How to Think About Products As A Product Designer/Creator?

Pencil As A Product. It is a system of wood, graphite lead, and outer grip design that helps people write on surfaces. Photo Source - Platform Native Library

I use the term product in a very generic sense. A product can be a tool that helps someone do something. Some things that come to mind are a hammer, a screw, a washing machine, a car.  A product can be something that gets consumed (A soft drink, a cookie, or a coffee). A product can be something that gets worn by people (a piece of cloth, a ring, a sunglass). A product can be a service as well, such as a ticketing system, or a cruise trip from point A to point B, or a cleaning service. A product can be a working system that helps access a set of information and helps in analysis using that information. It can be a bloomberg terminal or even a spreadsheet with a set of numbers.

It may be useful to think of a product as an intentionally created entity that helps get some job done. To access this product, people will be ready to pay some monetary value because it helps them achieve some goal. The goal can be washing clothes, getting the required amount of dietary nutrition, accessing some information for decision making, even taking a momentary pause from all the activities and sounds around us. We can call them goals to be achieved or jobs to be done or state to be achieved.  When we talk about goals to be achieved or jobs to be done in detail, we will touch upon Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. We’ll get there in some time. We will also discuss the concepts of ‘jobs to be done’ as had been discussed by Prof. Clayton from Harvard for a really long time.

Product End Receiver and Need Fulfilment and complexity of needs.

Understanding needs to be fulfilled and commerce is extremely important to gain a holistic perspective on products and answering to ourselves as creators of products (or services). 

There are things that nature provides and living beings can just reach out to them to fulfil their needs. The grass growing in fields is grazed by cattle. When you visit a zoological park, you can sometimes see a chimp using a small branch to pull a floating item on the water towards itself. Humans have a complex mind and we have learnt for centuries to gain access to materials provided by nature and synthesise them to design and build tools as an extension of ourselves. For an increasing population we need more and more such extensions to fulfil various needs at scale. There are people who design and build something and there are people who use these things. To be able to use these things they have to give something in exchange and that’s where the concept of money comes into picture as a medium of exchange. 

Let us take some examples:  

• A simple spoon is a product made for eating food. The job to be done in picking up a food item such as rice to consume it. 

• A road infrastructure has several inputs such as labour, building material etc and is used to move people and objects from one place to another. 

• A telephone has several inputs from various natural minerals and is placed as a final output product in the market. It primarily helps in communication which we can call as the job to be done. 

Start With The Customer/End User

A good way to start thinking about a product is to look at a need or simply look at a job to be done and the  frequency at which a need arises and for what periods of time that need is required to be fulfilled. If we start from the customer point of view - we can think about the job to be done. If we think about the product creators point of view, we can think in terms of ‘use cases’. 

When we start with the customer, we need to observe people closely to how they do things in their native environment. How do they improvise their actions in achieving their goal?

When someone starts to work on some problem statement in their, they set a base level expectation on outcomes. To achieve those results they have to take some set of actions. With every action they take there is some set of expectations in terms of feedback that gives and understanding that the action was successful. This logical sequencing of events with feedback mechanisms is really important. 

Customers (people) require to get some type of job done. 

A designer needs to ensure that these needs are met, that the resulting product is understandable and usable, that it accomplishes the desired tasks, and that the experience of use is positive and enjoyable. (Don Norman: Design of everyday things) 

Effective Design needs to satisfy a large number of constraints and concerns including shape and form, cost and efficiency, reliability and effectiveness, understandability and usability, the pleasure of appearance, the pride of ownership, the joy of actual use. 

Think - What can be the impediments to the experience? What are the things in the form of actions, confusions, unreasonableness, delays etc may surface as an impediment to an experience.

Think - In terms of feedback against each action and whether those feedbacks maintain the intended direction of flow of usage of the product.

Think - In terms of verbs. What are the flow of actions that are going to occur when a human interacts with this product?

Think - Whether the products is going to be used by a single person, or a group, or an entire institution.

Think - From the point of view of complexity that end users' mind is willing to handle in a particular context.

Best

VM

10th Boulevard

Reference

[1] Design Of Everyday Things - Don Norman

[2] Lectures and talks by Prof Clayton Christensen on 'jobs to be done'.