Tag Archive for product design

Anchoring Errors, Diagnostic Errors, Mental Model Traps, Metaphor Mistakes, Perceptual Blindness, Pipsqueak Articles

Perception & Context

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It’s All About Context When it comes to real-estate, it’s location, location, location. When it comes to design, it’s context, context, context. Consider the following scenario: you are going shopping at Good Will. You see a brand new coffee maker for $10. “Oh My God,” you say, “that’s incredibly expensive!” You don’t buy it. You go to Starbucks and see the exact same coffee maker on sale for $120. You get it—how can you pass up such a bargain? In a different setting, the perception of price of the coffee maker resolves as cheap even as the actual price is higher. Why? Why do we care about the context in which the product is sold as opposed to some other intrinsic characteristic? There are people who buy empty Tiffany’s blue boxes and cases. Why? So they can place jewelry and other gift items in there. The mere fact of being inside a blue box makes those object more valuable—they work harder. Again, the perceived value it’s not just in the intrinsic characteristic of an object in a box, but rather in the combination of the two: the product and its context. If a gift-giver tells you that the present you’re…

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Background Knowledge Errors, Conceptual Design, Errors, Ethnographic & User Data, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Mental Model Traps, Mirroring Errors, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Users

Metacognition Failure: If I find it easy, it must not be important

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Making something easy to understand is extremely difficult. A good designer knows this, knows how hard one has to work to make something comprehensible and easy to use. Unfortunately, users and consumers of products (including education) tend not to get it. We live in society ruled by “More is Better” p-prim: more stuff is better, more money is better, more food is good, more medication is great…more, more, more. Movies, television, newspapers, magazines, all reinforce this idea in our minds. We live in a “super-size me” world. But this basic decision-making algorithm leads to very faulty reasoning. There are multiple corollaries to the “more is better” axiom: thick books without graphics are more educationally valuable, more important (this is based on research I did many years ago with 5th graders); longer essays are clearly better and should get higher graders (the students worked harder/longer on them); big words are better than small ones in expressing ideas (thus we get very pretentious writing); work should be judged by the time it took to complete and not by the quality of the results it produces; more expensive clothes (cars, stereos, etc.) are clearly more valuable (this is a true statement, but most…

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Background Knowledge, Conceptual Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Great Design = Technique + Ideation

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How do we get great design? Most of us can recognize it, but creating it is another matter. I spend a lot of time thinking about product design: How can Apple come up with product after product that’s beloved by their users? Why does Microsoft have difficulty achieving the same? I think the key is in combination of two necessary components of greatness: mastery of technique and richness of ideation. Let me explain. Consider art. What makes Picasso great? During his lifetime, the man was incredibly prolific. He worked in many different mediums from paint, to metal, to charcoal. He excelled at Analytical Cubism, easily surpassing Braques in both quantity and quality of work. Picasso borrowed from African art and from impressionists. He followed Matisse until Matisse’s students started to follow him. Picasso dived into an art form and explored with fury until he transformed it into something his own. He borrowed from everyone and bent it and molded it into a unique creation. Picasso was rich in ideation. But ideation is not enough. What good is an idea when it lacks execution? Picasso was an art prodigy. He was able to draw amazingly mature life drawings at age fifteen that most…

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Anchoring Errors, Background Knowledge, Background Knowledge Errors, Diagnostic Errors, Mental Model Traps, Pipsqueak Articles

Working Memory Limitations vs. the Size of Problem

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Three BLind Men and an Elephant Proverb

The illustration above comes from Wikipedia, which has a complete entry on the Asian proverb about blind monks who examine an elephant and generate multiple hypotheses of what it could be. In product design speak, these monks are doing collaborative problem solving with a shared goal of identifying a mysterious object—the elephant. The monks, the story goes, all come from different backgrounds: an old tailor touching an elephant’s ear describes it as cloth; an aging gardner hugging the leg imagines a tree trunk; an elephant’s tusk is envisioned as a weapon by an arms master. Each monk brings his own life’s worth of experience to bear on the problem, but each has very limited access to the whole. It’s easy to see how this story can be used to explain the pains of collaborative and cooperative group projects in which individuals focus on product design. Each person brings their own expertise to the table, hopefully contributing positively to the whole process. But this story is also a good metaphor for understanding problem solving in context of our very limited working memory capacity. Unlike elementary school math problems that we all calculated, real world problems are messy and don’t come with…

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