In approaching each other's disciplines, designers and engineers often fall victim to some of the stereotypes that define them in popular culture, expressed in the following joke:
Go to school and learn a great deal about a very narrow subject area.
They continue to learn more and more about less and less,
Until they know everything about nothing.
Designers:
Go to school and learn a little bit about a great many subjects.
They continue to learn less and less about more and more,
Until they know nothing about everything.
Stereotypes aside, engineers, were always integral to advancement of product design, and over the past few decades alone, have opened frontiers of experiences that were in the realm of science fiction not so long ago.
Take space tourism, for example. At companies such as Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX, scientists and engineers collaborate with designers to develop an inspirational, intense experience for those who can afford it--the exclusive opportunity to satisfy deep emotional needs, fulfil a childhood dream of being an astronaut, or a yearning to see our blue planet from space.
A massive scientific and engineering effort will be required to make space travel a safe and ubiquitous experience product similar to commercial aviation. But, although the motivation is fueled by hopes for significant financial rewards to pioneers, the effort itself illuminates the essence of the human relentless quest for knowledge and exploration, and the desire to experience a range of emotions that extends any practical value.
Science and engineering thus make it possible to design the most powerful experiences, which, while delivered through ethereal hardware, satisfy ephemeral, emotional needs such as curiosity and excitement, which are hard-to-reproduce--and thus extremely valuable.
Scientific and engineering research often leads to applied solutions that sometimes change the course of human existence. Probably the most impactful to our current times is electricity. Pause here to consider life without it--most of the products discussed in this book would not have existed.
The quest to understand the nature of electricity was a scientific area of study that persisted for centuries, and pioneered by numerous scientists such as Alessandro Volta and Andre-Marie Ampere, whose names are eternalized in the electrical measurement units Volt and Ampere. Once understood, it was through the combined efforts of many engineers such as Pavel Yablochkov, who invented transformers, generators, and the rest of the infrastructure that made electricity a utility.
In recent decades, the science of understanding the human mind has opened new fronts for User Experience Design. Relatively new domains of research, such as cognitive, social organizational, and quantitative psychology, as well as behavioral economics, are having a tremendous impact on Product Experience Design.
For example, the Hick-Hyman law, named after the psychologists William Hicks and Ray Hyman, helps designers analyze the effectiveness of their design from a decision-making perspective, and simplify the design if necessary. The law expresses in mathematical formula the fact that increasing the number of choices a person has, increases the time it takes the person to make a decision.
Designers often interpret this law to mean that a long decision-making process due to the availability of many choices, is a bad thing, and thus reduces the number of choices the user has.
Related to the Hicks-Hyman law is "The Paradox of Choice", a term coined by psychologist Barry Schwartz, to argue the point that too many choices offered to consumers actually increase consumer anxiety due to the difficulty of making the right choice among the various options. The psychological value of many choices is further diminished by post-purchase regret due to the sense that selecting a different option might have been a better decision.
As a simple thought experiment, imagine two ice cream stores at a remote train station, on a very hot day. A train stops for a 10 minute break, and all the passengers are lining up in front of the stores, eager for a cone of delicious cold ice cream. The first store offers only two ice cream flavors--chocolate and vanilla, served in a sugar cone. The other store offers 24 flavors of ice cream. Now, estimate your chance of getting ice cream at any of those stores before the train departs.
Clearly, the flow of customers at the first store will be much faster and efficient. If you can't choose between vanilla or chocolate, you can just take both. The decision-making process at the other store is much longer, as customers first take in all the available options, and struggle to decide which of their favorite flavors to select. In the meantime, the pressure to choose is high, because time is running out and there are many people still waiting behind.
As designers, the lesson from such an example is that in some cases, a very limited set of options is superior to many options.