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Obvious Design is a boutique San Francisco-based
interactive product strategy and design agency in its twelfth year of operation.
It was founded in 1997 by Philip Haine out
of a passion for helping businesses succeed by making the right products, and making them simple.
We have two branches of consulting: product vision and interactive
product design:
Product Vision
& Strategy
There are countless possible directions to take your product. Which
is the right one? How do you even go about solving that problem with confidence? Or what do you do when you're cornered, with no choices? Or how can you "reboot" an
aging product line to fight off the innovator's dilemma?
Or, if you are a small player, how can you undermine a big, entrenched competitor? What are the implications of this year's trendy
technologies? Does that brash new competitor have
a home run idea or a strikeout? Should we invest in that interesting
product idea?
These are the problems of product vision. Through his extensive consulting experience,
Philip Haine has created and refined a thorough, systematic approach to attacking them.
This is not a flighty or vague discipline as the loose term "vision" might
suggest, but a set of rigorous methods leading to a
clear and defensible course of action.
Product visions translate directly into product and design requirements.
We have applied and refined these
proprietary methods for over twelve years. They correctly anticipated the
DVR concept years before TiVo the Apple & Netflix set top boxes, predicted the fate of the Segway at
the peak of its hype, and charted a potential future course for
handheld computers that cellphones are slowly filling in. We have applied these methods to the PDA space, to the Voice
over IP (VoIP) market, to small business needs, digital cameras, web broadcasting,
and many more. These vision projects resulted in clarity and insight
into customer segments, the competitive landscape and new product concepts.
Who needs product vision
services? Anyone whose
job it is to define products, product lines and product strategy. Namely product directors & VPs, strategists, product managers and designers.
If you are responsible for guiding product direction and need an unbiased, experienced second brain on the problem, we can help. We specialize particularly in defining 1.0 products.
For more information about our services and past projects please
check out the Consulting Services section
and well as the biography and news sections.
Interactive Product
Design & User Experience Architecture
There are many obscure sub-disciplines of product design such
as interaction design, information architecture, and so on.
The differences between them are not
that important. It's all about making stuff simple and gratifying to learn and use. We call the broad set of things we do Interactive Product Design. When the design problem is a large, interdependent system we call it the User Experience Architecture.
We have designed substantial products across
all interactive media: desktop productivity applications for
Mac and Windows, web-based SaaS applications for broad and specialized
user bases, hand-held software for Palm, Newton and GO PenPoint,
and UIs for consumer electronic products.
Philip specializes in the toughest
design problems, ones which demand breakthrough solutions,
and new product concepts for which there is no precedent.
This is not about incremental refinements to what has been
done before, but breakthroughs along the lines of the Apple
iPod, or the original PalmPilot.
(For some examples of this type of thinking, please see Steal This Idea.)
Achieving breakthrough product designs and architectures demands vision. It's not a coincidence that product vision is
the other side of our business.
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