Innovative Products by Guy Kawasaki

This is a lesson that I learnt from Guy Kawasaki (former chief apple evangelist) regarding great and innovative products. I wondered how he came about this concept but after reading his public profile, I then saw that he had truly amassed quite a lot of experience in innovation. As you might already be aware, apple is by far regarded as “the world’s most innovative company”… Think iPad, iPod, iPhone and the list goes on.

So if we have to know about great products and innovative ones… they would be best to ask.
Guy Kawasaki taught me these four principles of a great product. Lest go straight into them… Great products are Dice… which stands for Deep, Intelligent, Complete, and Elegant

Deep
It’s kind of informal but you have probably heard people saying something is deep. Deep here means that the product has many useful features. See at face value you might see one trait but as you sit down and study it, you see how the inventor or designer had many thoughts put into it. Lest just take an iPod for instance… if you were there during the hype of this product around 2006, you would agree that apple had a deep product. Mobile music was the hype and the iPod just played right into the market. It has so many features such that you could use it easily and conveniently.

Intelligent
Great products are intelligent… That means someone must have been “thinking” when he designed them.  Someone took away the pain of the consumer and solved that customer’s problem. Intelligence shows an exception that was put into the product. It carries the basic and complete logic behind innovation. So put your time into thinking if you ever desire to design an innovative product. The engineers of apple as we read, were coming up with new ideas that influenced the invention of the iPhone. Their then CEO, Steve Jobs, would reject different designs until they came up with what they assumed to be the ideal one. See…? It wasn’t one day’s work but a lot went into it. So that is the second trait of great or innovative products.

Complete
Great products are complete. In other words nothing is lacking in them. They come with user manuals, after sales support and such things. It, makes a customer look no further when buying such a product. They feel, they have a complete product. Imagine buying a car without wheels? No matter how nice the car may be, but that missing component is very important regardless of how little it seems. Now when designing a product for the market think from the consumer’s stand point. How convenient will it be for my potential customers to use this product?

Elegant
Great products are elegant. In this sense we mean that they are neat (well designed). Their overall look, appearance is eye catching in some way. Now as we all know, not everyone is attracted to the same thing but designers also have a target market. You see when designing baby toys, you don’t have adults in mind hey? So it would be charming to the baby not to the adult. In the Thesaurus dictionary the word elegant means pleasing to the eye. Imagine having a Lamborghini engine powered vehicle with very bad exterior design? That already rules out a lot of customers as well.

You can follow Guy Kawasaki on twitter and he has an official Facebook page as well.
Follow www.brilliantfoundations.co.za for more information