BYOMSPM

Chapter 7: Design in the World of Business

The following is a collection of key quotes from Chapter 7 of The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman along with my thoughts on each quote. Enjoy.

Norman starts by commenting on the reality of who a product’s actual customers are, aiming to contrast against the fact that the focus throughout the rest of the book is on the end user:

“It is the distributors who are the real customers, not the people who eventually buy the product in stores and use it in their homes.”

The Design of Everyday Things, p. 260

He also comments that although distributors play a key role in making the product available to the end consumers in the first place, the experience of the product for the user once they have it has to still be pleasant: “it doesn’t matter how many people buy something if they are going to dislike it when they start using it.” (Norman, p. 294). My first thought is that it seems like if the distributors limit selections in stores across a whole type of product effectively enough, there won’t be any options that provide a truly pleasant user experience, and the end customers will be left trying to pick the least-unpleasant product. And, at least across certain price ranges, I do think this happens a decent amount of the time. My second thought is that this book was last updated in 2013, and at that point I don’t think Direct-to-Consumer products were too big of a deal yet. I had never considered the impact that a DTC business model would have on the customer and user that product designs for, but it seems like it would greatly simplify the design process to only have to focus on the needs of the end user.

Norman then lists out factors that push companies to add additional features to products when they otherwise, based on their research, would not:

“
– Existing customers like the product, but express a wish for more features, more functions, more capability
– A competing company adds new features to its products, producing competitive pressures to match that offering, but to do even more in order to get ahead of the competition
– Customers are satisfied, but sales are declining because the market is saturated; everyone who wants the product already has it. Time to add wonderful enhancements that will cause people to want the new model, to upgrade
“

The Design of Everyday Things, p. 261

Norman calls this featurism, and I’ve also heard it referred to as feature creep. In relation to the third bullet, I was recently reflecting on Apple products and how dependent everyone I know is on Apple devices (well, smartphones, but it seems like Apple has a huge monopoly on them right now) for the majority of their daily activities. I was wondering why Apple doesn’t just charge exorbitant amounts of money for the phones. My brother countered with the same point as this third bullet which is that by now most people (both in my world and also in a lot of the world) already have smartphones, so there isn’t naturally much demand for new ones. Instead, Apple has to actively, artificially create reasons for people to buy new phones. One strategy to do this is to add enticing new features to the latest models (lately their focus seems to be on the camera); another is to make the new models very cheap (which they sometimes do with trade-in deals); and yet another is to make products that have a built-in limited lifespan. Despite my instinct that building in a limited lifespan for products seems like a shady tactic, he comments that it is in fact a common practice, employed even by Ford during the early 20th century.

Norman then gets a bit philosophical and circles back to some commentary on our dependency on advanced technology:

“Does the new technology make use stupid? No, on the contrary, it changes the tasks we do.

The Design of Everyday Things, p. 287

This brings to mind fears I’ve heard expressed (as well as personally had) in the last few years related to artificial intelligence and robots taking over the world, the singularity, humans becoming slaves to robots, etc. In response I’ve often heard people point to the technological revolution that has already happened with computers, citing that most people were worried that the advent of computers would eliminate the need for human workers, yet it has actually enabled humans to perform more complex and impactful tasks with the aid of computers. While I think the same will likely be true with more recent tech advancements, I think this quote touches on something else critical, which is that it’s still important that we don’t mindlessly and completely let technology replace everything it possibly can.

Lastly, Norman shares my favorite thought of his in the whole book:

“In Western cultures, design has reflected the capitalistic importance of the marketplace, with an emphasis on exterior features deemed to be attractive to the purchaser… We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.”

The Design of Everyday Things, p. 291

I want to print this quote out in 96 pt font and put it up as wall decor in my house because this is my Roman Empire (I think about this every day). There are so, so, so few products that I have experienced in my daily life that are truly designed & produced really well. The ways I notice it most prominently are through the use of suboptimal materials, lackluster aesthetic designs, low quality mechanical designs, and products that seem to miss the mark on actually addressing the need of the activity. As a result, I often find myself investing in more expensive versions of products in hopes that they will have paid more attention to these elements and provide for a more enjoyable experience of use. Or, if I can, I try to find vintage versions of products that were designed and produced during a time when the pressures of the markets weren’t felt so acutely. At the end of the day, I’ve started to gather that the designers of our markets today have learned that the only part of the product experience that really needs to be joyful is the experience of clicking “buy.”

Thanks for reading.

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Works Cited

Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press, 2013.