Being an orientated creative and technical company, we come across, that's to say use, see, observe and experience a real variety of 'products' that perform some sort of function, to help you to do something or simply make something easier to do. We particularly view and critique the aspects of the design, production and 'implementation' of these products from a professional and personal perspective.
Perhaps a good example or analogy would be the humble desktop calculator. It's fairly clear and understood what it’s supposed to do. You type in the numbers, perhaps from your hastily scribbled list of costs, or set of dimensions and you add, subtract or divide them as needed, to get your answer. Personally, I use one a lot as I unfortunately learnt a long time ago not to rely on my own mental arithmetic and anyway, whilst my fingers are typing in numbers my brain can be processing other things, well that's what I tell everybody anyway!
So suppose, that after typing in all that data, the calculator decided to do something else, i.e. not add up the numbers to a total that you needed!! Strange perhaps, even disturbing in fact, but certainly irritating and probably very frustrating.
Rather annoyingly, I was extremely disappointed again this weekend when doing some garden tidying, that a 'companies' leaf 'hoover/shredder/collector' wasn't really doing a very good job of any of those expected aspects of its function. In fact it was proving more of a hindrance than a help in clearing up the substantial amount of leaves that had collected and been blown into some large piles during and after the recent rather windy weather.
Without getting too much into the detail, (we are doing some reviews elsewhere on these tools), for this particular product, it proves again to me that the design and development process must carefully address the 'fitness for purpose' aspect that the product should bring.
Considerable experience over the years has led us time and time again to not just pay 'lip service' to all the terminology around the 'adding value' mantra, but to really concentrate on what the purpose of the product and/or service is, to make sure it really is "fit for the purpose" it was intended for.
