Design as differentiator - what we can learn from Apple

There is a great article in Technology Review about how Apple uses design as a product differentiator.  You can read it here, but the web site requires registration - if you don't want to do that you can download a PDF version here.

Reading the article got me thinking about design as differentiator, and how we can learn from Apple and apply their success to other products.  The following principles stood out for me - the points are followed by direct quotes from the article:

1. Design focus has to come from the top.  It was largely [Steve Jobs] who established the company's emphasis on industrial design. Indeed, some would say that he made design a higher priority than technology.  Even in the early 1980s, [Mark] Rolston says, "Jobs wanted to elevate Apple by using design." Jobs, he says, not only cared personally about design but saw that it could be a way to differentiate his company's products from the PCs of the day, which often looked little evolved from hobbyist boxes. Ken Campbell, a codesigner of the Apple Lisa, was quoted in Kunkel's AppleDesign as saying that Jobs wanted Apple to be what Olivetti was in the 1970s: "an undisputed leader in industrial design."
2. Don't be limited by standard engineering requirements - push for innovation.  But Apple, Rolston says, "will change a whole factory's process." What's more, he adds, the company keeps its eyes open for new manufacturing possibilities, no matter how obscure. One example is the "double-shot" method of combining layers of different or different-colored materials. Apple "saw that a manufacturer had a special process for this on a small scale," Rolston says, and incorporated layered materials into its designs--for example, the clear plastic layered over colored materials in iPods and older iMacs. "[Apple] pushed them to do it on a much larger scale. Apple helped the manufacturers master the process and product."
3. Design innovation doesn't just happen automatically - it requires significant resources.  [Robert] Brunner estimates that today Apple spends 15 to 20 percent of its industrial-design time on concept--far more than most other computer companies--and the rest on implementation. He says that Apple rides herd on manufacturers, sending design-team members to factories for weeks at a time to see what can be done and to push manufacturers to find new solutions. If the designers see a true innovation, they can integrate it into their designs and check the quality of execution at the point of manufacture.
4. User experience needs a seat at the table from the very beginning of product development.  [Donald Norman explains:] "There were three evaluations required at the inception of a product idea: a marketing requirement ­document, an engineering requirement document, and a user-­experience document," Norman recalls. [Mark] Rolston elabo­rates: "Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is 'Here's how people like to do things.'"  "These three [documents] would be reviewed by a committee of executives, and if approved, the design group would get a budget, and a team leader would be assigned," Norman says. At that point, he continues, "the team would work on expanding the three requirement documents, inserting plans on how they hoped to meet the marketing, engineering, and user-experience needs--figures for the release date, ad cycle, pricing details, and the like." And the team's progress would be continually reviewed as the project went forward.
5. Don't lose sight of the end product.  "Critical to Apple's success in design is the way Jobs brought focus and discipline to the product teams," ­Norman says. "[Jobs] had a single, cohesive image of the final product and would not allow any deviation, no matter how promising a new proposed feature appeared to be, no matter how much the team complained. Other companies are more democratic, listening to everyone's opinions, and the result is bloat and a lack of cohesion.

These principles placed design at the center of the product development process at Apple, and it is why their products are differentiated by being both beautiful and simple to use:

One direct result of that sharpened focus is Apple's unique ability to create simple products. Though the idea of a simple high-tech device seems counterintuitive (why not offer more functionality if you can?), it's worked for Apple.  "The hardest part of design, especially consumer electronics," says Norman, "is keeping features out." Simplicity, he says, is in itself a product differentiator, and pursuing it can lead to innovation.   Rolston agrees. "The most fundamental thing about Apple that's interesting to me," he says, "is that they're just as smart about what they don't do. Great products can be made more beautiful by omitting things."

And finally, on why design is such a powerful differentiator, I have to agree with one of Donald Norman's final quotes in the article, where he says that "Attractive things work better.  When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn't it? Or at least feels like it does."