A Good Product Will Work Well Without Having a Negative Impact on the Body. Here Are a Few Points to Consider for Your New Product.

By James F. Riordan

One of my pet peeves is picking up a pair of scissors which have long or large cutting surfaces or capacity, but have tiny little holes for your fingers. Invariably, as I start to use them, my fingers cramp up, hurt or blister and I have visions of choking the engineer who designed them.

If you think about it, every day you'll come across products that make you wish you could reach out and grab the designers, bring them into your life and make them use their own product to get you out of the situation you're in.

Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, wrote an especially good piece on this very subject called "On the Irritation of Everyday Things." In the article, Tom described the gyrations he had to go through to slide the seat back on his wife's car. The explanation would have been riotously funny if it were not such a sad commentary on the state of new product design in today's world.

As a new product designer. you should make every effort to be sure the product you are investing in or marketing has been designed for the customer who will use it rather than for the engineer's ease or the manufacturer's in-house tooling.

Winning products are those which seem to "flow" or fit in perfectly with the way a person moves and works. In other words, they provide the most functions with the least amount of impact on your body.

Before finalizing any investment or marketing plans, conduct a focus group of people who will use the product and watch their actions and reactions while they use it. Be sure to conduct the observations in the same environment in which the product will normally be used. Listen to the input of the prospective end-users and be humble enough to value them.

Never trust a design group when they tell you they have conducted ergonomic evaluations. Instead, do them yourself. Chances are the car maker who designed and built Tom Peter's car would have assured him that the car was designed with the driver in mind, but the truth may be that the person or persons who designed the seat probably designed it in an engineering department miles away from the designer who engineered the body of the vehicle.

The two design groups may not even speak to each other on a regular basis. They surely never watched prospective customers actually use the seat, before they made thousands of them or they would have caught the defect.

Remember that end-users want a product that acts and operates in harmony with themselves and their environment. They may have no interest at all in a product that you designed in the protected confines of your engineering department and that feels or functions like you think they should want.

Tom Peter's car seat would probably never have left the factory with that idiotic design had someone taken the time to watch both short and tall prospective customers enter and exit the vehicle.

I've helped many innovators redesign their products to match what the customers really wanted, after the product had been designed the way the engineer thought they would want it. One particularly silly example was a big "ham-handed" engineer who designed a very clever hand took for use in electronic assembly.

He designed the tool to fit his hand, had the injection mold tooling made at great expense and then realized after the fact that most of the people who would be using the tool were Asian ladies who had much smaller hands and who couldn't operate the tool at all. He had to quickly modify the product (at great expense) in order to make it useable.

The time to think about ergonomics is in the prototype development stage. The innovator should have as many prospective customers as possible (of all different shapes, sizes, mental capacities, educational levels and cultures) use the product before going to "hard" tooling for the production run.

The above article was taken from James F. Riordan's classic book, HOW TO EVALUATE THE POTENTIAL FOR SUCCESS OF A NEW PRODUCT OR TECHNOLOGY. Riordan's highly-acclaimed, 36-point system is a valuable tool for inventors, product evaluators or anyone interested in the invention process. Each section is followed by a comprehensive questionnaire that can be used to evaluate your product.

The highly-recommended book can be ordered by contacting the James F. Riordan Company, 3110 Camerosa Circle, Cameron Park, CA 95682. The company can be reached by phone at (916) 676-4729. The book may also be ordered through the Dream Merchant, 2309 Torrance Blvd., Suite 104, Torrance, CA 90501. The phone number is (310) 328-1925.