By Liberty Hudson, MEng ’23 (ME/Product Design)
This op-ed is part of a series from E295: Communications for Engineering Leaders. In this course, Master of Engineering students were challenged to communicate a topic they found interesting to a broad audience of technical and non-technical readers. As an opinion piece, the views shared here are neither an expression of nor endorsed by UC Berkeley or the Fung Institute.
“If you are a designer, it is imperative to establish both who you are designing for and what needs you are trying to solve at the beginning of any design process. “Without this information, the design will likely end up as either an aesthetic or meaningless artifact. Google Glass serves as a reminder of how severe the divide between consumer expectations and user realities can be. The product (shown in Figure 2) was unveiled in 2012 as a futuristic pair of glasses that integrated augmented reality to improve daily life — how exactly, remains unclear to this day. It has since been revealed that “an impassioned split was forming between X engineers about the most basic functions of Google Glass.” This disagreement centered around when and where the product should be worn to provide the maximum value, which failed to be resolved before launch. A decade later, Google has long abandoned the consumer market and recently launched Glass Enterprise, whose latest product line has an explicit business context in mind. This application pivot serves as evidence of the company’s design evolution [2].

“The key learning from failed products, like Google Glass, is the immeasurable benefit to engaging with the target demographic at all stages of the design cycle.”Incorporating the resultant feedback ensures the project’s scope is reflective of expressed pain points and that iterations make valuable changes that better product-market fit. Then, the product delivers to consumers, by solving their challenges, and to companies, by generating predictable revenue. This continuous engagement aims to align the goals of a product’s development and its future value. The explicit path to ensure all aforementioned criteria are accounted for differs based on the specific product and context. A sample, iterative development cycle to prevent product failure is shown in Figure 3.

References
[1] All Together Now. The Economist. (2012, April 21). Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/special-report/2012/04/21/all-together-now [2] Bilton, N. (2015, February 4). Why Google Glass Broke. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/05/style/why-google-glass-broke.html [3] Buffoni, A., Angelis, A. de, Gruntges, V., & Krieg, A. (2021, March 31). How to make sure your next product or service launch drives growth. McKinsey & Company. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/how-to-make-sure-your-next-product-or-service-launch-drives-growth [4] European Innovation Adoption Behaviour. European Journal of Innovation Management. Retrieved from https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/EJIM-01-2016-0003/full/html [5] Google. (2015). CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/20/opinion/pease-google-glass-what-went-wrong/index.html. [6] Jong, J. P. J. de, Gillert, N. L., & Stock, R. M. (2018, January 10). First adoption of consumer innovations: Exploring market failure and alleviating factors. Research Policy. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733318300040 [7] Lifewire. (2019). 97 Getty Images. 6 Ways to Save Money When Buying a Computer. Retrieved from https://www.lifewire.com/seven-ways-to-save-money-on-a-computer-832356. [8] Pichlak, M. (2015, December 1). The innovation adoption process: A multidimensional approach: Journal of Management & Organization. Cambridge Core. Retrieved September 25, 2022, from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-management-and-organization/article/innovation-adoption-process-a-multidimensional-approach/57C58BBA38794B3C215BEB9AE4F5A266 [9] Schneider, J., & Hall, J. (2021, August 27). Why Most Product Launches Fail. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2011/04/why-most-product-launches-fail [10] Sheppard, N. (2011, July 7). How to design a hot product. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://archive.nytimes.com/pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/how-to-design-a-hot-product/?searchResultPosition=1 [11] Person. (2022, June 8). Framework for Innovation: Design Council’s evolved Double Diamond. Design Council. Retrieved from https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/skills-learning/tools-frameworks/framework-for-innovation-design-councils-evolved-double-diamond/ [12] Dam, R. F., & Siang, T. Y. (n.d.). 10 insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview. The Interaction Design Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-a-quick-overview Connect with Liberty. Edited by Mary Tran.Op-ed: Preventing product failure by involving the consumer perspective was originally published in Berkeley Master of Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.