Building a website is just like building a Toyota
– posted February 20th, 2007 by Brian Donohue No comments
In this week’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “From 0 to 60 to World Domination“, author Jon Gertner teases apart what makes Toyota “as close to a juggernaut as any corporation in existence”. (I had to look up juggernaut: it means “a huge, powerful and overwhelming force or institution”.)
Being a NY Times magazine article, it’s long but readable, full of small insights, but too subtle to let you come away with one simple conclusion. But more to the point, what exactly does it have to do with designing websites?
This was the surprising thing: one of the secrets of Toyota’s success is “genchi genbutsu”. For those of you still brushing up on your Japanese, this means talking to and watching your customers in action:
“Toyota itself keeps pushing ahead. Under its system, an engineer appointed to lead a new project has a huge budget and near absolute authority over the project. Toyota’s chief engineers consider it their responsibility to begin a design (or a redesign) by going out and seeing for themselves — the term within Toyota is genchi genbutsu — what customers want in a car or a truck and how any current versions come up short. This quest can sometimes seem Arthurian, with chief engineers leading lonely and gallant expeditions in an attempt to figure out how to beat the competition.”
Whatever you do, be sure to talk to your customers
For a current client, my colleague Colman and I spent four days interviewing and doing informal user-testing on current and potential customers. This was all part of our discovery work, largely with the aim of enabling us to produce reliable and meaningful personas. We knew it from before, but still, we ended each day saying to each other that these interviews are an absolute gold mine.
So, too, at Toyota:
“In August 2002, Obu and his team began visiting different regions of the U.S.; they went to logging camps, horse farms, factories and construction sites to meet with truck owners. By
asking them face to face about their needs , Obu and Schrage sought to understand preferences for towing capacity and power; bysilently observing them at work , they learned things about the ideal placement of the gear shifter, for instance, or that the door handle and radio knobs should be extra large, because pickup owners often wear work gloves all day. When the team discerned that the pickup has now evolved into a kind of mobile office for many contractors, the engineers sought to create a space for a laptop and hanging files next to the driver”
The point is pretty clear — good products result not from isolated designers cooking up wonders, but from designers who go out and talk to customers, watch them, and design to make them happy.
User-centred design builds you a good car, or a good website!
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