Those of us involved in the discipline of experience design do well to remind ourselves that it wasn’t conceived when Tim Berners–Lee invented the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. According to Google Trends, the term “user experience” has been growing steadily in search popularity since 2004, however, its philosophy and processes didn’t fall out of the sky – they were founded on product design theory pioneered in the previous decades.
Sure, the processes which underpin it have evolved considerably since those early web days, however, the commitment to solving customer problems through design long pre–dates the internet.
When SONY’s export sales started to accelerate in the late 1960s, the distinct feedback coming from global markets was that their products were keenly priced but weren’t of adequate quality to make the necessary impact. Internally, SONY’s response wasn’t to do design better, but to do it differently. They committed to define design as a different thing to what it had previously been understood to be.
Around the same time, Toyota too were beginning to learn that the dynamics of overseas markets needed to affect how they thought about quality and what drove design decision–making. The quality of their process thinking at that time led their pursuit and successful achievement of being the largest automotive manufacturer in the world, a title they have shared intermittently with Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen in recent years.
These and many other manufacturers across a range of product types and sectors evolved what became known as the product design process. At its heart, this process seeks to achieve two important things; firstly it determines to humanise design by putting people at its centre and secondly it founds design in research and testing, to plug it into the people and marketplaces it is there to serve.
From these challenges and experiences came the classic product design process – striking in its simplicity – research / design / build / test. For some challenges it is more beneficial to understand it as defining a problem / solving a problem / building a solution / testing a solution. Regardless of the specific labels used to describe it, it expresses an important design philosophy, namely the centrality of customer validation and direction in good design.
Moreover, it ensures that the design process starts and ends with the people that the design is for. It commences by committing to ensure that design is fixing a real problem, well, and finishes by pledging to ensure that the problem has been solved, well.
Because of its power I find it astonishing that when design projects are under time or investment pressures that the first activities to be shelved are those which plug the design into the people that the design is for. This leaves the design process open to the danger of merely prettying up guesswork.
The process has the additional benefit of helping to establish project “True North” because it sets the immovable compass on the reason the design is being undertaken. This immediately casts a light on any subsequent decisions which might either enhance or dilute the project objective.
Imagine for instance a bank decided that their True North was to be the most digitally connected and capable bank in a certain marketplace based on a series of agreed KPIs such as quality of user experience, empirically measured user satisfaction and market penetration. Such a project vision would then provide a benchmark for what was required and the ability to readily identify compromises or diluting short–cuts which would de facto mean they fell short of the aspiration. Its power is in the focus it brings to a project team to design for outcomes.
I had the pleasure of attending the opening match at the Aviva stadium (formerly Lansdowne Road, Ireland’s national rugby stadium) in May 2010, an under–20s game played in front of a half–full stadium. This is another example of the product design process in action, as the IRFU wanted to ensure that the stadium was fit for purpose, and iron out any niggles before the autumn internationals and the Six Nations rolled round. Having designed the stadium to solve a problem they wanted to validate that they had indeed solved that problem before fully launching it.
That SONY is one of the world’s most successful electronics brands is no accident, nor is Toyota’s dominance in the field of automotive manufacturing. Culturally they both redefined how they understood design and had the humility to put their customers at the centre of the process.
Google, Amazon, Facebook et al have continued the evolution of that design thinking since the mid–1990s and we do well to stand on their shoulders, just as they stood on the shoulders of SONY, Toyota and others before them.