This blog is moving

To provide a wider perspective on the topics of engineering and product development, I’ve started a blog for my company, Root3 Labs. In addition to my own opinion, you’ll see posts from my colleagues, who range from NPD veterans to recent graduates. Unfortunately, I don’t think I could do justice to either blog by continuing to write about the same topic in two places. So, while I’ll continue to keep this blog posted as it is and may revisit it in the future, it’s not likely I’ll be contributing to it further in the short-term. Instead, I’ll be publishing my content through Root3 Labs.

You can visit the blog at www.root3labs.com/blog

I hope you’ll join me. I look forward to sustaining the conversation.

— Chad

The Triangle of Requirements

The Triangle of Requirements - A single star represents your project. You can move a star around the gradients to balance your needs, sacrificing one for the other two.

“You can get something good, cheap, or fast. Pick two.”

I’ve heard it many times, but what is it about? I’ve found that it comes down to planning. I come across this “principal” whenever I’m trying to rush a prototype or speed along a vendor. If I want a fast job done right, I’m either going to have to pay up to get extra resources on the job, or I’m going to have to wait for the assigned resources to do their due diligence for me. I don’t want a machinist to rush through my drawing only to miss a critical dimension or misunderstand a callout. My rushed order then becomes a significant delay.

So what can you do to balance this best? By planning ahead, keeping a constant eye on the critical path items that control the minimum schedule, we can improve our schedule, reduce our costs, and create the best quality. We can have the optimum resources available when we need them most – we can line up inexpensive resources to perform menial tasks and skilled, costly resources do only what they are best at. We can order long lead-time items well ahead so there’s no need to pay extra to rush the order. We can identify any high-risk unknowns and attack those first so later tasks are more predictable, more likely to stay on schedule.

I’ve also seen this quote, on the desk of an overworked secretary, “Your lack of planning does not justify my emergency.” It’s easy to get caught up in the firedrill of the day or the long list of design tweaks that need to be in the next prototype. However, it’s a good idea to lift your head and take a look at the project from the high-level perspective to help prevent rounding a bend only to find another emergency.

MicroManufacturing Conference

Standard machining and injection molding techniques are not adequate for manufacturing parts so small that they are barely visible to the naked eye. An entire industry has formed around the requirements to create very small, very precise parts.

Recent work in microfluidics has focused on new rapid prototyping and manufacturing techniques on the micro-scale. While plenty of techniques exist for fabricating small-channels within multi-layered glass, such as etching or even laser drilling, the material and process costs are high, so I’ve been on the lookout for plastic and alternative materials more suitable for high-quantity production.

In just two weeks, I’m headed to Minneapolis to attend the 2009 MicroManufacturing Conference sponsored by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Although I’m not a manufacturing engineer, I have found that it’s extremely difficult and expensive to design good parts without a detailed understanding of the manufacturing methods. By attending, I’m hoping to talk to vendors and learn more about the state of current technology than I can learn with online searches. If you’re going to be at the conference, or just in Minneapolis, feel free to stop me and say hi or even touch base ahead of time to arrange a meeting. I’m looking forward to an interesting few days.

A Simple Product With All the Features

I’ve been writing about keeping products simple. It makes your product easier to use for the majority of users. However, what about the users that don’t want simple? How do you keep them excited about your product?

I want to talk about cameras for a moment, as I’ve found them to be a good example of products that might have a good balance of everything. There’s no question that digital SLR’s (single lens reflex) cameras take better pictures than their point-and-shoot counterparts. They have larger, better quality CCD’s and better lenses. For the advanced users, it’s also easier to quickly adjust such features as shutter speeds and F-stops. Point-and-shoots are meant for convenience; they fit neatly in your pocket so you always have it handy. 

