One way to cut costs if you own a tech company is to have your son and his friends design your products for you:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/08/24/business.of.life.ap/index.html
No wonder our kids have the highest levels of obesity ever. To busy eating donuts and writing code or color coordinating their stupid computer. Man it’s a shame to see baseball fields neglected where I live, a real shame.
relax. its not so uncommon. story makes it sound special. i’ve been to plenty of focus gropes where people draw their ultimate product. then they vote and chose and whatever. depending on session an IDer will draw a final or final pair for a vote. that may have happened in this story.
touchy crowd.
It’s called “codiscovery” and you typically pay companies like Sonic Rim big bucks for it.
Good for them for being user centered and actually talking to their users!
^^ whoops, forgot to log in ^^
they didnt design it, they were useed as market research…
and probably not very well.
Their only market research was what the CEO’s son and 7 of his friends wanted in a computer!?!?!
I fail to see how that gives them an accurate picture of what the teen market wants.
Cameron and his friends were asked to draw up designs for their ideal PC. Two weeks later, the company came back with 20 product concepts, and in a five-hour session, the teens honed in on one.
Later the prototype went to focus groups nationwide, and now the hip-e is ready for release in November.
back up. 8 kids come up with concept. LATER a prototype went to focus groups. NOW hip-e is ready for release.
big gap between kids concept and prototype. who did that work? didnt see where kids did control drawings. or created CAD for prototype. then had parts made and assembled with components for focus group tests. lot of work there. and after focus groups more changes might have been made. who did that work?
just a group of upper middle-class kids. one with a bigshot daddy (like most American kids have a father who’s a CEO… and they buy a $1,200 PC. sure.). worse yet, group dynamics would have been considered in their selection. you cant call them a good market sample because of their association. too much group think and follow the leader. and at that pricepoint family income should have played. my nephew’s father isnt a CEO or even close and at 16 paid more for his PC than this. bet the original concept was a $7k behemoth.
real market research came after in nationwide focus groups. since we dont know what happened between the before and after, no telling how good those 16 year olds did. but one of them has a daddy getting free publicity. and some IDers worked up.
hahah- Appplied common sense thats what ID is, You dont need a degree to have good ideas. Apparemtly these kids had good ideas.
“but its screen and keyboard are framed in fuzzy pink fur”
Targeting towards girls, I assume? Sounds like that was an idea proposed by a 16-year old boy, “Girls like pink and kittens!”….and nobody actually asked a teenage girl, I bet.
No wonder our kids have the highest levels of obesity ever. To busy eating donuts and writing code or color coordinating their stupid computer. Man it’s a shame to see baseball fields neglected where I live, a real shame.
My niece is always on the computer. I IM her a lot. She is also an award winning swimmer and is a thin as a bean pole. She’s 13.