While there's clearly a great deal of attention around "green design" these days, there's very little guidance on how to design such products (e.g. energy-saving, recyclable, super-efficient, etc.) from a user-centered perspective. One could argue that there's nothing unique about such products that a typical user-centered design approach would not already accommodate.
But an interview with Terry Swack, which is making the blog rounds, emphasizes the importance of considering the uniqueness of positioning sustainable products:
"...most consumers still don't see the environment as a problem. Marketers have to help them not only to understand the problem, but to actually care about it. It's a matter of making it personally relevant and that their actions matter. But even the greenest consumers don't use sustainability as their primary decision criteria. The green product has to work as well or better than as the other, and be priced relatively the same. Then they'll look at the green attributes."
In other words, a sustainable product not only needs to provide comparable cost, functionality and ease-of-use, but also has the added imperative of effectively communicating its value above and beyond traditional product alternatives.
How is one to accomplish that? Since we're talking about attributes that go beyond the user's short-term engagement with the core functionality of the product - like its impact on the environment - I believe it is most effective to take a service design, rather than a product design approach. In service design we are not only interested in the ease-of-use around the product, but the user's holistic awareness and experience.
In a service design analysisI conducted last year, I defined three key characteristics of a service experience:
- Guidance - Information delivered to service consumers to learn about the
service, understand how to use and navigate the service, and to take
away for reference. - Comfort - Transitioning to physical, emotional and cognitive ease and
familiarity is necessary for services that take place in new contexts or
locations. - Sensation Excitement, surprise and other emotional factors can attract
interest and maintain engagement over the duration of the service.
While these characteristics were used in the context of a multi-dimensional user experience (i.e. attendance at a design conference), they can also be applied to a user's experience with a sustainable product:
- Guidance - This refers to the educational component of the user experience. Increasing the user's awareness of the relative value of a sustainable product, as well as it's appropriate usage, is (at least for the short-term). Implicit and explicit guidance needs to be factored into the design.
- Comfort - On one level, users need to be convinced that the sustainable aspects of a product will not compromise their experience in terms of mental demand, physical comfort or other comfort-related factors. At the other level, many users will feel a sense of satisfaction if they are sacrificing a degree of comfort in order to lessen environmental impact. The design challenge is balancing those two types of comfort across different types of users, and even within an individual's range of experiences with the product.
- Sensation - Excitement can come in many forms, but perhaps none more tangible then the pairing of saving money while "saving the planet". Many, but not all sustainable products can provide comparable functionality at a competitive or reduced cost.
As with designing services, it's critical to mindfully combine these three characteristics. One example is home power monitoring applications. These interfaces provide explicit guidance via reporting energy usage for various appliances within the home, support comfort, quite literally, through effective temperature management, and deliver sensation through a combination of heightened user control and cost savings.
