- The design of technology to fit human needs and capabilities is determined by the psychology of people. Yes, technologies may change, but people stay the same
External Forces
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Competitive pressures drive products, and by extension design. Three factors that influence competition are price, features, and quality.
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The real business pressures on companies are: the need for speed, the concern about costs, the competition that may force the company to change its offerings, and the need to satisfy several classes of customers and users.
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Additional pressures include the development cycle of products, and the restrictions imposed by large organizations, in addition to the complexity with managing them.
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These make it difficult to follow the complete process of design.
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Featuritis - after the product has been available for a while, a number of factors inevitably appear, pushing the company toward the addition of new features., even those outside of the original design or what it is capable of.
- More customers like the product, but they also want more features, functions and capabilities.
- Competition adds new features that aren’t in the sold product.
- The attempt to match competition causes all products to be the same.
- Most companies compare features with their competition to determine where they are weak
- Good design requires stepping back from competitive pressures and ensuring that the entire product be consistent, coherent, and
- The Customer Obsessed Approach — ignore the competition and appeal to what the customers really want.
- Customers are satisfied, but the market becomes saturated so there is a need to expand the feature set to appeal to more people.
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A design is flawed if it cannot be manufactured or marketed.
Innovation
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New technology forces changes, opening up new design challenges while rendering old devices obsolete.
- Technology changes rapidly, but people and culture change slowly.
- Most people do not like changes in conventions. It takes long for what should have been obsolete to die out.
- Most radical ideas fail: large companies are not tolerant of failure, which is needed to explore the space of possibilities.
- Failures happen but many are not publicized. Failures can happen due to unpreparedness of the marketplace, the technology, or the company.
- Ideas take a long time to go from conception to successful and useful product.
- It is extremely difficult to develop all the details required to ensure that a new idea works, to say nothing of finding components that can be manufactured in sufficient quantity, reliability, and affordability.
- Ideas that are too early often fail, even if eventually others introduce them successfully. People are conservative.
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Innovation can come incrementally or radically. The typical case is the incremental one.
- Radical innovation changes paradigms. It changes lives and industries.
- It starts fresh, driven by new technology.
- It is as likely to find the best technology as it is with the worst.
- It entails redefining existing technologies and industries.
- Incremental innovation makes things better.
- This involves continual testing and refinement in a hill-climbing manner (similar to the Design Process).
- Hill climbing is unlikely to converge to truly disruptive technology.
- Radical innovation changes paradigms. It changes lives and industries.
Society
- We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use. Design has a sociopolitical role as it meets the wants of people as well.
- What may be good for business may be bad for the environment. For example:
- The business practice of deliberately designing products that fail to sell more,
- The very notion of things being “in fashion”
- Subscription-based services.
- The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.
- The rise of small, efficient tools that can empower individuals leads to what Norman calls the rise of the small. Now individuals can do what was traditionally done by only a select few. Technology enables creativity.