Scott Clear: A motorcycle crash improved my designs

(soft music) - One of the most important areas when we're designing a new product or service is around the user. So you'll hear things like user-centered design. We're talking about experienced design, designing for the experience of the user. But, how do you get that big insight? How do you get that big a-ha moment? You're constantly looking at things and saying why did they design it this way? And a lot of times it's because they didn't know. They didn't have those particular experiences. So here's a story for ya. When I was in school studying architecture we had to figure out ideas for designing around disabilities and how do we incorporate that into the design that we were choosing to do. And the professor had given the whole classroom wheelchairs and we'd go around campus for a few hours trying ramps, doorways, and elevators and things like that. I thought I had a pretty good idea what it was like. I thought I could design for the wheelchair accessibility. However, shortly after that experience I had a unfortunate motorcycle accident. Broke eleven bones on my left side and I found myself in a wheelchair for ten weeks. Let me tell ya, it's a completely different story contextually. So you're finding situations that you're going to try to design around. Getting up in the morning, putting your clothes on, taking a shower, something simple like going through the doorway of the threshold and finding out that you can't get through the doorway or you can't get into your car to go to work. It gave me the affordability to be a much superior designer when it came to being ADA compliant. It also opened my eyes to a lot of the psychology and the performance characteristics that were needed to making life better in a wheelchair, either on the wheelchair or around the wheelchair. If you are the designer and you're part of the team that's designing the product or services around experiences what I'd tell ya, is you have to go a little bit deeper in your experiences so that you can maybe not get in a motorcycle accident, but you can find yourself figuring out how to design a deeper experience. So in your day in the life scenario, if you're designing for something figure out a pathway that's going to get you a little bit deeper than just doing your basic ethnography and your basic questions. So the big takeaway is make sure to go into this experience for you a lot deeper and you'll find out the a-ha moment in your design.