For the last year I have had a number of chances to give a presentation which I call «Lipstick on a Pig» , an expression I first heard when I entered the mobile industry. Despite it not being obvious what the subject of the talk is, people still come to see and it seems to mostly make sense to them.

Lipstick on a Pig is a not very attractive term that unfortunately perfectly describes the normal use of design in technology and innovation activities.

The problem is that during the development of products and services, many of which incorporate innovation and new technology, decisions are taken that will effect, usually badly, the end customer experience.

These decisions, taken in good faith by people who do not intend to create difficulty in delivering what they create, are in fact design decisions. But our preconception of design is associated with certain people and an activity that is useful but not an integral part of the development until the end of the process, where it will then make whatever we are making attractive and more acceptable to customers, whoever they might be.

But within the development of innovative products, there are many key moments where design is a useful and, in fact, a vital tool to ensure final success. Even something as basic as identifying the human application of a particular technology, needs a human centred and creative process that design brings. And throughout development, if the impact of decisions on tangible issues such as performance and usability, or intangible elements such as emotion or social context, is not understood, no act of design beautification will save it. It will in fact be the act of putting attractive lipstick on a pig of a bad user experience. The problems that result from this mal-practice directly effect customer acceptance, return on investment and eventual business success.

So I fear that almost everything we create has a problem when it’s launched, is not attractive to people or even more seriously and importantly, unusable, and either fails, or is less successful than hoped for, which then takes months or years to put right.

I strongly believe that if we model and make tangible what the end result should be like, how it should work and what people will really do, then we would produce products and services that were more successful.

So in my talk I show some examples of Lipstick on Pigs, things that appeared great ideas and were attractivly styled and presented but could not overcome the bad basis of the original idea.

The Sinclair C5 is one example, where the job of the designer was to style the fairing of this strange washing machine motor powered transportation device for the 21st Century. The real job for the designer should have been to locate the handlebar steering where you could actually use it rather than under your legs, and create something that could be seen going round Hyde Park Corner. Unfortunately the C5 was became a national (British) embarrassment.

Unfortunately another example of technological achievement over common sense is found in the Segway. Vast technological know who has gone into the computerised gyroscopic balancing mechanism that prevents you from falling flat on your face when you ride the Segway. I am convinced, however, the Segway is completely useless. It replaces walking, so, as the post office workers of Boston found out, you don’t warm up when you use it. They gave it back after two weeks off winter use, why reinvent walking†?

At a recent conference an indignant professor from a university in Estonia who told me that the Segway was used by students there. But this was meant to be a revolution in global transportation, not just a gimmick for campuses and golf courses. I have seen them used for tours in Florence but again, what is wrong with walking†?

The problem for me is that we put such trust in technology, and trust scientists to create our future. As a result we get C5‘s Segways, GM Foods, Microsoft, mobile phones that say they do email but are impossible to set up, massive government IT disasters, mostly miss and occasionally hit innovations, whether in medical, communication or financial sectors.

So Lipstick on a Pig is an expose, an explanation and hopefully a signpost to doing things better. Because when we try and understand people better, be creative about what we offer them, stop being led by technology, and realise that delivering beautiful gorgeous experiences like those that Apple create means getting all the decisions along the way right, not just bringing in someone called a designer to paper over the cracks at the end, then the world might actually work and we might like it a bit better.

An example I use in my talk is the current ticket machine at London stations. I usually refer to the ticket machine of some years ago where there was a button for every station as an example of what some one thought was simple but in fact was not. The newest example has a not very attractive touch screen interface. When you pay for your ticket, however, you use the separate card reader on the side (unlike the machines in Paris where entering your PIN code is all done on the same screen). The new UK machine has it’s own small screen, not angled, and positioned at a height between a child and an adult and unfortunately not suiting either. The result is that we are forced to lean over and peer at the screen to key in the PIN codes. I predict a generation of slightly deformed travellers who lean to the right. How did nobody have the presence of mind to prototype, possibly with a piece of cardboard, the layout of the screens and check the basic ergonomics.

We tend to measure progress in terms of technology but I would prefer we measured it against our ability to understand and deliver to emotional and physical needs and for most experiences of technology, we are still in the dark ages. For some reason we are loath to consider basic human responses and needs to technology, so bound up in our own cleverness are we.

So, I believe that by thinking differently about design, and emphasising how it can impact much earlier in the development of products and services, we can begin to remove some of the risks and start with a clearer idea of what we are trying to make, in the context of the real world.

Some of the main elements of design that can help are:

Getting insight into what the problem really is. Design is mostly concerned with how people will interact with technology, products and services, and so we should start with insight into what people do, the problems they have and the possible barriers to our new ideas. As we know, there is lots of market research around, but it tells us very little, or is rarley used back in the development process. There are many examples where research has misled or missed important issues, we need to go deeper and extract information that is useful to design.

Having ideas – design is a process where initial ideas are challenged and built on. By making ideas tangible and representing them as they would appear to people, right at the beginning of the process, you can gain a huge advantage and develop a clear vision of what is important to keep in the delivery process. Creativity makes things real, even things that do not exist, and this allows you to consider what could be, and test these scenarios with real people, way before anything real has been built.

User involvement – testing, user research and co-creation are all techniques that allow you to validate and check what you are building before you commit. This is a risk management tool that also allows you to investigate and explore.

The Customer Experience – is a horizontal experience, the result of many different parts of a business. But rarely do business even attempt to deign their experience in the same way the customer sees it.

At it’s most basic, the design process is a way of deciding what it is you want to create, at the beginning. This sounds so simple. It’s hard to understand why people deople don’t do this. But activity is everything, we put things together and then see what we have, brilliant and clever people make decisions which are right for them but not for their customers, and everyone makes assumptions about simplicity, usability, emotion, function and how things will work without testing or checking with real people.

So Lipstick on a Pig is an attempt to amuse and shock us out of our preconceptions of what design is and start realising that everything is designed, every decision we make contributes to the final «design» of what we experience and use, and more importantly, builds the simple building blocks and processes that we need to design better stuff and be more successful.

I enjoy giving my talk Lipstick on a Pig, and the original version is available in this site. But of course my ideas have changed and I get bored saying the same thing so, in the spirit of the age, I have developed Lipstick on a Pig Two Dot Zero.

LOAP2.0 combines a number of talks and focuses on the key elements of design that I think anyone can take and away and do tomorrow when they get to work. Don’t hesitate to give me your comments!