The Bottom Line on Great Design

By Jennifer Lloyd

It’s fresh. It’s bold. It’s great. Two weeks ago you didn’t know this product existed. Now that you’ve seen it, you simply must have it!
 
What transforms an ordinary product into fly-off-the-shelf merchandise? Part of the answer is good product design.
 
Young professionals engrossed in their iPhones’ capabilities, executives seated in space-aged Aeron chairs and casual shoppers strolling through Target’s “Design for All” collections may unwittingly hunt out well-designed products. But experienced designers and researchers are still pinpointing exactly what constitutes “great design” and how best to incorporate those factors into the innovation process.
 
Industry leaders, university faculty and researchers delved into these questions at the Consumer-Oriented Product Design Conference held at the McCombs School of Business Oct. 12 and 13.

Deconstructing Design

“Design is about understanding people, caring and having empathy,” says Steve Diller, leader of Cheskin Experience Design Studio.
 
Though some consumers might believe that product designers use eye-catching forms to dupe them into unnecessary purchases, Diller disagrees.
 
“(Product design) is not about manipulative sales,” he says. “It’s the opposite. Design is the skill of identifying and creating value.”
 
According to Diller, that value comes in the form of different product “experiences” that tap into economics, functionality, emotions, identity and meaning.
 
Though designers can best integrate the tools of experience in the early stages of product development, Diller says companies spend only a small portion of their development budget on designing the initial model. He says companies prefer to pump funds into commercializing and marketing the product and neglect front-end development. But he and other industry leaders and researchers have found new ways to invigorate the design process.

Form, Function and Fortune

Designers must unify form and function to achieve a lucrative design, according to conference presenters such as Michael Luchs, marketing doctoral candidate at the McCombs School, and Raj Raghunathan, conference coordinator and associate professor of marketing at the McCombs School.
 
“It is well accepted that product design—the combination of a product’s form (how it looks) and function (how well it performs)—is a significant determinant of its commercial success,” says Raghunathan.
 
Violina Rindova, associate professor of management at the McCombs School, believes form has often been neglected in favor of function. She says many companies heavily emphasize the technological capabilities of their products but miss out when it comes to good external design. She attributes this blind spot to the notion that design is trivial.
 
But this blind spot may also be a golden opportunity. Rindova says companies that have mastered the art of design send competitors scrambling to catch up even though their products may be technologically similar.
 
Rindova points to the iPod as one example in which a company took a basic digital music player and transformed it through great design. Apple Inc. has outpaced competitors and sold more than 100 million iPods since launching the product in 2001.

Design with the Consumer in Mind

According to Diller and other speakers, designers should not tackle innovative design alone. Instead, designers must consult consumers in order to grasp what a customer truly wants in both form and function.
 
“Speculating is not a way to design effectively, you have to go out and immerse yourself in the world,” says Diller.
 
Placing design into a practical context is something Steven Bishop, leader of IDEO’s sustainability efforts in Palo Alto, Calif., and Rob Wallace, managing partner of Manhattan-based Wallace Church Inc., know all about.
 
Bishop even put garbage into context when he helped design a new trash can for an OXO product line. He says the IDEO design team observed people’s relationship with trash in everyday environments. Only in the context of the home did designers notice how often people toss trash into the can as though they are shooting basketball hoops. This observation inspired designers to raise the back of the trash can for a better backboard.
 
Likewise, Wallace says his company helped Gillette place its MACH3 razor in context through a visual language. In talking to men and watching them shave, the designers decided that the razor should embody a “breakthrough” of speed and masculinity. They defined the look of the new product through graphic representations of jets, supernovas and even the characteristic bright blue color. These visual representations personified the brand experience most desired by customers and led to impressive product sales—one of the best measures of great design.
 
The McCombs Research Excellence Fund and The Center for Customer Insights and Marketing Solutions sponsored the conference.

Additional speakers from The University of Texas at Austin included Raji Srinivasan, associate professor of marketing at the McCombs School; Art Markman, the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology; Carolyn Conner Seepersad, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; and Peter Hall, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History. Other speakers included Page Moreau of the University of Colorado, Rolf Reber of the University of Bern in Switzerland, EunSook Kwon of the University of Houston, Wes Hutchinson and Xiaoyan Deng of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Frédéric F. Brunel of Boston University, Darren Dahl of the University of British Columbia and Bernd Schmitt of Columbia University.