging external services and suppliers, it is vital that you have a clear understanding and agreement of what each other’s expectations and capabilities are. Communication and documentation are at the core of this understanding.

Thorough and comprehensive design briefs, product design specifications, RFQ (request-for-quote) documents, confidentiality agreements, variation agreements and manufacturing contracts all form the basis of your commercial relationship with your clients and suppliers, and ultimately maintain a transparent, clarified set of expectations for all to work within.

Your relationship with these outside parties will vary greatly – some you’ll simply pay a fee-for-service or fee-for-product (such as designers and manufacturers); others will require on-going fees and renewals (like some forms of IP protection). That said, there is nothing stopping you from discussing alternate financial arrangements that may help to share the risks and rewards of your project with your suppliers and professional service partners.

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Well, that wraps up this 3-part series on “Design = Change for the Better”. I’d love to hear your thoughts about how this information can / has helped you move closer to achieving innovation – and as always, if you’d like to discuss your specific project with me, please contact me.

Idea # 2: The Jameson Principle

When developing new products, it is easy to incorporate new features or functionality “because we can!”

Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

Thanks to Professor Tom Barker’s “Jameson Principle”, a great way to determine if your new product or idea is on the right track is to evaluate it against four simple criteria:

1.    Better?
2.    More?
3.    Cheaper?
4.    Wow?

Better products enhance the user experience; they help get a job done faster, easier, more efficiently; they may be better looking than the competition, or they may use more advanced materials or production processes that helps them achieve a higher quality feel or more reliable operation.

The “More” criteria helps you determine if your new product enables more people to have access to the benefits your new product provides… For instance, the first email ever sent probably required an advanced understanding of telecommunications, information technology and computer-programming to be able to create, send and decipher… however, as the benefits of email communications became more understood, software developers have continually tried to design email software to be increasingly “user friendly” in order for more people to use it.

Cheaper is self-explanatory… if you can make your new product cheaper, without sacrificing its quality, functionality and appearance – why wouldn’t you? To reduce cost, you might look at the materials, manufacturing processes or the actual design of the product (such as part count, complexity, assembly process). You might survey your customers to identify ways to simplify the design by excluding lesser used / wanted features or attributes. You may work closer with your production partners to see if they can provide cost-savings through more efficient processes, automation or outsourcing.

“Wow” and “wow-factor” are terms that I often detest (more on that another time), however I do acknowledge that they simply and conveniently wrap up a lot of what Innovation and Design is all about.

Providing “wow” within new products is the sizzle that comes with the sausage. Achieving the other 3 criteria (Better, More and Cheaper) can amount to nothing if your new product doesn’t have some kind of “x-factor” – that tangible or intangible “thing” that sets it apart from your competition; makes it more desirable; just simply screams “buy me!” You can achieve “wow” within your products aesthetically (use a curve when everyone else is straight), functionally (use a touchscreen when everyone else is using hard buttons); physically (X% lighter, smaller, stronger, more-durable etc); ergonomically (one-handed operation; comfort-grip; large graphics; easy-to-read); colour, finish and so on. Apple have almost secured a monopoly on “wow” in recent years. This has been due, in no small part, to their investment in Design.

Wow-factor in your industry will differ substantially from other industries… so when you are developing your new product – try to define what “wow-factor” could mean to your market segment… what attributes, benefits and features would bring unique value and appeal to your product?

Stay tuned for next week’s final installment of “Design = Change for the better”. Of course, if you have any comments or feedback – feel free below, or contact me directly.