Conceptual Design
Product ideas face many pitfalls as well as missed opportunities. Among them are the obvious questions of can it be done, can it be built, and will anyone buy it. What is less obvious are usually related to performance, environment, and interface. These are often best solved by seeking experienced input from people outside your organization. Here are some examples.
Performance is not just how fast something goes but well it gets the job done. People tend to focus on the function rather than the task. It is a lot like saying an airline is in the business of flying planes instead of transportation. The sleek super-sonic passenger planes have never made money. If the obstacles for the customers to use your product add up to making the task too expensive or time consuming, the customer will find another tool.
The environment in which a product is used will make a big impact on how useful it is if the environmental factors negate features of the product. If the environment is often noisy, then sound cannot be relied on for feedback. If the users have dirty fingers, then touch screens are not a good idea. If the product is exposed to solvents, the housing better be able to handle it. If the customer has gloves on, the buttons better be large. Waiting for this feedback during field trials is expensive and time consuming. It is often better to seek the critical advice of experienced people outside your organization to help avoid this kind of oversight.
Products are often designed to interface to existing products the customers already have. Sometimes the deficiencies of third party systems impact characteristics of a good design. One example is a product designed for use by telephone workers using the worker's own telephone set to control the device and hear the device's responses. The product needed a voice so a professional voice was hired to record the device's vocabulary. Being a professional speaker, the person's voice was almost without distortion. This meant that there was almost no energy above about 1000 Hz usually found from the distortions in the average person's voice. Unfortunately, one of the most popular telephone craft sets uses a small speaker that could not produce much sound below 800 Hz. This made the wonderful voice unintelligible and the vocabulary had to be rebuilt with another voice.
Sometimes, the answers to "can it be done" or "can it be built" are not easy to solve without experience in answering these questions. Although most organizations deny it, "not invented here" is alive and well and too quickly conclude "it can't be done". Once this denial is overcome, there are two solutions. First is to buy the designs from somebody else and the second is to expand the experience base of your own organization. Consultants can be used in either situation. In the first case, the decision to buy would not be there if your own organization had done it themselves. The consultant can help review your potential purchased technology. In the second case, an experienced consultant can bring new ideas and experience enabling your organization.