602: Human-centered product design - with Ravi Sawhney

Speaker A: Our guest today, Ravi Swani, has spent more than 40 years designing products that you would recognize. From Teddy Ruxpin, the first animated talking bear, to RKS electric guitars, which won several design awards and were played by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and other artists, to a medical device that changed how an entire category of patients felt about themselves. He started his career at Xerox parc, working on one time the first touchscreen interface when it was a bleeding edge technology. And along the way he developed a methodology psychoesthetics that Harvard now teaches. It's a systematic way to design products that people genuinely love, which is our goal as product people.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Today he's still the founder and CEO of RKS Design, the design and innovation firm he started back in the 1980s, where he continues to help companies create products that connect powerfully with customers. And in this episode we you'll learn about creating such products, resulting in those products that customers love. And if you're listening to us and would rather watch the discussion, simply go over to YouTube and search for Product Mastery now and you'll find our YouTube channel.

Speaker C: How can you unlock your full potential as a product manager? We're sharing the product management insights you need. They are based on the seven research backed knowledge areas for product mastery. You'll learn to create products customers love, enhance your influence and elevate your career. Product Mastery now hosted by Dr. Chad McAllister, Product Management professor, practitioner and your guide.

Speaker B: Ravi, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker D: My pleasure. I'm happy to be here, Chad.

Speaker B: Well, likewise. I'm really excited.

Speaker A: I'd love talking to product designers.

Speaker B: You've had a huge career of success.

Speaker A: But I want to go back to the very beginning because you're at Xerox parc, right?

Speaker B: This was uh, innovation mecca, technology mecca,

Speaker A: once upon a time. And doing the first touchscreen interface right back when such a thing was very new.

Speaker B: Now we're common to that.

Speaker A: I'm curious just either through that specifically or just your time at parc, what did you learn? What kind of experiences did you have that kind of shaped how you think about products?

Speaker D: So I was part of the industrial design human factors group. And so we were working with PARC and Xerox Medical Systems. Primarily I was involved in the work with PARC in doing the touchscreen. So I was, I was the reluctant, that was a reluctant freshman designer in the group who said, I want to do traditional industrial design. And my boss, who's been a very good friend for, for all these decades, Frank Zinni, he said, Ravi, we need to get an industrial Designer over here to work with these 30 PhD psychologists on this new technology. And, and we've, we're taking screen and we're going to make it into a control panel. And, and there was no such thing as gooey at the time. So I said, yeah, no thanks, thanks Frank, I don't want to do that. And, and uh, uh, Frank sat me down and says, hey, you're young. You, uh, don't know what you're going to learn. This should just be a learning experience for you. So I reluctantly went over, met these brilliant, brilliant human Factors psychologists, about 200 programmers working with Carol Technologies and with all with PARC and Menlo Labs. And it was a huge team. And, and we had this, this very difficult challenge to get people to actually touch the screen, to control things. And in the process I had to play around with the graphics and design shadows and design buttons that looked real. One was used to touching the screen.

Speaker B: Right, right.

Speaker D: We were only told stay six feet away from the TV and don't put your fingerprints on the tv. So now you got a TV screen, albeit small, and how do we get people to interact with it and touch it? And in that process I discovered that, well, I needed to give a constant feedback loop. So I developed like this status bar and I put help over on the right and I gave all the status and I had the screen. And what had happened was, what triggered all of this is that Xerox capabilities of digital publishing had gone way beyond what a control panel could do. There was just so much that it could do. There was no way to do a control panel. I mean that was in 19, late 1970s. So we could scan a document or write a document, scan a picture. You could take your finger, you could put on the corner of the picture and scale it, you could drop in the text, scale it, adjust the type. You could do all of these types of things now but teaching someone, I wouldn't say teaching, I would say intriguing someone to actually interact with. It was a huge learning. And what I learned, right, the big takeaway is that it's all human factors. Everything is human factors and everything is about how do we motivate someone to do something new, hopefully for themselves that they otherwise might not do. And that's where it led into design as both a motivational tool and eventually psychoesthetics, which is a methodology I developed.

Speaker B: Yeah, we take it for granted now, right.

Speaker A: I have my, uh, iPhone near me,

Speaker B: obviously touch the screen all the time. And at once upon a time, like you said, that was not something you Ever did, you know, got fingerprints on the screen. Why would you dare touch it?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And changing behavior is not an easy thing to accomplish.

Speaker D: No, it's a very. It's difficult to do. But there is part of human nature that we want to evolve.

Speaker A: Uh-huh.

Speaker D: And so what I've found is always give people a reference point at which they're comfortable and that they recognize something and then it's an advancement on it. So if you're so. But we do want to evolve every day. We want to be something more than we were yesterday. So we have that underlying motivation. But we don't want to be radically different. We don't want to. We don't want to feel like we've been living our life wrong for the last few years or forever. That's not a fun thing to learn.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: I can't make too big of jumps. Right. It feels unfamiliar. But yeah, like you said, connecting to what's familiar now and evolving to the next stage. There's an aspect of your work that really appeals to me and resonates with how I think about product as well, and that's that you've kind of built, from what I see, your design methodology around this idea that products need to connect emotionally with customers. I want to kind of use that to frame rest of our discussion.

Speaker A: But let's start with why isn't. My background is engineering.

Speaker B: That's how I evolved into innovation along the way. A functionally well designed product that does the thing it's supposed to do. Why isn't that enough? Right. Why can't engineers just get this right without maybe thinking about this emotional, uh, component. Oh boy.

Speaker D: That's the most important question. Because even if we just look at pure function, that if it doesn't give a sense of empowerment and self actualization, which is on that emotional trajectory, we tend to not remember it, we tend to not bond with it. I'm starting to see with what the work we're doing now that we're creating these emotional moats, which are that you can have such a compelling experience that it creates a switching cost, so to speak. Uh, you know, and the other side of emotion is that there are so many different levels of emotional. Of emotion and emotional intelligence and such. And so we were talking about this just yesterday. We talk about there should be an emotional design. I said, uh, not like emotional, like I want to cry.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: Emotional meaning that it has a deeper meaning to me, that has a stronger connection. So in 1982, and I was so human centered coming out of Xerox and Xerox Spark that I wrote an underpinning at that time which was really foreign to design. I said, it's not how you feel about the design, it's how it makes you feel about yourself. Today we say the designer, the experience, how it makes you feel about yourself. Maya Angelou said, people forget what you said, they'll forget what you did, they'll never forget how you made them feel.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: So we are all looking for that self affirmation. We're all looking for that emotional connection. And the other side of our emotions are that our emotions are filters for all the noise in the world. That's what allows us to kind of cut through everything and see what we connect with. So I always see it as a much deeper, A, uh, much deeper meaning of emotion. That it's not just about making someone feel happy, it's about someone really resonating with them. Um, this, this kind of, we call it Persona resonance. That it's. And when you have that, it's really valuable in life. These are the things we really attach ourselves to.

Speaker B: Yeah, as you're talking about that, I'm thinking about products that I truly love. Right. That I would take time to tell friends about. And I do that because there's some, there was some moment with the product and choosing it and using it. Right. It solved, uh, my problem. But there is this. I like the notion of the product resonance resonating with me in a way. And as product people, if we can create products that have that strong connection, that carry their own word of mouth marketing along with them because of that, that's very powerful. Right. I think if we're only on the functional aspect, a competitor is going to come along and quickly displace us. And you have some good examples of that. I'm going to ask you about one here in a moment. But you do have a system that you call the psycho aesthetics. I think I got that right.

Speaker D: Correct.

Speaker A: Can you describe that, uh, in plain terms?

Speaker B: And I know you, you build that around customer needs, desires and aspirations. Help us understand psycho aesthetics.

Speaker E: So psycho aesthetics is a, we could call it a methodology that essentially empowers developers, innovators, creators to see, see through the eyes of their ultimate consumers and users and see it in a way that is projecting with the future white spaces, for example. And so it is a, say, a tool set. It evolved very highly. It was, I would say, a random tool set up until the early 90s. And then the late 90s, CK Perlade met with us and was brought in by his daughter who co authored the book Predictable Magic with me. And he really helped us organize it

Speaker D: so that people didn't understand it.

Speaker E: So you know, a lot of people talk about design thinking. I would say psycho aesthetics is design thinking on steroids because it is a repeatable methodology that anyone can pick up and use. And at the end of developing those assets from psychoesthetics, they will see what the weight space is, they'll see what their pains states are for the users, which we translate into help me statements. It's just a great suite of tools that we've used in its current formation now for 35 years. The roots of it, the actual methods go back 45 years at RKS, but it is a comprehensive methodology. It is not a philosophy, it is an actual methodology that's employed. And then today, hopefully today we will have the final working version of paai, where we translated all the human signals and all the human aspects into a controlled application that then uses an LLM, um, to empower it and to use it as uh, a force accelerator and to really do things that even I hadn't envisioned that my technology would do. So it's, it's a whole new world for this methodology that's 45 years old and actually today could be, could uh, be the pivotal day after, after basically loading in $20 million worth of ethnographic research that we've done to build in thousands of man hours.

Speaker D: And we're going to make it available

Speaker E: to students for free. Really, really an exciting time. I'm a big believer. That's why I put my methodology out to the world. And it's taught all over the world in design and business schools. But it is, it is something that's well baked and yeah, you don't have

Speaker D: to, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out or

Speaker E: a philosopher to figure it out.

Speaker B: Fantastic. I want to go back to a few things you said as you described psycho aesthetics, but as you mentioned, the AI tool here, it sounds like this is just coming out. What's the current status of it?

Speaker D: That is, that is scheduled to be released. If everything goes as planned. Scheduled be released probably next week, we'll do the final hardening, meaning today that our developers are done, our designers are done and now we've been through all the debugging process and so we'll do an official launch after we do another month of debugging, but it'll be available starting next week. And yeah, and what we do is we generate reports so it's a different use of AI. We come from human centered design. So to us, AI is like, oh, yeah, that could be a pencil crayon or a marker. To us,

Speaker B: sure.

Speaker D: What do we do with that tool? So we're not in love with AI. Uh, AI is probably in love with us. And so what we do is we ingest people's materials and then we have the questions that we ask that are relative to the foundational work and all of the modules that we generate in the reports that ask the business questions, the psychological questions, the demographics, the psychographics, the Persona breakups. And then once you do that, then we go to work. Then paai goes to work. It's not like working with the current LLMs where you ask it a question and then it maybe answers, but when it does answer, it says, and, um, next thing you're down the rabbit hole and you forgot where you what your original question was. I had a funny experience. I asked, I asked my chat, I said I was wanted to ingest my, the RKS website in and because for us to work, you have to have a PDF or some type of a, uh, digital format. We can't just take a website and parse it. And so I asked it to do that. And it took after about an hour of it saying, and I could write a book based on this and I could do this on this. And I kept saying, just give me the PDF. And at the end of it, it asked me to generate the PDF. We don't have those kinds of funny issues. We generate things like a canvas, a psycho aesthetic canvas, which is basically psychoesthetics laid out onto a canvas. We have a business canvas. Really exciting. We have an executive brief. We have a full report. We have team briefs which just blow my mind. We have the output needed for Pitch Deck. And I, uh, mean, I'm just surprised at what we were able to generate based on psychoesthetics. And it basically takes psycho aesthetics and then leverages it into all the assets that you would need to create a success in business. Our goal is just to reduce the failure rate, make people happier, make people more successful, like we've been doing at rks. But rks, the way we do it wasn't scalable and now it's infinitely scalable. You can tell I'm very excited.

Speaker B: Yeah, easy. I will definitely follow up with you because I teach executive, uh, MBA course in innovation program, and I've been playing with tools and been wanting to kind of adopt one. And there's a couple I've been Looking at and like this sounds interesting too, so. And you said you're going to make it free to students, so maybe that would work out even better. We'll get back to some of the things I want to talk about. But for people that do want to look into this tool, where can they go to find this?

Speaker D: Oh, it's pai.AI.

Speaker B: okay. And we'll make sure that's in the show notes as well. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker D: Yeah. And there's a waiting list. And then like I said, next week. Next week it'll be live.

Speaker B: Yeah. Which by the time people listen to this, it uh, should be live. You might not be through your month cycle yet, but they'll probably be listening to this about a week after that. So that must be good. Should line up.

Speaker D: As I say, it'll be one of two things. It'll be live or I'll be in jail for killing my developer, my cto.

Speaker B: Those of us familiar with software projects, we understand too well. As you were describing it, I'm glad you made the link to design thinking because you started talking about empathy without using the word, but being able to see the problems that customers need through their eyes. And you introduced something to this that I don't know what you mean to see the future white spaces. What do you mean by the white spaces?

Speaker D: So what we found in psycho aesthetics is that when we get to our mapping, so we map self actualization against interactivity. And so interactivity is on the horizontal, self actualizations on the vertical. And so as we start to map, and anyone can do this, can be very collaborative, you start to map Personas and what you find is that the way we've approached it is that forward looking white space, meaning that where is the puck going? As opposed to voice of consumer. We do start with voice of consumer, but then as you start to understand people more and more, you want to understand where they're going. And then you identify a white space, you map the competitive landscape and you see is that of value. Is anyone in that space? Is a successful friend of mine used to say we want to go fishing where the fish are and where no one else is fishing. And so uh, it's, it's very important because what we're developing today, aside from things we're doing AI so fast, if it's a physical product or it's a brand or it's something else, a service, it may not be out for six months, it might not. Medtech might not be out for years. So if you can't look around the Corner. If you can't look into the future of where people will be, what their needs and aspirations are, then you're probably going to be too late. You're going to be perceived. You're going to be perceived as being irrelevant or less relevant, less aspirational to the audience.

Speaker E: Okay.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, very important because we have to have that notion of Steve Jobs ability to predict the future. We need a, uh, methodology to help us see that. Right. And where to play in the future. You've talked about Personas a little bit.

Speaker A: I personally am not a fan of

Speaker B: Personas in favor of more of a jobs to be done sort of picture, because I find they have their purpose, but they're usually too general for me. Help me with that. How are you guys using Personas to give us more clarity about the customer, and then we can dive into understanding their unmet needs?

Speaker D: So we use it a few different ways. A primary way we use it is to create a war room. Like the war room, the room I'm in now, in which you build the Personas out in a way that the creative teams, the innovation teams, the engineering teams, can speak to and speak for that segment of the market that's being typified by that Persona. The other way we use it is, as I said, for, uh, projective mapping. And then as we develop the Personas, we look at what their priorities are, we look at what their key attractors are. We weight their key attractors. So we base it on experience, and we base it on desktop research. And a lot of times we base it on ethnography. And then we translate need states into help me statements. And the reason we call them help me statements is because we want to become the person who's helping that person solve a problem, accomplish something that is helpful, beneficial to them. That's. So it's very much the same language. It's just how we frame it just takes the creative team here onto a different level. And when someone says, you look at the Persona, it reaches out and says, can you help me do this? Your mindset essentially changes.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: It's not about it, it's about them and their needs.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Focus on the customer. And, uh, again, as an engineer, that's something we often need to be reminded about. Right? What we're not, we're not creating the solution. We're solving a problem for the customer, helping the customer achieve something, to accomplish something.

Speaker D: But it's so exciting to conquer. To conquer something new. And then the problem is that in the process of. Of conquering that, that technological Challenge. Yeah. Then the days of creating the technology and looking for a customer, probably, that's probably the reason that there's whatever 80, 90, 70% failure rates in new initiatives is that. Yeah, it's, it's not customer focused, it's not people focused. And, and then again, I mean when you scratch the surface, people start with voice of consumer. And voice consumer only tells you where they are now, not where they're going to be, where they want to be. I always love the quote that is attributed to Henry Ford. Nobody's really sure if he said it right. That if people, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yep, that's a good quote. I think an example would help make this a little tangible too. And the one I was going to ask you about, because it really did change how people thought about their problem and solving it. That was the MiniMed 507 insulin pump. And if you help us understand this a little bit, because in that you discovered the real problem there had to do with how diabetics, how the patients thought about, uh, a need. Right. And the use of the technology.

Speaker D: Yeah, it was, it's probably one of the landmark design projects, I think not just for rks, but I think for industrial design overall. Because here we had a device technology that would increase the length and quality of life for diabetics. That's phenomenal.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker D: And they approached us, the company sales had dropped by 50% and they were at the point of where we don't know what to do. And so we out of. And they probably deny that I, that's the way they framed it. But it came across very clear that it was a point of desperation. It was almost like we're all these brilliant engineers, we don't know what to do. It's like hell, I guess, let's go talk to a designer. And, and being human centered and being psychoesthetic focused. And we studied, we studied everything. We built the Personas. We spent immense amount of times reading their customer complaints and all that. That wasn't the real problem. So what we did was we, five of us decided we would become the diabetic. So we had the catheters inserted into our abdomens and we were given syringes into the pumps that pump saline and we became the diabetic 24 7. And what we discovered was that there was a stigma attached to taking out this overtly medical device. So if you're in a public setting, and we still see that today with, with products and with how people feel about themselves is that they never want to be perceived, that there's something wrong with them or that they're ill. And so this, you're in a restaurant and you have a slice of pizza, you have some pasta, you have some carbs. You have to take out, uh, this insulin pump and simulate your pancreas and with your knowledge, know how to give yourself a bolus of insulin. And when we did that in public settings, people turn their heads, right. And you, it's amazing that you felt it. You didn't just see it, but you could feel the concern. And what we realized was that when doctors were giving people the option of getting the Mini Med diabetic infusion pump, they kind of were like, you know, that's not for me. And the reason is because of the stigma attached to being ill. And not that a diabetic is ill, that's a condition. I guess it could be considered, I guess it is considered an illness, but it's a, uh, controllable illness. And so at that time, what we did is we translated the 510 approval and went in surgically and made modifications to the design and the engineering and the color treatment to make it look like a high end pager. And it was in the transformation was that now when you, when you reach into your bag or your pocket and you pulled this out, no one noticed that there's a clear catheter.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker D: Running away from it and that it's tucked under your shirt or your blouse or your dress. All it looked like was something very normal, like you were reading a page. And so sales went from when we

Speaker E: were engaged, sales had fallen from 60,

Speaker D: I think, million to 30 million. Three years later, the sales were, uh, 270 million. Just completely exploded. And then they were acquired for $3.6 billion at that time. So huge business success, but a huge success and just increasing the quality of life for people.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. And understanding what the core problem was, which is not a technical problem. Right. Making the insulin pump wasn't the unknown. It was why are people not using it that we think should be using it? What's getting in the way? Yeah, that convenience aspect and the perception of how you think people are looking at you, thinking of you when you're using it as a big deal. So we've seen it on other areas.

Speaker D: Yeah, it's a big deal. Everywhere we go, it's looking at you with this professional microphone. Gives me a feeling that I'm talking to someone who is really an expert in what they're doing. So even now we're making assessments of each other based on everything we see. That's what makes the world go round

Speaker B: for anyone listening. You can get one of these microphones on Amazon if you want. Maybe the 12 years of doing this helps as well.

Speaker A: Kind of as a wrap up, I

Speaker B: just want to see where you take

Speaker A: us for product managers, product leaders, right,

Speaker B: People inside organizations that are responsible for knowing what the customer wants and trying to make a product better or create a new product for them.

Speaker A: What do you think is a key idea that they should be taking away

Speaker B: from this conversation that they could put into action in the near term?

