Business and Beyond: Toyota, Drums, and Customer Experience (a Product Development Lifecycle Whitepaper)
Simple products break less
In working with engineers of all kinds, whenever my modest inputs are required to help ship better products, I like to say this: “Let’s make this feature work like a drum!” This expression is not my own – I “inherited” it from a good front-end developer friend, but it represents a principle in product design that I follow (more on that later). And believe it or not, it all started with cars and drums and LSD… as in Lean Software Development. Since we happen to be humans (even the geekiest of us), it often helps to remember why simplicity is the mother of genius – because simple things break less. This notion is at the core of great products and customer experiences.
Is usability of portable devices better when their batteries can be removed on the fly? Definitely. As a business developer who has spent countless months on the road in my career, I am yet to find a way to justify preferring a portable power bank over a simple, removable battery. Still, there are many schools of thought on this topic – both regarding Apple’s products specifically and regarding 
Wireframes and prototypes – as well as software used for wireframing and prototyping – make the process of creating an app, a website or any software or hardware product notably easier – by simplifying the product and allowing all involved in its development to focus on the product’s functions and user interactivity. Everyone in the production team – from stakeholders and information architects to project managers and quality assurance personnel – needs to understand how an application or website will work and what it is intended to do. For that purpose, wireframing and prototyping are not synonyms, technically speaking. Let’s look at their differences and similarities.
In my years of interacting with screens – computer displays, television sets and proprietary video hardware – of varying sizes and intended uses, I find one factor to have a much bigger role in retail customer experience and in general usability than the title of this post may suggest – aspect ratios. Over 20% of the world is using electronic displays or TV’s with wrong aspect ratio settings, and it turns out that this has deep physiological and psychological effects that affect the users, the patrons (in the landlord-retail context), the product manufacturers, and everyone in the marketing and IT sectors. Should anyone care about this problem? I have done some research to find a few interesting answers.
