Don Norman on Design Thinking (UVA Darden)

um Thank You professor Norman for joining us today you're quite right what you have you have to recognize you have to recognize that the book it was first called the psychology of everyday things was like every new radical product that comes into the market so lots of lots of my friends have startups and they they asked me for advice and they're going to revolutionize the world and you know it may be true but even if you're radical new idea is successful it takes decades for it to happen so when you're doing a startup don't try to do something that breaks the boundaries because you need deep pockets so I'll give you two stories and it's relevant to your introduction the first story is when I first joined Apple they were going to bring out a new product I had nothing to do with it because I just joined and I saw wow what a great product is there revolutionized the world I said and they released it edit failed they released the second version and it failed they released the third version and it failed so they gave up so most of you probably don't even know that Apple made one of the very very first commercial digital cameras a camera that didn't require a film I said was go revolutionize the world and wasn't wrong - right well I was right I was simply fifteen years too early you see when that camera came out the world wasn't ready for it first of all could only take about eight pictures it's always memory code second of all but but by the way film which you may have to explain to your class film don't wholly held about eight pictures in those days so that wasn't the problem you couldn't see the picture you take it there was no display but that wasn't the problem because no camera had displays that the real problem was when you got to took the picture what to do with it it was a mess to get her into your computer and then it filled up the entire memory of the computer and so the whole point was you're supposed to send it to somebody else so what you would do is you would take your own telephone and you would dial the number of the person you wanted to give it to and you would put it on these suction cups and it would send audio tones at 300 baud and you don't know what the word bored means but think of it as 30 bytes per second 30 bytes not kilobytes not megabytes knology wasn't there it took years we also didn't have inkjet printers you couldn't print it out in color so too early so the psychology of everyday things comes out today is a classic solder I don't know eight hundred thousand copies or something it got review in the New York Times The Book Review who said this is the stupidest book I've ever had the misfortune to read that person doesn't know what he's talking about I can't imagine why anybody would ever be interested and the New York Times was polite they buried the review in the back so not too many people saw it and sales took a while dick I don't know five to ten years before oh maybe there's something in here and then meanwhile by the way marketing the psychology of everyday things would you buy that book well where was it in the psychology section people go to the psychology section of the book to learn about why their mothers ate kill or something the publisher refused to issue a paperback and my literary agent managed to convince double date because that editor saw something in the book and the Doubleday put out the paper pack and the editor said what a stupid title it's a design book call it the design of everyday things and i said no i love psychology ever read a things p OE t poet and the editor said she said yeah you're a stupid professor you just love these cute things you don't understand sales and she was right i did like i asked people do i went to the bookstore as i've talked to the clerks that i talked to people and i asked about the title and everybody told me psychology of everyday things was a stupid title Oh start off the day with first of all great new ideas most of them fail most innovation is incremental we take what we have we make it better than 99% of innovation is incremental innovation over the years that's really important because it adds up and radical innovation which is what all of us want to do and change the world how many of those you're going to experience your lifetime just a couple I mean even if it's a hundred that's not very many over your lifetime most radical innovations fail and the ones that do succeed take decades RCA introduced color television and they lost money for like 10 years but they had enough money that they could continue to support it until it finally caught up thank you for your introduction thank you for for supplamine so thoughtfully um so how do you think that um the student of design or the student in general somebody who's early in their career what happens is they make this transition from wanting to build big huge groundbreaking things to understanding that at least on a week-to-week month-to-month basis it's this incremental thoughtfulness these small things that accumulate that really create you know media relevance and commercial successes what is that what do you think that process what taught a lot of people design how do you think that process looks and how do we put ourselves through that process here well actually you know most people that graduate from the University have creative inflated desires who graduated an architect and you want to build these massive structures and you spend all your day in a great big office with 50 other architects designing wiring runs or plumbing and your MBA students you all want to be general managers or CEOs and you'll be of lying manager you just have to work your way up and you have to realize it's the small incremental things that really do matter and there can be a challenge by the way that if you if when you're asked to design something there are lots of constraints and what are the changes the established base that it's very rare the designer gets a chance to start from nowhere from nothing to say here's a blank piece of paper do it almost always there's an existing product line you hope you can't make it too much different or your customers are repelled and or even if you're