This week, I’m on my holidays. A week lying about in the sun, trying to forget about engineering. But it turns out the systems mindset doesn’t go away that easily. So this isn’t a story about holidays but about raspberry mousse. Raspberry mousse and bottoms (trigger warning).
The hotel buffet isn’t at all bad, aside from the weighty temptation to subsist entirely on pizza and chips and some deceptive labeling, presumably aimed at improving the health of inattentive children:
So Hell and Tenerife have two things in common: vulcanism and brussels sprouts for breakfast.
This aside, there’s one thing that causes me mental strife: the raspberry mousse. It comes in individual portions, delightfully glazed in glittery mirror finish, and is delicious. But the first I encountered it was watching my daughter carrying one on a plate back to our table. As she approached, this is the aspect I was afforded:
Unappetising. Of course, my fears were dispelled the moment she put the plate down so I could see the full shape of the casting:
Much better. But it just goes to show that one man’s romantic symbolism is another man’s cleft. This must be born in mind always when developing products, especially those for use in any setting which you as an engineer cannot possibly claim to fully understand.
We’ve all driven cars. If you design a car, you have a good idea what the average buyer wants down to a fine level of detail, because you already represent the target market. Other markets, you might not perfectly represent but can probably get by on empathy to a reasonable depth – Fast Moving Consumer Goods, for example, is a market I have at times hated serving, with a fair proportion of what is produced seeming to me to be wasteful tat. But for each loathsome single-use unwanted gift I’ve worked on, I can at least still understand why people would want it and what they will and won’t like about it – the products are straightforward and the lifestyles of the market sufficiently relatable.
Medical use is a different kettle of fish. As an engineer engaged on a career full of perhaps years-long development projects whose deadline panics are predictable and last weeks or months, can you genuinely and deeply understand the needs and outlook of a surgical scrub nurse whose work consists of innovating around repeated sets of actions, and whose average project length might be 45 minutes with potential escalation always on the cards? How about the lifestyle of an ageing patient, their abilities, their anxieties, their motivation?
The lesson here is never, ever, at any level, to tell your users what they want, except to reflect back to them what they have already told you in consultation. Everything needs to be researched, from what the device does down to details like how each element of the UI is positioned. How is it purchased, managed and disposed of, and do different geographies or economic models handle things in different ways? How will it need to be serviced? Assume your customer has a completely different perspective. What you see as a thing of beauty and elegance may look to them like a bulbous, red, glittery bum.
To paraphrase a leading surgeon addressing robotics engineers at the Hamlyn Symposium a few years ago, “Innovate! We need your advances, but you have to fit into our workflow – get the device out of our way”. This is born out by experience - being told by a surgeon, when first holding a carefully designed piece of equipment, that we’d missed an apparently minor detail so badly that “I’d just drop this on the floor and do it the old way”. Medical professionals are justifiably impatient, as time is often their key resource. If a product doesn’t fit in, it will get used exactly once. Then people will stop buying it pretty quickly.
This is all pretty standard stuff, but I want to distill this attitude into the Systems view: your product (or, indeed, your entire company) presents interfaces to the medical industry in many directions, and none of them should be butt-shaped. If any view needs to be even a little rear-end-like, you need to make a conscious decision to choose the best compromise and not just let things slide in the easiest places. And always look to degrade something inward-facing first. If your product can present a buttlike aspect to your manufacturing operation, better than to the sterilization technician who has to clean it. If it can loom like a nether hinge over your service department, better than over a hospital’s purchasing or medical physics department. Of course, all this is limited in the end by economics and, I suppose, can be ignored if your technology is world-changing despite being a pig to live with – you’ve got to take it all as a whole and end up with something that makes sense as a sustainable business. But given any choice it is far less risky to keep your backside pointing inwards and your friendly face pointing outwards – I mean, how else should you face the world? One of Systems Engineering’s key functions in product development is to ensure your grottier interfaces are pointed in the least harmful directions.
And so back to lunch. My next of several visits to the dessert counter revealed that the heart-shaped raspberry mousses were almost all gone. Except for one tray of them, which seemed to have attracted less custom, thought I couldn’t say why.
