50% of product returns due to poor design
Now, this is just from a form+function perspective on design, but the business impact of poor design is enourmous. Seeing it in raw numbers - that half of electronics returned are due to poor design - that’s pretty significant. The number comes from the thesis of PhD candidate Elke Den Ouden, who’s at the Technical University of Eindhoven.
Thanks to Rosa Wu for tracking down some similar pieces from a Yankee group study:
- 30 percent of all recently introduced home networking products were returned because the consumer could not get them to work.
- 50 percent of consumers postpone purchases thinking the products would be too difficult to use.
And at the same time, we live in a world where some executives are cautious about embracing design because it might slow down the development process. The real question is - what’s the cost of not embracing design?
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