Unexplored Complexity

Have you or your company developed a product that just did not resonate with consumers or worse, didn’t take off once it went to market? You are not alone. Even when your team collects lots of ‘ethnographic’ research, conducts a huge market survey, or does an in-depth evaluation of competitive products and the product concepts you develop, something just didn’t click with the market. After all of that work, why does this happen? There are a number of possibilities (costs too much, no awareness, and so on) but the more I see it happening there’s something that groups are tending to overlook on a regular basis and that’s complexity.

Our world is becoming more complex with the layering on of technology, mobility, conservation and privacy, plus the multiple channels available for getting products. A toaster oven lives in a much less complex world than a medical device. Sure, you can spin it anyway you want to define something as complex, but in the end, the approach to collecting useful information for designing something like a surgical device is 99% of the time much more involved than research for designing a new toaster oven. The issue is that some companies are still trying to approach these research activities in the same way they did when they were developing products for less complex situations. Because design research is being used in more and more product categories (and rightly so), it is important to remember that these new categories often have a much higher degree of associated complexity.

Consider the surgical device example and what you would need to understand to inform the design process. The number of stakeholder goals and processes alone increases the complexity substantially (med tech, surgeon, scrub nurse, circulating nurse, central supply, bio-processing, disposal, purchasing, sales, safety, reimbursement) not to mention the regulatory, financial, and technical factors that come into play. Design research has to expand to include more than just the end user and a view of the environments of use in these complex environments. It’s not easy for everyone. You can’t just “do more” ethnography or survey more people. Design research needs to expand and adapt to complexity. And if it doesn't, that is when the risk for failure increases.

This is my first blog entry, and I am excited to explore this topic in more depth over the next couple of weeks and look forward to any thoughts you might have on this topic.