I flew out to our company headquarters in Dulles yesterday to see Tom Kelley, the general manager of IDEO, speak. I hadn't heard much about him, other than he'd written a couple books about innovation. His talk turned out to be quite interesting. The main point was that it's important for companies to be innovative in order to stay ahead of the competition. Duh, right? But then he gave some cool examples.
He said that one of the keys to innovation is to take an anthropological approach. In other words, observe and analyze how people use the products you design. Often actual human behavior deviates from expected behavior. For example, Oral B hired IDEO to design a toothbrush for kids. You might expect that a toothbrush for kids would be an adult toothbrush shrunk down to fit smaller hands. But upon observation, adults use their fingers to maneuver the toothbrush. Kids, on the other hand, have less manual dexterity and tend to grasp the toothbrush in a fist. So based on this observation, they designed a toothbrush with a large, chunky grip, and Oral B had the top selling toothbrush for 18 months.
One of the other keys to innovation is paying close attention to the user experience. For instance, when they broke down the reasons that customers go to Starbucks, they found that 85% of people go there to relax. This was a somewhat startling discovery since Starbucks sells a stimulant. But it turns out that Starbucks has created a pleasant environment so people go there for the experience as much as they go for the overpriced coffee. This is certainly true for me. I don't even like coffee! But I go a few times a week just to take a break from work... and to scout for the twins I mentioned in an earlier blog :)
So the seminar was really interesting. It was also really short. Basically, I flew to VA for a one hour talk. I ended up wandering around the campus for the rest of the morning. The mothership is huge. It consists of several buildings that all seem more modern and techy than our one building in Columbus. I had lunch with a coworker and some designers from another group. Then, we found an empty conference room where I played games on my PSP for 3 hours until it was time to catch the flight home.
1 comment:
Sounds like it was interesting, and the speaker does make a very good point. One thing I have learned in creating web sites and software is that how I think people will use and view the web site are different from how it actually happpens.
Playing PSP for 3 hours also sounds like fun. I don't have one of those. I'm still on the wifes GBA.
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