Why Products are Like People (Aka: My Dear Friend, The Toaster)

I'm endlessly fascinated by the study of why people love one product more than another (or choose, or adopt, etc).  It's not that complicated or erratic really. In fact, I think there's a fairly predictable set of patterns and principles inherent in the products that people love, and it's likely going to be included in my masters thesis next year. For now, this entry is just a variation on that concept. This is just a hunch that I would really be interested in getting feedback on. The hunch is that people seek out the same qualities in products as they do in people.

If you think I'm crazy, consider knowing a person with the following qualities:

• good communicator
• enjoyable
• accommodating
• accessible but gives you free space 
• trustworthy
• flexible to change
• well-kept appearance  

I imagine this would be a person that you would like. Now, consider a product with the following qualities: 

• easy-to-understand
• enjoyable 
• useful
• accessible but non-obtrusive 
• dependable 
• adaptable/customizable 
• nicely designed

Much like the person, I expect this is a product that you would enjoy owning and using. The commonality between person and product affection is probably not very shocking in any way. And of course, I wrote this list with this hunch in mind, so it's extremely self-fulfilling. However, it's worth considering what's not included in that list to get an understanding of the implications this concept may have on product design and development. Specifically, I'm thinking about performance...

There's something exciting about a product with all the bells and whistles and performance measures way beyond your needs. Just the same, it may excite you to know the best athlete in school, the best looking girl, or the smartest person you know. For both the product and the person, these things are great and potentially useful in some circumstances, but for the most part, they aren't the reason you like them. The basic common principles above are essentials for truly liking a person or product, while unnecessarily high performance and other high-level attributes are not. In fact, one could argue that these non-essentials even become a detriment as they hit a certain level. After all, do you really want to be friends with the smartest person you know? 

Idea 15: Disruption Leads to Twitter Concierge

For this week, I would like to focus on the Disruptive Technology paradigm. This concept, evangalized by authors and MIT professors Clayton Christianson and James Utterback, explains the phenomenon of technology or product concepts that enter a market and completely change the business model as a result. I won't attempt to explain the whole concept, here but the idea is that a market can grow and shift in such a way that it opens up the opportunity for a disruptive product, often centered around price, novel technologies, and "good enough" performance.  Corresponding attributes of the products in the new market could include improved accessibility, design simplicity, and ease-of-use. Disruptive Technologies often appear in a mature market environment where the existing firms have been competing on high performance measures, carrying high prices along with them. The opportunity for disruption is heightened when the competing level of performance has actually exceeded the need of the average user. (For more on the exceeding of user expectations, read up on the invaluable Kano Analysis method.)

So how to identify opportunities for Disruptive Technologies? This is obviously a real challenge but the idea is to seek out markets where product features and performance may be hitting expectations but exceeding needs, which is a signficant distinction. What markets feature users that may soon become overwhelmed with information, confused by features, and seeking simplicity? Personally, I think Social Media is a target.

To scope the exercise, let's talk Twitter. Now I use Twitter far more for consumption than for production of information. I do Tweet, maybe a few times a week, but mostly, I really like Twitter as a means of following interesting people and companies related to design and innovation, just to keep up on any interesting happenings that may be going on. I also happen to follow a dozen or so sports writers that cover the NFL and the Boston Red Sox.  Twitter for me is really about saving me time by simplifying the vast array of available information by distilling it down through people I have trusted to do the filtering for me. The product is fine - part useful, part interesting distraction, part time-saver. It's generally valuable, but it's an endless fire hose of information that I can't possibly keep up with (my own fault for configuring it this way, of course).  

What if you could create a simpler version of Twitter? More assistance, more templates, less consumption... no tweeting, targeted at a less technical audience that has no use for tweeting but does want up-to-date information. No searching and browsing for information sources. Simply type in a topic that interests you (e.g. European Business, World Cup, etc.) and the system dynamically determines the most relevant Twitter sources tied to the topic (I'm talking Twitter "Concierge" not Twitter Search). This is about competing on a simple, high-quality user experience, not on quantity of information. Could even consider implmenting this in a whole new form factor, like a counter-top device, appliance display, etc. I think I know a whole range of people who would be interested in this, and I wonder if you do too...

Ideation by Design

If you've read "Where Good Ideas Come From" by Steven Johnson, you would be sold on the idea that most (if not all) great ideas are simply connections or new applications of existing constructs. It's such a simple insight yet endlessly interesting when you consider the deep repository of evidence that spans time and domains. So if Johnson's hypothesis is true, why do we fail to apply to our ideation methodologies? For some reason, idea generation tends to be left to the design department, or the creative manager, or some other "idea guy" that's expected to sit in his office and wait for the perfect idea to appear in a mystical image. So, in many entries to come, I will focus on developing an ideation process that proactively leverages known patterns observed in natural idea development. Please provide feedback as I would love to work together on developing these ideas...

LegoLive Concept

New concept for Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Interface class...

LegoLive (which has no connection to Lego..yet?) allows kids to continue to play with their creations by adding them to a digital world and playing with friends online. Games and activities can challenge kids and their imagination.

Top 10 Websites - What Do They Allow Us to Do?

Yesterday, I stumbled across a list of 50 most popular sites on the web according to Compete, an online analytics firm (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/27/compete-september-201/). The top twelve sites, in order, were Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Ask.com, Amazon, Live.com, MSN, Bing, Ebay, and Blogspot. The results here are not surprising, but I'm intrigued by the implications of them. Specifically, what are the most popular sites enabling us to do?

At risk of starting my masters thesis a semester too early, I started to attempt to break down each site into the fundamental needs they are addressing. (note: for my thesis, I plan to do this breakdown across a wide range of domains and product types, and then apply the patterns from that analysis into a framework for developing needs-based products).

