Noel Franus

A business magazine all about design.

Last week Experience Manifesto pointed us to the latest issue of Fast Company, and after a week of insanely busy days and nights, I finally got a chance to flip through it yesterday during a flight back home. It was superlative -- I thought it was probably one of the most relevant issues, cover-to-cover of any magazine I've read in a while.

In fact, I think there's a lot worth talking about in that issue -- stuff that anyone in the design-as-differentiator business needs to read up on.

We're packing the family into the car for a work-related road trip next week. But in between Portland and Menlo Park I'll be throwing some of the magazine's more resonant blips on the blog for further reflection.

As a preview, I'm happy to point to Strategy by Design, by IDEO's Tim Brown. It's not that he's saying anything revolutionary, but rather that he does an excellent job of beating that drum we all need to hear. When I find myself, our team or my vendors falling into routines, it's always good to come across something as refreshing as this:

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they're willing to try to do what you do. We call them "T-shaped people." They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T -- they're mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That's what you're after at this point -- patterns that yield ideas.

These teams operate in a highly experiential manner. You don't put them in bland conference rooms and ask them to generate great ideas. You send them out into the world, and they return with many artifacts -- notes, photos, maybe even recordings of what they've seen and heard. The walls of their project rooms are soon plastered with imagery, diagrams, flow charts, and other ephemera. The entire team is engaged in collective idea-making: They explore observations very quickly and build on one another's insights. In this way, they generate richer, stronger ideas that are hardwired to the marketplace, because all of their observations come directly from the real world.

Comments:

I believe Sun has many T-shaped people...people with skills and perspectives beyond a narrow domain...yet, have we been successful "product designers"?

How much does user experience matter in the backroom of data centers, a world with proud, DIY geeks? Are not Apple and M$ at the forefront of the "experience computing" world?

If the most important thing is value and not price, why has commoditisation hurt us? Are we not able to convince the world at large that we represent value...???

Posted by Umang Kumar on June 11, 2005 at 09:26 PM PDT #

Wow, lots of questions here...much to pick from ;-)

Let's pick value, why not. Value isn't created on our end, it's a perception that the customers create. Any business can pack all types of features and strengths into a product, seeing that as a differentiator, but at the end of the day the value is a claim that only the buyer controls. They see the value or not.

So if all of the perceived value in Product A is seen to be the same as Product B, then customers consider sacrifice: no longer are customers interested in what you have, but rather they ask themselves what's it going to take to do business with you? How much do I have to sacrifice to hook up with you? If the pluses are the same, what are the minuses?

Price becomes a factor at this point. Free is a plus, anything more expensive than free is a minus. And I'd say that any company that loses out simply because of price hasn't clearly articulated (dare I say it) its value proposition in a way that's meaningful to its customers.

Certainly that's not the end of the story. But I think it's a useful start in framing it. And I have plenty of faith that this is something that'll be changing within Sun.

Posted by Noel on June 15, 2005 at 08:01 AM PDT #