7. Your Products and Services Are Talking to People
How to make sure that they’re saying the right thing—What is a design language?—Why is it important?—Thinking strategically.
You decide the primary family auto has been a good and faithful servant but it will soon be hitting its high-maintenance years, so you drive out to your city’s motor mile, and wrestle your car’s way through Saturday afternoon shopping traffic to where a string of various dealerships line the road. You start down the access road and glance into the lots, unaware that each suite of products is having a conversation with you, each brand making a design promise. What you are experiencing is design communication, a.k.a. as design language, and the most successful suites of product lines all have the touch of a designer behind them, one who consciously has orchestrated what you hear, see, and feel into a specific emotional response.
© Lenovo
This idea is an important part of your design strategy and should be considered and developed carefully. The "snick" of a door closing with firm confidence, the sweep of the instruments on the dash, the position and shape of the gear shift, and every aspect of the exterior design—the latter being the first impression you get of a line of autos and how you can tell them most distinctly apart even if you saw them on the highway without their insignias.
You pause beside the Volvo dealership, and the vehicles are saying to you: safe, sturdy, well-built, and dependable. But really, some kind of look like they were evolved from metal shoeboxes struggling to be aerodynamically efficient. That might be fine for a soccer Mom and her kids getting to the school for an event, but you identify with sportier things, so you move on. Can’t you have safety, dependability, quality workmanship like that, and yet have a car that handles well on a winding road and looks good when you’re pulling up to the valet parking line of a quality restaurant?
The next dealership is BMW, and these cars are really talking to you. The model line looks as though they all share the same DNA. Your heart picks up a beat, and you turn in. You get out of your soon-to-be-retired auto and walk around a "Bimmer." It is different from each angle, but exciting with its long body and the sleek profile that combines for a sporty yet aggressive look. The distinctive kidney grill on the front you would know anywhere hints at a big engine that needs air. From the side, the car looks fast, thanks to the convex and concave synergy that the form creates. You don’t know any of this, just have the sensations and emotions you experience. The roof line sweeps back in a gradual taper that stretches your sense of proportion of the whole car. From the back, you see the form from function contour aerodynamic design meant to optimize the flow of air. Both front and back seem low slung, even athletic, and the front overhang is short with large wheel arches as the car tapers back slightly wider powerful rear flanks. It looks like a dark cat poised to chew up the road.
You open the door and settle into the cockpit. At least it feels like that; the separation of seats by a center console and gear shifter along with the layout of the surrounding dash translate into an experience that promises to "fly" you down the road. Instead of one large flat dash and simple separations, the interior is marked by constant change, contrasting colors and textures, yet a unity of overriding design that is palpable in a sense of layering, with the center console sweeping to the rear seat and all of the beauty saying at the same time everything is where it is for a function, for a heightened experience no matter where you are in the car.
You climb out, shake off minor goose bumps, and decide that to be fair you need to see a few more of the car lots. You climb back into your auto, which is starting to look and feel a lot older and clumsier than it did when you set out, and you head for the next dealership, which happens to be the Hyundai lot. What’s going on here? A lot of the cars look familiar, and this design language concept with which you are only beginning to feel familiar is, telling you a whole lot of mixed messages. It’s like the Tower of Babel. That model looks kind of like it’s pretending to be a BMW, and the one over there is almost an Acura. Another looks a bit like a Mercury, another Toyota-ish, another with shades of Lexus, and so on. You get the same sensation at the Kia lot, and you even decide further along Auto Row, that Toyota got some of its sizzle from the designs of the German cars.
So you start thinking about which companies have product lines with design integrity, authority, and self-confidence showing through every aspect of their design, and now you are beginning to understand about design communication and why it matters.
It’s about a story—you see, the thing that is hard for most business people to grasp, is that the design language is there to tell a story. It takes a customer’s need or desire and spins its story all the way to an expected fulfillment. Any writing class will tell you too that it is always better to "show" instead of just "tell." That’s the exact function of design language. It shows. For that shopper at the BMW lot, the scenario playing through the mind might involve a drive up a winding Pennsylvania road in late spring, cornering the switchbacks with tight accuracy while the sound system fills the slick cockpit interior, finally pulling up to a country inn for brunch and being recognized as one of the "Bimmer" elite by fellow patrons.
Yet to another customer, who pulled into the Volvo dealership, the scenario playing is about driving in confident safety through an increasingly maddened morning rush to get the kids off to school, drop off Fluffy (the family cocker spaniel) at the vet for a grooming and checkup, and then head for the grocery store where the car’s extra trunk space (even better with a station wagon) makes loading and unloading a breeze. Different dreams, different answers, different design language, because design language also "defines" a product to its customer base.
