Marketplace success as a measure for design success.

Design is often understood as applied creativity. Artists create things for the sake of expression itself, while design is about creating innovative things that make people’s lives better. This is a useful distinction when it comes to measuring the success of a designed product. For an artist, popular acceptance does not necessarily indicate whether she has achieved her intended goals. For a designer, though, popular appreciation (particularly in the form of sales) does correlate with success. The people who buy and spread the word about a product really believe it offers them innovation and a better quality of life.

But some ideas and products succeed in being recognized, appreciated, and purchased, while others fail. How can we know ahead of time which ideas will offer people helpful innovation in a form that they understand and appreciate? I believe that the success of a product is established long before that product reaches the marketplace. The difference between successful products and similar, unsuccessful ones, does not lie in any concrete feature or application. Instead, the difference lies in the degree to which the team behind the product understood the real opportunity — the depth of understanding is manifested in the results. The key to really understanding the opportunity depends on bringing research into the project process early on.

Really understand the opportunity…

Devoting time to research at the beginning of the design process allows a team to redefine their project problem and understand the real opportunity. Most design problems are originally defined in terms of a company’s business or market goals, such as “increase market share” or “make a new widget.” For a design team to have a plan of action, however, it needs to use research to understand who or what the market is, then to understand the near-term issues for that market. As a result, the design team will understand the real issues to address — and the real opportunity. The break-through success of the Palm Pilot is an excellent example of a process in which research enabled a team to identify a better opportunity — and create a product that left the competition in the dust.

In 1994, many companies launched mini-computers in the shared, business-centric belief that they were the next big product trend. Apple launched the Newton, and Palm Computing entered the market with the Zoomer. Despite predictions, the category did not take off. Ports and other hardware made mini-computers awkwardly large; multiple software applications, including handwriting recognition, made them slow.

For their follow-up effort, Palm did research which led it to a new and unique development opportunity. An in-depth study of the people who had bought the Zoomer revealed that they did not intend to replace their desktop computers. What they wanted was the digital equivalent of scraps of paper, or a planner which could connect to the computer they already had (“The Next Small Thing,” Fast Company, June-July 1998, pp.97-110). The real opportunity, therefore, was not mini-computers, but portable information. Because no one else shared this same understanding of the real opportunity, Palm’s second product, the Palm Pilot, had no direct competition and sold a million units in 18 months — more units, in a shorter time, than any previous electronic device.

…in order to solve better problems and be more innovative.

Understanding the real opportunity gives a team bigger and better problems to solve. And it actually forces them to innovate — like at Palm. As a further illustration, here is a scenario in which research turns an ordinary design problem turn into an industry-changing opportunity for innovation. Imagine that your team’s next project is to design a new tractor. If you accept the assignment as is, you may design a cool tractor. But since your team prefers never to take an assignment as-is, you decide to investigate whether a redesigned tractor is the really the best problem to solve. So you go out and do primary and secondary research into farming and farmers’ needs in the 21st century. First, you discover that the trend is for farmers to make fewer capital investments in traditional machinery. Second, you observe other aspects of farming in 2001, such as the effect of the World Wide Web, which offers better access to weather information, direct access to multiple agricultural marketplaces, bulletin boards for remote problem solving, and so on. This gives you a sense of what your customers care about, their issues and priorities, and what they really need. Now your team can recommend that in addition to a tractor redesign, your company also has a much larger and inherently more innovative opportunity to create tools that help reinvent farming. Your design team now has open season on innovation, your client gains a competitive advantage, and its customers get tools that address their real needs — all because your team took time to do some research up front.

Research: a secret weapon for successful design.

I believe that project teams that have the edge when it comes to producing successful results — results that are innovative and relevant to people’s lives, and which therefore sell well — are the teams that take time at the beginning of a process to understand the real opportunity for their project. By helping a team find and solve their real opportunity, research can make the difference between an okay product and a breakthrough innovation.