better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

What’s Your Perception?

19 June 2011

I saw this ‘thing’ on my travels this week and it set me wondering. In the picture you can see a top of the range internet video conferencing facility with double screens and all mounted on wheels for ease of movement.

Quite an impressive bit of kit if you like that kind of thing.

And yet….

In the middle if the picture you’ll notice a large coffee tin that’s being used to raise up the height of the camera, which is a decidedly low tech solution. It’s probably not what the designers had in mind when they first sketched the product…

‘Ah this is a wonderful product Sebastian, but could you leave a space in the centre there that’s roughly the diameter of a coffee can…?’

I bet not.

However, this picture is really inviting you to think in two ways:

Firstly, it could be a comment on how people forget to think about how their product or service will be applied. Clearly the camera needs to be mounted so that you can raise or lower it. When you think about your products or services, what are you missing?

Or…

Secondly, it could be a celebration of ingenuity. How clever to adapt something in the moment and find a good use for a seemingly unrelated object. Instead of over complicating their product, the designers just did a good job of getting the essentials right. When you think about your products or services, where have you got the basics right… or have you over complicated things?

It’s all a matter of perception. What’s yours?

Tags: perception