The Customer Insights class that I’m taking this semester offers a pretty interesting thought right off the bat: my professor writes in his syllabus that “A human-centered approach to design presents the opportunity to create products, services, and programs that can have a significant impact on our communities.” To me, a human-centered approach makes a lot of sense, and yet, it isn’t always what’s executed when companies engage in product design. It seems fascinating to learn about the evolution of marketing and design, especially given the shift from traditional products to human-centered ones that are derived from innovative ideas and thoughts.

It seems relatively straightforward, right? Deliver products and services to fit the needs of people by discovering what those needs are. If you can gear your design and research process towards those needs, you might strike gold and find the next big product. So, why have so many products and services failed at achieving just that?

One of our class readings, an article entitled Insights Into Customer Insights, talked about how customer insights revolved around gaining a truly unique understanding of consumers and turning that understanding into something that offers a competitive advantage to the company. While it sounds relatively simple, it occurred to me that this is an incredibly difficult task. How does a company know what will or will not work? How do you even begin to generate genuine customer insights? How do you get employees to think out of the box and create solutions to problems that they don’t even recognize? These are all questions that I think need to be considered for companies to excel in the very system they’re functioning within. The article goes on to talk about how employees should always ask the question “Why?” The philosophy of continual progression really resonated with me. It seems like the trick to being truly innovative is that you can’t ever just be satisfied with meeting needs. Rather, you have to exceed those needs and produce a slam-dunk idea, product, or service.

Another one of our class readings was to explore the IDEO HCD (Human-Centered Design) Toolkit. While this document was incredibly long, the key takeaways were so easy to digest and really got my thoughts going. IDEO defines human-centered design as “a process and set of techniques used to create new solutions for the world.” They suggest that the process for human-centered design is to “Hear, Create, [and then] Deliver.” It sounds so easy when it’s put like that, but each one of those phases is incredibly difficult to do right. I read an article the other day about Samsung and LG phones. The article discussed how the two companies hired new design specialists to focus on improving their mobile devices. HCD clearly applies in the case of mobile phones. In an era of smartphones, iPhones vs. Androids, and more, it’s clear that the company who dominates (arguably Apple as of recent times, who, even with the highly-publicized flawed iPhone 4, continues to create buzz) the market is the one that resonates the most with the consumer. Apple does a phenomenal job of creating devices that, as my professor pointed out in class, work the way you think they would work. That concept in it of itself has prevented other tech giants from getting it right.

The other day, we had a discussion in class about what happened to the music industry. In relation to another article we read in class titled From major to minor, the concept was to really discuss what music companies did well and could have done better to anticipate the wide change in how people get their music. We had an interesting discussion about the motivations for pirating music and talked about where the industry fell short. While I don’t consider myself a huge music buff, the discussion itself was really interesting to me because it got at a bigger issue: what is the future going to look like and what can we do now to anticipate how technology will change? Technology is a huge interest of mine and I hope to get my career started in the industry. However, if this class has taught me anything so far, it’s that product design is so vital to success and there are many different ways to think about design. These concepts are especially crucial in the technology industry and I see such value in thinking critically about the issues that come along with the ideas.

On Monday, we had a guest speaker come to our class named Jeff. Jeff talked a lot about the history and philosophy behind design and mentioned some key names of people who have gotten the design philosophy right over the years. I wanted to point out a philosophy that really caught my eye. It’s a quotation by Henry Dreyfus, who said, “If people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient, or just happier, the designer has succeeded.” Jeff pointed out the Dreyfus quotation to highlight the idea that a more human-centered approach began to emerge in the 1930’s and 40’s. For me, there were several interesting ideas about this statement. First of all, it suggests that the designer and the people are separate entities and thus raises the question: can the designer ever truly satisfy the people if they are looked at as an “other” rather than being seen as one of the people? Another idea is that if success is based on intangible results such as happiness, a completely subjective metric of success, did these human-centered designers ever feel satisfied? If they made someone happy, how did they know they couldn’t have made them even happier with a better product? How good is good enough? Finally, I was so intrigued by the phrase “more eager to purchase” within the quotation. It really got at the heart of human-centered design: if you create a product that creates demand and thus, increases a consumer’s eagerness to purchase, the designer has certainly succeeded from a business standpoint.

Well, these are all of my initial thoughts about how a design philosophy is relatively straightforward, yet difficult to nail. I hope that I didn’t ramble on too much and would love to hear your thoughts about anything I’ve written about! Until next time, my fellow blog readers, I bid you adieu.