Paying close attention to good design is not unique to the automotive, architectural or consumer-products industries. In fact, office and production-equipment designers at Xerox have long followed a similar path to create smart but simple-to-use business systems that please customers.
As a result, Xerox products "look and feel" a certain way, even though they may widely differ in price and features and function. Each is immediately recognizable as a Xerox product that will deliver quality to the customer.
Why does Xerox take this approach? Like cars or furniture, office equipment is part of our everyday lives. And people want to feel good about the equipment they work with every day and expect the experience to be "intuitive, coherent and pleasant," says David Parsons, who directs Xerox's Industrial Design/Human Interface center.
The IDHI center, based near Rochester, N.Y., is a key component within the Xerox Engineering Center, which is part of the Xerox Innovation Group. The Xerox Engineering Center is charged with all platform planning and product delivery processes in Xerox, including design, engineering excellence and coherence.
"Our job is to specify and design the user experience so as to make our products approachable and intuitive - with a consistent look and feel across the model line," says Parsons. His team does everything it can to make every Xerox system not only as easy to use as possible but also as similar in functionality - such as how the controls look and work, where they're located, the colors that that are included, the way a drop-down menu is configured and worded within a printer driver.
"Once a person understands and knows how to use one of our products,"
Parsons says, "there isn't that steep of a learning curve to the next product."
This makes it easier for people to "graduate" from smaller products to larger, more complex systems.
Parsons and his design team also believe that the "human factors" - such as ease-of-use, approachability, appearance, desirability - are at least as determinative to the success of a product as the raw engineering; that in order for any piece of equipment to deliver maximum functionality, it must also be something people aren't adverse to using. Indeed, the final measure of good design may be whether people actually enjoy the experience of using the product.
"Pride of ownership is critical," Parsons says. While good engineering makes a product capable, it's good design that makes a product desirable.
Overly complex user manuals - and training regimens that can take weeks or months just to achieve basic knowledge of how a new machine works - are two cases in point of bad design, according to Parsons.
The IDHI team knows that people have a low tolerance for studying user manuals or for dealing with balky, hard-to-use equipment. And in today's business environment, a digital copier or printer that's intimidating or too complex is not going to help enhance office productivity, Parsons says.
To make office products pleasing to the wide range of people who use them, Parsons and his design team work to incorporate such things as pictographic instructions that can, for example, show workers how to quickly and easily clear a paper jam. The control panels and their functions, meanwhile, are designed to be as straightforward and self-explanatory as possible.
And, in keeping with the goal of consistency, each piece of equipment is designed in a similar manner, so that workers don't need to relearn everything from scratch when a new printer or copier arrives. A good example of this is the green "start" button - an innovation designed by Xerox in 1970 - which is always located in the same place on the control panel. It has become the industry standard for ease of use on business products.
"It doesn't cost much to engineer these qualities into our products," Parsons explains -- it just takes a little forethought. As a further example of this philosophy, he points to Xerox's efforts to comply with a section of U.S. law that requires federal government agencies to buy products that best accommodate workers who may have various disabilities.
Accordingly, the controls on compliant machines incorporate such design features as concave button recesses to make it easy for people with motor control problems or sight problems to hit the correct button. Also, Xerox machines are already configured so that all of the commonly used controls can be accessed by people using wheelchairs just as easily as other people. "It's just good design," he says. "Users should always be at the center of the design process."
Parsons and his team use methods similar to those used in other industries to gauge future trends and to anticipate customer needs and wants that may transcend the purely functional.
These methods include design and customer trend analysis and color forecasting, as well as customer focus groups to obtain direct feedback from potential customers.
In one case, a Xerox small-office multifunction machine required a shipping screw to be removed before the power was turned on. Developers wanted to use word-free graphic instructions to avoid the cost of translating the instructions into several different languages for worldwide markets.
"However, feedback from usability tests and customer focus groups indicated that users preferred worded instructions. So the developers changed from using word-free graphic instructions to ones that that included words," Parson says. Result? "There was a 100 percent increase in the success rate for removing the shipping screw before the machine was powered up."
"This is all part of our strategy to help people find better ways to work,"
Parsons says. "We want to persuade people not only to purchase our products - but also to repeat their purchases because they are so pleased with the way Xerox products are engineered to work with them."
|
Design Principles Play Vital Role in Xerox Product Development