Products and Services: One Big Iceberg
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
A few things are coming together in my head…and it is a pretty straightforward idea. The “slabification” of design is an apple-ish trend. The product gets slimmer, there’s more screen and less industrial design. The interface is the design.
And the product’s real value comes form how it connects me to a world of data and services that reside in the cloud. So we’re stripping design and intelligence from the devices in our hands and putting it into a system. And that system must be very well designed. This will spread to more and more products. To wit: HP’s TouchSmart Printer is connected to an App Store, too.
Core77 had a nice article about the importance of service design here and it is a useful reminder that on the most basic level how a product works for the user is the most important factor in owning a product.
Which brings in the idea of Design being invisible. Frog Design’s DesignMind this week emphasized that:
Design has become a way of finding solutions. Aesthetics is just a part of this process
Either a solution works or it doesn’t. If it works, it becomes natural and invisible to the user. The only reward for a well designed system is the pleasure the user gets and the “stickyness” that it will engender.
http://www.eccoid.com/blog/?author=3
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