Is Commercial Failure Indicative of Poor Design?

There is an important co-dependency between design and business. In the words of Terence Conran, “A businessman with little knowledge of design is unlikely to be a very good businessman, and a designer with no knowledge of business is unlikely to remain a designer for very long”.

Even the most splendid products would be rendered useless if there were no one to use them, and so a products commercial performance is inherently linked to its design process. Does this important relationship dictate that a commercial failure is also a failure of design?

The definition of success is the achievement of something planned or attempted. By this definition, commercial success is measured relative to one’s initial goals. If a product’s commercial performance were an important goal, any failure in this would indicate some failure in its design. If commercial success were not an issue, then, arguably, that product could never be a commercial failure.

Shouldn’t commercial success always be on a designer’s agenda? A designer will always have to balance a number of competing considerations– the function of the product, the user experience, graphic design, and more. The same is true for the commercial aims of the product. While many companies will simply aim to maximise revenue, others focus on increasing their user base, or the gaining most publicity for their product and company. If the product is innovative, the main aim may simply to introduce and create excitement around a new technology. All these commercial considerations must be balanced.

Ustwo, a Shoreditch-based digital design firm, are one such company where commercial success is often not the aim, and in fact their business model is reliant on this approach. The company’s revenue is generated through the design and development of mobile applications for clients, and this is what most of the company’s resources and workforce are focused towards. Indeed, many design firm’s work in this way – designing products for other companies.

While most of the company works on producing other client’s products, a smaller team works on creating on their own products and IP. The goal of these products is to demonstrate the design skills of the company, and they publicise the company by creating a distinctive and enjoyable experience. The products don’t need to achieve any commercial success – and indeed the frequently don’t – because their chief role is to raise the companies public image and bring in clients for the revenue generating sector of the business, and then that revenue is reinvested into creating more IP.

Commercial success is not always an aim, and a product can still be well designed without this sort of success. However, a products commercial viability should always be considered, and a product should make sense within a larger business model. As Dieter Rams said, nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. If a product were not a commercial success, it should be because it was designed to be so.

An important question to pose is whether the merit of a product is intrinsically linked to its design process. Some would argue that a product’s design process should be all encompassing. As ethnographic and market research, defining a target audience and business feasibility are all key elements of a product’s design process, any commercial failure is presumably partially attributed to some form of failure in the design process.

Having said this, the design process does not become an inherent characteristic of the product itself, so whilst commercial failure can signal a process failure, it doesn’t make a product a wholly badly designed product. It is perfectly possible for a product that fails commercially to be rebranded and achieve commercial success. Clearly, there are external factors that effect it’s success. Commercial targets are transient attributes, which can and will change over a product’s lifespan alongside external social and economic factors.

Finally, there are three key viewpoints to consider in analyzing the success of a design – a users perspective, the point of view an economist would take, and a designers opinion. The success of a design can be very subjective, based on one’s own criteria and agenda.

For a user, if it is sufficiently practical or entertaining, it’s a success. A user will measure a products success by its ability to solve a problem of theirs (whether that be a tangible issue or simply a desire for entertainment), how easy it is to achieve this solution, and the cost at which the solution came. A user’s perspective is very personal, and usually not dependent on a products success at a wider level – for a user, a product can be well designed despite a failure commercially.

Having said this, some products are seriously undermined by commercial failure - particularly digital products, which enable some form of social interaction. Not only do these products require a reasonable user base to work fully, but they also have a long-term reliance on the company staying in business – should the company to receive sufficient commercial returns, the product may cease to exist, or at least may no longer be curated. This can often create vicious cycles of decline in a product.

A perfect example of this is in the world of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). No matter how well the game is technically and visually, the game still relies on it’s multiplayer element – the interaction and cooperation of large numbers of users. If a product like this fails to garner a user base, the game experience will be less enjoyable and so even fewer will play, beginning a vicious cycle of decline. If the game does particularly badly, the company may choose to discontinue the product and remove support from the game – should this happen, the product can no longer be played.

This same process can be evidenced in other areas, to such as social networks – a perfect example is what’s happened to MySpace - and the issue is not reserved only for the digital realm. The same kind of thing occurs frequently in the world of physical products. The instant camera industry once hugely popular, now offers very few products. In 2008, Polaroid – a company synonymous with the industry – announced it would discontinue all of it’s instant camera range. As the camera manufacturers

For an economist, success and failure is based on commercial performance as explored earlier. If a products business model is badly designed, or it fails commercially for any reason, then they would consider a product badly designed.

For designers, success lies within elements of the product. Obviously, making an overall good design is important, but a designer will analyse which elements of an overall design are particularly successful, and which are less so. It is rare for a product to be completely well designed. A designer may take the key elements of a commercial failure, tweak it, and make it succeed. However, as it is still the good design of the commercial failure at the heart of the usefulness of the new product, the original could still be described as a well-designed product.

In conclusion, commercial failure doesn’t necessarily mean that a product has been badly designed as a whole. It may still successfully solve consumer’s problems, and numerous elements of the product may be very well designed. Perhaps a better question would be “If a product aims to be a commercial success and fails, does that mean that it is necessarily badly designed?”. Design success is based primarily on design objectives, if a product was designed with commercial success in mind, then its failure would indicate bad design somewhere along the line. Having said this, even the most carefully designed product may still fail commercially, and at the end of the day, whether a product is well designed is subjective as described earlier.