I personally think that this is a really good read and it seemed to me that Kim Goodwin was writing from the point of view of a designer within a product design company(product could be tangible(physical product) or intangible(service or digital product). As in the corporate world, there will always be a team of people weather big or small, who fulfills the different role within the project like designer, engineer, marketing and so on, this information about designing human-centered product within the ecosystem of structured company would be really useful when we graduate and step into the real world. As of for now, we not only have to understand the role of the designer(which was covered in this reading), we too, must learn everything from the engineering(the coding/construction) to marketing (pitching/selling the idea) prospect that will lead to the completion of a project.

 

The Design Process:

In terms of project planning and management, I partly agree with the chart which the book is focusing on, the “Process”:

This chart seemed really logical, but I think that in real life designing situation, the research and project should be happening simultaneously.

I drew this chart as I personally think that it would be rather inefficient if we were to plan a project before doing any research regarding it, normally during research, there would changes made to the project which will drastically change the planning of the project or even scraping the idea due to really similar product already existing in the market without prior researches. This is why, I think that the safer way is to research and plan simultaneously to avoid wasting time, effort and resources.( As mentioned in the reading – Project Planning is happening “Before dedicating resources to a project”.)

 

Research, the good old research.

I always think that research plays the greatest part into designing,

“To solve a problem, you must first understand it. Good research helps you make the best product definition and design decision later on.”

I totally agree with this sentence as a research well done will not only help the designer to understand the situation better, it will also help them to understand what resources is available to them which will help them to complete the work in a more efficient manner. For example, sometimes, outsourcing the productions of parts might be of a better quality at cheaper price and faster than to produce them in house within a certain company, and this information could be found during the research.

 

In Summary

I really think that this will be a good guidance to creating a human-centered product or services if I am to read the whole book, by reading this chapter, it gave me the rough idea of how to plan for the planning process, as I did not previously know that we were supposed to think about implementation of support to our project/product which we are making.

When I was reading the Principles, it mentioned that “Does it help your user to accomplish their goals?” and ” Will it help the users minimize their work?”  as the evaluation of weather a supposed principle is both true and applicable to the problem in front of you, these evaluations are indeed wonderful, however, not all products and service were designed with maximizing user’s convenience in mind, how about in situation where the customer is not the user, do we take the end user or the one who is paying the bill into the consideration?

In the situation of selling service as products, having the best service(above user’s expectation) at the reasonable price would greatly increase the perceived value and customer’s loyalty to an extend, and so is a good marketing strategy. If a good marketing strategy is being considered during the planning phase but not as an after thought (like now we have a good product, but how do we sell it?), could the marketing strategy be seen as the product itself?