Marketing theory states that when people get products or services, they don't actually want them as such. What they want -desire- is to fulfill one or several needs, and the chosen products or services provide the means to do that in the most efficient or preferred way.
If your company is planning to launch a new product or redesign an existing one, user feedback is crucial, but another really important step to improve user experience and product quality is to ask ourselves the further steps people take with our products:
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| Image taken from joecool.org |
- What levels of satisfaction do users expect from using our or any other similar product?
- What spaces, tasks and other products interact or are within the proximity while performing the activity our product provides?
This has proven for us to be a great product enhancer. Of course, charging a product with excessive abilities would result in a complicated interface that users will find overwhelming. A good example are 90's remote controls, when TV's and VCR's started to have more functions they became utterly complex. A phone is not valuable just because it's sleek and useful. It also has a great OS, customer support or custom rubber protections.
At Interloft we take every project with an analog approach. We do not treat them just as products, but we see them instead as a -critical- part of a system. When a user interacts with a product, he/she creates sequences around it. How can we make these sequences swifter? From a high-end computer to simple kitchenware, it is always important to imagine where and how it will be used, and what are the possible circumstances and contexts that surround it.
We hope you find this useful.
