Category: Product Design

(Morrisville, N.C.) Montie Roland, president of collaborative product design and development firm Montie Design, will be leading the discussion, X-Rest – The Process of Going from Concept to Consumer?

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Todays client generally wants a product that is economical to manufacture, elegant, and robust. Robust products have an advantage in the market place. This is especially true in this age of the easy accessibility to user reviews over the Internet.

According to the Wikipedia,

Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance. A system, organism or design may be said to be “robust” if it is capable of coping well with variations (sometimes unpredictable variations) in its operating environment with minimal damage, alteration or loss of functionality.

Why is robustness important? Robust products perform as expected in a wide variety of situations, environments and contexts. Robust products often outperform expectations and delight users. Robust products have significantly reduced warranty returns. These products leave a positive impression on the user. Customers often respond by becoming local, or internet, evangelists for the products. These customers may also become life long users and purchasers of the product, or service.

Developing criteria to gauge the robustness of a product can difficult. Some industries and user contexts (such as military) already have specifications in place to gauge the robustness of a product. Unfortunately, many industries do not think in terms of robust products. Robustness can be a broad and vague requirement, especially if the approach to defining qualitative (and subjective) terms is not organized and methodical.

A good way to understand robustness, is to look at areas that are impacted by the robustness of a product. One area that robustness impacts is manufacturing. A robust product tends to be easier to manufacture because it is less sensitive to tolerances and other small variations in the process. When a product is less sensitive to changes in the manufacturing process, it is usually less expensive to manufacture. Robustness at the manufacturing level is often the result of well planned and executed design that avoided ?mission creep?.

Robustness at the user level is manifested in many ways. One example is having the product perform as expected on a continuing basis. An example of a robust design is the ignition switch in your car and the key to turn the switch. This switch is often used twice a day for ten or more years. The key that you started your car with today is probably in your pocket, or purse, as you are reading this article. That key is constantly (while carried in a pocket or purse) in contact with other metal objects such as change and other keys. Many times, at the end of the day, keys are tossed into a bowl or other container for overnight storage. Car keys see constant wear and abuse from the user and the environment. However, when you walk out to your car you, expect the key to turn the ignition and the car to start. The devices are used in a wide variety of environments from cold weather in the winter to hot weather in the summer. The user may be wearing thick winter gloves. Keys also must be adaptable for use in a wide variety of environments from a mans trouser pocket to a womans purse. They must be small enough to fit in a purse or pocket. The car key and ignition switch are examples of two very robust devices that function very reliably for an extended period in wide variety or circumstances and environments.

Robustness must be designed into the product from the beginning. One way to develop robust products is to determine (in the beginning of the project) exactly what product it is that you really wanted to design. Products must be well defined and targeted. Mission creep (the addition of unnecessary or previously unanticipated features) is the enemy of robust products. Mission creep is where the product design mission is expanded from the initial, targeted product. Mission creep diverts resources and time away from the appropriate product in an effort to extend the product into areas, or features, that arent critical for the success of the product. This lack of focus can result in extra product features at a cost to the robustness of the product.

Robustness also comes from a commitment to integrity in all stages of the design and manufacturing process. Customers expect robust products. Companies delivering robust products exceed the expectations of the customer. They are also creating an environment that encourages repeat purchases from satisfied clients and that is good for the bottom line.

Montie Roland is President of the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development Management Association. Roland is also President of Montie Design, a product development and prototyping firm in Morrisville, NC and the RTP Product Development Guild. You can reach Montie by email at: montie@montiegear.com

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Design, by its very nature, is an iterative process. The product design process begins with creating preconceptions. Those preconceptions are used to create a prototype. The prototype is then tested and the test results are evaluated. The evaluations are used to form new preconceptions and the process begins again. These iterative cycles can focus on the entire design, or they can focus on a small area (or technology) of the product. This process relies on prototyping and testing. Prototypes come in many forms. The word ?prototype? is commonly refers to a working model of a product, or product concept. A written, or verbal, description of the product could also be a prototype. A sketch could also serve as prototype. The exact nature of the prototype isnt as important as the effect of the prototype, which is to validate the success, or failure, of the product. As the design progress, the cycles of iteration become more focused, as the developers refine the product.

