Products Are People Too
Recently I’ve had the opportunity to speak to people who operate in the world of products.
What defines ‘products’ to my mind, as opposed to just regular objects, is that they are intended to operate in the market. Products are put on the shelves of shops, or on websites, and are sold, often to people who have incomplete knowledge about what they do, and who had no part in their design. Products eventually reside in people’s homes and in people’s pockets. And they cost money, which means people have to decide what to buy.
Oh, and there’s the mass market too! Products can only compete if they’re mass-manufactured and therefore mass-consumed. Component and factory cost are way more important than I thought—the assumption of a high-consumption society is baked in.
And whereas I used to only think about, well, sociality, adaptability and materiality, these product designers have a million more constraints.
My favourite constraint they have to design for – which I heard from some toy inventors – is ‘shelf demonstrability.’
‘Shelf demonstrability’ is that a product needs to tell you what it does before you pick it up. It has to attract you to look at it, communicate visually and with a demo mode button what it does, then convince you to buy it. Sometimes it’s important that the consumer believes they completely understand the functionality of a product, even if it does much more when they eventually get it home, and even if they turn out to be wrong.
A product can be as well-designed for everyday use as you like, but if the consumer never takes it off the shelf, it’s got no chance. No chance.
And another thing: There’s the shape that products should be to sit on the shelf (like this: []), and market sectors, and functionality lists and so on.
And what started happening is that I was getting a colossal list of constraints.
It was when I was facing all these constraints that I ran into experience design.