bringing in a new you're going to make a new coffee pot and coffee maker of course are a bunch of existing ones so you have to tread the space between the existing ones and it's difficult job it's a challenge now I suspect that all of you in the class are not going to be designers um I was I ran the triple M program at Northwestern triple-whammy used to stand for masters in manufacturing and management and it was an Operations program taught by the engineering school at an MBA program caught by Kellogg and you ended up two degrees I took over the engineering side but operations was needed anymore because the business school had good operations people so I switched it to design and so my students ended up with courses in design and an MBA from Kellogg and etc that's become a very popular program now if you look to see where those graduates are one or two ended up in design countries so one of my very first graduates I got a job at ideals which was a dream job for everybody and the way you got the job and I do know was saying I'm not a designer he didn't pretend to be a designer he said when I understand the process of design and you guys meet people understand business and that's where the that's where the jobs are the jobs are management where you can be managing the design or managing the company and saying hey you know this design-thinking stuff well design thinking is a strategy it strategic could ought to be part of the governance of a company because what design thinking is doing - stepping back and say what are the real problems we have so you you asked about incremental little a problem with incremental is we have this product will be leased it it's out you know sales are going down competitors have come in what can we do to increase the sales again we go out and we try to what designers would say go out and look at your customers and see what other issues are and refine it you're you're living relatively limited um actually attempted to go in two directions there's a wonderful book by a woman in the Harvard Business School about I remember her name she's Korean but the point was most people most designers do in most marketing people do is they take a look at a product and they look at all the competitors product and they say oh there are 26 features in competition and you know 25 and hours and there are six features in the competition that we don't have so we must add those unless it is Astra strategy when you don't have the same features as your competition don't try to catch up because all that does is make your product look just like theirs and there's no differentiation what you should do is look at the features you have that nobody else has better or that features you have that are better than everybody else's and make them even better because you need to be different now back to the incremental ISM I argue that what you guys ought to do is not yes not just stick in the design department which is always kind of in the middle of the company and it's never going to go up where you actually don't have that much say someone else decides what product to make and then your job is to what make it know you want to be the group the same with products to make and that's where the Design Thinking approach comes in where you say what's the real problem with our company what's our real strengths what's our core competencies you know the sender story the core competency how do we give really our selves not how do we catch up with the others how do we make ourselves different from the others and what's the fundamental problem we're trying to solve and that would be a good segue to one of the things that profoundly different about the practice of design as opposed to the traditional marketing techniques that a lot of students learn here especially in that first year is a focus on starting with the individual instead of starting with aggregates in the practice of design what I think it is about our emotional wiring or habits or the history of business that makes it so that we have to reteach people to focus on the individual it's not a wiring it see we become obsessed with numbers and MBA school is one of the culprits where if it is measure vote and you can't put it in an equation it's no good and the economists have ruled the days and the economists are so logical so sensible it's just a wrong and no one notices the wrong because you know I say this to designers who complain they can't convince management the designers have this wonderful idea and they try to pitch it to management and management won't listen and I say well how do you try to sell it I say we explain to them how valuable it is and how people love you know our products and and etc etc and I say forget it first of all management knows you're good that's why they hires you they're not they're not interested you telling them that they're not interested you giving them a sales pitch so what is what is human centered design is understanding the person who is using your products right well your designer who's your customer question you guys think your boss your boss what's one take any other purchase your product the buyer the purchaser of the product so whoever's had your boss a nice job it right most designers say there's they're trained to think that it's a customer who matters know is that it's actually not your boss your clothes it's the boss of your boss and so and if you're working in a you working in a consultancy then what I say when you're given an issue just to help the company with your job it's actually not to make the best product your job is to get your client promoted because it's your what is the company care about sure the company wants wonderful products and once but in the end what they care about is province and so your job is to understand the business of the company and try to help the company be successful and I think it's amazing how many workers of all levels because you know at Apple I had 250 people working for me I was vice president of advanced technology and my people were dedicated and really excellent and they all thought that whatever they were doing was the most important thing in the world why else would they do it very it was the rare person who step