Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman Page B

foremost; what does a product do, what function does it perform? If the item doesn’t do anything of interest, then who cares how well it works? Even if its only function is to look good, it had better succeed. Some well-designed items miss the target when it comes to fulfilling their purpose and thus deserve to fail. If a potato peeler doesn’t actually peel potatoes, or a watch doesn’t tell accurate time, then nothing else matters. So the very first behavioral test a product must pass is whether it fulfills needs.
    On the face of it, getting the function right would seem like the easiest of the criteria to meet, but in fact, it is tricky. People’s needs are not as obvious as might be thought. When a product category already exists, it is possible to watch people using the existing products to learn what improvements can be made. But what if the category does not even exist? How do you discover a need that nobody yet knows about? This is where the product breakthroughs come from.
    Even with existing products, it is amazing how seldom the designers watch their customers. I visited a major software developer to meet with the design team for one of their more widely used products, one that has an overabundance of features, but nonetheless still fails to meet my everyday needs. I came prepared with a long list of problems that I had encountered while attempting to do routine activities. Moreover, I had checked with other dissatisfied users of this product. To my great surprise, much of what I told the design team seemed to be novel. “Very interesting,” they kept saying, while taking copious
notes. I was pleased that they paid attention to me, but disturbed by the fact that these rather basic points appeared to be new. Had they never watched people use their products? These designers—like many design teams in all industries—tend to keep to their desks, thinking up new ideas, testing them out on one another. As a result, they kept adding new features, but they had never studied just what patterns of activities their customers performed, just what tasks needed to be supported. Tasks and activities are not well supported by isolated features. They require attention to the sequence of actions, to the eventual goal—that is, to the true needs. The first step in good behavioral design is to understand just how people will use a product. This team had not done even this most elementary set of observations.
    There are two kinds of product development: enhancement and innovation. Enhancement means to take some existing product or service and make it better. Innovation provides a completely new way of doing something, or a completely new thing to do, something that was not possible before. Of the two, enhancements are much easier.
    Innovations are particularly difficult to assess. Before they were introduced, who would have thought we needed typewriters, personal computers, copying machines, or cell phones? Answer: Nobody. Today it is hard to imagine life without these items, but before they existed almost no one but an inventor could imagine what purpose they would serve, and quite often the inventors were wrong. Thomas Edison thought that the phonograph would eliminate the need for letters written on paper: business people would dictate their thoughts and mail the recordings. The personal computer was so misunderstood that several then-major computer manufacturers completely dismissed them: some of those once-large companies no longer exist. The telephone was thought to be an instrument for business, and in the early days, telephone companies tried to dissuade customers from using the phone for mere conversation and gossip.
    One cannot evaluate an innovation by asking potential customers for their views. This requires people to imagine something they have no experience with. Their answers, historically, have been notoriously
bad. People have said they would really like some products that then