Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Fast Talk: Apple in Their Eyes (14 Jun 2005) In the first 15 years of my career as a designer, many clients would come in with an idea already set and then ask me to make it pretty. The trouble is, their ideas were based on research from competitors' products or trends. It's very difficult to make a completely different product that way. You'll end up with more of the same. That's what happened with iRiver's first hard-drive player. It was based on an engineering spec, and we didn't have as much freedom with the design. So with the H10, its successor, I felt we had to start from scratch. We obviously couldn't ignore our biggest competitor, the Apple iPod, whose design is so popular. But we wanted to do something different. With the iPod's click wheel, I noticed lots of people using only one-quarter of the turn with the thumb. So I thought, if that's all they need, why not make it just go straight up and down? That idea -- that a vertical touch pad might make more sense -- came from just watching people at coffee shops. Industrial design has become one of the few cards manufacturers can play these days. It's especially true for MP3 players, because the technology processes have become commoditized. At the end of the day, users will buy what they feel attached to, what they're happy with, what they can show off as part of their identity. Design is no longer an easy process that comes at the end. It's a matter of life and death, so it should come first. Article URL: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/fast-talk.html Read 41 more articles from Fast Company sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Fast-track your Web apps with Ruby on Rails     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy