Design Like Apple offers seven principles for CEOs, managers, and designers, so they can begin creating great products and services which result in great experiences:
Design Makes All The Difference – Beauty, ingenuity, and charisma create a unique competitive advantage
Design can differentiate your product from your competitors if you use your design skills to create an emotional connection and loyalty. To make it happen you should have beauty, ingenuity, and charisma in every level of your product development as well as customer touchpoints.
- Beauty: The aesthetic qualities of any product or service can make a lasting impression. By focusing on some beauty principles you can make a remarkable product.
- Ingenuity: Technology should be human-centered and natural for people to use. Most end users for technology are normal people and if the experience of using new technology be confusing, it can make in undesirable for people.
- Charisma: Focusing on the relationship of customers through every touchpoint to have charm and glam can meet customers’ expectations.
A charismatic product makes the customer feel like the center of the universe.
Design The Organization – Nurture taste, talent, and a design culture
Building an organization with design taste, talented people, and well-defined culture can make the company reward creative thinking and experimentation. This also results in emotional engagement of beauty, ingenuity, and charisma all around the company.
- Design taste: It can be developed by education, personal interest, and approaching creative people. Your organization can have someone who could establish a design vision, and curate design outcomes.
- Design talent: the capability of either an internal or external team of designers to realize the design vision and helping with the development of products is mentioned as design talent.
- Design culture: When leaders of an organization value design and creativity, design culture blooms, and as a result, creative people with different responsibilities will be hired. Design culture emphasizes on benefits of design values.
The Product Is The Marketing – Great products sell themselves
Nowadays people buy products with great designs, as they believe the design of the product markets its quality. Old-school advertising can’t visualize the quality anymore. When a product is good, the customers generalize it to the company and brand. If the quality of the product is good, they will buy more from the same brand and company, on the condition that the quality always is the same.
By focusing the function of the product and even narrowing your market and marketing requirements, you can over the tyranny of good and create products that are great.
Design Is Systems Thinking – Product and context are one
Products alone don’t exist, they are a part of a system originally created from the product itself to the context around it, and expands to systems, jobs, and platforms that encircle the customer and creates loyalty to the brand. Designers use system design to create experiences, by considering every little detail as well as the outlook to observe interactions and the wider context at the same time. These views can make customers invest emotionally, which switches them from customers to advocates.
Design Out Loud – Prototype to perfection
Prototyping allows designers to bring concepts to life, and visualize them before they become real. Using prototypes makes it easier to communicate about what the product will be. Prototypes can show the flaws and costs as well as the appearance of the product, to show important parameters.
Another good feature of prototypes is that it lets collaborators discuss their ideas freely. Stakeholders can share their ideas about the design and are involved in the process of prototyping. Other than internal stakeholders, real customers can also give feedback if the prototype is given to them in a real marketplace. A good thing about prototypes is that you can visualize them and use different tools and methods like storytelling and theatrical methods to show to your team, how the product will look like and what people might experience in real situations, how much cost will be needed to manufacture the product, etc.
Design Is For People – Connect with your customer
Design research is about focusing on qualitative factors and data about the behaviors and motivations of people. For this matter, the research team should have empathy, and listen to customers and observe their life while interacting with products intently. We should keep in mind that no product can be useful for all people, so defining a persona to know who should we design the product for is really important. Gathering qualitative data and filtering them to build a new product can add extra value for the customers and the company.
Design starts with knowing your customers and creating a corporate culture that is keen to listen to those customers.
Design with Conviction – Commit to a unique voice
As a company, you should find your own special signature and voice that can add unique value to your brand and show the design values at all touchpoints of customer interaction.
Apple believes in simplicity, which is applied from the look of its products to their functions, but maybe another company rather do something else. Whatever your voice wants to be, it should not only be on the surface, but also deep in the culture, because your product will always be linked to your values, and all teams should understand and use the voice in all products.
Design is not window dressing or an add-on feature. Design is there from the beginning to define and guide the product or service from development to completion.
The principles written here are the essentialities for designing not only a product but also a new service that big companies follow, but we should keep in mind that these are not the only things to take into consideration, and not always following rules and principles can lead to satisfaction of all stakeholders.
You can find out more about how we do Service Design and develop Clojure-based Products in Flexiana and compare our principles with Apple.
Bibliography: Design Like Apple: Seven Principles For Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences