Subject To Change Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design
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We live in an increasingly uncertain world, where the tools that served us well for so long no longer do. Technology isn't sufficient; we can't simply add features to attract an audience. There is no more efficiency to squeeze out of our operations, nor defects to remove from our products.
How do we deliver great products and services in an uncertain world? The thing to keep in mind, not just in the abstract, but truly and viscerally, are your customers and their abilities, needs, and desires. When you do that, when you truly empathize with the people you serve, you'll realize that for them the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing they truly care about.
Apple is a company that has parlayed design into phenomenal business success, driven by CEO, Steve Jobs. Here's what he has said about delivering beautiful solutions:
"When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really undertand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem and you see that is really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop... But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem - and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works. That's what we wanted to do with Mac."
Steve Jobs
In that quote, uttered 17 years before the introduction of the iPod and 23 years before the iPhone, Jobs neatly captures the evolution of product ...
At Adaptive Path, and in this book, we take a different approach to the idea of design. At heart, we believe that design is an activity. As an activity, it incorporates these elements:
Empathy. Design must serve a human purpose, and so design requires an understanding of how people will interact with whatever you're designing.
Problem solving. Design really shines when it's used to address complex problems where the outcome is unclear, many stake-holders are involved, and the boundaries are fuzzy.
Ideation and prototyping. Design produce things, whether they're abstract (schematics, blueprints, wireframes, conceptual models) or concrete (prototypes, physical models). Design is a creative activity, and thus requires actually creating something.
Finding alternatives. Design is less about the analysis of existing options than the creation of new options. Sometimes that means looking at existing options in new ways, and at other times that means creating from scratch ...
To cut through the complexity of a world that is both shrinking (in terms of the global village) and expanding (with respect to technological capability), business must take advantage of the power of design to realize true competitive advantages.
Once you stop thinking of your customers as consumers and begin approaching them as people, you'll find a whole new world of opportunities to meet their need and desires.
The key to create successful products and services in rapidly changing world is not resistance to unexpected change, but the flexibility to adappt to it.
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To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It's a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today's environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations. Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them. In "Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World," Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.
Additional information
- Pages: 186
- ISBN: 0596516835
- EAN: 9780596516833
- Dewey: 658
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.