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Design Relationships: Integrating User Information into Product Development

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Having been in design education since 1966, I have a particular perspective on Adriano's work that reflects on the transformation of the Industrial Design profession's focus on form and styling to one that now has a new position of power at the strategy and development table. Adriano's book brings a lasers' focus to four important product development issues: highly compressed development cycles, complexity of products and systems, confluence of multiple technologies and how companies often fail to understand users' interactions as key to the development of user-based product architectures. His approach is an important work for anyone invested in a deeper understanding of systematic methods to insure the creation of products that will better serve their intended audiences. Educators, engineers, product managers and designers will find this work of great value.

This book is a must-read for corporate managers who are often challenged by the need to make decisions related to product design without following the necessary steps to collect and analyze user requirements. Adriano's new methodology allows designers and non-designers alike to effectively map out user interactions and translate them into product solutions without the need to spend an extensive amount of time and resources in user research and analysis.

While a graduate student at the Institute of Design, I found the principles and techniques of the Function-Task Interaction method crucial for designing an digital camera. The techniques allowed us to develop a product from the inside out and create something that mapped closely to our target market's cognitive needs. It affected the final outcome dramatically and challenged us to question our assumptions resulting in a better design.

The design field will greatly benefit from this innovative user-centered approach to product development. Adriano Galvao introduces a structured method for integrating users' workflow information early in the design process to ensure that user requirements are properly addressed in the form of product attributes. The FTI method has proved to be a great tool for designers in rapidly generating focused design solutions throughout the development of complex and highly interactive technology-based products.

Reconciling the best practices of user-centered design and robust architecture development has been a persistent problem in product development. This book presents an important step in establishing common ground between these two perspectives. The Function-Task Interaction method's affordance-based approach provides an intuitive language for UI designers and architects to integrate user-product relationships into the product architecture design process. The case studies provide good working examples of how to incorporate this method in product development groups.