However, if you delve into the manual settings for a point-and-shoot (I have had good experiences with a few of the products in the Canon Powershot lineup) you might find ways to tweak your photos for better results and get more functionality from your camera. I like to play with the depth of field, using focus to highlight my target instead of location within the frame or lighting. I’ve also been experimenting with white-balance. I’ve found those two features alone have dramatically improved my ability to capture the moment. My Canon SD750 even has the ability to setup hotkeys, so I can get into the white-balance menu with one key-press instead of navigating the function-tree. 

Even though I’ve been stressing the importance of keeping products simple, they should only be as simple as they need to be. In the case of my camera, sometimes I want to just grab a quick picture of my kids doing something goofy, and I don’t want to worry about setting up a shot. Other times, I’d really like to get an image with more character, and I’m glad I have a camera that has a multitude of manual features. 

What products are you using that work well for both the novice user and the advanced hobbiest?

An appetizer: Figs topped with chevre and wrapped in prosciutto. Photo taken with the Automatic settings - auto focus, flash, 77mm focal length (35mm equiv.), f-stop (f/4.0) and exposure (1/60).

The same appetizer taken with Manual settings. No flash, f/2.8, exposure (1/40), 37mm focal length (35mm equiv.).

Unknown Stakeholders

Are you overlooking someone in your user research?

It may not have the romance of flowers or diamonds, but a good universal remote control can do good things for a gadget-lover’s marriage. Before we got a high quality universal remote, there were remotes all over and a page of instructions for guests. My wife grew to understand it, but she hated that I’d complicated such a simple task as watching a movie. More often than not, she’d just turn the TV on by hand and listen to it through the native speakers. Now, she just hits the DVD button on the remote and everything turns on (well, most of the time!) so she can watch a show in 5.1 Dolby Digital surround even if she doesn’t care much about it.

So, if you were writing the product specification for a universal remote control, would you have thought to include your user’s significant others, house guests, and friends? You would surely have included the owners of home theater systems as a significant stakeholder in the design. They want equipment with a ton of features, high performance, and customization. Unfortunately, those requirements might not be as well accepted by the rest of the household if the system is difficult to use. Could you have unknown stakeholders that are preventing a purchase? Should they even be your primary target for the user interface?

Are there stakeholders that have been ignored during the design of your product? Are they holding back the success of your product? How do you find them?

Creating simple, intuitive products

My kids’ grandparents all live out-of-town, so they wanted to set up webcams instead of just using the phone. So, I setup GTalk video on my PC right in Gmail.  Then I sent my mother-in-law instructions to setup iChat on her Mac to work with GTalk. Of course, it doesn’t work. She’s not computer savvy enough to troubleshoot the problem and I don’t know enough about Macs to know what to tell her. After an hour of searching forums and trying to talk her through it, we gave up for another day. But once my mother-in-law shut down iChat, we were immediately able to use video through Gmail. What? Is this a missing step in the instructions? I don’t think we were alone in our frustration since the forum was full of posts about having trouble getting them to talk to each other. 

Was the process intuitive? To some engineers at Google and Apple, it must have been. I’m sure they configured the software and were mooning each other over video in no time. Ideally, they would have also consulted my mother-in-law, or at least other users with her level of experience and understanding, to see if she had any trouble understanding the instructions.

What does it mean to create a simple, intuitive product? Certainly, there are technical challenges to making something simple. But, shouldn’t it be easy to create something that’s intuitive? I think it can be, but it involves a bit of work by the designers.

One challenge is that “intuitive” is a subjective term. Product users don’t all use the same vocabularly or may not understand the subtle intricacies between two options, and they may not have the need, desire, or patience to learn. It doesn’t help them complete their task, which is all they’re trying to do. Therefore, what I may think is clear and obvious in a user interface is anything but. The good news is that understanding your user is not a mystic art. You could just ask them.

If it’s possible to consult with your end-users, get their feedback early and often. Talk to tech wizards, grandmas, and anyone else that might use your product. Can you use the misunderstandings of a few early users to overcome the confusion, apprehension, and fear that will keep your most un-savvy users from loving your product?

Photo credit: John De Boer