On the difference between Good design and just “pretty looking stuff”.

I recently bought an air purifier from Xiaomi. It looks really sleek compared to you average home air purifier, and it also comes with a native app. The app includes readings on your home air quality, as well as the life of the filter(“your filter is at 40%”, type of stuff). I though those feature were pretty useful.

Now when my filter was nearing 0% for the first time, I opened up the machine, only to find the filter tightly packed in plastic packaging.

Obviously, I might as well have turned the machine off for the past six months, it was just blowing air and not filtering it. I don’t remember if I put the initial filter in and left the packaging on, or if it was just inside the machine when delivered.

In any case, this is not about fault. It’s about the difference between good product design, and just sleek looking stuff.

It’s really nice of Xiaomi to build a machine that “looks good”, and an app to come with it. However, if this machine and app combination is unable to give me a clear warning that the machine is setup in totally the wrong way, those are just empty gimmicks. I looked often at the app, and the “your filter is at XX%” message. I was fooled into thinking the machine was working properly.

All that was needed is a warning: “the filter is not properly setup, please check”. Good product design would have included such a warning. Knowing whether the filter is properly setup is essential to using the product.

Good product design would have made the product more useful to me. In this case, the sleek industrial look, the nice native app, those were just empty bells and whistles hiding a hopelessly badly designed product.