What are good products?
Good products create habits, great products inspire emotions, amazing products are indispensable.
A lot can be said about the qualities of a good product. Good products recognize a deeply felt need to solve an existing problem and they have a path to fulfill it. Good products are easy to learn, adaptable and are responsibly made. In fact, they do it in an invisible way that just seems to work! Essentially, good products meet a user’s expectations of being useful, usable and desirable.
Good products are responsibly made.
Let’s talk about this a little bit. Can a good product exist and be responsibly made at the same time? What aspects/qualities of a product show us that a product is responsibly designed?
It’s pretty difficult to think of any Apple product and not think of exceptional design. In fact, iPhones are so exceptionally designed in delivering the desirability aspect of a user’s expectations that in 2018, Business Insider reported that over 80% of American teenagers prefer using iPhones to Android devices. Apple iPhones and cellphones, in general, are so exceptionally designed that 1 in 3 adults would rather give up sex than give up their cellphones. So well designed are cellphones that Apple had to introduce the Screen Time app to help users monitor their screen time.
Design is such a powerful tool
‘… in this new world, it is we: the message designers, the product designers, and the specialists in the transportation of ideas and their artefacts over great distances and times, who hold the ultimate responsibility. We have a professional duty to make sure that our inventions are not just clever, but that they are wise; that we don’t just create cool things, but that we are in alignment with a sustainable future…’
D. Berman / Weapons of Mass Deception: Design & Responsibility
One of the first lessons I learned as an aspiring designer is that a designer’s toolkit should always include the capability of asking, “How might we…” questions. At what cost, however, is a notion that I’m still learning.
With no formal education or experience in product design (at this time at least), I struggle with how to properly frame this concept of responsibility in design. However, any aspiring designer need only watch Mike Monteiro’s, How Designer’s Destroyed the World to understand the role a designer plays and the responsibility, ethics, and power that comes with making a product useful, usable and desirable.
