Sony's Decline: When great tech isn't enough...

Sohrab Vossoughi wrote last year in the Harvard Business Review about the decline of Sony in the last two decades, and how the strategy that served it so well in the past just isn't enough now. Sony's products have always had great technology, capability, and quality - but now it's the design of the user experience that matters most.  According to Vossoughi: "In the early 80s, simply delivering technology in a usable form was still the biggest challenge, and Sony got it right before anyone else. ... In [today's] experience economy, these expectations are reversed. Technology is a given, and the question of 'what are the specs?' has been replaced by 'what is it like to use?'"  It's a refrain that I've heard professionally, too: clients claim that some tech has been tried before and didn't catch on, when what was really needed was a well-designed experience around that tech.  So Sony, don't fire those engineers - but hire some product designers to make a bigger difference!

Digital Calendars Wasting Space on the Past

Skeuomorphism is easy to identify when it mimics the aesthetic elements of tangible objects, but it can have even more impact when it's subtly copying interactions from the physical world. In Wired, Clive Thompson points out this influence in digital calendar apps, where the monthly view stubbornly sticks to showing a single calendar month, regardless of how much of that month is in the past. This is relic of paper calendars where it made sense to put each month on a single sheet - but digital calendars are free to show just the current week plus the next several weeks, a much more useful proposition. So, why don't they...?  Skeuomorphismmmm!!

The Never-Hungry Caterpillar: Empathy in design...

That white blob sketched into the image above is the Never-Hungry Caterpillar, a concept designed and/or written about by Marc Hassenzahl and Evgeny Morozov which calls users' attention to the power wasted by electronics in standby mode. Here's how: "The Caterpillar has three different modes: It breathes slowly in the case of 'normal' energy consumption through a device, such as a TV. If the TV is switched to stand-by, the Caterpillar starts to twist and turn awkwardly, as if in pain. This can be resolved by disconnecting the TV entirely. The metaphor of a caterpillar touches upon people's tendency to help and take care of living things."  What's innovative here is the play on guilt and empathy - this isn't a blinking light or a buzzing alarm, it's a living thing in agony! Or at least that's the trick; they're counting on a very basic, almost lizard-brain instinct to help something in pain. As we grow desensitized to various alerts and messages, this is essentially an escalation in the arms race for our attention. Shrewd, manipulative... and possibly, effective!

Kombo: Fun with specialized tools!

I have a soft spot for specialized tools: niche products refined through decades or centuries of iterations by and for the experts. As a layperson, seeing a product of this type is like looking into a parallel universe where they're ubiquitous - it's amazing not merely that they exist, but that they're so well-developed. The Kombo Tool fits in this category, and if you couldn't tell by looking (I sure couldn't), it's for fishing. It's a bonker (yes!), a filet knife, a scooper, and a sharpener - of course, it's waterproof and it floats in case it's dropped overboard. It sounds like a well-designed product that I'll never use - but it just makes me happy that it exists!
[via Gizmodo]

The Aspirin Point: Shrinking ingredients liberate design

Rain Noe recently wrote in Core77 about the "Aspirin Point", where the functional component of a product (a few milligrams of the drug) becomes so small that the physical design of the product (the pill) becomes essentially independent. This is incredibly liberating from a design point of view, because the product can be designed purely for the best possible use case. The Aspirin Point is gradually reaching consumer electronics, and USB flash drives are one of the first products to get there. In the tiny drive shown here (images from Rain), the cylinder that protrudes from the port isn't needed for electronics - it's purely ergonomic and aesthetic. What's the right shape? The right diameter, edge, and surface for a user to be able to remove it easily but prevent snagging on things? It's great to consider those questions all by themselves!

The Yellow Dog Project: Designing a message...

As a dog owner - especially since my dog is an energetic pit bull - I try to be responsible when my dog is approached by other animals or children. But it can be difficult, when even the humans don't always ask before interacting with her - and when they do, the question often carries a distinct connotation: "Is she friendly?"  I don't want to answer "no" because she is friendly, but she also needs her space, so the answer to that question is longer and more awkward than the asker expected. The Yellow Dog Project is trying to make that answer both easier and preemptive, suggesting a yellow ribbon or bow on the leash of any dog who needs this kind of consideration. It's a good attempt so far: the yellow-ribbon signal is flexible enough to be easy but specific enough to be recognizable. The trick is getting word of it to catch on, because its effectiveness will depend on reaching a critical mass. An awareness campaign by the ASPCA would be a good ol' 20th-century method, but the Yellow Dog Project currently has over 23,000 likes on Facebook. That's a start - now if only other dogs could be taught what that yellow ribbon means, too...

Good Design Starts with the Right Problem

I recently attended a workshop on the Stanford d.school's design innovation methodology given by Jeremy Utley, and he shared an excellent story about defining the right problem before designing the solution. Paraphrasing and simplifying: a project brief called for less-expensive infant incubators (about $2k) for use in Nepalese hospitals, where normal incubators (about $20k) were too costly to purchase and maintain. It sounded like a straightforward, well-defined project - until the team went to Nepal and noticed that there were no babies in the hospital. They learned that most babies were actually born in rural areas because parents couldn't make the long trip to a faraway hospital - and so the problem was redefined. Instead of "a low-cost incubator for hospitals," the real need was to "keep infants warm in rural areas" - in a way that's easy, portable, and works without electricity.  The result of the effort became the Embrace Infant Warmer, a $25 sleeping-bag-like pouch that uses a phase-change material ("rechargeable" in boiling water) to keep a constant temperature. It's a fantastic example of how assumptions should always be questioned as a first step in design - it can mean the difference between merely giving the client what they ask for, versus truly giving  users what they need!