Importance of user-centred design for industrial designers
As industrial designers, you are more concerned about the product aesthetics, or how good the product looks.  Product appearance is what attracts customers in the first place, especially products designed for the home or personal consumer market.  Your customers want products that make a statement about who they are, their personalities, and the lifestyles that they desire to be associated with.

Unfortunately, many industrial designers tend to tradeoff usability to achieve a particular aesthetic effect.  Many products have very similar looking buttons of same shape and size such that it is unclear what the functions are unless users get close enough to read the labels.  Often, labels are hard to read as they tend to be small or printed on shiny metallic backgrounds, or simply molded into the plastic (or embossed on metal) making them hard to read from certain angles.  Buttons and controls are designed to blend with each other or with the background making them hard to see to provide a 'minimalist' appearance.  Some controls are too tiny to manipulate comfortably while displays are designed to look 'cool' rather than convey information that is easily understood.

With technology and lifestyles becoming more sophisticated and customers being more knowledgeable and educated about the products they buy, products cannot sell on looks alone, unless they are for decorative purposes, require very little or no interaction or are very infrequently used.  Users buy products and interact with them to perform tasks to get the job done. Customers don't want pretty products that are difficult or tedious to use, as they have to interact with them often.  For example, mobile phones are used daily and Nokia phones are popular because they are easy to use.  Similarly, Apple sells because they blend aesthetics with great usability and functionality (look at their iMacs and iPods).  On the other hand, customers also don't want ugly products with great usability.  The trick is to strike the right balance:

good aesthetics + good usability = great product!

User-centred design services for industrial designers
If you are an industrial design company designing products for other companies or manufacturers, you can use us as your partner to provide greater differentiation for your company and more compelling value for your prospective clients.  Together, our complementary skill sets of aesthetics and usability will enhance the competitiveness and marketability of your client's products.

If you are looking for early usability inputs for your design concepts, we can help you to analyze and brainstorm product concepts that meet user, task and contextual requirements, and to develop usability requirements for the product.

Before you even embark on design concepts, we can help you to perform user, task and functional analysis to determine the product functions and features, priorities, how those functions should be accessed and controlled, their logical,  functional grouping and behaviour.  We can help to analyze the context in which these products are used and the implications for the design, including product ergonomics, positional and operational requirements of controls, status & feedback indicators and displays, as well as the coding methods to use to allow quick visual or tactile recognition and identification.

When you have initial product concepts on paper, we can review them from a usability perspective to fine-tune ideas, identify potential problem areas, pros and cons and select the best concepts to take to the next phase of details and refinement.  These reviews can be repeated with foam or cardboard mock-ups which can be used for early 'fit and form' tests.

If you are also involved in graphic design of symbols, icons and other labels used on the product, we can help you review and test user perception of the meaning of these graphics as well as placement on the product.

top