INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: businesses solve problems they can measure, not the ones that matter most

I recently heard marketing expert Rory Sutherland make an observation that explains a lot of questionable product decisions. Businesses love to shrink a problem until it has one right answer that you can quantify. Because right is something you can defend. So we ask how to make the train faster instead of what makes the ride worth taking. Faster is easily measured. Enjoyable is not, so it gets ignored even when it matters more.

Take Uber as an example. Every cab company optimized what it could count, the time and the fare. Uber went after what they couldn't, the dread of standing on a curb with no

idea when the car is coming. They put a moving dot on a map with a timer. The wait got no shorter. The pain of uncertainty just went away.

The measurable problem is rarely the real one for users. Anyone can shave a second off. The harder thing, often worth far more, is fixing what no one put on the spec because they couldn’t count it.

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