The ultimate goal of a consumer electronics product can be considered to be providing a good experience to the user. Functionality, often driven by technology, is critical to achieving this, providing a foundation onto which other important experiential factors can be added, leveraging a deep understanding of users and their context. The best design processes for consumer electronics products incorporate functionality at their core.

The consumer electronics industry is primarily concerned with making products people want to buy. Consumers buy products for a number of reasons, the field of economics considers the two central market forces to be supply and demand, the latter is a measure of a people’s desire for a product. The simple need of a number of individuals to perform a key function the product provides could be quantitatively measured to derive this metric, however consumers can also be said to want products for more subjective reasons. Stephen P. Anderson’s (2011) hierarchy of user experiences neatly defines both a consumer need and want for products as a hierarchy of requirements starting with a product’s’ ability to help a user perform a critical task and ending with those related to the user’s personal experience with a product. Our obsession with the ‘new’ makes it clear that technology enabling new functionality does drive purchases of consumer electronics products alone, how many people do you know who keep a smartphone longer than their contract term. However, the Apple Inc. stock price increases since the introduction of the iPod in 2001 and iPhone in 2007 makes a strong case for the importance of experiential design; neither the iPod or the iPhone offered functionality that was new to the market on launch, but instead leveraged design to create what Stephen P. Anderson would call a ‘seductive interaction’.

“It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better”.

Sir Jonny Ive

All good consumer electronics products clearly embody two concepts therefore, that of rapid technology development enabling new functionality and that of the everyday people who create market forces for better product experiences beyond basic functionality. These two aspects of consumer electronics are brought together by successful product design processes.

Functional technology development, with its quantitative performance metrics is well suited to empirical development using the scientific method, often tracked by NASA’s Technology Readiness Levels in commercial environments, to set and answer research questions. This is a process Dyson have become famous for, with Sir James Dyson famously taking 5,127 prototypes to create his first cyclone vacuum cleaner. The more difficult bit is making a causal link between quantitative performance criteria and the creation of a good experience. Better dirt pickup may be obvious for a vacuum cleaner but a clear bin so you can see it working is a less obvious detail that unquestionably helped provide a different and better experience when using the product that was partly responsible for Dyson’s early success. The question is what is a good experience as created by a product?

“Good design is as little as possible. Less, but better, because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.”

Dieter Rams

“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”

Dieter Rams

Many heuristics aiming to provide guidance on answering this question have been proposed over the years. The first to be created for the design of consumer electronics came from Dieter Rams, one of the most influential industrial designers of this century. Dieter was born in 1932, and spend much of his career working for Braun, a company founded in 1921 that saw its first success making radio sets, the very first consumer electronics product. At Braun, Dieter formulated 10 principles for good design that clearly articulate that a product must be capable of undertaking a core function well and then build in creativity, beauty and simplicity through its specific delivery of that functionality.

1. Good design is innovative
   “The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.”

2. Good design makes a product useful
   “A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.”

3. Good design is aesthetic
   “The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.”

4. Good design makes a product understandable
   “It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.”

5. Good design is unobtrusive
   “Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.”

6. Good design is honest
   “It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.”

7. Good design is long-lasting
   “It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.”

8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
   “Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.”

9. Good design is environmentally friendly
   “Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.”

10. Good design is as little design as possible
    “Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.”

While the design trend for functionalism that Dieter is often considered a part of has arguably given way to other movements in product design, a products function, enabled by technology, and understanding of its users in context remain as key considerations in all contemporary design processes.

David Benyon and Phil and Susan Turner (2005) provide a more up to date framework for thinking about the four elements of people, activity, context, and technology in their book “Designing Interactive Systems”. This describes a people-technology system created to perform a given activity in a given context and provides a number of considerations for each element in an effort to promote the importance of designing to “support people [doing what they want to do in the context they want to do it] and for people to enjoy”.

Stephen P. Anderson (2011) goes a step further in his book “Seductive Interaction Design” and makes the case for great products focusing completely on meaning and pleasure people derive from them once the technology is delivering its basic functionality reliably in an easy to use form.

The one thing that all these design principles have in common is the core value they place on the basic functionality of a product. Additionally, they each claim an understand of users and the context of use is important to creating a good experience on top of this basic functionality. How exactly basic product functionality can be linked to experience is less clear.

The problem becomes classifying and measuring these less tangible factors so the design can be optimized for eliciting their response in users. In turn, this means there requirements can be used to drive the direction of functional technology development through adding performance constraints to its iterative design process.

Generally, the user characteristics relevant to the design of consumer electronics products can be grouped as physical, psychological and contextual (Benyon & Turner, 2005). Relevant physical differences typically include ergonomic and sensory while psychologically they are preference & personality, thoughts & feelings, and experience & education. Contextual differences are broader and encompass aspects such as historical, cultural, linguistic and social as well as the specific objectives and expectations for the use of a product.

The size and quantity of the variation between people in terms of these factors means that primary research is often required to understand the relevant characteristics of a user group and the context they are using a product in so as to measure and predict what will be both useful and desirable. It is clearly impossible to consider and meet the requirements of every user and context so a selection must be made, forming the target market; When actually running the research, a small number of selected individuals assumed to be representative of this target market are studied to reduce the cost and time of this research. The specialism of product mechanistics, meaning the study of people as if they were machines, is now used extensively in consumer product R&D centres to quantify these experiential factors in ways that can be measured and therefore causally linked to functional technology performance metrics, driving its development in turn.

People often find functionality and aesthetics difficult to reconcile and so it is useful to give some specific consideration to this topic. Sven Ove Hansson‘s (2005) “Thesis of Aesthetic Duality” provides an excellent review. Given a products ultimate objective of providing a good experience, I prefer the simpler explanation that aesthetic elements of a product are functional, providing desirable semiotic meanings, inspiring subjective perceptions of beauty or being uniquely personal, all of which adds positively to the user’s experience overall. The lynch pin remains functionality however, with poor functionality strong negative elements would be added to the experience that aesthetic functions would find difficult to overcome. In contexts other than consumer electronics, such as art or farm machinery for instance, this may not be the case, but for consumer electronics, even aesthetics an be approached with a design process that puts functionality at its core.

It is clear therefore that a design process for consumer electronics products with functionality at its heart and incorporating a deep understanding of users and their context can drive great product experiences and aesthetics.

References

1. Google Finance, 2019. “NASDAQ: AAPL Market Summary”. Google Finance [Online] Available at: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=appl&tbm=fin#scso=_Oy8FXuWiMZKrgAaBiKuYCg10:0 [Accessed 26 December 2019].

2. D. Benyon, P. Turner & S. Turner, 2005. “Designing Interactive Systems“. [Print].

3. S. P. Anderson, 2011. “Seductive Interaction Design”. [Print].

4. S. O. Hansson, 2005. “Thesis of Aesthetic Duality“. Sweden: Royal Institute of Technology [Online] Available at: https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=324 [Accessed 26th December 2019].