Designing for Interaction

"Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (Voices That Matter)"

Dan Saffer has reviewed Donald G. Reinertsen’s book Managing the Design Factory: A Product Developer’s Toolkit, which provides a very stark look at the product design process.

Reinertsen speaks about sales being a measure of how much users appreciate the value of a product:

The only measure of the value of a design is its economic value. Our designs are not important because they are beautiful or because they are innovative; they are important because they make money.

A rather naff quote (as my boss said ) and this doesn’t really help us with design ideas but it does remind me of what is important when communicating our product and service designs around the business.

A few interesting points to pull out of the review:

• Design to fail half of the time, because you can learn much more from failure than you can from success
• The UI is only one interface in the product - we have to design for interfaces with other products as well as interfaces with organisations (internal and customer).
• You have to be able to explain why a customer will prefer your product to others in less than 25 words.
• If the product’s proposition doesn’t exclude anything, it’s worthless.

As Dan says, the book provides a very clear view of the design process and a reminder of the important economic perspective.

Are you interested in buying the book?