It’s about strategy—you can see this with any product or service. Take a house. A home buyer looks at each listing and makes each visit with a dream or expectation. Finally, the buyer sees one and says, "Oh, yeah. This is it. I can see us living here. I can see us entertaining, the kids having room to play, and it’s got wonderful closet and storage space and the kitchen will be a dream to work in and there’s workshop space." Its modern style fits your self image, and all the materials and details they use make you feel comfortable. You’d be proud to live in this house. The design language for the house is speaking. The house connected with you. You are the customer the designer intended to reach, and he was successful. For electronic products, and most products for that matter, where scale has to step in and thousands of people need to buy the product, the design communication has to be even more consistent about sharing its story, which is why it is so vital that the CEO and everyone else "get" how design language functions, and communicate clearly about it as they establish strategy for a product.
Take Dell’s release of a new rugged model laptop in 2008, the Dell Latitude XFR D630. While the advertising does the telling, picking one up and looking at it lets the design language speak. It says, "Hey, my kids could haul this around in the backpacks to school where it could take a bump or bounce during the course of everyday use." Or, a business person could say, "The thing is not a beauty, but look at those rounded corners, built-in handle, its thick, heavier feel. This is a road warrior. Even though it’s a bit more, we can save IT time if every sales rep is carrying one of these." The target audience is getting the story of the design language. One techno reviewer, though, clearly missed or misspoke the story and tried to compare and contrast the rugged Dell with Apple’s MacBook Air.[29] The bloggers ate the reviewer alive, and when they did they made it clear they understood the design language of each disparate product. You take the Dell machine, designed to meet Pentagon durability standards and fit in a PC-business environment, and compare it one of the thinnest, sleekest Apple personal-use products, and you have a language mismatch.
You can be certain that neither Dell nor Apple misunderstood what the design communication of the two quite different products were supposed to accomplish, or what story they had been designed to share. This is why it is so important that an implicit understanding of how a design communication is part of the strategy of a suite of products must be understood by and employed by everyone in managing the customer experience supply chain. Once again; all products communicate with customers. But you don’t have to look hard to see many that do so poorly, or spin the wrong story, or make promises that can’t be kept. You need to be "spot on" with your design language story. The "how-to" part of making that happen is going to depend on you.
There are many things you need to do, from hiring good designers, changing how your development process works, making sure everyone contributing to the customer experience understands their role and contribution, changing how you manufacture to support good design, and so on, and so on. But one of the most important things you need to do is learn how to create and implement design strategy. This will be the cornerstone of everything. First, let’s take a closer look at design language to understand how it leads to strategy.
And a critical piece of this is how the design of your customer experience communicates to people. In the "trades," we refer to this idea as a design language.
What Is Design Language?
As a place to build from, let’s start by taking a look at Webster’s definition for language:
lan·guage
Pronunciation: ’la[ng]-gwij, -wij
1 a: the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community b (1): audible, articulate, meaningful sound as produced by the action of the vocal organs (2): a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings (3): the suggestion by objects, actions, or conditions of associated ideas or feelings.
In reality, we use the idea of language as a metaphor, which is not much of a stretch if we contemplate (2) and (3) above. Every time you see a suite of products where the function and form have merged to say a distinctive and positive thing to you that evokes an emotional response in you, you are experiencing design language. It is the consciously orchestrated work of a designer, whether it is Michael Graves designing one of his colorful, yet whimsical, tea kettles with its distinctive egg motif, as sold at Target, or Sam Farber designing the puffy black handles of the affordable Good Grip kitchen utensils sold almost everywhere that make the kitchen a joy instead of a pain for those who suffer from arthritis.
From the designer’s point of view, if you make anything, you are saying things to people. If you make more than one thing, you are saying even more things. A Dutch designer named Adrian Van Hooydonk, for instance, is credited with a large part of the design language we have been talking about speaking to you when you were looking at the BMW and feeling a strong emotion without necessarily knowing why. In 2001, he was, though still in his 30s, design director in BMW’s California car studio and design consultancy, Designworks, and he came up with the 7 series. Although the new 7 series was not universally loved at first site by the global Bimmer community, largely in reaction to the high rise truck lid, these design cues have since turned up all over the car-making world, including at Mercedes, Lexus, and Toyota. By 2004, Adrian took over design responsibility for all BMW designs under group design chief Chris Bangle, and his first task was to look to the design language, because, as he explained, "We changed our design language only because we needed to expand. Soon we’ll have 10 car lines.
