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Meaningful Design - a step beyond typical user-centered design and product usability
Meaningful design is design that transcends simply meeting a user's needs and instead also speaks to their underlying values and lifestyle. Companies most often look to features and price point as the key movers of customer loyalty. While this is not wholly incorrect, it represents only a piece of the picture. Consumers evaluate products based on several things - they certainly look at the functionality and price - but they are also driven by deeper underlying motivations, sometimes unconsciously. They think about how a product makes them feel, what emotions it evokes. They are also influenced by how it fits into their existing values and sense of identity. In fact, these latter unconscious responses are often much more powerful than performance and price in determining a consumer's final choice about which product to buy or which brand to remain loyal to.
Meaningful design is a concept based on work that industry leaders Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Darrel Rhea have done. They outline the concept in detail in their book, Making Meaning. The target to the right represents ways in which consumer's make decisions about whether or not they will purchase a product. It illustrates the different levels at which consumers analyze products to make purchase decisions. Their theory, which we have found consistent with our experience, is that the earlier you can move to understanding what is meaningful to your customer, the more effective your design becomes.
The outside ring represents the functionality, performance and features sets of a given product. At the outset, a person knows that they need something that has certain functionality or performs in a certain way. Then, they might look at price - who has the best deal for the same or similar functionality. The next deeper level of consideration is on the emotional level - or how does this fit into their lifestyle? Once you get to the fourth level - identity - loyalty to and desire for your product overcome price and even certain feature sets. For instance, if a person cares deeply for the environment, and they identify themselves as someone whose life derives meaning from supporting green efforts, they will chose products that they feel are consistent with their lifestyle over those that do not. At this point, the product becomes one that adds meaning to their lives.
The earlier in your development process that you begin to understand what is meaningful to your target customers the better. Even when executives are making decisions about which products they should greenlight and which they should shelve - they should keep the customers and the experiences they are trying to enable at the forefront. This will make decisions about where to focus efforts much easier to make.
As you continue down the development process, it is important to start at the center of the target as often as possible. Rather than starting with features, then moving to price, then trying to understand something about lifestyle and values, start instead by trying to understand what is meaningful to your consumers and then exploring how you might make a product with the correct features and price point. Working from the inside out is much more effective and cost efficient than working from the outside in. It also ensures that you won't get mired in features discussions, never making it to the truly important perspectives of lifestyle, value and meaning.
One of the key ways to do this is to start by moving beyond traditional market demographics. When you are recruiting participants for contextual interviews or focus groups or surveys, concentrate your screening efforts on lifestyle and values questions and limit your socio-economic inquiries. This allows you to begin to build personas and target your user in the most meaningful way from the start of the process.