Consulting Services for Designing User Friendly Products

Consulting services are offered to enhance product design and are based on the rationale described below.

Understanding Product-User Interface
Most of today's electronic products appear to be designed to impress the (young) consumer and are packed with varied features (manifested in a large variety of buttons and switches accompanied by complicated LCD displays). For example, electronic products, such as digital cameras, cell phones, or audio equipment, incorporate a confusing mix of buttons plus on-screen functions that require study of massive manuals. Almost all functions in such devices can be simplified greatly by using simple on-screen menus and by eliminating a large percentage of buttons and knobs, resulting in intuitive and easy to use designs. Ask yourself, for instance, how many digital camera manufacturers can claim to have designed their product for simplicity and easy of use and imagine the competitive advantage of a manufacturer that can legitametly make such a claim. Or, ask yourself what percentage of most digital camera features is actually used by 90% of individuals who own the cameras.

Configuring Products to Fit the User's Perspective and Needs
Here are some of the questions developers of any product need to ask: What does the typical user need? What are the common learning problems encountered by users? Which functions are essential (i.e., used with great frequency) and which features are inconsequential and unnecessary? How much effort will be required to learn to use and then *remember* how to use all features of a product? How appealing is product complexity to the baby boom generation of mature, sophisticated, and affluent individuals who simply cannot afford to spend weeks playing with or studying a product so as to use its various functions?

The following sections, hopefully, will help engender a new philosophy of product design that eschews confusing bells-and-whistles complexity in favor of Minimalist Design.

Simplicity and Ease of Use
Consider necessary and desirable features versus those that increase complexity without enhancing usefulness for most users. Manufacturers who design their products with a primary emphasis on ease of use can develop advertising campaigns based on our suggested philosophy of minimalist product design, and discover the great appeal of such an approach to consumers. You might ask yourself: In the competitive field of manufacturing, how many companies can (or have) built an advertising campaign around these issues of simple and approachable designs?

To be useful, a product does not require massive amounts of buttons, levers, graphics, or complicated software. Instead, it needs to be user oriented: simple in organization, easy to learn, easy to navigate (requiring the most economical (fewest) series of motions to achieve each objective -- developers should not forget the lessons of time and motion analysis), and possess a coherent logic that is learned, relearned, and rehearsed as the user employs its various features.

Our basic guideline in evaluating product user friendliness is that simpler is better . In contrast, most products (whether automobiles or electronic equipment) are packed with enormous amounts of detail, are poorly organized, and include many assumptions regarding user know-how. If you design a product, ask yourself this: "How can I teach a total novice the most essential features of this product in one hour?" Or: "How can I organize my product features, as they are presented to users, so that the most basic features required by 90-95% of users will be immediately accessible and apparent, with the remaining more complex and esoteric features delegated to a secondary position?

Intuitive Logic and Organization
A novice user should be able to learn all basic functions of a product within one or two hours. In contrast, most products today are so full of confusing detail that novice users need to devote great effort to be able to navigate the various necessary functions. Even then, they may be unable to perform many functions they require and may find themselves continuously frustrated by having to refer to accompanying poorly written and poorly organized manuals that require days or even weeks to master.

Manufacturers who produce products that have intuitive and easily accessible interfaces are bound to enjoy far greater popularity with consumers (particularly, the more affluent and older generation of consumers) than those who pack their products with confusing and somewhat marginal features that confuse and frustrate the consumer.

It is difficult for engineers who have lived for months, or even years, with the development of a product to distance themselves sufficiently from a product and to perceive it from the perspective of the end user. What is more, as successive models of a product are developed, many features are tacked on as an afterthought (not because of a logical and functional relation to overall product design, but simply to "impress" inexperienced consumers). Typically, this results in a disorganized and arbitrary arrangement of buttons, levers, or software aids.

Analysis of Memory Burden Imposed on Users
Poor organization of a product imposes a considerable memory burden on its users who not only must learn about its various functions, but must remember all the complex functions over time. For example, how many picky and arbitrary rules, moves, and clicks does the product require its users to remember? For most products, this can easily run into the hundreds. It is safe to say that most users tend to forget many of the functions offered by a product because of the inordinate memory burden. As a consequence, most users eventually focus on very limited features of a product and ignore additional ones whose use is difficult to remember.

A simple consideration of memory burden imposed by a product will provide a convenient gauge (and general guideline) for understanding product user-friendliness. Remember that different kinds of buttons, levers, computer interfaces will intuitively imply different functions. Is this in fact the case or are the various control devices on a product assigned to functions in an arbitrary and tacked-on way, presumably with the intent to impress?

Essentially, any package of features can be broken down into an outline (or hierarchy) of functions and almost all of these can be communicated quickly and effectively with simple controls. Most importantly, the different means whereby product functions or features are accessed by a user (e.g., levers versus knobs versus buttons versus LCD displays) must exhibit an intuitive organization such that all functions accessed via a certain control mechanism (e.g., buttons) should have a logical and functional relationship with one another. When this is successfully accomplished, memory burden on the user is tremendously reduced.

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