Faster Talk: Apple in Their Eyes

Let the Customer Drive Design

Steve Gluskoter

Codirector, Industrial Design and Usability
Product Group, Dell
Round Rock, Texas

Sometimes, something that looks cool or neat is of no value to the customer. By the time we entered the market for MP3 players in 2003 with the Dell DJ, there had been a lot of products out there, and we studied the vast majority, including the iPod. There were positives and negatives for every player, and we tracked them. But we didn't want to focus on what everyone else did.

At Dell, we don't make design decisions based on style alone. Customer input is a huge driver, which is why we talk to our customers directly through our in-house usability lab. This is where we test our concepts alongside our competitors'. Then we watch and learn. That's how we realized the importance of volume control, which has a dedicated button on the Pocket DJ. It's something people want to adjust constantly but was often buried or difficult to find on other players.

We also do our own trend watching. Honesty of materials was one trend that factored into the design. People want to know that the cold feel of metal in your hand is the real thing, so we chose to go with anodized aluminum, which gave us the strength and rigidity we needed. Also, our surface is fingerprint resistant. In the labs, we saw that people were incredibly annoyed by that with the iPod.

There's a sign in the lab that says two things: listen to the customer and you're not the customer. We bring in people across a broad demographic, from target customers to owners of our competitors' players, from teenagers to corporate executives. It's hard to do the wrong thing if you're talking to enough people and listening to what the masses are telling you.

Steve Gluskoter, 41, joined Dell in 1993 as its first industrial designer. The Pocket DJ, released last October, was named one of Oprah's Favorite Things in 2004.

Put Design First

Young Se Kim

CEO and founder, Innodesign Inc.
Palo Alto, California

In the first 15 years of my career as a designer, many clients would come in with an idea already set and then ask me to make it pretty. The trouble is, their ideas were based on research from competitors' products or trends. It's very difficult to make a completely different product that way. You'll end up with more of the same.

That's what happened with iRiver's first hard-drive player. It was based on an engineering spec, and we didn't have as much freedom with the design. So with the H10, its successor, I felt we had to start from scratch. We obviously couldn't ignore our biggest competitor, the Apple iPod, whose design is so popular. But we wanted to do something different. With the iPod's click wheel, I noticed lots of people using only one-quarter of the turn with the thumb. So I thought, if that's all they need, why not make it just go straight up and down? That idea -- that a vertical touch pad might make more sense -- came from just watching people at coffee shops.

Industrial design has become one of the few cards manufacturers can play these days. It's especially true for MP3 players, because the technology processes have become commoditized. At the end of the day, users will buy what they feel attached to, what they're happy with, what they can show off as part of their identity. Design is no longer an easy process that comes at the end. It's a matter of life and death, so it should come first.

Young Se Kim, 54, founded Innodesign in 1986. This past January, Bill Gates showed off the H10 during his keynote address at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

It's the Inside that Counts

Henri Crohas

Founder and CEO, Archos
Paris, France

I do not share the opinion that Apple's design for the iPod is any good. That's because I define great design in terms of fantastic machinery. And if you look inside the iPod's technology, it's quite common and unimpressive. It isn't anything special. What Apple has done well isn't the iPod, but iTunes. It has been the first to pull together all of these music editors and convince them that they have to open a big store online. But there's a second phase coming. Like the cell phone, the technology to integrate photos and videos is now available. Microsoft has been working on this for years. Its Windows Media Center is well advanced and does everything iTunes does, plus more.