We had a successful design language, but it couldn’t have stretched to 10 lines. We wanted to start the change while we were still successful. That’s very BMW. If you wait until you’re failing, the change will be scarier, more radical. Our goal wasn’t to be radical."[30]
Following the idea that you can’t please everyone and that it’s best not to try, Adrian and his crew aimed to target the people attracted to owning "a driver’s car," yet beauty needed to have the right mix with performance and function because while buying a car is an emotional experience, it also has to have a rational side. "Our goal is to communicate—through proportions, surfaces, stance—the performance, agility, and power."[31] That also involves integrity so that a car shouldn’t look like it can corner well if it can’t. Every factor has to be honest, bold, and come together for that tingle that goes up your spine.
Your products communicate with your consumers through design language. It is a compilation of forms, surfaces, materials, textures, graphics and colors, details and behavior, that all signal values. It is also how your product functions, what it does, and how it does it. It is its tone and tenor, and how it operates and sounds. Think of that iPod, iPhone, or sleek MacBook Air you just bought. What does it say when you see it, hold it, turn it on, and use it. Its design language is talking to you, and if you are Apple, believe me, this language is well thought out. Developing a design language program takes time and money. Doing so has obvious benefits.
Keep in mind that whereas almost every suite of products or services embodies a design language, they don’t all work well. In many cases, that reflects tension between management and design. The customers don’t know anything about what goes on behind the scenes, nor should they. However, they do sense what is being communicated to them, and if that message is totally garbled, they won’t even consider the product or service. When you grasp the significance of design language, you’ll begin to see many companies that get it wrong. But to reinforce our point, let’s take a look at a company that gets it right, from one end to the other, with its customer experience supply chain management style.
When you walk into an IKEA store, you know you’re not in your everyday furniture and fixture store. As we said with BMW, the function of design language is to define the audience, knowing that it’s not for everyone. The BMW message is focused. It is all about performance, prestige, authenticity, and great German design and craftsmanship. But as with any great brand, the message is focused and a broader customer base is attracted by this focus because it is aspirational. People want to buy into it and be that focused individual that BMW is "targeting" with its design.
At IKEA, your experience is varied, and the mix is in large part the design language of every aspect of the company pointing you to where the real focus of the store is pointed—quality furniture at affordable prices. The parking lot wasn’t much different from most, and so far the clerks are far from Nordstrom interactive. In fact, you weave through a pretty populated store and are left more to your own devices than not. But what does catch your eye are the clean lines and solid clear quality of the products. You also notice how they are fitting their products into your life. How they are helping you make good choices. And how this modern lifestyle makes you feel cool, hip, and smart. And the prices are good. Real good. But you get the feeling everything is going to come in a box and you’re going to have to assemble it. The displays are great, whole rooms as they would function, and let you see how each object could function in your home, there’s a product trial period, and there’s also a canteen where you can take a break.
You decide on an entertainment center and there’s a hiccup or two before you have the box on a cart. When you check out, there’s a line, and you end up with a box in the car when what you would really like is someone to deliver the darn thing and assemble it. But you did get one heck of a good price on something that’s going to last and will make your house look great.
You get home and prepare for one of those "some assembly required" experiences that can make the night before Christmas a nightmare, but you become pleasantly surprised. Instead of one of those fine-print jumbles in a dozen languages other than yours, you get clear step-by-step illustrations with a Ziggy-sort of cartoon style that every person putting together the object together at home can understand because it speaks in emotions. You see the cartoon character was unhappy when the corner of a cabinet broke, so you put a rug under your assembly area. You relate to the character’s joys and frustrations, and before you know it, you have your new unit together and it looks great. When its products are displayed and shipped around the world (in nearly forty editions to almost thirty countries in more than a dozen languages), what better way to avoid awkward repetitions and achieve clear, simple assembly than by using the language of emotion. This is all part of the design language that targets and connects with the general masses of upwardly mobile nest builders everywhere who seek good design, modern lifestyle, and quality at a fair price. They are communicating this to you through the store, the banners, the layout, and of course, the products. Everything. It is all about how design communicates to you, and that you get the message loud and clear.
Speaking in Tongues
Realizing that design language to a large degree engages emotionally with the intended customer (or prospective customer) base rather than primarily through logic, you can see why most managers have trouble embracing the importance of this idea. It’s a concept for them that’s hard to wrap their heads around. Part of the resistance might come from fear of giving up control in a design driven environment. But if this is all approached in the way we’ve been suggesting—as customer experience supply chain management—the upper managers of any company will have just as much participation in how things are done, and they’ll also be part of the unfolding success story.
