The wow factor
When aesthetics become inseparable from the function of a product, consumer buy-in becomes a given—as many companies from around the world have discovered
Charles Assisi | TNN
Seoul is Samsung country. Every road in the city eventually leads to a building or factory with hoardings on it that scream Samsung. Inside each of the facilities are the company’s foot soldiers who assault the world each day with products that scream even louder for attention. And leading the charge is the company’s design team which has turned its fortunes around from an outfit that copied Japanese designs to one that is nipping hard at Sony’s heels. The company routinely sweeps every design award anywhere in the world.
But 12 years ago things were different. The world outside Korea didn’t think much of its capabilities. This was a reality that pushed chairman Lee Kun Hee into a lot of travel, endless introspection and long conversations. The outcome: He was convinced that if the future had to be captured, it would have to be on the back of design. “Because,” says Sudhakar Nadkarni, former head of industrial design at IIT Mumbai, “designers understand the consumer more than any other functional head in a company.”
For that reason alone, Kun Hee shifted Samsung’s design centre from a small city in Suwon to the capital Seoul. Having done that, he hired American design firm IDEO to collaborate and train his people. Since then, his team has spent a few thousand hours in various parts of the world—including India—with a single point agenda. What is the one thing that compels a consumer to buy up a product?
A designer conducting a guided tour of the facilities for the media points to one of the plasma TV sets on display. “If this thing looks like it can fit into any Western home, it is the outcome of a few thousand hours we spent at stores in the US and Europe attempting to understand customer psyche.” Apparently, after a consumer walked into a store and latched on to a product, Samsung’s designers would conduct a ‘post-mortem’ in an attempt to understand the person who walked in and what possibly went through his mind before making a final purchase.
The insights they gained translated into products that met with runaway success. So much so, that engineers at the company now concede ground to designers. Take a very recent laser printer built by Samsung. On the drawing board, the designers argued that consumers like printers in which the paper lies flat. Engineers argued building a model where the paper is fed vertically makes more sense because it drives production costs down 10%. In the past, engineers would have won the battle. The management arbitrated in favour of design. The engineering core was stunned.
The move wasn’t without precedents. At Bang & Olufsen (B&O), a Danish electronics company with a cult following, engineers build only after the designer reckons it meets a certain set of standards. “The steel frames around television sets—are brushed horizontally on the horizontal side and vertically on the vertical side. At B&O, it is brushed only vertically,” points out a company spokesperson. Why? “The designer likes it that way. It enhances the aesthetic value of the product even though it drives costs higher,” he says. Incidentally, Samsung’s printers are selling well.
Designing for the globe
Designing for the global consumer is fairly complex. At Yahoo! India’s offices in Bangalore where a significant part of Yahoo’s instant messenger is designed, Ram Prasad, the CTO, points to a unique problem his designers face. “In a country like China, red is considered sacred. For the rest of the world, it signifies danger.” Getting around issues like this, he says, needs not just engineers who understand algorithms—but designers who can work with ethnographers and sociologists who understand communities.
It raises a fundamental question that designers grapple with across the world. Is there anything like a design that is globally acceptable to all users?
“That’s a question I grappled with for a long time,” chuckles Nadkarni. “I finally got the answers in Germany while talking to the design head at Braun. He said design has a common grammar. But subtleties exist. When it comes to electronics, design is global. But with furniture, there is nothing global. You have to account for local sensibilities. It all depends on what is it that you are working on.”
Having said that, the best designers make mistakes too. At B&O for instance, they grapple with engineers on what kind of technology ought to go into a product. The cellular phones that it ships sport only basic functions—make and receive calls and store a few telephone numbers. Cameras, which are now considered, de rigueur on phones, are excluded. The designers think phones are meant to talk with and that too much technology can complicate life. Their phones, apparently, offer crystal clear voice quality. So far, so good!
But a few years ago, when the world bet on VHS as a standard to play video tapes, B&O built television sets with Sony’s Betamax in it. One of B&O’s core beliefs is that when a product is built, it ought to last at least 15 years. And the technology they bet on is usually something they believe will last that long. Betamax bombed and television sets that shipped with the standard built into it were rendered white elephants.
The exhale moment
With good design houses, mistakes like these are rare. Instead, the pay-off for focussing on enhancing a customers experience is high. Cases in point? Compare the stock prices of Starwood Hotels, Proctor & Gamble and Apple Computer against the Standard & Poor 500.
All three outperformed the index. Why? Because at Starwood Hotels for instance, which owns brands like Sheraton, designers working on the rooms, spent a lot of time thinking of something called the ‘exhale’ moment. That is the moment when the guests walk into a room, close the door, put their bags down and take a first look at their room. They figured that if the beds are big and plush, customers exhale with delight. To create that one moment, Sheraton allowed their designers to spend $800 million on new beds.