back and say what does this matter for the company I went and I talked to the engineers or the software people to the marketing people so I really went across the company and it was amazing how most people just thought of their own narrow little thing they were doing and you could tell the people who are going to be the future leaders it was a few people step back and look at the big picture but that's what design training should give you that's actually one that's why I'm so pleased that design training comes into MBA courses MBA school because it gives you the gives you the breath step back and say what I care about is company and is success so what is it that say design can bring to this now the question was about the difference in part between designing and marketing in design we really say one of the fundamental needs of the person that's eventually going to use this in marketing we tend to look that we tend to use questionnaires surveys other kinds of data there isn't there's a reason for the difference because we are trying to satisfy the real needs of the person marketing is concerned with what people buy and those are not the same things so we buy for all sorts of reasons and probably all of you have experiences you may have gone into it you want to buy an automobile you want to buy some fancy appliance and you do have done your research you're going at the store or the dealer know exactly what you want and you end up with something different so what caused that well you just saw this it was just really nice where you saw what you had done the research oh and there's something about it it just didn't excite you and job so what we buy is not what we need necessarily but once we've bought it then the importance of satisfying the needs comes out because that's what determines whether you recommend it to your friends and the kind of vibe comes out the kind of you know informal Network so both of these are important and the fact that we use somewhat different methods to find them perfectly reasonable perfectly reasonable so I always get upset when people argue about which method is better because I say well why are you using it what is the purpose of the method sales satisfaction there is one more thing though one thing I don't like is a literally socioeconomic class sort of the type of traditional way we divide up consumers I believe the correct way when you're designing something is don't look at how old they are don't look at how much money or education they have look at what activities I want to do so you want to sell a car to old retired folks what do you want to sell them take a look at what they do because first of all when you are old and retired you do not feel old you say you know I've always wanted this hot ride when I was a teenager I wanted a sexy car I wanted to be able to go out and drive and sleep in the car have sex in the car but that was easy enough money and I couldn't do it I know finally my kids are out of the house I am money I have time that's what I want how do you your great job talking about how designers should approach business people these are you know our students here are students of business and as you mentioned from your prior experience most of them will go on to be managers managers of general areas and but though all we all work with designers today in some fashion how do you think they can best prepare themselves to get the most out of their design colleagues and the design investments that they make over the course of their career well first of all when you manage designers ah good luck it's amazing designers of the traditional design education that's starting to change commercial design education is in art and architecture schools and one of the things I sort of taught is that business and evil and and managers are stupid um actually professors think the same thing professors think that they're Provost and their deeds that are stupid and you would why would anybody want to do that etc etc it's sort of a common feeling by the way the hierarchy in the organization you are the lower lower level people who don't don't understand I think you're stupid why you make this a stupid decisions didn't you understand and but designers have that really they really have it strongly by the way the real issue of the reason that you think it's stupid in my opinion is because professors don't understand the economics of university and they don't understand the kind of constraints and difficulties that their executives their Dean's and their provost and the president have to try to make the university balance that yes you have to satisfy the students yes you want to produce great graduates yes you want to get good jobs but you know there is that budget and you given with the balance of budget in the end that has all sorts of real constraints and almost usually the people in the lower parts of any organization are insensitive to that and they don't understand the sales pressures in a manufacturing company for example or the manufacturing problems or the labor union issues and by not by not taking the broader review you therefore think that gee I just presented this great argument I did this great thing and I got rejected stupid management instead of backing off and say well again was this going to help the company be more profitable what are the issues um when I reminded me something I wanted to say but I'll save it for later now the issue is though when you manage designers you want to get their creativity but you also have to channel it into things are gonna work for the company um I don't know if you've read these I've driven a things with the new edition that they have it's a soldering in the in the back the last two chapters I talked about the issues of real design um that and I talked about this double diamond approach which is designers like to spend the first few months figuring out what the real issue is and it drives managers crazy no management comes down from up above and says look we need to revive our line for the Christmas rush yes it's February which means that we better have the stuff ready well we have to start marketing it to our distributors in when August September and it has to be the manufacturing