| Selling Good Product Design |
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It’s easy to sell well-designed products to customers. And that applies to every product line and across all market segments – from household consumers, to business users, to professional clients. Good looks, intuitive interface, ergonomic comfort, and ease of operation all exert a powerful influence on buyers.
The hard part, for those who produce the products, is selling good design, and especially the investment that good design requires, to one’s own colleagues. The sticking point is that even though good design can be critical to a product’s success and to that of the company behind it, good design is also subjective – residing in the eye of the beholder – and not everyone agrees on exactly what it is, particularly those holding the purse strings. But the costs associated with achieving good design in both time, talent, and money, are clear, objective, and almost always in competition with other priority claims on a company’s finite resources. So what can product managers – or anyone else responsible for delivering a competitive product – do to sell their associates on the necessity of spending money and resources on good design? How can they justify the cost, predict the returns, and organize themselves for improved design and innovation? Take the lessons learned by two very different technology players in Pittsburgh: Medrad and LogicLibrary. What Gets in the Way of Good Design? Innovation, by definition, is not routine. It requires trial and error. And more often than not, it includes disagreement over priorities and methods. One obvious conflict occurs between the drive to bring multiple new products to market and the limited or inaccurately planned resources with which to do it. As Paul Adam, Manager of Product Development Process at Medrad observed: “Developing new products isn’t a repetitive, predictable process like manufacturing. Variability between projects makes resource estimation very difficult - more new products end up in the pipeline than an organization has capacity to handle. A funny dynamic can happen where managers overestimate to ensure their needs are met so management feels justified in asking for more from the product.”
UI-Driven Strategies
So how were the lessons applied? By incorporating User Interface-driven strategies into every aspect of the organization and product development process. According to Medrad’s Jerry Callan, “Usability can be the whole branding strategy, or just an incremental feature.” Coticchia’s vision for LogicLibrary takes the concept further and offers three principles to justify investing in a well-designed user interface: “Three things make or break the deal: a good graphical user interface, an easy install process, and meaningful reporting.” Both companies have instituted processes to support the planning and resource allocation necessary for good design – processes which also help resolve the conflicts between different disciplines. At Medrad, in addition to an integrated R & D and Marketing coalition, major new product utilize “The Triad” – a core product team consisting of a Program Manager, Product Planner, and Lead R & D Systems Engineer. All three roles are involved with every step of the product development process. They meet regularly to establish the original business plan, identify usability concerns, work out resource issues, incorporate customer research, and sort through iterative customer testing results. LogicLibrary uses a nearly identical process. All cross-functional roles are involved in the process from beginning to end. Product Management determines what to build and Engineering decides how to do it. All parties are held accountable for the product’s success, and nothing is released without cross-signatures from all managers. Even the customer is virtually present in the guise of empathic Product Managers. As Coticchia notes: “We knew we needed someone to be responsible for thinking about who will be using our product and under what circumstances.” Dodging surprises Front-end planning for design using a product planning/customer research approach can go a long way towards avoiding requests for unplanned features and unanticipated technical issues, at least in the experience of Medrad. Since the early 1990’s, the company has adopted a product planning method called the “Genesis Process”. Using extensive customer research, including product team members trained in ethnographic research methods, focus groups, and early prototyping, along with input from a separate Product Innovation Group, Medrad plans extensively for new product development. Paul Adam is particularly enthusiastic about the possibilities arising from new methods: “We use ethnographic research especially when we need to make major step changes and find additional new product ideas.” LogicLibrary supplements its engineering plans with constant customer communication and encourages continuous feedback on potential product design improvements. And both firms bring in outside design consultants as needed to improve navigation flow, standardize user interface elements, and ensure easy accessibility. The price of good design There is a price, however. Planning ahead for good design and responding to unexpected requirements costs money. At different times, both companies have found themselves needing to go to senior management for additional resources. Coticchia found himself needing to ask his company’s board for an unbudgeted $100,000 after early customer testing revealed significant design flaws that he realized had to be resolved to be competitive. He used estimates of lost sales as well as anticipated savings from reduced product support to get the budget he needed and to support a business case, return-on-investment argument. “It’s gotten easier and easier to sell UI – both to customers and to our board,” he says. With the increased customer interaction, our technology and applications are more exposed. Everyone – including our board – has had more exposure to the concept of good design and can better relate to the need for it.” Adam concurs: “We’ve recognized ease of use as a key competitive advantage. We know we have to spend time and money on it. Medrad management is willing to spend money on design, but we still face pressure to make it an efficient and affordable process.” Industry studies offer additional support to justify spending on design. Between 1999 and 2002, for example, Dell Computer realized an astounding increase from $1 million in daily sales to $34 million per day after redesigning their e-commerce site. Database administrators using Oracle’s improved navigation structure performed their tasks 20% faster. And while neither has life or death consequences, to the operators of medical interfaces who can’t figure out how to use them right, the consequences could be grave indeed. From increased sales to refined product development processes to preventing deadly mistakes, good design makes sense. At the end of the day, taking the time and spending the money to create products that customers really want and find easy to use is a good investment.
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