Selecting the right ideas
Michael Grossman of the User Experience Arts blog recounts the presentation by Alex Lee, CEO of OXO at this year’s GEL Conference. (A personal favourite of mine from the States.) In order for a idea to become commercialised at OXO, it must be intuitive to use, obvious in function, provoke thought and inspire re-use. OXO also discounts the value of verbatim customer feedback. We’ve also found that people are often bad at articulating needs and frequently do things they would never tell you. I can only assume the insight to develop the Angled Measuring Cup came from watching people bend over to get level with traditional measuring cups.
When we begin our workshops on user-centred design, we have participants peel an apple with several different peelers (including an OXO peeler). The participants, regardless of design experience, are quickly able to list all the positive and negative attributes of each peeler, and through a few minutes of experience, have done some great design thinking around creating the perfect peeler.
August 9th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Justin, I just saw your post and wanted to thank you for the link. Alex Lee’s presentation was one of my favorites of the entire GEL Conference. It lets us see behind the curtain as to how a company known for its design, innovates. Mostly we hear about the Eureka moments here in the U.S. instead of the hard work that goes into intentional innovation. Is that true in your part of the world as well?
August 9th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
I’d say it’s still fairly common for many organisations (arouns the globe) to view innovation in a “eureka” context as opposed to a structured process. My other pet peeve is so many of the successful case studies and model innovators rolled out before us are usually big corporations. I fear this may scare off smaller organisations, or present a “well, that’s all right for them, but not for me” reaction to design. OXO is still a great story, as it all began with one product …