has to start around then if it's a hardware product so you don't have that much time and so you go to me your design group and you give them the charts and they say wonderful we're going to go out we want to study our customers in India and in Europe we want to understand it really need and see what the issue is with the current products and you say yes that's an excellent thing to do but we don't have time they said we have to do it and which time you need Oh six months and you say well how about two weeks you know I'm just being fight about how much time so you finally compromise with one month to finish the design okay so you go away and you come back in a week and you say show me your progress and theirs and they're all over the place and they have no progress and let you say what do you've been doing all this time you got a whole week already have your month and they say well we're trying to figure it out what the problem I told you the problem I told you what I needed no no we're trying to figure it out and um what you have to do those you have to let them do it encourage them say I'm really pleased that you're doing that and rethinking the problem but remember the deadline is whatever October first and you've got to be finished by it actually won't be October 1st will be March 1st you've got to be finished by March 1st um and you go away for a week and you come back in a week and where are you oh we figured out what the problem is geesh you've spent half your time and now you just come back I gave you the problem in the first place well actually we think it's not what you said different but again you have to encourage them and you do come back the third week of where are they they're all over the place you cannot see any any progress actually in this and what they're doing is they're looking at all the possible things they might do but if you hold them to their deadlines and their budget would usually happened it's just what happens to all of you when do you write your assignment paper you know like we could give you six months a writer but we could give you a week to writer it doesn't matter you're going to do it the night before happen here okay so what what happens is that magic happens at the very end and they do often come through if you let them have that and it turns out that what was happening all along was it wasted because it means that they really did think about all the alternatives they really didn't think hard about what the issues were and they thought about what the possible solutions were and if their good design team um and I'll come back in a second if they're a good design team they understood the financial constraints of manufacturing constraints the install base constraints they had also talked to potential customers so they understood what kind of changes they would welcome and what they would reject and so if you give them that freedom you can come up with wonderful results but let me tell you it's I don't like managing any other group and so managers have to have a lot of tolerance for this kind of vagueness and indecisiveness it's really a messy process when you manage an engineering group you give them the problem in day one or they're starting to work on the solution in a few hours they never though ever stop to ask whether that was the right problem but you have to be the managing designers is very different managing creative people in general very different the one of the comment I would say was you should never let these Group B just designers um I like to have multidisciplinary groups I like from day one you have design team together with engineering together with marketing and it depends on the product you actually have together with manufacturing maybe service all there now you might have a you might have ten designers and one each of the others but you want you want as they're going through if somebody who's pointing out is wondering well I don't know we can manufacture I don't know we could ever service that well you know the kind of phone calls we get about the problem is it costs us a lot of money and here's the sort of problems that they're always talking about so that as you go to the process or aware of the business component and then as they as they when they finish the design and it gets the one gets going to the next section usually the engineering uh you want a few designers to say one or two designers to stay on the team so now we have mostly engineers we still want some sales some manufacturing some marketing and designers because the engineers only find new issues or new problems and if you're not unless you have everyone there they don't even invent their own solutions so you want to make sure you have the representatives with the expert knowledge to help you Shepherd it through but it's it's a challenging design is a challenging management problem when it's a wonderful one because you can you could actually revolutionize the company through effective design when you're when you're managing those kind of interdisciplinary teams what are the things that you seem to be most successful for creating an environment where it was manufacturing of the support people that they're not there to have a veto they're there to help everybody else understand what that part of the customer relationship is like how do you how do create that environment as opposed to uh you know I'm vetoing this because I'm in support and I say it's going to be hard to support the way the way I've seen it work a way of seeing it work bad is when the Vesta manufacturing guy this is and I've seen out nothing to do most of the talent is your question or whether you say this of okay that's that's a horrible way it's not good for anybody what I like you to say here's the design team get to work and you're all equal and so if this works when this works well you don't even remember which one is a manufacturing guy which is the business guy which is the sales time they're all contributing whatever they need you know again I don't like always to go back to my past life but I will that Apple I was this right first into was introduced this when we had it was software products so we had the design team the engineering team and marketing