Know Thyself: User Feedback and Vibrator Design

Getting (and giving) good insight is harder than it looks

One of the things I get asked most frequently when people hear that I develop vibrators is if and how we get user feedback during the design process. And, although it’s usually asked with a laugh, it actually gets at some really interesting aspects of design and culture in our product space.

The boring answer first: looked at from a wide enough perspective, designing a vibrator is no different from designing any other product. It’s important to try to understand the problem you’re trying to solve and both your user and how they’ll interact with the final product. Once you wrap your head around what you’re trying to do, you should prototype and iterate frequently, and let feedback from your users inform and drive the evolution of the design.

However, if you’re creating a product as personal as a vibrator, that last bit poses some less common challenges and the design process starts to look a little more unique. The issues fall into two main bins: (1) body and mind and (2) culture and communication.

You Are A Beautiful And Unique Snowflake

It’s trite to say, but everyone is in fact different. Everyone has a unique body, with differences in everything from dimensions to geometry to nerve distribution. And, in addition to measurable physical differences, there are physiological differences in how different people perceive and experience sensations, including pleasure.

Compounding these body-related differences is the fact that how we experience pleasure has a huge psychological component as well. Getting into that is a different essay (or book), but it is pretty easy to understand that there is no “universal human” to design a vibrator for or around. So, one obvious question becomes: who do you even ask for feedback? Or, put more realistically, how do you try to have a sufficiently representative group of test users to help you create a product that works for the most different people?

How Does That Make You Feel?

Once you have some answers to those questions (and for the record, I don’t think there is a perfect answer), you get into the culture and communication side of the challenge. More specifically, trying to overcome conscious and subconscious difficulties with providing thoughtful, candid feedback.

For many products, observational testing is the gold standard, since you can draw conclusions as a designer that the user may not. While it is certainly possible to do observational testing for vibrators, it creates some delicate considerations related to privacy and logistics, as well as the danger of an observer effect (if someone knows they are being observed, will they behave differently than they would otherwise?). I’m sure everyone has their own approach, but we have never done observational user research. This means that we typically give prototypes to our user group to keep for a week or two and use at their leisure, with pre- and post-test period interviews. This is a tremendously valuable part of the design process for us but even it can be tricky.

The first reason is straightforward — given the cultural baggage and historical taboos around vibrators and even around sex more generally, some people are very uncomfortable talking candidly or in detail about how they explore and experience pleasure and physical intimacy. Of course it’s possible to choose a user group that is more comfortable having those conversations, but then you run the risk of skewing your sample and may end up with a final design tailored to a subset of the users you intended to address.

Even more insidious is an indirect effect of society’s traditional unwillingness to be open about these topics. Interestingly, I've found that many people (including myself) may be willing to speak frankly about sex but are actually unable to be as articulate as they could be about other topics. I think this is because relatively few people are in the habit of thinking meaningfully about sex. This seems counterintuitive when we consider the pervasiveness of sexual imagery and allusion in the world around us, but I think it comes down to the difference between “thinking about it” vs. “being thoughtful about it.” The majority of the times sex flits across our consciousness, it is in a superficial or simplistic way, often on such a basic level as WANT (if the ad agency was doing a good job). It is relatively rare to be introspective about how we (and our partners) experience pleasure and intimacy, and if you never spend much time thinking about something, you are unlikely to have much insight into it.

Regardless of which reasons affect which people, the end result is that the raw material (user feedback) that designers and engineers need to refine their products is limited. Even that is just one facet of the larger issue — if we don’t know ourselves, it is difficult to improve our sex lives, with or without vibrators.

A Brighter Future Beckons

At the risk of shamelessly sucking up to you, dear reader, I will say that I’m really happy that you’re here. There are any number of reasons I’m heartened by the growing dialogue around sex and technology in forums like Boinkology, but the most relevant one to this particular essay is that more discussion and introspection about sex and intimacy makes it easier to design awesome pleasure products. It’s a virtuous cycle — better products then make it easier for people to explore and enjoy their bodies and sexuality. I’m excited to join the conversation.