The recent events of Elon Musk 's plan for colonizing Mars by 2024, releases of Goggle and Apple's conversational AI assistant and the uprising IOT mark another advancement in the betterment of humankind.
We’ve entered a fascinating era. Everything is possible and dreams can come true. It is foreseeable that technology advancement extends further to the different life stage of humankind. That's why we are developing Babylook and planning to launch a Kickstarter campaign.
For those who have ideas to build something cool, but afraid too much, my thought is to build your prototype first.
It is always true that formulating a new business is not easy. There are tons of decisions you need to make, like finding the right business partners, marketing targeted segmentation of customers (You can use online tool Business Model Canvas) until a sound model is formed. You would also have tons of worries about your plans. No matter how difficult the issues mentioned above are, it is undeniable that the design is the most determinant factor for the public to get awareness and the first impression of your brand.
The importance of product design is undeniable, paraphrased from The Record:
Industrial designers develop aspects of a product that create emotional connections with the user. They integrate all aspects of form, fit, and function, optimizing them to create the best possible user experience. They also create visually appealing designs that can stand the test of time and ensure that the product is ergonomically suited to fit the user, including how they will functionally relate, interface or live with the product.
How successfully they can do this often determines if the product would be in the market. Firms that leave industrial design to the end of the development lifecycle, or just outsource it completely will struggle to achieve success in the consumer-driven markets.
Here are my top three reasons that you should build your prototype first:
1. The design shapes your business model
The product design is the soul of its brand identity, just like iPhone and Mac series as to Apple.
The brand logo, the slogan is also important factors, but nothing manifest the philosophy more than the product itself. What's more, product-first design solidifies your business plan, push forward the development of other processes.
We can see an example of how Palmer Luckey created Oculus Rift:
The young visionary dreamed up a homemade headset that may transform everything from gaming to medical treatment to engineerin and beyond. He posted regular updates on his work on MTBS3D, a forum website frequented by virtual reality enthusiasts. His 6th-generation unit was named the "Rift," and was intended to be sold as a do-it-yourself kit on the Kickstarter crowdfunding website to fellow fans.
With foreseeable hardware capability to build up the specification
marketers will need to learn to rely less on judgment and intuition in the era of big data.
Product-first development is the best way to understand the technical restraint of your business model so that you can maximize your positioning and differentiation of the product.
You can save the time from unrealistic dreams.
Making a hardware components specification requirement save you from being overconfident to satisfying too many needs and wants you heard from potential customers. What's left behind of a shiny business model may just be silly imagination.
2. Play with rules about Kickstarter's hardware terms
Only working functions of a hardware and product can be shown on a Kickstarter Campaign. Three new policies for product design and hardware projects were set in place by Kickstarter as described in their blog posts in 2012, followed by waves of confusion and dissentient.
Here are the three new hardware policy:
1. Product simulations are prohibited. Projects cannot simulate events to demonstrate what a product might do in the future. Products can only be shown performing actions that they’re able to perform in their current state of development.
2. Product renderings are prohibited. Product images must be photos of the prototype as it currently exists.
3. Offering multiple quantities of a reward is prohibited.
We cannot launch a project when it is just at an inspiration stage.
It helps fund a designer's idea and a writer's research, but not a hardware's development. That's why we should plan ahead.
3 . Hardware is unmalleable
Agile might have become the World's Most Popular Innovation Engine for software, but not in hardware. For software products, the flow of deliverables is such that new and usable features appear steadily over time, and these features are aggregated into a newly-released product. On the other hand, for hardware products, the flow of deliverables does not produce a steady flow of usable features over time, and the product features become usable late in the development cycle.
A business idea could change every time after you have more research and gain more insights;
Software is more malleable (easier to change) than hardware. The cost of change is much higher for hardware than for software. Software products evolve through multiple releases by processes of accretion and refactoring (adding new features and re-writing existing logic to support the new features). Hardware products consist mostly of physical components that cannot be “refactored” after manufacturing, and which cannot “accrete” new capabilities that require hardware changes.
Therefore, specification requirements of the device must be decided first. Adding or changing even one small function can lead to a huge change in the design.
Once you had made a perfect design that you thought it was, a sudden addition of minor features could make you reconsider the whole structure again. Finding that you won't have enough space to accommodate this little component.
As we know about hardware, most products don't change their design over a generation (iPhone as an example). Every update brings a little improvement, leaving room for refinement. I consider it as a kind of "modern creativity".
*Note: This article is not asking you to do nothing than digging your head in drawing drafts and graphs; The whole business modeling is also a process of design. You have to make your mind clear and decisive for every step you are going to make. A consciousness of your constraints makes your ideas practical. To me, every design, and also services serve a propose and are for the betterment of the end users.
Leave a Reply