Speaker D: I would say, I would say that study your customer, but know your customer well enough that what will they need as ah, opposed to what they say they need at this point because they are very, very different things. And what people say and what people do, of course, are different anyway, right. But really being able to dig in and if you do develop Personas and you, and you do start interviewing your customers, dig deeper, really get, understand who they are, why they are, what their total life is like, what kind of car do they drive, what do they like? And you'll start to, you'll start to develop a level of empathy for them that's very deep. And then I would say another thing is that think globally. I was reading something on LinkedIn where the, I won't name the person was saying designers are now arbitrators of taste. And my point is, well, we work globally and my taste probably has nothing to do with the design we're doing for a new cooking stove that's going to replace wood burning in the villages of Africa. It's like, what does my taste have to do with that? It's about them and what their needs and aspirations are. And, and it's a global market. And so you have to be able to really, uh, understand that and think about doing things that increase the quality of life for, for people you may not know, people who may not know of people that you couldn't possibly even have empathy for because you just don't even know how they live. Uh, you go to someone's house in Africa, in a village, they don't have running water, they don't have electricity, they have no facilities. But they have pride.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. They have aspirations and they have the constraints of their environment. And back to you sharing that ethnography is often a tool that is used and that's what you loaded results of ethnographic research into the LM too. I think that that's my personal Favorite way of understanding customers and having empathy for them is being in their shoes. Right? Just like your diabetic example, becoming the person with the insulin pump and actually

Speaker A: using it tells you a lot more.

Speaker B: And in the world of software, for software product managers, we talk about eating your own dog food or if you would prefer champagne. We have to know what it is like to be the customer that we're creating a solution for. And uh, as the better job we can do with that, the uh, better the solution will be as well. So appreciate you sharing that with us.

Speaker A: I do want to get a innovation quote from you. We love innovation quotes around here.

Speaker B: Before we get to that, just as a reminder, anyone that is wanting to

Speaker A: become a, I would suggest maybe a

Speaker B: more professional product manager. I stumbled across this myself in my career. I had already been doing product management for about 10 years and discovered an organization called PDMA, the product development Management Association. And they had a certification, the new Product Development Professional Certification.

Speaker A: And learning their body of knowledge and

Speaker B: preparing for that and passing exam.

Speaker A: Just so many good aha moments that

Speaker B: kind of knitted together my experience in a much more coherent way to the

Speaker A: point that I found it so valuable

Speaker B: I just started helping others learn that knowledge as well. And I have a system now called

Speaker A: the rpm, um, experience.

Speaker B: That's the Rapid Product Mastery experience. If you want to find out more about how that can help you or help your group at work, simply go to the same name as the podcast

Speaker A: productmasterynow.com Ravi, what's a quote you want to share and share a little bit

Speaker B: about what it means to you?

Speaker D: Yeah, I probably go back to the one I gave you earlier, which is that it's not how you feel about the designer experience, it's how it makes you feel about yourself. Uh, and what that does is it turns the camera 180 degrees so that you understand that you can create resonance within a person through anything you're developing. You can create a sense of empowerment, self actualization, reward. We, as you'll see in Psycho aesthetics, we also believe in Campbell and the hero's journey. So putting people on the hero's journey, understanding where Campbell was coming from and that as he said, people aren't looking for the meaning of life, they're looking for the experience of living.

Speaker A: Very important.

Speaker B: Right? And that we are the guide, we're not the hero in that story. Our customer is the hero.

Speaker D: Absolutely.

Speaker E: Yep.

Speaker B: Uh, love that. Thanks for sharing that as well. For people that want to find out more, we already know about this AI tool that will be out when they're listening. And that was at AI. Where else should people go to find out more about the work you do about resources that your Design company has?

Speaker D: RksDesign.com has a multitude of case studies and methodologies. Psycho aesthetics There's a Harvard uh, case study on psycho aesthetics. There's a Harvard classroom exercise. The book that we that was published by Wharton Publishing is called Predictable Magic. That's out of publication but it's available and then online. There are two psycho aesthetic methodology books on Amazon and yeah, we wish everyone just to a more efficient, better job get more more done with less effort and greater success.

Speaker B: That's fantastic. Ravi, very nice being with you. Thank you for sharing your uh, approach to product design and that aspect of having deep empathy and tapping into what customers actually need.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Being in the customer's shoes.

Speaker D: Thanks Chad. Really enjoyable.

Speaker B: And for listeners, if you do want

Speaker A: the written version of anything we discussed,

Speaker B: including notes to those resources, Simply go

Speaker A: to productmasterynow.com 602 Once again, keep innovating.

Speaker F: Thank you for listening to Product Mastery now where product leaders and managers get gain product mastery through practical knowledge, influence and confidence. By listening you are becoming a product master creating products customers love. Find additional resources@productmasterynow.com keep innovating.