While the head of design does not need to be the tail that wags the dog, in a design-driven company, design does permeate everything. At Apple, even the company announcements that go up on the wall move through the design department to ensure the company maintains a unified language that shows in every product and service. Unfortunately, when most companies decide to define and create their design language, they do it for many well-intentioned reasons that ultimately take them off target.
In our experience, clients who ask for a design language of their own cite the need for differentiation and consistency, and want to save money by leverage of time, resources, and materials. All good reasons.
Interestingly enough, very few cite communication to customers or brand definition or relationship with end users as reasons to invest in language projects. What is wrong with this way of thinking is:
- Consistency is not always the right answer. Many of your products do need to differ from one another. But this should be on purpose, not by accident.
- Thinking only about competitors takes the spotlight off you. You need to carve out your competitive position, but core language values should be more permanent. More about you. Markets and trends change quickly. You should adapt to this, but hang on to your core values.
- Leverage is a good thing operationally, but can create compromise. It does not matter if you saved time or money this way, if nobody wants the stuff you are selling. Be careful with leverage. It always sounds good on paper. In the end, it should be about great ideas and great products and services. Saving a few bucks or a little time inappropriately could kill this.
The most often overlooked reason to think about design language is that your products are speaking to people—telling them things about what it does, how it does it, and what your company is about. It is connecting with them and also telling them things about themselves. Not with everybody, but with certain people. It makes sense to think about who and how, doing all you can to connect with them in a powerful way.
The role of design here needs to go far beyond simply devising forms or details, or the selection of three-dimensional motifs to differentiate a company’s desired market position. Rather, design should create products and services that dramatize the company’s core values in the form of concrete customer experiences and emotional responses.
One more time—this is not exactly an easy thing to do.
Getting to Your Own Design Language and Strategy
Creating language is a process, not an event. Business is a process, not an entity. Successful businesses constantly adapt to change. They behave more like organisms than organizations. Creating a good design strategy needs to recognize this. Old school thinking is about creating rules and boundaries, thus creating design systems that prized uniformity and consistency to a fault. Problem is, in today’s world, they are out of date before the ink dries, and the reality is that one size does not fit all. What we need are new design language systems that sacrifice those rigid qualities in favor of being alive and dynamic.
This is something you need to build into all of what you do. It’s not just a one-time thing. It’s a "real time," always present aspect of how you manage what your products or services are saying. Design language as it is alive and used today is attuned to our more conversational markets and to those willing and eager to articulate their needs, wants, and dreams as well as voice dissatisfaction when those are not met. It tells a story that unfolds over time. It creates relationships through discovery and satisfaction.
Design is not a statement, but an ongoing dialog. You need to understand the story your customers want to hear, and that has to be written in a cohesive and flowing way, not assembled from something like rough blocks you jam together. Think again of the word orchestrate. All this has to come together as part of one strategic plan that is based on customer emotion.
How you go about creating and developing a design language specific to your product lines or service lines depends on what you want to say to your target consumers. The message should be consistent, recognizable, and rest on an emotional foundation.
Begin with building on who you are. However well you think you know what you are up to, you need to experience a refreshed self-awareness, a "know thyself," as Socrates would say. You need to explore and build a deeper understanding of your brand and product experience. To figure out your brand, let’s go back to the Marty Neumeier questions we posed in Chapter 3, "How To Matter":
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Why does it matter?
We asserted earlier that most companies have no difficulty with the first, some trouble with the second, and have no clue about the third. For instance, are you in the automobile business, or are you in the business of making reliable, affordable transportation ideal to a selected consumer base? If you went away, would customer’s shrug and slip effortlessly to a competitor, or would they clamor as loudly as the thousands upon thousands who had a huge collective "hissy fit" when Coke went to New Coke. Or worse, could your business go the way of the Dodo and Polaroid and Sharper Image. Getting this clear and candid picture is why it might be best to hire professionals to help you. Like people, companies are prone to flatter themselves and not be as brutally honest with themselves as they should be. Outsiders are best in this case because they can be objective and really see you for who you are, not who you think you are.
