Of course it’s important to listen to consumers, because they can very clearly tell you whether or not they’re satisfied with what you have to offer, as Netflix recently learned. But consumers are rarely able to envision improvements that have yet to be invented because they base their suggestions on what they know.

The designs of the most successful consumer electronics, automobiles, household appliances, and many other products are based on observations about the way we live—what we do rather than what we say.  This approach is much more informative than organizing focus groups, because despite their best efforts most consumers are ill-equipped even to accurately describe the status quo. If asked to describe how they perform a certain task, most people will relate an idealized version of the process, omitting details that they consider trivial, irrelevant, or unflattering. But through direct observation, design researchers can discover how a process actually works (or doesn’t).

When Proctor & Gamble wanted to explore the future of floor cleaners, the company asked the Boston design firm Continuum to investigate, and a team of design researchers arranged to watch people mop floors. What they discovered was surprising: They found that people were spending more time taking care of the mop—rinsing it, wringing it out, and storing it—than they spent mopping the floor.

The researchers began to wonder, How can that time be shifted away from the mop? It wasn’t just a mathematical question; it was a question of asking, What form will drive people to a different behavior? They decided that the mop head shouldn’t be precious, something that needs care. At the same time, they concluded that most household dirt is dust, which can be removed without water.

The designers’ solution was a lightweight mop with disposable dust cloths shaped to trap particles of dirt. Proctor & Gamble called its new product Swiffer, and later reported first-year sales of $200 million. Some consumers reported that their children liked to play with it.

Had Proctor & Gamble polled a focus group, it’s unimaginable that consumers would have asked for lightweight, waterless, disposable dust cloths that their children would like to use. They might have said that they hated the mess of mopping, or disliked bending over, but I’d be surprised if anyone said, “I hate to clean the mop,” because they probably would have viewed that as self-evident or irrelevant. They might have thought that cleaning the mop is just something that has to be done.

Recently we visited bond traders for a client who produces business software. The client believed that one of their products could use some updating, but felt that overall the product was doing what people wanted it to do.  After all – customers were renewing their licenses annually.  When we visited with traders and looked over their shoulders we found that an important part of the client’s product had been replaced on the traders’ screens by free, less robust Web applications.  We asked the traders why they weren’t using the client’s product – a tool far superior to the free apps and already paid for by their employer – and they told us that they didn’t know the client’s product could display this information. But when we showed them the feature they had missed and watched them use our client’s product, we discovered that the data was presented in a format that wasn’t useful to them. As we stood there watching, the traders started up those free apps.

Only when a problem is identified is it possible to design solutions, and only through close examination of the human requirements can we gain the insight to remedy the most persistent flaws in our everyday business tools.  If we can eliminate some of the drudgery that plagues these systems, we can reduce the time people spend wrestling with these tools and apply that time to the fulfillment of business goals and the pursuit of innovation.

Most people can’t imagine how much better our business software could be. It’s so much work to operate these systems that it doesn’t occur to people to ask for them to become a pleasure.

Steve Jobs didn’t ask people how he might make computers more convenient or more fun to use. He asked himself those questions—just like a fellow visionary who transformed our popular culture by revolutionizing another industry more than a hundred years ago. It was Henry Ford who said, “If we’d asked them what they wanted, they’d have asked for faster horses.”

A hundred years from now people will be quoting Steve Jobs in the same way that we quote Henry Ford—and by then maybe everyone will appreciate just how right they were.

Read about what Henry Ford’s horseless carriage can teach us about our electronic business tools.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).

Every day, good ideas percolate around the water coolers and coffee machines of the business world, but even in companies where collaboration and innovation are core values, the process of pushing a good idea through a corporate bureaucracy can be tantamount to passing legislation.

What if there were an efficient way to routinely test new ideas, measure their effect on the bottom line, and reward innovation? As it happens, there is.

One of my company’s clients, a European bank, recognized that its overseas workforce represented untapped potential. Its largest office in India employs 700 men and women who are highly educated—every one of them has earned at least one master’s degree. Their job is to balance the books each day at the close of trading from Hong Kong to Frankfurt to New York, and each person sits at a work station to carry out an assortment of very specific tasks of reconciliation. These activities have a predictable sequence, but they also have many variations, according to the kind of financial instrument and the nature of the trade.

