Design & Innovation

Another item discussed in The Art of Innovation that I’ve found useful is the idea of prototyping. The company I work for makes a product that is 90% software and so the GUI is extremely important to the overall usefulness of our product. We have had numerous discussions over the years about features that should be added to our software environment. Some of these features are to fulfill customer requirements and some are for enhancements that we think are useful for the market. Generally, our product group takes feedback from sales, goes to work internally and creates something, tells the rest of the company when it will be available and then shows it to us when it’s complete. Often the end result is not exactly what was expected. Product management will defend their decisions and explain their rationale but once they have written the code they don’t want to go back and make changes.

There is no participation by sales/marketing or any customer input during the design process. It would so much more beneficial if our product management group brought others into the design process. I believe we would have opportunities to come up with better ideas and improve the finished product.

In the book The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly and Jonathan Littman, Kelly talks about the first two steps in IDEO’s methodology as Understand and Observe. The idea being that to really uncover the needs of a user you must go beyond asking the user what they want. You must really seek to understand what the user is trying to accomplish through observation and study. The user may not even be able to articulate what he or she wants and only through observation can a designer really understand the issues.

I work for a software company that designs its products to meet the needs of engineers performing various types of testing on network elements in communication networks. As a company we do not take the design process far enough. We have solicited customer feedback about what they like or don’t like about our product, we have had some product managers visit customers and sit in conference rooms to talk about our product. However, we have never sent our product group into the customer environment to observe and study how the users actually use our product.

These insights into how IDEO views design are very valuable and applicable to my company’s product. I think it is possible to design a superior product by collecting one or two meaningful insights into user needs. The decision criteria among users in our market are very fine; such that one or two very insightful features could have a major impact on a customer’s final decision.