Characterize what makes your company vital. Understand if and why you matter. Define your attributes. You should build a manageable set of words that describe who you are and what you offer. Then look at the basic qualities you communicate and the ideas that make up your products, and the values that people should perceive. Use what you discover about yourself as a dialog with people, both inside and outside, to reach agreement on what your products are really about. What you learn should become part of your goals and a means of measurement. Long ago, L.L. Bean and Abercrombie & Fitch had to wake up and say, "Hey, we’re not really sporting goods companies anymore. Most of our sales are coming from clothing, shoes, and accessories to puppy yuppies. We need to retool for that." And they did.
Own the idea of who you are. Dedicate resources to building it. This might mean bringing in a design consultant, hiring design staff, or converting your whole company, the way Samsung did. Have a constant dialogue within your organization to continually refine and hone your approach. Hear and listen to what your constituents think, but don’t simply react to what they say. Don’t spend too much time looking at the competition. Like your brand, your identity is a living organism in the guts of your customers, like those Harley Davidson faithfuls.
You need to not only just listen to what your customers say but interpret what they are expressing, and from that make inferences about what they think. Instead of focus groups and traditional research, you need to watch what people do, observe what they use, as well as how they see, feel, hear, touch, and interact with every aspect of a product. You need to experience epiphanies about what they know and really understand how they feel, even if they don’t express or communicate that as clearly as you would like, and from that you need to appreciate their dreams—what they really want or need. When you grasp that, you might find you need to change the way you do things.
You can only do that if you can get to a company-wide commitment, with strong leadership up and down the ranks, and especially an absolute buy-in at the top, because a partial change, or minor adjustment, or a tweak here and there is the kind of band-aid on a balloon that marked the demise of companies that thought they mattered, but found they didn’t. You need to incorporate a design strategy that acts as an overriding tool that you use across the management experience supply chain to help guide these customer experience-driven developments of all you extend to your targeted consumer base.
Build it in. You need to ensure that the revised sense of customer experience you gain is built into the language of who you are, what you do, and why that matters. You must work to create product design that supports the brand attributes and works to further the proposition. Look at your line and prioritize the attributes for each offering. You should land on a unified approach that extends through different elements, both physical and operational. This means focusing on product behaviors as much as visuals. Look not only at how things look, but how things sound, how they operate, how things work. You should define your ideal brand experience. What do you want people to feel when they come in contact with your company? Build the kind of scenarios they should experience, write stories your design language should be sharing. This should lead to the building of the perfect emotional framework for your company and brand that allows you to use words and ideals that can be defined tangibly to create an ideal vision.
From that you build a prototype experience in the purest form of what you want your customer to see. These will be real things—models, boxes, displays, stores, and so on, but also shares your ideals, your philosophy, and your boundary conditions for your experience. Then you test it. Not for popularity, but to see what people really think. How does it make them feel? What do they get from it? What turns them on, or, more importantly, off. Refine all that, then go out and build it into your process.
All of what you do should support and be consistent to the brand. Customer experience should be part of the brand that identifies and defines your products. Think too of aiming toward achieving icons and avatars (as used in a derivative design sense for a product—spin-off products that clearly fit with the suite or line).
Creating an iconic product can provide a halo effect over your entire product line that will lift the equity of all your products. It can serve to redefine who you are and set your language in an entirely new direction. The trick is figuring out how to leverage the icon in a meaningful way (see the Razr story in Chapter 1, "Design Matters"). A single product that is an exceptional portal to a spectrum of experiences that matter to customers can make or remake an entire company, as is the case with the iPod. It is important to take these opportunities to present your language in its purest, most iconic form.
You need to observe trends, but ignore them when it comes to your brand. There is danger in surfing trends. When it’s over, you are screwed. It’s best to be yourself and look at trends as context. You need to keep your products flexible and scalable. It is bad business when a language hurts a single product for the "good of the whole." A good design language is not about a singular design scaled to fit whatever product you want to ship. This can truly damage a product where your existing language simply won’t scale. Rather, a good language is an ethos and an idea, with a well-defined vocabulary to make things fit together. You construct your design statements using this vocabulary. You don’t jam a successful idea from the past and force-fit it into your future. Rather, like BMW, you evolve your design language to inform expanding lines.
A design language is by no means "marching orders," but should bend enough to allow every product to be its best. You need to manage all this continually. This is not a science. It needs discussion, ongoing development, constant care, and awareness, which is why it might be best to seek professional design help. Again, language is a process not an event. This will build over time. Stay focused on this. Continue to have dialogs and build a shared understanding. This is how your language will develop.
In the next chapter, it’s "all together now" as we bring all the elements together so you can consider what it will take for you to make the "leap of faith" into becoming a more design-driven company.