and and actually I had those people working for me my division and I never knew which was which I didn't know which people had PhDs and which people had flunked out of college and never graduated what I didn't know was what their skills were and how valuable they were so it didn't didn't matter so in the product division when I was working on someone products it was great because I remember the marketing person decided I didn't know enough about the market it we on a trip to France to talk to a number of the major customer sites and what what the marketing people did was give me access to people all around the world to understand the world market and but we came back and we would debate these issues and again everybody would have a say some people would be more knowledgeable than others on these components but and what was nice was people respected their knowledge they didn't give a damn what part of a country from so if you can matter to that environment it works really well and actually the same thing is when you say this could be hard to manufacture and people push back on you the correct response is not to argue the correct responses say hey you know I'm going to call up my friend helen who runs a manufacturing plant in singapore let's go there take a look at how they do it and that really makes all the difference in the world when you go and you watch and you say oh I see you've um recently you've been really vocal about where Apple is with their their product line and the pathology of styling over substance why do you think that that happens to products and how do we keep focused on what really matters to our audience in this life Laura every company has trouble staying focused over decades and decades and decades and it does actually have a problem with being the leader is you get cocky and you you don't step back and criticize yourself and there's a lovely book by um I guess it was by more from Intel's called the basic was about decidable the book was what was about paranoia almost all right survivors I think only the paranoid survive right you should always be thinking people are attacking you and really be critical of your own worth and I think I Apple lost that touch at the Apple got cocky that Johnny I've came in and completely restructured the design group so the design work was now in charge Johnny a wonderful I used to used to work with him because Johnny would have these wonderful ideas and I thought they were brilliant and he couldn't get the engineering groups to accept them and come to me for help and I would I would trot around to all the VP's of all the different divisions and try to convince them and occasionally he had to go up to the CEO unfortunately had an incompetent CEO at that point that was Gil Amelio but when Jobs came in he gave him free rein he said yeah that's what we need but the the problem is that hive is a more classical industrial designer he's trained for appearance and so if did change a poor Apple obviously you can't deny it's been a success but um design is not a single enterprise it's like like saying business is a single enterprise you're going to get an MVA yeah but are you going to be in marketing you can be in operations if you're be in sales you could be in finance they're very very different disciplines and require different talents and the same with design so what they've lost was their interaction design trying to make things intelligible understandable um and there's some good Adam though that when I try to convince you of this most people say what are you talking about I love my Apple product they're so easy to you well they're not that easy to use when you actually think about it and when you actually you love your iPad and you love your high forward but I don't see you taking no to your iPad an iPhone I see you taking notes there's a laptop right there and um because the laptops were better and are easier to understand and you have menus which hey that reminds me of all the different actions I can do whereas a the iPhone and the iPad but we just came out with iOS 9 and I finally picked some of the problems that we've been complaining about but guess why I just read an article in Forbes it says 25 powerful secrets in iOS 9 well come on if they're so powerful why are they secret but you have to get because they don't want to mess up the elegance by having a menu and saying what you can do here are having any niche so you have to remember that on this one I hit with two fingers from the middle of the screen and swipe upward eight or diagonal but it's kind of like that yet remember all these obscure things and they've lost their and so I'm writing an article with Todd Mazzini Bruce Todd moussine he was the very first user interface designer at Apple and Oh had these wonderful manuals of how to do it he wrote the first one and they forgotten those principles and we've been leading the current manual and then the current manual isn't bad it has all the right principles in there but they don't follow them themselves this is for the other people for their developers not for us so I think there'll I you know Apple is a good company and has really good people and after that first critical article I wrote in LinkedIn of all places I got it I got some private email from some of my former employee people used to work for me when they were Apple there's still an apple and they said thank you we've been having this argument internally and you are in your article is going to help us so I think Apple is because great people and I think there is there's a lot of people there understand the issues so all companies go up and down um Apple has a misfortune of being so profitable that when somebody inside is trying to say look our products are not as good as it could be um the managers are going to say you know we're really busy we have this problem you know a Foxconn people are again giving problems so we're having trouble in China we're having trouble here there look come on stop bothering us with those trivial things when the companies are turning that's when they'll pay attention you talk about design as a process of communication and it Hanks the importance of discoverability which is one of the things