Good Product Design Guidelines
Anyone can design a mousetrap….
But not everyone can dominate the mousetrap market with runaway profitability (unless you are Apple and it is the iMousetrap). Below are some good rules to follow if you want to succeed.
1. Design and sell innovative products, not clones of what are already on the market. Cloning reduces your design to commodity status and if you’re small, the mass merchandisers of the world will control your business. Innovate and re-innovate in each succeeding generation to stay one step ahead.
2. Feature creep is a disease, brought about by marketing departments making a combined feature set from all their competitor’s projects or engineers eager to use all the feature set of their new microprocessors.
Case in point: The modern digital watch. It has several alarms, a stopwatch, maybe several time zone displays and yet the normal user can not change the battery himself (OK maybe it’s just me, I have 10 watches in the drawer with dead batteries… ). The last breakthroughs in watches were quartz timebase for accuracy and before that self-winding watches. Go back further and it was illuminated (albeit radioactive!) dials and waterproofing. Do we need a watch that reads our RSS feeds or has a cell phone built in (or a TV)? No, and they never sell.
3. Ease of Use – To quote the Red Green Show, “If you can’t be good looking, at least be handy.” Good advice. This ties in nicely with no feature creep and innovation. Who hasn’t become frustrated trying to run a cell phone camera? One that I owned required navigation into two submenus and a 20 second wait for the camera subroutine to load. The next model had just a button on the side that you pressed to launch the camera app, turn phone sideways, wait 5 seconds and press to click. Much better. Another bad example is my digital camera. There are over 15 buttons on the sides, top, front and back. Open the viewfinder and there are menus galore. It takes great pictures, fortunately, because the default settings work well. Just don’t press any of those other buttons by accident.
4. Get your core technologies right first – When companies get in trouble, especially public companies who must appease their shareholders with growth claims, one of their temptations is to either a) get into a new product category, outside their expertise or b) buy a smaller company, also outside of their expertise. The first clue is that they are not growing in their core industry. It could be a combination of bad marketing, lack of innovation in their core technology or they are in a category that is shrinking. Buying a smaller company has it’s own issues. Usually a company is for sale when it is in trouble itself. You won’t find Apple or Google on the auction block but you might find AOL or Yahoo there. Think about what you are buying and why. The really successful companies re-invest in their core technologies and keep on top. Consider Apple and Bose. Yes, Apple DID get into MP3 players and phones. However, they took decades to get the desktop computer right first.
Summary:
Not only do the rules above apply to hardware manufacturers, but you can apply the same exact rules to website design. Have an innovative site with unique content, preferably about something you like and know about. It should be about your “core technology”, specialize in one topic. It should not have “feature creep”. Too many widgets, for instance a forum before you have built content and established a traffic flow, are not good. The site should be easy to use (good navigation, consistent from page to page, decent font size, split up paragraphs…)
The above concepts are good for manufacturing, good for websites, good for life….
Written July 14, 2010 by Vic Richardson
