David Kelley explains why observing people in their actual environments matters for product design. He uses examples from gas stations, toothbrush design, and medical devices to show how watching users reveals needs they can't articulate themselves.
And I just thought I'd talk about three very quickly. I'd talk about three of the kind of highlights of what's important in the product development process. The first one majorly overlooked is the observation phase. In general, what's happening today are people are looking at what people are saying. They ask them in focus group, they do mall intercept studies, and they talk to them. They. But the truth is that people can't tell you what their latent needs are. You have to really get out there with your social science. We hire as many social scientists as anything else these days. Anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, go out and actually watch people and find out what it is that they have problem doing. Just recently, watching people pump gas, the number of people who dump gasoline on their clothing is incredible. The percentage is incredibly high. It seems like there's a solution, there's a problem there. And so just. But you ask them, do you ever have a problem pumping gas? They say no. And so by observing, what we're trying to do is really, we're looking at what they're saying. And now that's the kind of think of them as a customer. If you think of them as a user, you watch what they do. But what we're really trying to do is get over here and understand what they think and they feel so that we can have that, what they value as humans, what they value as a culture. And then you can really do something that satisfies them in general. You know, I grew up being an electrical engineer and studying technology and all that. Great. But one of the things I'm finding is that studying technology, you know, I studied things like microprocessors with numbers like 4004, 8008, and those are not very useful right now. But so technology kind of fades on you. But studying people, understanding what people value in different age groups and certain cultures, and pays back over and over and over again. So we spend a lot of time now observing people and trying to understand them. By the way, engineers don't like doing this. It's too messy. If you ask them, they'll say they have heard the voice of the customer. But that usually means they've talked to a few on the telephone, they haven't been in the house, they haven't spent a lot of time with them. They don't have empathy for the user's needs and wants. So it's completely different if you're designing a remote control. It's completely different to have a TV in a focus group room and bring somebody in and have them try Your remote control in the focus group room, completely different. If you go to their house and you watch them using a TV remote control, there's dogs running around. They're like laying on their backs on the sofa with popcorn. You know, I mean, it's completely different. Right. So you certainly wouldn't design a black remote control with black buttons if you in the dark, if you were actually there and seeing what they had trouble with. Toothpaste. We like tons of hours of watching people brush their toothpaste. Yes. We are in people's bathrooms watching them brush toothpaste. And, and in the case of Oral B, in designing a kids for under five, trying to get kids under five to want to brush. It's not intuitive. We didn't. We would have thought you design a smaller toothbrush. The truth is you design a bigger toothbrush, they palm the toothbrush. So the toothbrush needs to be thicker, not thinner. Also, we put this little dot so you can try to get them to put their thumb up. But it's not intuitive. It's not, you know, like if you. Again, you wouldn't get this from any other way other than observing them. In the case of the Polaroid izone camera, this is a project we did with Polaroid. It's the best selling camera in the US right now. And when watching people, it turned out that with Polaroids, people are not really excited about the image quality, but they're really excited about the play. It's all about playing with the camera. Once you realize and watching them that they're not actually paying much attention to image quality. They're not talking about, you know, 330, you know, dots cringe. They're not talking about anything. You know, they're megapixels. They're not talking about that. They're talking about they're having a good time playing them and sticking them up. And you know that. And so this camera, which if some of you know, have you seen this camera? It's a little camera, it's got sticky film in it. And so they like putting them on the ceiling and putting them on the foosball players and wearing them on their backpacks and so forth. So it's all about play. And so it hit a chord with the age group that we were after. And then there's more serious things like the defibrillator that we worked on with Heartstream. You know, they say when these are totally rolled out, 100,000 years, 100,000 lives a year will be saved. This is a portable defibrillator. And the trick here was trying to actually watch people try to use it. After we've designed prototypes of, you know, you're going up in this, you're in this emergency situation and this person is dying, you have six minutes to administer this, the shock to their kind of electrical system, to get their heart going again. And so the user interface has got to be really straightforward. This one has, you know, well, this is one of the designers laying, you know, like lay acting. We spend a lot of time in hospitals, like, pretending about 40% of our business is medical. Spend a lot of time in hospitals pretending we have broken legs and things like that, trying to actually find out how you go through the hospital. But anyway, so again, this is really just about realizing that you got to go through the messy part of going out and really watching users in their environment. Okay.
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