The design of everyday things. Design in the world of business.

Here I provide my thoughts that popped up during the reading of the forth chapter “Design in the world of business” from “The Design of everyday things” book.

Key take aways

• disease “featuritis” is inevitable and it will kill the product
• in our current economy, money will take over user needs. There is an opportunity in creating incentives to prioritize “user needs” vs money or at least correlate them.
• idea is nothing. How you create a successful product from the idea is everything. It’s usually not easy, it takes lots of time and there is no guarantee that the product stage is achievable.

Featuritis

Like this word. Author says it’s a disease. I’d say it’s inevitable disease of the product. And most likely this disease will kill the product eventually.
When we create the first version of the product it’s usually good: simple, easy to use, easy to produce, etc.. But after the first version appears — we want the product to satisfy the needs that are nearby, so we start to add new features in attempt to capture a larger market share. Eventually the product becomes too “feturitis” so it’s easier to kill it and create something new. By us or by our competitors.

Cash machine vs users satisfactory machine

Author expresses his dissatisfaction with the fact that managers are prioritizing money flow over people’s satisfaction. I can share the dissatisfaction but we need to admit that it’s our reality. I’m not saying we just should put up with it. We should complain, and we should seek for the solution. Just complaining is not enough.

Long journey from idea to the product

Author provides few examples where ideas were presented long time ago(decades or even centuries) and we still don’t have the product or just have gotten it. We should understand that idea, usually, costs nothing. Because you can’t make anybody’s life better with idea or even with technology. Only products change people’s life. And usually the path from idea to the product is really long, hard and maybe don’t even exist. I think it’s useful to keep it in mind that if you have an idea of how to change the world you need to prepare yourself for the huge amount of work.