The software the workers were using to perform these tasks assumed that every act of reconciliation required steps A through F. But many workers knew that in some cases step B would be redundant and E would be irrelevant, and some of them had developed shortcuts and workarounds to circumvent standard operating procedure.

The company’s own software system provided a perfect opportunity to capture this knowledge, so we designed a way to build social networking into the system. We designed a chat room for everyone who has a similar work queue so that anyone who has an idea can record and share it. We also designed a way to track alternative work processes, monitor their performance, and compare them with recommended methods in terms of their efficiency and effectiveness.  Now, when a new idea proves to be effective, the person who proposed it is recognized and rewarded.

Tapping into the workarounds and rewarding creativity created a new culture among the workforce. Instead of reflexively following the sequence mandated by the software—Check this box and this box and this box—they began to think, Gee, I should think differently about this, because it can directly affect my life. I could take home more money; I could gain more respect from my peers if they see me excel; I might be promoted. Who knows what could happen? And the frustration level of those who once wondered, Why are we doing it this way? has plummeted.

This networking system was designed in the U.S., built in Europe, and deployed in Asia, but the concept has no boundaries, because good ideas can surface anywhere—if only they’re given a chance.

Read more about how to stimulate innovation by considering the human context.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).

Most people can easily describe everything they want from their business systems. The hard part is figuring out what’s needed.

Many Fortune 500 companies have compiled rigorous lists of requirements for new technology only to discover that every technical requirement has been fulfilled in a form that’s incompatible with the skills and routines of their workforce. Other firms conscientiously try to learn what the users want, only to find that some of the features implemented at their request are counterproductive.

Imagine that you’re gathering the requirements for a 911 command center to be used by dispatchers who are seated at terminals to monitor multiple radio channels. The basic requirements might seem obvious: an intuitive interface with absolute clarity that enables dispatchers to direct the right resources to the right locations in a matter of seconds. These were the priorities of a legacy system that my company was asked to evaluate.

My clients were leading providers of mission-critical communications systems who had become the owners of an aging 911 desktop system. They asked us to evaluate it, so our design researchers visited five urban and suburban locations to observe the system in use. What they saw was troubling.

The interface was essentially an interactive directory packed with information, but the display was poorly organized and difficult to decipher. Some of the symbols were cryptic, and every communications module was given equal prominence, with no visual distinction between active radio channels and dormant sources. Oddly, some dispatchers were working with displays that looked somewhat different from those on other terminals.

We learned that at one point dispatchers had been asked to suggest how to make the system more user-friendly. Some wanted to be able to drag and reposition communication modules throughout the screen, so the system had been configured to allow the display to be reorganized and even personalized. Randomly dispersed among dozens of buttons and tabs for communicating with police, fire, energy companies,  and medical rescue units were photos of family members, pets, and—on one screen—an animation of a Christmas tree with flashing lights, insistently demanding attention.

What was needed was clearer communication by the interface and a new interpretation of how it could best serve the users. Our solution was in direct opposition to what the dispatchers wanted: Rather than giving them an option to customize the display, we designed a format that conformed to the workflow and stabilized the position of each unit in a fixed grid. We also changed the behavior of the system by designing it to reflect priorities and to communicate the availability of each resource: Radio modules expand as they become active, and inactive functions automatically contract.  Red, yellow, and green color-coding signals the status of each transmission. Cryptic icons were replaced with intuitive symbols for police, fire, and medical assistance. The result is a system that continuously speaks to dispatchers about the availability of each resource, with elements of the screen expanding, contracting, and changing color as their status changes so that the entire workload is visible at a glance.

What some of the users wanted—a system that could be individually customized, with familiar faces to ease the tension of a stressful job—had become a source of potential confusion. The new design doesn’t give dispatchers what they wanted, but by communicating with them more clearly it makes their jobs easier because it gives them more of what they need.

A demonstration of Electronic Ink’s design for a  911 Command Center Radio Control Application is on view at the Museum of Modern Art until November 7 in an exhibition called  “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects, ” which the New York Times has called “one of the smartest design shows in years.”

