DESIGN THINKING

Management is all about predicting uncertain events with certainty, and your skill set and working experience play a significant role in increasing that confidence levels in your predictions. Now you can relate it your industry or profession that as a management student or a trainee are you in predicting future strategies such as product designs, features, marketing, technology, demand supply, competitors move, price, cost, sales, revenue, profit. In a larger or a smaller way, if yes than you are on the right track, In the case of no than on a lighter note, it is a high time for you to look for another job or industry else your MBA will soon go in vain.

 As a product management neophyte, I always used to ponder sometimes that "Should design lead the technology or design should get a lead by the technology" and this quest dares me in the same way when someone asks "Hen came first or egg." Although I am very well aware of the fact that both are inextricably linked and difficult to visualize in isolation. Let me put my two cents on how I see design and technology. I see design as an "Enabler" and Technology" as a "Doer." "Enabler" means the one who helps in the execution of a task and makes it possible & easy for you. "Doer" means the one who performs the job for you. So for better products, you can focus on either of design or technology more, but for great products, both technology and design have to complement each other equally. For more understanding let me put in simple words "Design helps humans in communicating with the technology." Now the question comes how?

As per Don Norman Author of "The design of everyday things," most essential characteristics of great design are "Discoverability" & "Understanding." 

Discoverability says that key controls of the product should be visible and easily accessible and the best case would be the actions that user has to perform from the key controls must be easily understood by the design of controls itself. Let's say while riding car or automobile when you put your foot on accelerator or brake; you can easily sense that it will only work by pushing not by pulling. Also while watching television having a remote control in your hand, you can understand that buttons need to press. Apart from that the size of the buttons also have its design story, for example, controls like power on-off can be designed bit bigger in size for increasing the discoverability. No one gives training to users that how remote control of television works, the design enables the user to perform actions, and it becomes so easy for the brain to process information and performs the task. However, for the cases where the job is perplexed, training requires for users to understand the controls of the system. For example in cockpit only trained pilot has the knowledge which control will perform which task, though better design can help the pilot in remembering those sophisticated control and its functions. So as a product manager or designer you have to put your brain at work in understanding the human psyche and making the designs of your products as obvious as you can.

           Now I will dig a bit deep in and try to give you a glimpse of the relation between visibility and accessibility which I talked about while explaining discoverability. As per Human psychology whenever we humans take a look at a thing or an object, our eye movement starts from the center and because of this human psychology, you must have seen that all critical controls of the machine or software placed in the center. For example, in all the doors whether it is regular doors at home or refrigerator doors all the hasp or "PUSH" and "PULL" notification appears in the middle. If I talk from the software's perspective also whenever you turns on your Windows operating system your login password appears at the center or while logging in to a website their user id, and password pattern also follows the same centricity principle. In case you are a shopping junkie, you must have noticed that during sales in e-commerce sites, they flaunt their big banners in the center of the screen for maximum eyeballs. In websites, it might appear at the top, but if you check by taking laptop screen as a reference, you will feel that these sales banners are in the middle of the laptop screens. Also, the charges of the advertisement property which are at the center are high in comparison to other locations. Centricity principal in design also says that all those things which are appearing near or at the center are critical controls of the system or product and will be used or seen most of the times for sure. 

There are some other psychological concepts also which makes the discoverability of controls of a product better like affordance, signifiers, mapping, and feedbacks. Let me shed some light on it one by one.

In design affordance referred as an attribute of an object (Means what all functions an object can perform) and there is also anti affordance (Means what all functions an object cannot perform). So as a design engineer or designer you must have to think for out of box ideas to communicate both affordance and anti-affordance to the users clearly. So that attributes can be perceived by the users correctly.

Now again designers are not some sorcerers who have some magic wands and things will automatically get communicated to the user about affordable and anti-affordable elements of a product they must require some tool. Those tools called as Signifiers (Which signifies and it is a sign). Signifiers are the clues for the users which help them to access or understand the affordability of the product. For example, in Microsoft Word or any other document reader there is an option for zoom in and zoom out. Zoom in and out is the affordance of the document reader, and its signifier (Which says moving right will zoom out and moving left means to zoom in) says that where to press for accessing this affordance. So the signifiers have to be perceivable. The third concept is Mapping; its function is to make the relationship between control and its output for example, in systems for increasing the volume you have to drag the button up. Just imagine if it had been the other way round means the user is dragging down the button for increasing the volume and dragging up for decreasing it. How difficult it would have been for the user for remembering this pattern that's why mapping comes into the picture and plays an important role while defining controls of the product. Now last important psychological concept is "Feedback" which contributes in discoverability; Human brain always looks for the acknowledgment after completion of the task. For example, after sending a message from phone or WhatsApp, a confirmation signifier says that message received by the recipients successfully gives an immense gratification to the user. These Feedbacks system must provide to its users as quickly as possible, and also as a designer; we have to prioritize these feedbacks. You must be pondering why? Because user mind space is limited and in now technology era where every gadget comes with multiple functionalities and at the same time feedback of each and every functionality is equally important. So just imagine with many such feedbacks how the user will decide which feedback is valuable and which are not. It will clutter the user mind space. Like in mobile phones, the most crucial feature is calling feature just imagine in case ringtone of the message and calling function gets swapped and when a call is coming only beep sound comes as notification, and in the event of an incoming message, the continuous tone is ringing. How will the user feel? He will confuse because they are not meant to be like that, the message is less crucial function than call and call need more attention by the user than the message, that is why these design engineers made the ringing tones like that. 

                                Foreseeing the future, how technology is moving with leaps and bounds and everyone is working towards the miniaturization be it a phone, chipsets, speaker, memory, processor think of any electronic equipment, you can see its miniaturized version with a more advanced and extra feature in the coming years. Designers too are feeling the heat nowadays how to cram so many features in the product keeping usability and aesthetics of the product in mind. It would be interesting to see when future technological era like IOT (Internet of things), AR(Augmented reality), VR (Visual Reality) will fledge their wings in the air.