Another feature of the modern Nokia bureaucracy, that wasn’t present 15 years ago, is the obsession with data gathering. I remarked that no other company spends us much on ethnography or focus groups, or market segmentation strategies. Turn to almost any page on the website, and you’re invited to fill in an questionnaire.
“Yes, that’s it – and Apple doesn’t do this,” Risku agrees. He highlights one in particular as an example.
“When you have a branded product, the marketing is merely information”
“There is a philosophy called Contextual Design, every designer at Nokia has been trained in it by the guru Karen Holtzblatt [2]. Everybody has attended her courses and got her very expensive book signed. The idea is that you ask the users what they are doing, then design something. If you think about Apple, they don’t ask anybody. The idea of users as designers is a catastrophe!
“It’s only relevant to evolutionary products, it’s not relevant to blue-sky products.When you have a blue-sky product, there are no users, and so there are no users' opinions. We have to rely on what the desires of users are and trust the designers.”
Because the market decides what’s a hit and a flop?
“Yes.”
via Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan [printer-friendly] • The Register.