Product analysis

Examine how the product performs; determine its strengths and weaknesses; turn the weaknesses into opportunities for improvement.

An analysis ties every observation to a consequence, so it changes what you would design next. A description only says what the product is like.

So the redesign can be shown to have improved it. "Tips at 4 kg placed 80 mm in" can be re-measured; "a bit unstable" cannot.

State it with a measurement, say what it costs the user, name the feature responsible, and write it as a testable requirement ready for a specification.

Users: what happens at the task. Manufacturers: what is expensive and where rejects come from. Engineers: what the design is limited by. Service: what breaks and what they refuse to fix. Retail: why it is bought or returned.

People give reasons and priorities but misreport their own behaviour; testing gives numbers against a stated condition but only for what you thought to measure. The strongest findings are where the two agree.

It is existing user research in quantity, written by people at the moment they decided the product had failed them — and it is already in the client's records.

They have adapted to the faults and report the product as acceptable, and the people who gave up — who hold the strongest finding — are absent.

Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the product and true now. Opportunities and threats are external and about what is coming.

Function, performance, usability, features and materials — tagging each entry with its lens stops the SWOT collapsing into four opinions.

It is the weakness written again. An opportunity is external — a market gap, a regulation, a supplier or a rival's absence — that the product could exploit.

Strength with opportunity gives what to push. Weakness with threat gives what to fix first. Those two pairs are the output, not the four lists.

Use it first; test it whole; dismantle in order; analyse the parts; infer the decisions. Each ends in recorded data rather than a photograph.

The usability baseline — how long a first-time user takes, where they stop, what they try — can only be measured on a working product, and it is gone once it is in pieces.

Minutes to open, the number and type of tools needed, and how many parts were destroyed getting in — comparable numbers that can be set against a rival or a redesign.

It is usually there for a reason you have not thought of — a standard, a patent route, a manufacturing constraint, an old failure. Removing it blindly reintroduces a solved problem.

Everybody good = a saturated row, nothing to win. One rival ahead = a gap to close. You ahead = a strength to protect. Everybody weak = the unmet need, and the real opportunity.

A column tells you which existing product is best, and copying it produces a fifth version of what exists. A row nobody has answered gives you something rivals cannot match by tuning.

Otherwise you compare test conditions rather than products. Figures from four manufacturers' websites compare four marketing departments.

A market usually converges on one answer, so every competitor shares the same blind spot. A watering can and a fuel can both pour one-handed and neither competes with a kettle.

The deliberate habit of refusing to accept that something which works is as good as it can be — and converting the irritation into a stated need somebody could design against.

What everybody accepts; what you notice anyway, with a measurement; the question you refuse to stop asking; and the finding stated as an unmet need.

Wheels and suitcases both existed for decades before anyone combined them. Nobody lacked the technology — everybody had accepted that a suitcase is a thing you carry.

"Needs a lighter kettle" chooses the answer before ideation. "Needs to fill and pour without lifting it" leaves several very different products possible.

Empathizing (where does the current product fail?), defining (what baseline must be beaten?), ideation (how do others solve this?), and evaluating (did the new design beat the old?).

A before-and-after comparison on the same measurements — so the final evaluation can show improvement rather than claim it.

It tells you what a redesign would have to give up as well as gain. The part you cannot explain is usually there for a standard, a patent or an old failure.

Competitors share the market's assumptions, including the wrong ones. The principle that solves your problem has usually been found somewhere it was not called the same thing.