Read about how to evaluate the performance of business systems through direct observation.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).

The sleek business systems that we use to manage data and generate information look nothing like the massive manufacturing machines of the Industrial Revolution, but they have a lot in common.

Too many of our electronic business systems are engineered on the assumption that once the software has been programmed to fulfill its functions, its human users will do what’s necessary to learn to operate it. These systems dictate the sequence in which tasks must be performed without sending clear signals that could prevent confusion, and they punish errors. Even so, like the industrial looms introduced in the eighteenth century, they represent a triumph of technology, and workers are expected to adapt.

To advance to the next stage of the Digital Revolution—a more efficient, more profitable, and more humane business environment—we must reshape our electronic tools to respond more sensitively to our needs and to better complement our strengths. We can train our workforce to adapt to almost any process, no matter how uncomfortable, but a major adjustment in our relationship with our electronic business systems is long overdue.

We need to ask these systems to become better business partners. We need to insist that they meet us more than halfway—by more accurately anticipating our needs, by communicating more clearly, by organizing data into meaningful relationships, by preserving traditional work processes that have value, and by gracefully helping us to recover from the mistakes that we will inevitably make.

Our efforts to become the masters of our own electronic business tools have become a prolonged apprenticeship that has continued for more than a generation through no fault of our own as we grapple with one clumsy system after another. The persistence of extended training programs for business software is a symptom of a fundamental flaw, a reliable indicator of systems that don’t communicate clearly.

When software is designed to convert data to information that we can instantly grasp, it enables us to shift our focus from the tool to the task—freeing us to think beyond our immediate goals, to consider new possibilities, and to create innovations.

The textile workers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries weren’t encouraged to think for themselves, and manipulating the machinery required their full attention. Though they labored side by side, they worked essentially in isolation, and we can only imagine their frustration and stress.

We’ve come a long way since the Industrial Revolution, but we still have far to go.

Read about how business software can be designed to communicate more clearly.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).

Personal habits are one thing, but how can you persuade people to abandon an inefficient business procedure when they’d much rather keep doing things the same old way? If we all truly believed that change is good, an entire galaxy of change-management tools would vaporize, together with their attending gurus. But everyone knows that change is risky.

Yet it’s entirely possible to persuade people to form new habits without even calling much attention to the process. I was reminded of this over the weekend as I moved through a check-out lane at a mammoth hardware store. A few years ago, who knew that today we’d be using self-service technology to scan our purchases? What can those self-service checkout systems teach us about other business systems?

Developers of software systems often attempt to “revolutionize” business processes by abandoning the familiar, fully functional language and organization of existing work processes. Often the message seems to be, “Effective tomorrow, forget everything you’ve learned about this business and start doing things differently.”

Imagine that self-service checkout systems were intended to revolutionize our shopping experience by changing every part of the process—by eliminating cash registers, directing us to “Procurement Points” at the opposite end of the store, and asking us to input an SKU number for each purchase instead of scanning a label. Change-management experts would counsel, “We’ll provide training by posting signs at each Procurement Point to show customers how to locate the SKU on a package.” Instead, savvy retailers have gradually introduced self-service checkout aisles that parallel existing lanes, and no one needs a manual to master the new systems. Ironically, a sign of their increasing acceptance is that each time I visit the hardware store I notice that the lines in the self-service aisles have grown a little longer.

Many new electronic business systems have built-in workflows that are different, and more efficient, than existing processes. When automated workflows make sense and are clearly communicated, people will follow the new paths, especially if the system preserves appropriate aspects of their past experience. But these new paths represent a journey, one that will require clear signposts.

Just as those who use automated business systems on a daily basis are creatures of habit, so are the developers who create these systems. During the last few decades this young industry has developed a tradition of conceiving, developing, and manufacturing its products in certain ways, not one of which routinely specifies concern for the ultimate users from the beginning to the end of the process.

What’s missing from standard software development is the traditional design process that analyzes, measures, and validates products in order to arrive at an understanding of how the products will perform in the hands of the men and women who use them. Yet these electronic products continue to sell, even some that are essentially unusable, so developers have little incentive to modify their standard methodology.

