The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

A fourth example of how to use the Design Yardstick introduced on August 19.

Two days ago, we used our design yardstick to analyse a product leaflet from a customer point of view, then from the manufacturer point of view. Naturally, the reading is different for each point of view.

The yardstick also yields different results depending on which stage you’re at experiencing a product. As an example, you will gauge a PC differently when you are installing and setting it up for the first time, than when you use it on a daily basis.

At installation time, a ‘good’ Microsoft Windows-based PC looks like this from a customer point of view:


click to see the pic

Then, after a few days, the same customer sees it like that:


click to see the pic

Generalising, it is reasonable to admit that the reading from our design yardstick is fairly time dependent, not only during the life cycle of a product (as demonstrated above), but, over years, during the evolution of a product family/platform. We shall illustrate this latter point in a future entry devoted to the Macintosh, from 1984 to present times.