Different industries have differing levels of toleration number of iterations in a design sequence. Machine design is a good example of an industry with a low tolerance for iteration in the design process. Engineers that design machinery attempt to practice design in a very linear fashion. The goal in the machine design industry is to reach a finished, and proven, design in the least amount of time with the least number of changes or redesign cycles. This approach attempts to follow the straightest possible path to a completed design. This ?straight arrow? approach leads us to classify this industrys design methodology as a linear one. Even with this approach, iterations are necessary. Design iterations inevitably occur during the process of design a new piece of equipment. The can be caused by a machine, or system within a machine, that doesnt perform as expected. When this happens, that part, or sub-system, is redesigned and redeployed. Because of these issues the machine design industry does not have a completely linear process.

The linear nature of machine design is driven by two factors. The first factor is the prevalence of a function requirement and the minimization of aesthetic requirements. In my opinion, the biggest cause of the use of a linear design process in the machine design industry is the percentage of engineering and design costs as compared to the total cost of producing and marketing the machinery. Many machines are custom, or semi-custom, to the specific application (often manufacturing). This results in a small number of units to amortize the engineering costs against. This is a situation where the cost of design and engineering is a significant percentage of the total cost to produce the each machine. As a result, savings in the cost of design have a significant impact on the profitability of that design. This is the exact opposite of consumer products that have a low cost of design, relative to the total cost of producing the product.

Consumer products are examples of products with a very iterative design process. These products are typically produced in high volumes. This allows the cost of design and engineering to be amortized over a large volume of product sales. In higher volume products, there is more incentive to spend more time on the industrial design and front-end design (fuzzy front end) stages of the design process.

Any product, or service, will be judged by the market place based on the experience that the product provides. Machinery is evaluated on institutional-experience criteria including performance, ease-of-use, speed of installation, return on investment (ROI) and uptime. Consumer products are evaluated on end-user experience criteria that include ease-of-use, aesthetics, coolness, usefulness, perception that the product creates and the experience that the user has when interacting with the product. The latter criteria can be very subjective and difficult to capture in any sort of written document.

Products with great user experiences often succeed in the marketplace, where products with poor user experiences fail to generate sales. This does not mean that user experience is the only indicator of potential success. A product may have a compelling value to the customer that overcomes a poor user experience. Typically these products are the first in their class and provide some functionality that is new to the industry. This is a case where the value to the customer is high and the customer will accept a poor user experience in exchange for that functionality. As a segment of an industry matures, the user experience becomes a more important indicator of how well the product will sell in the marketplace.

The current game console war is a good example of this contrast between functionality and usability. The PlayStation 3? is a game console that has an average user experience, but provides state-of-the-art computer graphics. The Wii? is a game console that provides average computer graphics, but has a wonderful user experience. The Wii? has outsold the PlayStation 3? by about twenty percent.

Product iteration allows the design team to explore a variety of concepts. The evaluation of these concepts helps to decide which concepts to integrate into the product and which concepts to drop from the product. Many times the issue isnt whether a concept is good, or bad, but rather ?is it appropriate This is especially true when the design team is evaluating, and improving, the user experience of the proposed product.

Product developers, designers and engineers use the available resources (which are always finite) to work towards achieving the best product possible. The nature of the product and the expectations of the industry and customer ultimately drive the exact nature of the design process. Design is iterative. Product designers rely on experience and a refined process of iterating through the design cycles to create the next product. Often a designer achieves success not by any one single action, but by the consistent application of an educated, and refined, design process.

Montie Roland is President of the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development Management Association. Roland is also President of Montie Design, a product development and prototyping firm in Morrisville, NC and the RTP Product Development Guild. You can reach Montie by email at: montie@montiegear.com

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Camping is an activity that transcends the standard social and economic assumptions. Camping is an extremely popular activity that attacts hundreds of thousands of participants each year. We come to see and experience locations and activities like:

Hiking on Mount Mitchell in North Carolina

Sliding Down a Gigantic Rocks into 56 Degree Water at Sliding Rock

The modern camping trip is a buffet of products designed to help improve the camping experience. We bring, use and make icons, and artifacts, like:

The Venerable Coleman Camping Stove

When the Tents Leak, The Pop-Up Shelters Come Out

The podcast (below) discusses the camping experience and how we could redesign that experience to make camping more universally acceptable. Hopefully this exercise will give you ideas on how-to evaluate the experience associated with your products. Evaluating the experience associated with an existing product can be an excellent way to define new product experiences. These experience models lead to developing new, or derivative, products that make these new experiences possible.

As always, your comments, and suggestions, are welcome. Please send them to me at montie@montiegear.com. Have a great day!

Sincerely,
Montie Roland

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