How to design for the consumer
What are some examples of bad design?
Like driving down the road trying to change the radio station at 80 mph. Look how many controls are on the cockpit of your car. Television systems and home theaters require 23 remotes. More companies are interested now, but if you take a look at the TVs and home theaters, you have competing companies, and it's not going to get simpler until they agree with each other.
And the good examples?
Obviously a company like Apple is high. Bose is an excellent example of a company trying to solve this problem. Bang & Olufsen are expensive, but they're very well thought through. Many people would not add this company, but I would, which is Microsoft. And of course Palm. I would say one of the outstanding successes in this is the BMW Mini Cooper. The interior design of that car is quite well done.
What about the iPod success?
The iPod success is really not because of the ease of use of the iPod. The iPod success is because it's a system. Before the iPod, people forget that you couldn't really purchase music. One of the first things Steve Jobs did was to negotiate the sale of music at 99 cents. Second is iTunes, the website and the application to find the music and get it into your iPod. It's relatively effortless. Other companies did it, and it was a million steps. He also solved the digital rights management problem, which made it pretty invisible to the users. And then, finally, there was the iPod. Which is well designed, of course, and . . . has become an advertising symbol . . . . Apple conceived of this as an entire system, not just a cool music player.
So what will make products better?
What makes them more usable is a company that cares—that changes its process and thinks about humans from the very beginning of the process. Most companies think about this at the end. The good news is that more and more companies are understanding this. The bad news is that the number of companies is increasing, and the new ones have to learn . . . . We keep creating new technologies that are done badly. Like watching TV on our phone.
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