New Tech isn’t always the answer.

There’s an abundance of new technology available to the average inventor and it’s only growing. As designers it’s important to recognize that new technology has and will always have a place when it comes to innovation, however it’s good to remember that technology is only as good as the final product and how it’s incorporated within it. Use technology where it makes sense and don’t where it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s about masking the technology entirely. If you haven’t heard of Doug Dietz story about redesigning the user experience around MRI Scanners for children, it’s entirely worth the 19mins the video below takes.

As a principal designer for GE Healthcare, Doug had been designing diagnostic imaging equipment for more than 20 years when he realized that young patients' actual experience of this cutting edge technology was, well, awful.

Designing around the end user means designing from an empathetic perspective. If technology makes a process more efficient but doesn’t make the user’s experience with that process any better, it’s not well designed. A prime example coming from the tech mecca of Silicon Valley is Juicero .

For the unfamiliar Juicero is a now defunct startup that made a wifi connected, high tech cold press juicer that pressed prepackaged bags of pulp into juice. The company had difficulty gaining traction with it’s initial price point of $700USD (which later dropped to $400USD) and continued to decline after criticism of it’s unnecessary application of technology, and price. Not to mention it turns out you could squeeze the prepackaged bags of pulp into juice by hand…

It’s important to remember with the incorporation of any new technology, there's going to be a learning curve, it’s the responsibility of the designers to make that learning as intuitive as possible. More importantly we need to know that new technology is needed, and that it will make an improvement over current solutions.

At AK Studios we’re big proponents of keeping things simple and never designing features into a product for features sake. With a larger focus on the user throughout the design process I think Juicero could’ve been quite successful. People love fresh pressed cold juice and hate the mess, and time it takes to make it at home. After all theres a reason Juicero received over 118 million in funding. If Juicero isn’t enough of an example about improperly applying technology into our products and solutions, Doug Dietz work should be. Dietz and his team’s work at GE leave us all with an great lesson and understanding of why designing for the end user is so important. If we can all strive to be a little bit more empathetic throughout the entire design process the world will be a better place for it; not to mention your product will be much more successful having done so.