MIT's Technology Interviews IDEO Founder Bill Moggridge
Bill Moggridge, cofounder of IDEO and father of the "interaction design" movement, was recently interviewed by MIT's Technology Review. It's a short interview, but Moggridge covers everything from how he feels American design was lost until 15 years ago to how tech companies can better understand the needs of customers.
Moggridge and the team he has built at IDEO are a constant inspiration to me. Something I learned recently at the Adaptive Path MX Conference is that IDEO is no longer just doing traditional design work but moving into new areas such as designing new business models and marketing campaigns. These approaches are still founded on the application of design thinking. For example, they helped introduce the "Keep the Change" service for Bank of America.
From the interview:
TR: How can tech companies better understand the needs of customers?
Bill Moggridge: What we're looking for is the latent user needs in a situation where, at least at the beginning, you don't know what you're going to be making. So you have to have insights about people driven from their psychology, their desires, their interests, and then apply that to the context where you might be inventing or coming up with a solution for a new product or service or space, or whatever the context may be. Once you've got to a first prototype, build it quick and try it out. As soon as possible--even a small attribute of it--try it out, because you're likely to be wrong.
I particularly liked his final comment -- it's something I've come to learn, appreciate and apply in my current role.
TR: Parting advice?
BM: Put together a team with a great engineer, a crazy designer, a good businessperson, and a good human-factors scientist or psychologist of some kind, and put them in a room and get them to try to work together. It's a big challenge, but they come to a point, surprisingly quickly, where they realize that what they can achieve together is much more than they could do individually.
Great minds may think alike, but minds that think differently, originating from different, unique backgrounds and skillsets, create the disruptive ideas that change the world.
