3 ms·
These ideas aren't born in the actual product design teams, where "don't put touch control near things that get hot" or "no unprotected touch controls on surfac
by alxlaz 4y ago
These ideas aren't born in the actual product design teams, where "don't put touch control near things that get hot" or "no unprotected touch controls on surfaces where spilling can occur" are not concepts that need to be explained. The way this usually happens is that product management hands down the requirement from down top, either on their own or after contracting some expensive industrial design agency (i.e. a mixed team of engineering and art majors who never had to sell, service and especially provide tech support for, any of the products whose outside they designed) to help "refresh" their product line.
Then, when in a shocking twist of events it's absolutely miserable, the tests are slightly mangled to highlight the usability gains ("easier to wipe", "looks modern and integrates well in a modern kitchen") and ensure no one's yearly bonus is endangered.
Surprisingly, it works out really well despite competition because everyone's doing it pretty similarly.
If your next question is "but why on Earth is it done like that!?", well, there are many reasons for that. But the tl;dr is that making kitchen appliances with universal, "boring" features, which last for 20 years, would spell disaster for a lot of companies in a lot of industries, from home appliances to furniture, and for smaller, specialized suppliers in these fields. The market has fine-tuned itself for frequently replaceable junk that's just good enough to that someone can plausibly say "well ackshually" when I refer to it as junk. Anything better would inherently result in much longer growth cycles, which Western management and stakeholders are not capable of handling anymore, and would disrupt "fashionable" trends, which would further prolong growth cycles in both home appliances and connected industries (furniture, home decor, cooking vessels believe it or not, and so on). It would also make it difficult to outsource mass production to cheap factories with poor quality control processes, thus driving prices up even more than the better materials and design would warrant, but that's more of a second-order effect than a cause by now.
Sauce: I used to work on consumer products years ago -- not kitchen appliances specifically but I know people who did those, too. Attending meetings was a lesson in cognitive dissonance and doublespeak and it's one of the least rewarding tech jobs you can imagine.
- synu 4y agoI get that it's better for the producers if everyone agrees to make throwaway appliances that need to be replaced every couple years, but how do they prevent someone from entering the market and selling high quality equipment that lasts? They would have fewer repeat sales, but more of the market share presumably.
- alxlaz 4y agoIt's a combination of factors but the gist of it is that they're not preventing anyone from doing it -- nobody wants to do it because they can't justify it. Designing and selling long-lived consumer products is a tremendous effort in terms of regulatory activity and logistics. And if you're just entering the market, you're entering a market where established players have been sitting on standardizing committees, lobbying regulatory bodies, and have had special deals with manufacturers, transporters, TV channels and shopping malls since Jimmy Carter was in the White House, and have been able to leverage them when dealing with online shops since the days of the dotcom boom. Furthermore, getting that "more of the market share" requires actual first sales to happen in the first place. Selling fewer, better, and inherently more expensive products by claiming that yours are really good and last a long time is not very straightforward at all: it's not like everyone else is openly advertising that they're selling cheap junk that's worse than their 1980s versions in every way except maybe power consumption (because we can make better power supplies now). If you're selling kitchen stoves that last for twenty years, it's gonna be at least seven or eight years before anyone really believes you. So all this requires tremendous initial investment in a pretty hostile environment. Consumer markets are already perceived as low-yield and under tremendous price pressure. But, worse, some segments -- household appliances in particular -- also suffer from a "marketshare = dead market" problem: if you sold someone a washing machine that lasts fifteen years, you're not going to sell them another one for fifteen years. So if you're selling things that last for fifteen years, you gotta convince the folks whose money you're depending on that you can keep selling things at a reasonable pace for fifteen years from now, and you won't really know if you've succeeded at your basic value proposition ("we make better things that last longer") for at least seven or eight years into it. That's not just pretty risky, it's on a timeframe that's about an order of magnitude higher than companies/investment funds/people willing to throw that kind of money into things that run on electricity are able to work with. That's not to say no one has been entering these markets. They have, but they've usually done it through other value propositions -- stuff that's even cheaper, stuff that's ethically sourced and so on. New premium brands do pop up but they either target prosumer/super premium markets (slang for "super rich people who want to brag or impress"), where the rules are slightly different, or go straight for the professional market first, where the rules of the game are very much different, and use whatever reputation they can make there to start selling home appliances too.