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to feel as if they're serving the product, their frustration can easily build into anger, and
even rage. In the world of salesmanship, frustration and anger are enemies. Rage is often
fatal. Ease is the Holy Grail.
Most consumers don't know a RAM stick from a GUI, but they do know how to make
themselves heard. They do it with complaints, feedback, focus groups, and, most of all with
money. As consumers, we are willing to pay for ease, reliability and an accurate fulfillment
of our expectations. We don't like to pay for problems. If we find a brand that's easy to use,
we stick with it. Apple's decade-long resurgence has been based on that exact idea.
With the advent of email and the Internet, new users flooded the PC market. They loved
the new digital possibilities, but they demanded ease. Apple recognized these new digit-
al consumers and was in a good position to give them what they wanted. The company
was already grounded in the notions of utilitarian simplicity; all they had to do was bring
products designed by this principle to hundreds of millions of human beings who wanted
an easy portal into the online world.
Tim Brown describes the core dynamic of this in his topic,
Change by Design: How Design
Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
: “An organization that com-
mits itself to the human-centered tenets of design is practicing enlightened self-interest. If
it does a better job of understanding its customers, it will do a better job of satisfying their
needs.”
As consumers, we are making new and different sorts of demands, we relate differently to
brands and we expect to participate in determining what will be offered to us…
Today's digital designer lives in an increasingly user-centered world. A designer must
look past the workplace and beyond personal inclination. He or she must envision their
product in the hands of a user who knows nothing about its inner workings, and everything
about what he or she wants it to do. Today's successful designer knows users intimately
enough to see the world through their eyes. This isn't just a matter of studying ethnography
or demographics. The best designers learn what's in the heart and soul of a user. They learn
how these factors should affect their decisions about where to put the “play” button, or how
big a toolbar should be. They know how to empathize.
Empathy is seldom easy, but it's simpler and more straightforward when you're em-
pathizing with people you know. Understanding and identifying with the emotions of
friends and family is a more direct process than making the same kinds of connections with
total strangers. Anyone who wants to successfully appeal to a wide audience must learn to
empathize in a more general sense. For a designer, this means thinking about aspects of the