that we've read about in the design of everything's would you mind talking for a second about that and how it relates to the study of design and the introduction of design processes to layperson well yeah I mean design is not making something look pretty that's an important component because we love emotionally pleasing devices we like things that are attractive we like things that feel well but design really is a way of thinking there's a way of trying to match but people need to the things that we deliver for them and that we feel like is to be in control I'd like to think they we like to think that we understand what is happening to us that we have some saying what is happening and in some cases where we have no say then that we have great faith and trust in what is happening so why don't people why are more people afraid of flying than afraid of driving and I think because and drive in fact there's lots of studies and driving the driver feels in control and the driver all drivers are above average we know that and drivers feel that they control what's happening and when they're in an airplane though who knows what's happening and I look out the window and I and you know and I we have a little bit of turbulence and oh my god the wings will fall off um they don't want to control but it's or statistically there's no comparison no matter what manager you use driving is a lot more dangerous if flying after a big aviation crash people stop flying or afraid of flying and guess what the death rate goes up because they switch to automobiles and there are deaths so when we design things I think one of the most important thing and that's why the discoverability and the feedback is so important because then people know what operations they can do and then they also know what what is happening and it's really good if you can undo what you've done because especially the computer the undo is a very powerful operation on your laptops I mean how many times when you're writing you try out our sentence excel that's not right I'm you know I knew undo it it's really nice to be able to experiment that way it's not just forever is a way of try whatever writing and experimentation but so what we want to do is you want to provide products that increase people's companies confidence and their own abilities and that's why that's why the communication is so important to a communication between you and the product and the product in you Dion okay why I am before we run a time I want all the students ask some questions so um any questions for professor Norman klas hello they've been taught okay mantra goofed up that's you're not like MBA students come on I don't think I've never given to talk to MBA classes where I wasn't interrupted what's the matter with you guys you been studiously reading your book they already know everything I'm wondering how you apply this principle within like a company that has a really strong existing portfolio and I worked in CPG this number and like every every product had like a really strong crayons so how do you apply this principle of designing game to a product that customers are already familiar with so tell me what would the e/m job is already a successful product and the customer should lean with it if you go to any of the design any of the decision meetings any of the management meetings probably not what do you think the issues were facing that particular product group well I was in serial and don't want to eat cereal anymore well wait a minute I thought you just told me they have a well-established line they're doing well and now you say nobody wants to eat cereal anymore yeah I just like nobody wants to eat it like how do you change it and still maintain it brand equity well that's that's actually see the nobody wants eat cereal anymore is an opportunity but you would but but what you get is you approach it more like an engineer or businessperson you say well so how do we change their minds or how do we change the product know what's the real problem here so let me just give you a quick survey quick summary when when I hear of a problem nobody wants to eat toriel anymore I want to know what the real problem is so I want to know why is it nobody eats cereal anymore and when you tell me I'm going to say why is that and when you tell me I'm going to say why is that that's the Japanese five lines they do want to eat breakfast don't they and actually in the middle of the day they want a snack don't they dry cereal is one of the people's favorite snacks and etc etc I wouldn't understand what's really driving this and maybe there's an opportunity but we understand what people really are looking for - maybe repackage a cereal maybe it should be sold as snack so I mean I love dry cereal I never eat it in the morning for breakfast but we have it around the house so I have it at work because when I'm hungry I just grab a handful say well you know it's got vitamins and fiber or stuff actually I've stopped doing that a lot because Oh carbohydrates no no no no but again you look at that you say okay with your package more more dried fruit in this so we're going to do this or do that or we're um but again I think when you the reasonable size sing as a stable established line the real danger in company thinking is that hey we made it everybody loves this we'll just keep making it forever no because first of all your competition is trying to change and second of all the world is changing used to be cereal or wonderful hey look no fat great what we should have every morning and now suddenly oh no it's carbohydrates cyclist of account etc etc so you've got to be always asking probing but take that as a challenge and a challenge one other way you can change the whole product line and therefore be a successful young star in cereals okay other questions carry on I have a question about you're disgusting in terms of design for tablet and forums and how that's not optimal for what people action like you and how we see that that design is actually mimicked in other companies doing the same thing and to tie that ak-47 beginning and people won't accept innovation that's too extreme and so seeing it would be easy enough for people to design another interface