The desire to upgrade
There are so many different products that we fill our lives with. From the physical objects we keep in our homes to the software we use on our devices, we are constantly interacting with made things. Some of these we love, others we hate and most we never even notice.
Regardless of the eventual experience we have with a product, we choose to bring these things into our lives for a reason.
The specific value we get from any given product is unique to that product category and use case, but there is something more universal we seek from every product we buy no matter what it is.
When we purchase a new product, we’re seeking to upgrade some experience in our lives. Whether it be a dissatisfaction with what we have, a desire to have what others have or the allure of some shiny new object, we actively seek things out to improve some aspect of our lives.1
Product designers can learn a lot when they take this insight and apply it through the lens of product desire. To understand this more concept more specifically, we have to explore the different types of upgrades that a product may give to people.2
Types of upgrades
There are three distinct ways in which an individual product can upgrade our experiences: Performance, Emotional and Social.
Performance upgrades
We purchase some products to help us do things we care about more productively.
There are many variants of performance upgrades that people desire:
Goal attainment: Products that help people achieve their goals with increased frequency, accuracy and precision.
Efficiency gains: Products that help people achieve their goals with less resources (i.e. money, time, energy).
Reduced interaction costs: Products that make an experience feel more convenient and simple.
Money making and saving: Products that increase a persons earning potential or helps them save money.
Information: Products that improve the probability of making smarter decisions with more + better information, as well as improved analysis.
Reduced real & perceived risk: Products that improve our confidence and peace of mind.
Emotional upgrades
Emotions are our internal responses to the happenings of the world around us and within us. As we navigate our daily lives, we are continuously experiencing a range of emotions that impact what we do and how we think.
When we interact with a product, we have no choice but to experience an emotional response. Products that deliver emotional upgrades make us feel a way that we enjoy feeling.3
Some examples of emotional upgrades include:
Entertainment: Products that provide entertainment value. We love spending time doing things and observing things that we find enjoyable.
Pleasure: Products that make us feel really good in the micro-moments of usage. Using a Theragun for muscle recovery is an extremely pleasurable experience for people that might be sore after an intense workout.
Excitement: Products that offer an increased level of emotional intensity during usage.
Emotional wellness: Products that elevate our sense of wellbeing and overall health.
Social upgrades
Many of our experiences are shaped by the relationships we forge with others and the communities we plug ourselves into. Products that facilitate, enable and augment our social interactions are highly desirable for that reason.
Some examples of social upgrades include:
Building relationships and community: Products that help people become a part of something bigger themselves and build connections.
Signaling: Products that help us elevate our social status in a community we care about. We do this to convey wealth, health, intelligence and other virtuous things that we believe others will value in us.4
Acknowledgement from others: Products that give people reward and recognition for something they care about.
The role of design
Every new product idea is a proposed theory for change, some of which will stick and the rest of which will fall flat.
If people purchase things to improve some aspect of their lives, then the fundamental aim of product design is to create quality products that meaningfully upgrade an existing user experience. It’s the attempt of the designer to contribute something of value in order to improve the way people live and work.5
From this perspective, design is not just about appearance. It's also about function, value and progress.
“To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
- Herbert Simon
Successful product design requires an ability to observe imperfections in the way things are and the capacity to create solutions for progress. Without the gap that exists between what we have and what we want, the need for design would be absent.6
Design opportunity emerges from these observed imperfections in our lives. A big part of making something better is first realizing that it can be made better. Everything that is designed, from computers to cameras to digital apps, contains failures, limitations and flaws that create an opening for new and improved design.7
When we look back to the things we’ve had and reflect on the things we have, it’s possible to concretely imagine and build the next appropriate evolution of those things. The old is continuously being replaced by the new, sometimes gradually and other times more suddenly.8
Our newest ideas will resolve many of the failures from previous iterations, though they will also likely come with their own existing and eventual failures, creating an endless cycle.9
“I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.”
- Kevin Kelley
Since everything that is designed contains imperfections, everything is subject to change over time.
Closing note
We all encounter the products of design in every minute of every day. That constant presence of designed things has a large influence on our perspectives and behaviors.
When we create something new, we’re asking people to throw out their current way of doing things for a promise of a better way. The aim of design and the promise of designers is to turn good ideas into useful things that upgrade people’s lives in ways both big and small.
These are the three primary sources of product desire
While the desire to upgrade our lives through the products we purchase is universal, the underlying motivations influencing those purchasing decisions are not. People have different motivations for buying the specific things they do. A car lover may purchase a Mercedes because of how it drives, whereas a non-car fanatic may purchase that same vehicle to signal wealth and build status in a community they care about.
Critically, products that make us feel good does not necessarily mean that they have to make us feel happy. The type of emotional upgrade we get from products just has to be something that we enjoy experiencing. A great example of this distinction is the content we consume on streaming platforms. We can use products like HBO Max to watch movies that make us feel happy, but we can also see movies that make us feel sad or mad while still being enjoyable to watch.
The luxury goods industry is largely based on this human desire to be positively perceived by others. A Chanel purse doesn’t hold personal items any better than a purse you can get for $40. However, someone buying a Chanel purse is not buying a personal items holder.
The type of design contributions I’m describing could literally be anything, big or small. From the creation of a transformative industry changing product to adjusting the placement of a button on an interface, a designer's contribution can be made in almost any way.
The underlying reasons for these flaws are wide ranging. It could be because of limitations in technology, imperfections in design, functionality that’s entirely absent or a whole host of other things that we might want but don’t have.
As product creators, it’s imperative to develop this ability to continuously evaluate things so you can identify their inefficiencies and open the door to opportunities to make them better. It’s not uncommon for us to adapt to the limitations of the things in our world and accept them as the way things are. We become habituated to our environments and in some sense, go on auto-pilot.
To evaluate something well involves looking at it with a critical eye. To be critical of something means to give it meaningful thought and analysis, which is generally against our default preference for passive thinking.
Successful product design is just as much about looking backwards as it is about looking forward.
Success in design is actually dependent on previous failures in design. One of the most obvious examples of this is cars. The mass production and distribution of automobiles has had an enormous positive impact on societies, solving many different types of problems and creating an incredible amount of opportunity. However, the existence of cars has also produced a number of extremely large failures, namely the massive number of automobile accident related deaths that occur each year and a relatively large impact on the environment.