In regard to this Top 50 list, beyond the Like's, Playlists, and Recommendations, what are these products really doing for us? In other words, we need to shift our thinking from the product does to what it allows us to do. What needs to do the meet, particularly compared to other options on the market? Are there common needs addressed that come up more often than you would expect? This is really just an initial thought exercise to build some foundation for this concept, but I think it's worth doing. The point is that we don't choose products for their features or their performance. Generally speaking, we choose products because of what they do for us or or enable us to be. Let's play around with that Top 10 list...

Top 10 Sites and the Usage Patterns (September 2010)
Google.com: To discover new information, To find something, To learn, To be connected,
Yahoo!: To discover new information, To find something, To learn, To be connected,
Facebook: To be connected, To feel popular, To be entertained
YouTube: To be entertained, To learn,
Wikipedia: To discover new information, To learn
Ask: To discover new information, To find something, To learn
Amazon: To buy, To make money
Live: To be connected,
MSN: To discover new information, To find something, To learn, To be connected,
Bing: To discover new information, To find something, To learn

So, what do we make of this? Just a few thoughts and then you can draw your own conclusions...

- Clearly, the fact that 5 of the top 10 are search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Bing) indicates that people primarily see the web as a mechanism for finding information, which can lead to buying products, answering questions, finding people, and a countless other destinations. This isn't particularly interesting, but the disparity between search sites and more information-browsing sites (Wikipedia, non-search portion of MSN) show that saving time and reducing information clutter/complexity could probably each be added to the "needs addressed" of the search sites. If we had to abstract this exercise out to the web itself, one could clearly state that the web's primary need addressed is for finding information.

- Not surprisingly, the social capability of the web is also a primary function. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Live all over email clients, enabling people to stay connected from a social perspective.

- Next up is consumerism, which to be honest, is not as prominently features as I might have guessed. After all, being able to purchase products online is a tremendous time saver, and "To Save Time" is probably one of the best features a product can offer. Nonetheless, Amazon cracks the list, and Ebay (#11) and Craigslist (#13) just missed the cut. I would be curious to learn whether there is a trust factor at play here, where Amazon might simply be the most trustworthy site to purchase from.

Idea #14: Artificial Constraints and the "Wake Agent" Alarm Clock

An often valuable exercise in the ideation process is the approach of identifying products or services that have gone unchanged, questioning long-standing assumptions, and looking for opportunities for improvement. This is a common but fairly ambiguous challenge and may be too vague to instigate targeted innovative ideas. Instead, I believe the most effective way to do this is to decompose the system into a set of sub-parts,  understand how they come together and interact, and then questioning them on a part-by-part basis.

Now here's the trick... when it comes to redesigning a product or service that has gone unchanged, I suggest you prompt new ideas by creating a series of artificial constraints for each of the sub-components. For example, experiment with the sub-components by removing them, replacing them, "de-technologizing" them, resizing them, or whatever other action you would like to take to generate fresh ideas. Keep in mind, before you do this, it may be valuable to write down the high-level intent of the product to ensure that whatever innovations you design at the sub-levels do not alter the whole point of the product. 

Let me demonstrate by analyzing a common household product: the alarm clock. While you may wake up to your phone every morning like I do (highly recommend the first few bars of Karma Police for this), this doesn't mean that there is no longer a place for the trusty traditional alarm clock. So, let's just abstract out and consider the intent of the alarm clock, which is simply to "wake someone from sleep at a pre-defined time". In order to meet this intent, there will need to be a timing mechanism, an easy way to set it, and a means for waking someone up. A great deal of products have been created that utilize light, vibration, and other methods for waking sleepers up, so I'm going to try out a different direction for sake of this exercise. 

In order to instigate new perspectives, I'm going to create an artificial constraint for myself. That constraint is that the alarm clock cannot be placed on the nightstand (or next to the bed). This restriction should instigate new ideas for alterations in alarm clock form factor. Now, we move from intent to concept generation. We could come up with a range of alarm clock concepts that are built into the bed, such as flattening pillows or escaping blankets, but I would suggest avoiding the suggestion of any alarm clock concept that may risk the quality of sleep of the person during the night. With the nightstand and bed off-limits, what's next? My answer came from the sky... 

Consider a small spherical alarm concept that is about the size of a golf ball. During the night, it sits fixed in the ceiling far above you as you sleep. When the time comes for you to wake up, the alarm slowly drops down on a zip wire, like a secret ops agent dropping in for a mission. The alarm wakes you up with audio, direct light, or some combination. Since the length of the alarm drop could be pre-defined, it could drop to a close enough point where only soft audio would be necessary. Once the sleeper wakes and reaches for the alarm, it detects movement and pulls itself back up towards the ceiling. The sleeper is not able to turn the alarm off until they are sitting up in bed. Once the alarm is turned off, it returns to its original place in the ceiling to await the next day's wake-up call. Concept sketches to come...

Idea #12 (Revisited): Cue

The following is a set of design concepts for something I've been working on for Prof. Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Interfaces course at the MIT Media Lab. This is a Cue, a system for leaving digital artifacts in the physical world. As you'll see from the images, the basic premise is that it enables people to leave physical or virtual pointer to digital content (video, pictures, audio, messages) in specific points in time and space and for specific people in the real world.

UPDATE: My project team of Birago Jones, Nicholas Pennycooke, Phil Salesses and myself presented the CUE concept to Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Interfaces course last Thursday, the 21st. The class was mostly lukewarm about the concept, but interestingly, Hiroshi was pleasantly excited and receptive to it. We'll call that validation for now! Thanks to the team for the great work. Development to continue on CUE....  

Presentation slides here...