When aesthetics become inseparable from the function of a product, consumer buy-in becomes a given—as many companies from around the world have discovered
Charles Assisi | TNN
Seoul is Samsung country. Every road in the city eventually leads to a building or factory with hoardings on it that scream Samsung. Inside each of the facilities are the company’s foot soldiers who assault the world each day with products that scream even louder for attention. And leading the charge is the company’s design team which has turned its fortunes around from an outfit that copied Japanese designs to one that is nipping hard at Sony’s heels. The company routinely sweeps every design award anywhere in the world.
But 12 years ago things were different. The world outside Korea didn’t think much of its capabilities. This was a reality that pushed chairman Lee Kun Hee into a lot of travel, endless introspection and long conversations. The outcome: He was convinced that if the future had to be captured, it would have to be on the back of design. “Because,” says Sudhakar Nadkarni, former head of industrial design at IIT Mumbai, “designers understand the consumer more than any other functional head in a company.”
For that reason alone, Kun Hee shifted Samsung’s design centre from a small city in Suwon to the capital Seoul. Having done that, he hired American design firm IDEO to collaborate and train his people. Since then, his team has spent a few thousand hours in various parts of the world—including India—with a single point agenda. What is the one thing that compels a consumer to buy up a product?
A designer conducting a guided tour of the facilities for the media points to one of the plasma TV sets on display. “If this thing looks like it can fit into any Western home, it is the outcome of a few thousand hours we spent at stores in the US and Europe attempting to understand customer psyche.” Apparently, after a consumer walked into a store and latched on to a product, Samsung’s designers would conduct a ‘post-mortem’ in an attempt to understand the person who walked in and what possibly went through his mind before making a final purchase.
The insights they gained translated into products that met with runaway success. So much so, that engineers at the company now concede ground to designers. Take a very recent laser printer built by Samsung. On the drawing board, the designers argued that consumers like printers in which the paper lies flat. Engineers argued building a model where the paper is fed vertically makes more sense because it drives production costs down 10%. In the past, engineers would have won the battle. The management arbitrated in favour of design. The engineering core was stunned.
The move wasn’t without precedents. At Bang & Olufsen (B&O), a Danish electronics company with a cult following, engineers build only after the designer reckons it meets a certain set of standards. “The steel frames around television sets—are brushed horizontally on the horizontal side and vertically on the vertical side. At B&O, it is brushed only vertically,” points out a company spokesperson. Why? “The designer likes it that way. It enhances the aesthetic value of the product even though it drives costs higher,” he says. Incidentally, Samsung’s printers are selling well.
Designing for the globe
Designing for the global consumer is fairly complex. At Yahoo! India’s offices in Bangalore where a significant part of Yahoo’s instant messenger is designed, Ram Prasad, the CTO, points to a unique problem his designers face. “In a country like China, red is considered sacred. For the rest of the world, it signifies danger.” Getting around issues like this, he says, needs not just engineers who understand algorithms—but designers who can work with ethnographers and sociologists who understand communities.
It raises a fundamental question that designers grapple with across the world. Is there anything like a design that is globally acceptable to all users?
“That’s a question I grappled with for a long time,” chuckles Nadkarni. “I finally got the answers in Germany while talking to the design head at Braun. He said design has a common grammar. But subtleties exist. When it comes to electronics, design is global. But with furniture, there is nothing global. You have to account for local sensibilities. It all depends on what is it that you are working on.”
Having said that, the best designers make mistakes too. At B&O for instance, they grapple with engineers on what kind of technology ought to go into a product. The cellular phones that it ships sport only basic functions—make and receive calls and store a few telephone numbers. Cameras, which are now considered, de rigueur on phones, are excluded. The designers think phones are meant to talk with and that too much technology can complicate life. Their phones, apparently, offer crystal clear voice quality. So far, so good!
But a few years ago, when the world bet on VHS as a standard to play video tapes, B&O built television sets with Sony’s Betamax in it. One of B&O’s core beliefs is that when a product is built, it ought to last at least 15 years. And the technology they bet on is usually something they believe will last that long. Betamax bombed and television sets that shipped with the standard built into it were rendered white elephants.
The exhale moment
With good design houses, mistakes like these are rare. Instead, the pay-off for focussing on enhancing a customers experience is high. Cases in point? Compare the stock prices of Starwood Hotels, Proctor & Gamble and Apple Computer against the Standard & Poor 500.
All three outperformed the index. Why? Because at Starwood Hotels for instance, which owns brands like Sheraton, designers working on the rooms, spent a lot of time thinking of something called the ‘exhale’ moment. That is the moment when the guests walk into a room, close the door, put their bags down and take a first look at their room. They figured that if the beds are big and plush, customers exhale with delight. To create that one moment, Sheraton allowed their designers to spend $800 million on new beds.