We’ve learned to expect that any new software system will require a training budget and a period of adjustment, and we’re no longer surprised when the period of adjustment becomes painfully prolonged. The business community has come to accept it as part of the cost of doing business. And that’s an expensive habit.

Read more about what’s missing from the standard software development process.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).

It’s not quite accurate to call the objects in this exhibit inanimate—many of them are shape-shifting digital devices that pulse, glow, and speak English. “Talk to Me” shows how designers are using light, sound, and touch screen technology to create new forms of communication that entertain, educate, and inspire us.

In their introduction to the exhibition, the curators point out that good designers transform new technology into objects that anyone can use. As these objects give us access to complex systems and networks, they talk to us, and when the initial script is created by designers, the communication is effective and even elegant.

Design is such a subtle influence that when it’s well executed, its presence may be invisible. We’re more likely to notice its absence, when we find ourselves facing a kiosk that grudgingly dispenses train tickets or parking permits from behind a bewildering array of buttons, or when we’re stumped by a software program’s confusing displays and commands. The difference between a device that stops us in our tracks and one that speeds us on our way isn’t just a matter of technology but also design. It’s a question of how clearly information is communicated.

MoMA is exploring this subject by gathering together a rich diversity of objects designed to communicate by means of their forms, materials, and structures. Some are prototypes, such as an illuminated prayer rug embroidered with electroluminescent wire and equipped with a compass module that causes its patterns to brighten as the mat is turned in the direction of Mecca. Other exhibits have already been adopted as our daily companions—interactive games, toys, and virtual pets.

Many objects chosen for the exhibition serve public needs, such as JetBlue’s kiosks for self-service check-in, a MetroCard vending machine—and, I’m proud to add, a radio command center for 911 systems developed by Electronic Ink for use by police dispatchers.

As a reminder that simple, two-dimensional designs also can speak to us forcefully, MoMA includes a collection of graffiti tags from New York and Paris and an old-fashioned date stamp that prints emoticons.

“Talk to Me” is a provocative discussion of how design shapes our everyday experience, and I’d be talking about some of the good designs featured here even if none of them were mine.

Read more about Electronic Ink’s design for a 911 system in an article by business columnist Joseph N. DiStefano of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

View a three-minute video of the Electronic Ink design featured in MoMA’s exhibition, “Talk to Me.”

“Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects,” organized by a team led by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design, is on view from July 24 to November 7 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St., New York.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).

Last spring a company that supplies food services to millions of people around the world mentioned to our team that they were interested in taking a closer look at one of their operations in Philadelphia, at the ball park that’s the home of the Phillies.

Citizens Bank Park has 43,637 seats, and last season the stadium was filled to 103.5 percent of capacity, leading national league attendance with a total of 3,647,249. That’s a lot of hot dogs—but receipts from food concessions weren’t corresponding with the surge at the box office, and the company wondered whether its point-of-purchase terminals should be redesigned to process sales more quickly. My company offered to investigate.

As a first step to evaluate the technology we needed to see it in use, so five of our designers and design researchers headed for the ball park to observe the concession stands during a game and gather data on how well the point-of-purchase terminals were performing. Our researchers quickly determined that the terminals were operating smoothly and efficiently, and they saw very few lines of customers waiting to pay for their orders. But the company’s suspicion that there might be a problem was correct: There was a big bottleneck. However, contrary to the company’s expectations, the bottleneck wasn’t at the end of the transaction. It was at the very beginning.

To place their orders, customers lined up in front of ordering stations. Our researchers saw as many as nineteen people standing in each of these lines—seldom more, because as the lines snaked out from the concessions in random patterns, the twentieth person would be bumped out of line by the heavy crowds flowing around the concourse. And despite a multitude of workers behind the counters ready to take orders, the lines moved slowly. The reason was simple: The menu displays were so poorly designed that only the first few people in line could decipher them, and by the time customers reached the head of the line, many of them needed more time to decide or felt so confused that they began ordering things that came to mind rather than items listed on the menu. Workers on the other side of the counters were under so much time pressure to take orders that they were rushing their customers and causing further confusion.

Any technology is only as effective as the form in which it’s presented and the context in which it’s delivered, especially the human context. That’s why raw metrics seldom tell the whole story.

