Is bold design the best design?

Recently, products of popular brands were found unusual by society. People made various jokes about Mac Pro, Tesla Truck, and PlayStation 5. I believe there is a reason behind why weird designs become popular lately (even though we accepted their appearance in the last two years).

For large organizations, it is hard to make big changes. So, they mostly stay safe and be sufficiently innovative by changing small things with the lowest risk. But today, companies have to focus on more dramatic differentiation as new products are reproduced with minor changes and products converged more and more.

Product differentiation is not a new topic. Business teams such as product management, marketing, sales, or brand always want a different product for the market. A different product can have a bigger piece from the cake as there is no or a few competitors in that part of the cake. Different features or styles of the product can target various user groups, and it can be used to place a product in a different segment. But also it is good to have a distinguishable product in the market if all the competitors are converged and they are almost identical.

However, from smartphones to computers, cars to home appliances, many technological products around us converged to their competitors. Because the competition is increased in the last decades, companies trying to survive with the price of their product in the market. So, one of the efficient ways to grow some percent each year is decreasing costs. To make products cheaper, you either manufacture in a more standard way such as less complex forms, or you buy components from bigger manufacturers who also sell this component to other brands. Of course, this is an oversimplification of the whole hardware industry but you got the point. As a result, to make products price competitive companies have no space to play to be different.

Personally, like the rest of the majority, I am not a fan of the design of the products above. However, I encourage companies and designers to come up with unusual design solutions. Because we cannot experience that product or cannot know the reaction of the market if the product does not exist. Even it is a bad design solution in terms of aesthetics, semantics, and usability, I think it is a contribution to design practice. We learn from this exploration to develop better products.

The bold design might not be the best as we see in Fiat Multiple, but it is worth trying. If we think about how markets and user behaviors change rapidly, I believe bold products have a greater chance for business success than safe copycats. This is not only my opinion, Verganti (2006) showed that design-driven innovative furniture companies have a more aggressive growth rate when they are compared to the rest of their competitors in Italy and Europe. They might not only making their product different. But we can assume that their products are not similar to competitors if we can distinguish them as design-driven innovative companies.

In contrast to the advantages of being different, changing things dramatically may affect the user experience badly. If you played a game on a console after using a PC for years, you might know that it takes time to get pro in a controller even though you have played similar games on a PC. So, users experienced with the existing controller design and changing its design and experience dramatically can hurt the customer base. Let’s look at another meme:

Sony keeps the existing controller design in PlayStation for 10 years with minor changes. While Xbox doing some major changes, Nintendo had very dramatic changes. I would not say that one approach is better than another, I can simply say I prefer one way to another. Although I mentioned that keeping the same controller design seems important to keep your successful sale rates, in terms of innovation, it is not a very productive approach. The first two consoles of Nintendo were very successful. They understand the dynamics of the market are rapidly changing and they do not afraid to make bold changes. Even though these changes do not always bring success to the company, they have also announced very innovative products with commercial success in the later attempts. I believe Nintendo Wii and Switch are examples of this success. Especially, the Nintendo Switch Labo https://labo.nintendo.com/ is my personal nominee for best interaction design in the 2010s. Even though being bold does not bring success in each case for Nintendo, they tried and reach business success in some of these tryings.

Norman and Verganti (2014) noted that radical innovation happens if companies look for the meaning change besides the technology change. They gave the example of Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo Wii as a meaning change in gaming as “games for everyone, controlled by gestures and whole body” besides the technological developments in sensors and computer vision. In that perspective, the meaning change is what I call bold design. While the paradigm shifts, it seems bold to us. Of course, not all bold design attempts will end up with meaning change. I accept these attempts as explorations, and these increase the chance of a company to become a leader in the market instead of a follower. As more people are aware of the value in trial-and-error, iteration is emphasized more and more. There are also risk and resource costs. But as they say, fortune favors the brave.

References

Norman, D. A. & Verganti, R. (2014). Incremental and radical innovation: Design research vs. technology and meaning change. Design Issues, 30(1), 78–96.

Verganti, R. (2006). Innovating through design. Harvard Business Review, 84(12). 114.