Peter Merholz tours us through some of the most successful companies and how they focus on the interaction with the user, arguing that good designers create experiences, not products. Here's a taste: When you start with the idea of making a thing, you're artificially limiting what you can deliver. The reason that many of these exemplar's forward-thinking product design succeed is explicitly because they don't design products. Products are realized only as necessary artifacts to address customer needs. What Flickr, Kodak, Apple, and Target all realize is that the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing that our customers care about.
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I am not a believer in disposable goods creating much of a life experience, it sounds pretentious and almost desperate on the part of many designers. Being in love or in mourning are experiences, as is being afraid, mesmerized, horrified or surprised. This is the realm of cinema, art (sometimes), theatre and the like, hardly product design. Whatever experience using a mass-produced object provides is quickly forgotten and rather low on the intensity scale of everyday life.
Manufacturers are only geared to sell hard goods that fill a purpose, to then be discarded or recycled. The anarchy objects are made in is rather inevitable, can you imagine the task of considering every interaction between the product on your screen with everything else out there? Life was way simpler in Kodak's time.
Designers should leave creating experiences to artists and writers for one simple reason - it takes serious time, talent and effort to create memorable ones. Time especially is a commodity in rare supply today in R&D departments. Designers should stick to what design does best - serve reliably and unobtrusively.
Great article. But I feel that this is written by someone new to the product design process, maybe coming from another field. I can't see how Experience Design is different from the thoughts that lies behind all work done by architects and designers for the last few hundred years. That said, I think the article is relevant and as always it is refreshing to get this kind of text written by someone articulate not from the hard core designer-crew. What I mean is - if we designers we're better at communication, maybe Peter would have picked this up years ago. Then again, maybe we wouldn't be so good at designing then :)
Best regards,
Frederik Andersen
Goodmorning Technology
I guess the lesson learned is remember that optimization for one set of users can drastically harm others.