The Hindu Business Line : Dissonant design

I'm watching Chupke Chupke - in my opinion, one of the funniest Hindi movies ever, and as I chuckle over a particularly comic piece of dialogue, I find myself hitting the rewind button to savour it once more. Unfortunately I've forgotten that this is my new DVD player. Frustrated by my Onida player conking out on me in the month after the warranty lapsed, I expended my irritation by switching allegiance to Philips. Superficially, the two look identical. Yet, as I quickly find out, the remote design isn't the same - the Onida places the rewind-forward wind button at the intuitively appropriate spot that makes life easy when your fingers feel for them in mid-laughter. In the Philips, on the other hand, they've been relegated to a spot that requires you to actually look for them and then peck at them gingerly. In a piece of twisted logic, their place on the remote has been replaced with the chapter buttons, so that instead of a quick flashback, I find myself in the beginning of the movie. By the time I've located the right spot once more, my funny bones are no longer in the mood. I just hope the same designer isn't in charge of designing air-traffic control systems, where hitting the wrong button could have slightly more drastic consequences.

Why is product design so disappointing in so many products of daily use? We all know the inherent design conflict between form and function - but why is there so much tension between form and form? I find myself frustrated in small actions every now and then, when a closer eye to detail would make using the product a pleasure instead of a pain. Take the mundane act of grinding and processing. My mother has a Braun, over 30 years old and though an antique in some ways, it looks far sleeker and has a far better jar design than the Sumeet that I use. In hers, the mixie jar is married to a form-fitting lid that sits snugly in its place, no matter how high the mixie speed. In mine, the mixie-jar has an awkward dome shape with this floppy gasket that has to be threaded in place each time - and if that is not done with loving attention, it reacts with vengeful aggression, spraying banana milkshake or chutney all over me in gleeful spurts.

I've been in so many cars - Indian and foreign-made - I am yet to find a woman-friendly design. Barring one Maruti model, none of the cars has had a place for a woman's handbag. The dashboard above the glove-compartment is stylishly curved which makes for aesthetic appearance, but try flinging your bag on it - or indeed, a wallet or a cell phone, and you find yourself doing an involuntary Galileo experiment of guessing which one will hit the floor first. There are so many bells-and-whistles in every car now - from music, to weather control, to sensors and GPS - yet, look for a spot in which a bag can repose and you will end up swiveling around and tossing it on the back seat. Seat-belts are another source of driving-angst. I am all for safety features, but is this really the best possible design to keep a person strapped in? Feedback from a number of women friends validates that they too find the strap irritating - it feels uncomfortable over parts of the anatomy, and it chafes exposed skin unless the driver is wearing a man's shirt.

Packaging - another bugbear in my life. Two things are guaranteed to get my BP rising. One is the print on tablets. Isn't it a strange and sad irony that as we grow older and we have to pop more pills, the writing on them seems to get proportionately more difficult to read? Regularly, I am asked to decipher the reading on a pack of tablets by someone whose ageing eyes find it difficult to confirm what they are consuming. The pills are either enclosed in shiny, reflective material which ensures poor readability or the print is in these tiny, tiny fonts that would convince a bifocal wearer to run back for another eye check-up. The less said about the requisite data, the better.

Have you noticed that the expiry dates are often only stamped on one end of the strip - so if you are not really vigilant about starting at the other end, you soon have a set of eight tablets that you are not sure are any longer valid for usage? Would it be so difficult for each strip to have an extra attached strip at the end, which is not backed by tablets, on which the batch, name and expiry details are given clearly? Too expensive, says one pharma marketer to me, it would take up the costs significantly. Would it, really? Or does it conveniently lead to some built-in obsolescence with consumers chucking away tablets of dubious pedigree once the name and other details have been punched away?

Another pet peeve are labels. You buy an expensive new shirt/top and a little while later find yourself fidgeting and squirming to rid yourself of this irritating scratchy feeling at the back of your neck.

Why must labels be at that spot, rather than, say, on the side of the shirt, inside? And if they must be there, why can't they be in the softest of fabrics, without harsh edging?

Why are so many products so badly designed? Do marketers not think about the different ways in which we relate to a product? Or do they simply not care?

I recall reading a case study which featured a cellular company in which the geek designers were placed on one side of a one-way mirror to observe customers who navigated the menu on the phone.

As they watched the consumer get confused and lost, the geeks hit the wall in frustration, yelling "No, no, you idiot, that's not the way to use it!"

It is, of course, a moot point about who the idiot was in this case.

Product design is part engineering, part architecture, part interior design, with a huge blob of psychology and anthropology thrown in. Marketers and designers need to stop viewing customers as idiots on the other side of the mirror and to start using the product with the customer's eyes. This needs an outside-in approach where customer views are used as an input to improvement: What does she want? What irritates him? What are the problems she faces when using it? Unfortunately, what is finally served up is often a function of inside-out compulsions: What is our manufacturing cost? How can we improve profitability? Why should we bother to change this?

Good design can reduce costs, command a premium, offer a potential differentiator. And in these difficult times when fickle consumers transfer allegiance with promiscuous regularity, it can promise a connect that transcends the functional to an emotional level, where a user makes a choice that is not just for consumption, but as an extension of the self. Good design, in the final analysis, is good business.

(Radhika Chadha is a consultant in strategy and innovation. Karategy is the proprietary name of the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow.)

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