artefact + marketing = product
Business is quite simple: you make something, you sell it - right?
Those involved in product design and software usability know that it is not
as easy as that. You don't just make something, you need to understand who is
going to use your product, what their needs are etc. in order to design the
right product for the right people.
This looks like a one-way process, but of course, in a commercial world, deciding
who you are going to address and which needs you address will be largely by
determined by who will pay money. So marketing certainly seeds design.
In fact, things are far more closely tied than that.
First of all the features that sell a product are not necessarily those
that are really useful.
I have three use-words for design.
We need to design products so that they are:
The last of these includes acceptance within an organisation, aesthetics
of the design so that people want to use it, and marketing it so that users
can see it is there and buy it.
If a product is not used then it is useless however useful or usable it
is!
Standard usability typically stops after the first two!
There are exceptions to this. Participatory design is ostensibly about making
a better design because end-users are involved. However, the process also
makes sure that the future users are committed to the final system and are
far likely to use it whether or not it is better at meeting their real needs.
That is participatory design is a form of marketing!
It is often said that software products have too many features that no-one
ever uses. However, customers (who will become users) are likely to be attracted
by long lists of new features. If you want the 20% of features that really
are useful to be actually used, you may need to add the other 80% of irrelevant
features that mean that customers buy it!
So the needs to market a product change what may go into a product.
But, the interplay goes deeper still.
If you market a car as powerful and sexy this will influence who buys it,
but almost certainly the person who buys it will drive it faster and more
recklessly than the same vehicle marketed as a family car. Our use of a product
depends on our perception of the product.
At a deep level you could say that the artefact we have designed only becomes
a product once it takes on a set of values and purposes within the users mind
- and these are shaped intimately not just by the design, but also by the
way we market the product.
In usability we know that a product is more than a raw technical artefact
it also consists of the documentation and training that goes into, what
some call, the wetware of a system (the humans!). The first a user sees
of a new product is when it is advertised and sold to them. We are missing
a crucial element if we ignore the effects of the way the artefact is
marketed to its future users.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Internet products and services. The
users are fickle and critical, products are virtual with uncertain boundaries,
and documentation, if provided, is unlikely to be used. How we present a product
on a website, in PR in advertising will intimately determine the use of the
product.
Think about web-based email. Your personal mail is received by a multinational
corporation, siphoned into their internal data stores and dribbled out to
you when you visit their site. Would you do that with your physical mail?
However, this is not how we perceive it. Users have sufficient trust in the
organisations concerned that they regard the web mailbox as 'mine' - a small
section of a distant disk is forever home.
The factors that build this trust are complex and intertwined, but certainly
include the interface style, the brand and reputation of the provider, the
wording used on the site, the way the service is advertised to you, newspaper
and magazine articles. In the UK a few years ago an executive of a large jewellery
store said, in an off-the-cuff remark, that their products were cheap. The
store's sales plummeted as public perception changed. Imagine what would happen
if a senior executive of Microsoft described hotmail in the terms at the beginning
of the previous paragraph!
As we address the needs of a networked society, we must go beyond the creation
of useful usable artefacts, and instead design products that will be used.
To do this we cannot rely solely on cosy relationships between users and designers,
but open up the design remit to consider every stage of product deployment
from the first advert the user sees until the consumed product hits the bin,
is deleted from the hard disk or the URL is cleared from the favourites list.
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