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What’s Up With Products That Fix Other Products?
Ideally, when you create a design for a product as an entrepreneur or company leader, you engage your customers and make them part of the process. Everything is very collaborative, people communicate well and you end up meeting a real need with accessible, intuitive, data-backed features.
That’s in a perfect world. In reality, entrepreneurs and leaders design poorly all the time. And in the worst instances, “fixing” the product would take it completely off the market.
As an example, think about women’s jeans. One of the biggest annoyances ladies face is a gap in the back of the waist. It happens because designers make the jeans without accounting for the fact that women often have a waist that’s smaller than their hips. Although some brands do have alterations that improve the issue, women who want to wear a pair of pants off the rack often have to wear a belt. Some companies like Mancro are creating elastic, no buckle versions of belts that are made to address the problem while also getting rid of the unsightly bulge that buckles can create.
Sometimes these bad designs happen because of technology or other resource limitations — creators simply can’t mass produce a better version affordably given the tools they have. And in these cases, improving the products depends on how quickly the technology adapts or…