Making a meaningful design analysis of any product that’s used by human beings requires research techniques that consider both the product and the people who use it: direct observation followed by analysis, proposals for alternatives, and a process of evaluation to test those alternatives among a representative group of men and women. Often a design analysis of a business system will reveal that what appears to be a technical deficiency is a human problem, one that can be remedied with low-tech solutions as basic as redesigning a two-dimensional graphic display and establishing an arrangement of orderly queues to channel customers to their destination.

What the data can tell us about a business problem is immensely valuable. But when we understand how technology performs in the highly volatile environment of a public arena, it’s a whole new ball game.

Read more about how design research can solve business problems.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).

“When was the system installed?” I ask. The doctor—let’s call him Dr. Jones—quickly responds with an unusually specific answer: “July 10th, 2010.”

Our lives are marked by dates we’ll never forget—a marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a parent. This physician has another landmark date: the launch of the system that would change the way he practices medicine.

Should have known from the start

Beginning on July 10, 2010, and throughout the next two weeks, there was something about the new system that just didn’t seem right: That something was an EPIC employee who followed the doctor around every minute of every workday, coaching him on the use of the new system. Dr. Jones thought that this seemed a bit extreme and likely not a cost-effective way to deploy a product, but he wondered if perhaps his instincts were wrong and this was just the way that things were done in the newest era of computerization. Looking back, this oddity was fully indicative of the new normal—a system so difficult to use that it would require more than the physician’s own hands and mind to operate it successfully.

The whole patient – The whole record

Dr. Jones recognizes the value of a single patient record shared across the whole of the health network. Unfortunately, interacting with the electronic system he’s been given is so awkward that when he examines a patient, he can only concentrate on the here and now of the encounter by recording the current data. Accessing and reviewing all the available historical information—the patient’s full medical record—is just too difficult because of the way the data is organized.

Before the electronic system was installed, Dr. Jones had available a copy of his patient’s paper chart, a set of documents that could contain eight or more years of information. He would begin an exam by thumbing through that collection of papers, looking for trends and utilizing his professional experience to quickly familiarize himself with the data patterns in his notations that describe this patient’s path to this moment. He would then bring to the exam a solid, informed historical perspective. In the EPIC system, information for each patient is scattered across multiple screens, and it’s not possible to quickly navigate among them to obtain a summary. With this system Dr. Jones can only hope that he has some recollection of the patient’s previous visit—for example, a finding of an elevated cholesterol count—but he has no expectation of being able to view the patient’s electronic historical record without an expensive, time-consuming effort. The alternative which Dr. Jones and many of his colleagues have adopted is to print out the paper records which comprise ten or fifteen pages for each patient.

This physician also is frustrated by the fact that the electronic system restricts the ways in which he adds data to the patient record. Data entry is quite possibly his most difficult challenge. The notes that he can input must be minimal and by their nature they’re cryptic—not nearly as rich as the notations that are possible within a paper-based system. He knows that other doctors feel the same way, and he knows that their notations are usually less informative and even more enigmatic than his own.

A hired hand

Verifying new notations as they’re added to the patient’s record presents another challenge. How can a doctor complete all the required fields in an electronic system’s displays during a patient visit and make sure that his notes are accurate and the chart is closed properly after a final review? Increasingly, the answer is to delegate. Like many of his colleagues, Dr. Jones employs two assistants whose job description didn’t exist until recently: medical scribe.

A medical scribe’s job is to follow a doctor into every exam room and input all the data that the doctor directs the scribe to enter into the electronic system. For Dr. Jones, this process of dictation goes on all day, for each of the 60 or 70 patients he sees each day. Unfortunately, this is not the end of his work with the system. At the end of every exam, or at the end of the day, he needs to close each of the open files on the system by reviewing the scribe’s work, certifying that all the information is correct, and finally hitting the “Close” button on the display of each record.

To review each patient record takes a doctor three or more minutes to complete. This can add up to several hours of additional work to be carried out during the day—or on the weekend. For many physicians, this extra time commitment is unacceptable. Something has to give. Like other workers, physicians are figuring out how to deal with the system in a way that serves their best interests, and their solution is anything but desirable to the business concerns of their hospitals.

