Don Rickert Design

Do You Have any of these Problems?

These are all symptoms of a product that is not perceived as useful and/or not easy to use and/or unattractive and/or unappealing. Don Rickert Research & Design has the experience, know-how and process to address all of these problems.

• Your Baby is Ugly and You Know It

You know that your product is ugly, hard-to-use or lacks important features and you need fast, actionable advice on how to make your product more useful, usable and or attractive.

• Customer Complaints
• Reduction in Units Sold (or Reduction in 'Page Hits')
• High Shopping Card 'Bail-out' Rate
• Complaints from the Sales Force
• Returns
• Swamped Call Center

You are having high volume of complaints to Customer Service and you need to know what is wrong and how to make it right--fast! An overwhelmed Call Center usually points to a serious usability or customer appeal problem with a product.

• Most Customers Don't Respond to Your Satisfaction Surveys
• Those Who Do Respond Give You Low Ratings
• Less than 100% Repeat Business
• Friction Between Product Management and Engineering
• Your Product Is Not What You Thought that Engineering Was Building

Value and Quality

Two related perspectives from which to judge the goodness of a product are value and quality—actually it would be more accurate to refer to perceived value and quality. These perceptions happen very quickly, apparently faster than previously thought; even faster than purported by Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book, Blink.

For instance, in a recent study, Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa found that first impressions of a visual stimulus are made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing (see Nature: Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye)

Value

What has come to be known as the Fitch perspective (Fitch is a very successful Industrial Design firm), a valuable product is one that a customer will buy or a user will adopt. The Fitch model states that valuable products possess three critical attributes:

• Usefulness: Do people perceive it as having a useful purpose?
• Usability: Is it relatively easy to learn and use?
• Desirability: Is the product appealing enough on an emotional level for people to go to the trouble to buy/adopt?

Quality

Quality is another way of looking at goodness. The product marketing thought leader, Noriaki Kano1, says that products have three components of quality:

• Basic Quality: "Must-have" requirements that the customer expects in the product (e.g. the car starts every time)
• Linear Quality: Product attributes that customers can identify they want more or less of, such as good gas mileage, easy to use, etc.
• Attractive Quality: Surprises, delighters, exciters. Unexpected attributes that distinguish the product from its competitors, such as novelty, beauty, pleasant sound, “Wow!” factor, “coolness”