(2006-10-02) Peterme Services Not Products

Peter Merholz says people should Stop Design-ing Products (and do Experience Design instead). Really he's talking about designing Whole System-s. At the very least, we need to think in terms of Whole Product.

ToddWilkens wrote a similar blog post a while back.

He credited Adam Richardson of Frog Design, who commented on Todd's post. (Adam's original post complained about the Motorola Q Cell Phone, to which I Commented that his scope of complaint didn't seem to really go beyond the narrowest sort of product definition - Motorola just screwed it up.)

Part of their slams against "old" design processes and tools like Persona-s are that they often treat humans as Ration Al actors, ignoring Culture, Emotion, Motivation, and other Context factors.

Peter's presentation makes the point The thing is, with decades of intense improvements in efficiency and productivity, businesses cannot compete on optimization any more. Everyone says this, but if it's true, then why does Product Quality and Service Quality suck so broadly?