Business is bombing

For many physicians, the EPIC system has added an extra person to the exam room. I’ll leave it to the social scientists to tell us how this might affect the confidential nature of the patient-doctor dialogue. From a business perspective though, the impact is clear.

These doctors are salaried professionals who are paid a specific amount of money for their full-time work in their practices. The two scribes hired by Dr. Jones are a direct cost to his practice—he is paying their salaries out of his pocket at a cost of about $50,000 so that he can continue to see the same number of patients as before.
Doctors in practices adjacent to his in the building we visited have a different approach. Because their lifestyles require their entire paychecks, these individuals are not willing to pay for scribes, and because they value their time with their families, they’re not willing to work the many extra hours the system requires of them. They are simply seeing fewer patients.

For patients, this means longer waits to receive care. For the hospital, a reduced appointment schedule means fewer reimbursement dollars.

The advances in the practice of medicine that will be made possible by electronic record-keeping will one day be truly epic, but at this early stage the technology is a work in progress that requires a much more thorough examination of its human requirements.

Read about how the form of medical chart can influence the course of treatment.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).

The widget manufacturers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a pretty good idea of how well their products fit an existing need and how well they were performing, because if their widgets weren’t quite right, they heard about it from their customers. A widget-maker’s brand was identical to the quality of his product, and he didn’t need a focus group to tell him how it was perceived.

But as smokestack industries evolved into World Wide Widget companies, relationships between manufacturers and their customers became impersonal and indistinct. As the physical distance between the two groups has widened, the personal contacts that once provided a conduit for the steady flow of information about the strengths and weaknesses of a product have been replaced by research techniques such as customer surveys, interviews, focus groups, proxies, and personas. At the same time, the distinction between customer and user has become blurred, especially among buyers of software products—typically, CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, and other executives—and the larger groups of men and women who use the products on a daily basis. When a software manufacturer focuses its customer-satisfaction surveys or usability testing on buyers rather than users, the communications gap expands and the confusion is compounded.

Just as the identity of customers for business systems has become unclear, the identity of the products themselves has become ambiguous. Manufacturers of electronic business tools such as off-the-shelf software and cloud-based systems commonly market their products as services. Because the physical presence of these products can seem ephemeral, it’s easy to forget that these marvels of technology are just a new form of manufactured goods—machine-made products that are engineered, built, marketed, and sold. Yet unlike Industrial-Age consumer goods, the newest products of business technology can be difficult for customers to compare, and two systems with similar functions and features may be structured in ways that provide very different experiences to the people who use them.

The most visible part of a software product is its package—the way in which graphics are used to enhance its appearance onscreen—so it’s easy to confuse the packaging of these electronic products with the products themselves. That’s why so many companies try to improve an underperforming portal by amping up its graphic design, mistakenly thinking of the “user interface design” as the colors, graphics, and letterforms that make up the display rather than the experience one has with the system.

Package design has a long and honorable commercial history, but it’s not the same as product design. Throughout the 20th century, packaging became increasingly important as a marketing tool for a wide range of products, including nearly every mobile phone, every bottle of perfume, and every box of cereal. Today so much attention is lavished upon package design that it’s often confused with product design, the content and structure of the product itself. The confusion is greatest when the product is electronic.

In the technology domain it’s become an unavoidable cliché to cite the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad as exceptional examples of a great product in a great package—imaginative, beautifully engineered products packaged in innovative, interactive shells. If only our electronic business systems were so thoughtfully organized and so cleverly packaged! Instead it’s more common to see a system with a convoluted navigational structure and obscure vocabulary overlaid with colorful graphics.

Old-school manufacturers knew that what counted most about a product was the user’s ultimate experience of ownership. When Motorola, Westinghouse, and Zenith began producing tabletop radios with shiny, candy-colored casings made of a new plastic called Bakelite in the 1930s, they recognized that as innovative as the new plastic was, most people really didn’t want to know about the molecular structure of the casing or the internal workings of the radios—they just liked the way they looked and the way they worked. If the colorful casings had been wrapped around shoddy products with confusing controls, the new models wouldn’t have succeeded for long. Their manufacturers recognized that producing an inferior product, no matter how attractively packaged, wasn’t a viable business strategy for the long term. But when the companies made their reliable old products look more attractive, the experience of owning them became even more satisfying.

