Core77

Customer experience--it's all the rage these days. (Shameless plug warning...) Hey, we've even got an excellent article up by Peter Merholz on the importance, nay, necessity of this key design process element. Keeping with this spirit, Businessweek's posted a nice case study on peripherals company Kensington's move towards incorporating user experience measures into their strategy to yield the new Ci Lifestyle Collection.

The article compares Kensington's shift to that of Nintendo's, where both companies suffered a lagging rank due to lack of resources, slightly dwarfed by industry giants--in this case, Microsoft and Logitech. As Nintendo has already risen from the flames thanks to the red-hot, not only user-friendly, but user-infatuated Wii gaming system, Kensington now embarks to test out the first fruits of its recently revamped customer-focused labor. The new Ci Lifestyle line includes two mice that will land on shelves, and hopefully many desks and kitchen tables, after feeling out the user in the home, at the office, and on the go. Enlisting the services of design firm One & Co., the team dug deep into the psychology of usability, heading straight for the people to find the real problems that were left to solve. After research and development, Kensington's new products focused more on the experience and less on features by addressing style, function, convenience, and performance accordingly.

Slimmer profiles without sacrificing ergonomics, combined wired and wireless connectivity, and improved portability are some of the fixes that make this collection a lot more about the customer, and consequently, about the customer taking it to the checkout counter.

...their goal in seeing the process through from research to final design was to create the total product experience. 'You have to be satisfied with a product in all facets of your experience with it, whether it's something you're doing eight hours a day, or it's something you do once every six months.'

For Kensington, this approach has changed the way they think about product design. 'If you ask most people what design is, they say it's what the product looks like: pretty colors, nice finishes...The breakthrough for us internally was the realization that design goes much deeper.'