Uncovering what makes good products great
When thinking about what makes a product good, often times we get a consensus that great products are useful, usable, effective and delightful. Most importantly, they solve real problems. To build great products, we need a problem, and defining a problem means noticing a problem. But how can we notice a problem when our minds are closed and our eyes shut? There’s no 5-step toolkit to help us discover a pressing problem to solve, because chances are, it’s sitting right before us if only we had allowed ourselves to see.
I was watching Tony Fadell’s TED Talk the other day, finding myself intrigued by the notion that good design means reading between the lines. Fadell spoke about how the windshield wiper was invented by Mary Anderson in 1902. While inside a street car in cold and snowy New York, Anderson had noticed how the driver would open the windows every time he needed to clean off the excess snow. All the bottled up warm air would escape, leaving the passengers freezing in their seats. So she thought to herself, “why can’t we just clean the windshield from the inside?”
A problem worth solving is literally screaming for attention. Don’t get me wrong, the windshield wiper has made me mad — for all the times I had accidentally activated it when planning to signal left (can’t fault the bad driver!). Yet I know it’s a timeless product, and we thank Anderson for the safety her invention has brought to our roads.
This story truly struck a chord within me. How were these passengers totally fine with having to deal with the cold? Wasn’t the discomfort a telltale sign of something? Speaking with hindsight, I’d have been infuriated with the state of public transport. Indeed like what Fadell has revealed, habituation can be a blessing and a curse. Being so accustomed to the way things work has its perks (imagine how tiring it must be if we had to think about how to hold a mug every time we drank our coffees!) but it can also leave us accepting reality as facts of life, oblivious to the things that need changing.
“We have to see the world for what it really is, and not the way we think it is.”
The secret to great design, I have learnt, is solving a problem no one sees. Being a philosophy junkie myself, I am always curious about philosophical nuances underlying our day-to-day experiences. Fadell’s thought nuggets reminded me of a brilliant school of thought raised by Kitaro Nishida, a Japanese philosopher, in his book ‘An Inquiry into the Good’.
Pure experience, according to Nishida, is what it just is. It is one nullified of intention, judgment nor discretion, such that it exists “without the least addition of deliberative discrimination.” Experience is not necessarily subjective for it exists as itself equally to all individual, one that has yet to be conceptualised. His main point is to empty experience of all its content (intellectual content, meaning content), reducing it to the instance prior to the subject-object distinction.
The consciousness of a newborn child epitomises pure experience, as the infant has yet to differentiate self from external sensations nor has he learnt to conceptually classify these external sensations into objects of consideration. As such, a newborn child perceives directly facts as they are presented, yet to be exposed to a world of conscious discrimination. Nishida’s analysis of pure experience has urged us to consider the relation between the intellectual contents of our true reality and our pure experience of the world. His account provokes us to question the relation between meaning and pure experience, and raises many questions regarding how knowledge should now be grounded and perceived.
Pondering over this, I’ve come to see how Nishida’s ideas may be applied to Anderson’s perception of the problem. An individual does not encompass true, first-hand, pure experience, but rather it is the experience that envelops him and eventually transcends him. What we perceive through our individualistic experience is almost like that of absorbing reality, granting us the ability to make deductive assumptions of the world around us and for us to garner knowledge that is well grounded. It is within pure experience that problems worth solving are rooted, and immersing ourselves in pure experience increases our chance of stumbling upon them.
As a budding UX designer myself, dissecting consciousness and experience is what pushes me to rethink a lot of the tangible and non-tangible products we have grown so accustomed to using today. I’ve learnt that coming up with ideas for our ‘next great product’ requires keeping our eyes peeled, thinking out of the box, and immersing in the world around us.