or a tablet type device but they have it yet and it hasn't come copper so it is responsibility of big companies push innovation or can we allow for a smaller mental development um actually put it slightly restructure each state what you said I don't believe that um the tablet and phone are necessarily bad for the kinds of activities people want to do I think they could be made better but but in fact when you want to write your paper and whether it's a paper for class or if you have to write a white paper or report or do a complex red sheet for your business these are not the right tools and and today the best tool really is a laptop and you notice that most of us like what I'm talking to you right now you can't see what I'm in front of but um I have a big screen that is that wide and that tall it's horizontal and off on the Left I have a big screen that's that high and that wide it's vertical and so I have there is my calendar and there is my email on this is with a big screen in front of me I can have two or sometimes even three different documents and I'm working on right now I only have one thing which is a big picture of you a class um quite a bit of you so you're not quite life-size but almost because that makes me well that's that's important it makes me think I'm really talking to you so I think we will have different devices for different purposes and that there's nothing the matter with having a tablet when I travel and having to have to take quick notes I haven't established from my photographs and like private things or to quickly check email and every five or the short email and to have a bigger machine in my office you're going to have I can afford you know the space to have these big displays and you'll have to interact with the big machine differently than with the tablet and you notice that the companies are changing to the new release of the tablet they in Microsoft Microsoft is actually the most innovative and trying to figure out how to manage the desire to have a lightweight tablet and also a good screen and a good keyboard and to use the powerhouse applications of Microsoft Lakes like Excel and Word and PowerPoint and so they developed a really lightweight keyboard and they developed touch sensitive screens and they made it easy these tax the screen and just use it or put the keyboard back on and so they they they messed up I didn't do a good job in the first few attempts Micro and Microsoft was famous for taking many attempts to get it right and they now have they're now at what it's the 10th of 10th or something and it's not so bad so the problem is they've lost to Matt no one is giving them a try out so we'll see whether Microsoft is still the favorite vendor for business and we'll see whether their new approach which is trying to try to to take the advantages of tablets in a detachable tablet with the advantage of a large screen keyboard um when you're at your desk we'll see whether that works I have friends who love it who think it's wonderful that they can do everything they need they can take notes with a pen on the screen or they can type now it's interesting that the new iPad copies quite a bit of what Microsoft here oh isn't it interesting Microsoft lets you do two things at once or years when your screen Oh so the new tab iOS 9 lets you if you can remember how swim out from the right and they add a second application simultaneously with the main application and oh we're going to give you a little scribe to give you a pen so you can write on the screen Apple users they will never do that now they provide one and oh we're going to give you this little phone up keyboard that surprisingly it looks very much like Microsoft keyboard so all these companies are innovating and experimenting and testing but I really think in the end we're going to have specialized devices device I travel with will be more limited but easier to carry and work with and the device I work on in my office will be heavier and bigger out here but much more active floor office work alright other questions for professor Norman introducing yes they're going back with said earlier about not putting people in buckets remember like a education I would have actually observing what what they're doing before you can make those determinations who's having so much question I'm working for a healthcare company that helps employers reduce posture here for their employees and so we're having kind of an internal argument about well the we target people some people are of the opinion that we target people to don't make a lot of money so we are manufacturing firms blue-collar workers because they're more likely to go to a value based provider or some people say well okay they don't have the same kind of education level that people it serves in terms to do may be more likely to adopt this technology can use it look at example we need to go after younger for employers with cutter populations that you know are used to using apps for work you know it's just sort of war built in there thanks for going sure so how do you when you're having those types of ornaments and you really didn't even sure what your target market might be how do you go out and then observe tactically without going through the process of fishing your company onboarding them and finding out at that point that the adoption rates low and having to have to find out the hard way so you've got to go out check it out who your custom versions are who they likely are you then go out and drink with them go to their bars Oh what do they care about or go to go to their kids soccer games on Saturday and Sunday where you'll actually need a lot of them um and I usually you could have you can uh if your company already already has customers quite often the customers are actually delighted to help you if you say you know we're interested in trying to help the health of your employees but we really need to understand how you know what they care about would you like to be part of an initial study with us you my experiences in some companies are very protective but a lot of companies aren't you to like it that you might actually be doing something that they care about you're actually quite health quite happy to help