Industrial-Age manufacturers could easily identify the owners of their products, evaluate their experiences with those products, and respond accordingly. But the owners of electronic business systems are typically not the people who use those products, and software manufacturers need to be honest with themselves about whose voice will matter most in the long term.

Our industrial ancestors never forgot the difference between how a product looked and how it worked. The women of my grandmother’s generation had a saying: “Handsome is as handsome does.” Because in those days it was common knowledge that beauty is only skin deep.

Read about what can make data beautiful.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).

Fine-tuning the design of business software is commonly treated as a troubleshooting issue that’s addressed after a system is deployed, a procedure typically undertaken by technologists working with business analysts, experts in the business domain at which the software tool is targeted. This process is often thought to be an activity that requires no specialized training in design, one that can be performed by any capable technologist collaborating with someone knowledgeable of the business.

In fact, this is exactly how most business software is designed—by technologists and business analysts who have no training in design. That’s why so many of our brilliantly engineered business systems are nearly impossible to use. (Full disclosure: I was trained as a designer at Carnegie Mellon, and this is what I do. But please bear with me.)

Even our most sophisticated business systems are the products of a relatively young industry that’s still in the adolescent stage of defining itself and developing all the skills that will be needed in order to fully mature.

Owners of small, young companies typically wear many hats until they have the resources to recruit additional expertise. Like startup companies, industries and professions also evolve into groups of experts with closely defined job descriptions. In the building trades, it was once common for carpenters to lay bricks, install plumbing, and hook up the electricity. In the early years of automobile manufacturing, little distinction was made between engineering and design—that’s why the Model T had a hand crank that was such a nuisance. But as automotive design became a specialty, automobiles became easier to operate and a lot more fun. In medicine, a profession in which at one time every physician was a general practitioner, we now also recognize the expertise of epidemiologists, pediatric surgeons, hospitalists, and many more specialists who bring an understanding of the human context to traditional methods of diagnosis and treatment.

I would argue that the software development industry is still at a stage comparable to a young, energetic business that cultivates within its ranks an entrepreneurial spirit, a willingness to pitch in to do whatever is needed to get the job done, and a self-confidence that sometimes blinds it to its own limitations. Working within the industry are multitudes of talented information architects, application developers, data modelers, and many other specialists, including thousands of professionals who hold the title of User Experience Designer or Web Designer. But many of these so-called designers are technologists, business experts and usability professionals who are being asked to do the work of designers.

Many members of the software development industry have yet to recognize that creating a connection between a product and a person isn’t something that just anyone can do—that design is a profession built upon long-established methods of solving problems for human beings. Designing a product that works well in the hands of its users is a job for professionals who are trained to diagnose human problems, identify human needs, and translate an accurate definition of those needs into a satisfying form, whether the product is an enterprise system or an SUV.

It’s true that some of the research methods used by designers—direct observation, interviews, and language-assessment tests—are widely practiced within many professions, and these techniques are taught in executive process-management seminars that have become a growing business in themselves. So couldn’t your technologists or business analysts learn to perform a contextual analysis of your business processes, perhaps organize a card-sorting exercise to assess the suitability of language in your software system, and estimate the potential impact upon productivity of proposed modifications? Maybe—but would that be the best use of their time? And how precise would the results be? You are likely to build a rich body of data representing what the business is doing and what functions a system may need to deliver. Unfortunately, what will be lost will be an opportunity to gain an understanding of why the business is behaving the way it is – knowledge that is the catalyst for innovation.

Whenever resources are available, it’s much better to work with someone who has specialized expertise. Professional training is no guarantee of excellence, but it can make a big difference in the performance of any job, no matter how small. Anyone with a pair of scissors can give you a haircut, and you could even learn to do it yourself—but when it’s time for a trim, where do you turn? I’m betting that you make an appointment with a professional. The design of a business system deserves no less.

Read about how to evaluate a designer or design consultant.

Harold Hambrose is the founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, an international design consultancy specializing in business systems, and the author of Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate (John Wiley & Sons).