I’ve just started reading Adaptive Path’s book, Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World. Here are some thoughts it’s provoked so far.

People / consumers / users / fool-proof
Ugh, the problem with words! This sentence stood out:

“Once you stop thinking of your customers as consumers and begin approaching them as people, you’ll find a whole new world of opportunities to meet their needs and desires.”

As I interpret the sentence above, the word “consumer” risks rendering an anaemic, flat, or mono-faceted view of a person, who should be considered as not just a consumer, but – well – a whole person. So if products should be considered in a wider context, so should people.

Still, you could argue that this is all silly pedantry – holding little to no value for designing a product or a service – and that the word “consumer” doesn’t imply a limit, per se, but usefully demarcates a single activity.

Inconclusive, and possibly over-analysed.

That said, words matter.

Don Norman wrote that we shouldn’t use the phrase “fool-proof” when talking about making a product simple. Why would you want to insult your users by calling them fools? He also wrote that if the product is difficult to use, you can only blame the product.

Empathy with users (user is my preferred term) is necessary for creating a good product experience.

Brand strategy versus experience design
Peter Merholz draws attention to an article on experience design by the UK’s Design Council, which confuses brand strategy with experience design. According to the Design Council, “experience design concentrates on moments of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create”.

Merholz wrote a succinct and clear response to Ardill’s article. Merholz’s view is that brands work “inside-out”: brand is how the company projects how it wants to be perceived. Experience design works the other way, or “outside-in”: an “appreciation of customers’ motivations, behaviours, and context leads to the development of a product, service, or system that can satisfy them”.

In Merholz’s definition, brand strategy and experience design are totally different things.

I really like the clear definition of brand strategy and experience design as Adaptive Path explains it. The confusion is there because experience design is still formative, and there is no universal, solid framework established, and perhaps there shouldn’t ever be a universal, solid framework. After all, everything is subject to change.

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It’s a very thought-provoking read so far. I’ll write up other ideas and thoughts I deem worthy of sharing…