you make a better product that will be better for them we found this with customers all alone by the way we ask customers to help us improve the product they just love to give us their opinions and work with us um and and again you have to be careful that you can't you don't want to promise anything because you don't know yet what you're going to do and you have to be careful you're going to be sensitive to proprietary information or to the privacy of the people you're talking to but I have a feeling that you might be surprised when you talk to the wide variety of people that um again I'm a fan of the activities people do unless because I'm a fan of is because I've observed it over time and I used to start off looking at the standard democratics and I just didn't think that fit of people's real interests in either behavioral change or buying patterns um that it's interesting you know and in every group of people you will study there will be sparkling till they'll be dumb ones it's uh so if you really can't say oh you know the people with the workers here are not as well educated well that may be true that doesn't mean you're not as intelligent so again I think you just have to work hard to figure it out how to get to them and the ideal way to get to them is by the way get to them in their normal activities so maybe in a company it's you're going to have to go into the mess hall or wherever they eat lunch and have lunch with them and I'm serious about going out to the bars and drinking with them now the only problem with going to the bars and drinking with them is that's a special segment of the population those who tend to be the young unmarried ones um and or maybe the old unmarried ones huh not the ones with it's not the vast majority that are probably the middle which is the ones with families but they're they have family activities well first of all you'll find them in the supermarket so you'll find them at the shop and you'll find them on in the soccer games and the football games and the Little League games all right I think we have time for one last question ah Victor Velasquez hi um I came a question really when you were presenting some of the things that you stated is that marketing focuses on what people buy while designers focuses on what people need so my question here is how can we balance both things and in the beginning of your presentation we're stating that his rope that Apple developed but so this this probe that was developed was ahead of its time I mean like they were focusing on what people were needing but at the end of the day that people wasn't buying but I wasn't buying this probe so the development of this product was see a flaw on the design thinking process because again he didn't it wasn't bought a increase I'm sorry what what product was it then product the camera that you were explaining before of Apple that was meeting a need of a consumer but that en was a failure because he didn't say nobody bought it at the end of the day but it was ahead of design was it a flaw of a design thinking process to bring this product to market no actually you have to realize that the the methods we talked about today the human centered design method the Design Thinking methods didn't exist in those days we're just struggling to do that but um when you really have a radical new product it's not obvious how you test it not obvious how you find out what people's needs are Apple had talked to a fair number of people contract understand business people and so on who really thought this would be wonderful that I can take a picture I'm I'm in construction we're building this apartment house and we always run into problems and we have to call up the architect and have big debates and they have to come and visit us because we can't explain to them what we're talking about wouldn't it be nice to take a picture and just send it to them so the need was really there now the problem was it was a relatively small niche market they hadn't the people didn't realize you know more pictures are taking today on the cell phones and I've never been taken to the whole history of photography and who would have thought would've thought that we took selfies would become popular I don't know how you never predict in retrospect it's easy to understand but it's always easy to understand something after it's happened so when you're trying to when you're doing these radical things um it's really hard I don't think you can succeed in fact you can I will get look I want to know how innovative a company is or how innovative a designer is I want to know how many times if you fail if you haven't been failing then you're not very innovative it means you're not pushing the boundaries and so failing at the the real question I think about the apples camera is whether it was not succeeding what should they have done could they have repackaged it in a way that would hit that would be great for the niche market and not for the mass consumers until that niche market grew should they have stayed in the business in which case they would be the leader they would have been a leader in digital cameras or was it right to say nope sorry this is not where we want to be today that's quit and I don't know the answer to that question because I think you can give really good logical arguments about why it was yeah you tried wasn't the right time get out of the business don't waste your money or yes you should really stay in but you can lower the investment but keep that product there because that way you'll be enhancing your own skills and when when the time is ripe you will be the world leader it's a there's no that's why it's so much fun working in this great innovative areas because there are no no methods there are no correct answers well thank you so much for making all this time for us professor Norman it it's been an honor thank you again well thank you and good luck with your careers

Channel: Alex Cowan

Views: 21,279

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Don Norman, alex cowan, the design of everyday things, user experience, design, venture design, uva darden

Id: CkPQj7Y6-gc

Length: 59min 42sec (3582 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2016