Engineering the Customer Experience
In this post I wanted to share some of what goes into designing something as seemingly simple as a desk lamp. When you design something custom, the customer experience becomes an obsession. And it has to - if it didn’t become an obsession, barely perceptible, and yet critical, details would be missed. The low hanging fruit is taken, the next level requires reaching up and exposing the little things - the ones that are easy to brush off as unimportant. And as you’ll see many of these details aren’t things that will reach out and grab the attention of the user. Your creations can reach out and grab the user in both intended and unintended ways - you’ll notice that many of these details are aimed at simply subtracting negative experiences rather than adding positive ones. That may seem boring but often the thing that makes a great product is disguised in the negative - it’s the lack of annoyance, lack of complexity, lack of options. This obsession with the customer experience is what gives the work meaning. In this particular design project, the obsession had 2 stages: first, getting the sizing just right for this customer and the space, and 2nd hunting down all of the details that I didn’t like about the first iteration of lamp and fixing them.
I met this customer at the Carter and Co Winter Market where I had the first iteration of the lamp for sale. I’ll refer to the first iteration as V1 which has a design story of it’s own here. There are some people who just get it. They can take one look at something and they have an immediate sense of how much original thought and sweat went into creating it. They value that thought and sweat and you feel yourself reciprocating that energy back at them. It’s a good feeling. She loved the lamp but wanted the dimensions altered so we decided to start fresh. I began the process by gathering what information I could about the customer and the space. I knew that we were close in size, I had dimensions for the side table and couch, and I knew that she planned to use the lamp mostly for reading. I created a mock up of her space in my living room and started doing some user testing on myself.
Mock up and user testing different lamp positions
I had to decide which lamp position to really optimize for. The position labeled “downward tilt” seemed like the go to position for reading because it puts the most amount of light on the page and the shade blocks the direct light from your peripheral vision. I then started to do some user studies with the lamp in that position. Move the lamp around, get up and down from the couch, sit back down in a slightly different position, etc. This helped tease out some of the smaller details. It takes a while using your product and seeing it from different angles before you can really make good judgements. When I first finish a project, it usually takes a while before I feel confident in how I feel about it. I sit with it a while and the judgement eventually comes into focus.
Areas for Improvement
The V1 lamp that I used in the mock up was a bit too tall so I placed it on a shorter table to try to get the correct height off the ground. After a few iterations on the mock up with the V1 lamp and the CAD model with the V2 lamp, the two eventually converged. I used the overlay to dial in the camera angle and then created a side-by-side to confirm that the CAD model matched up pretty closely with the mock up in real life.
The mock up illuminated 3 major changes that needed to be made with V2. 1) the lamp needed to be about 3” longer, 2) the stem needed to be about 10” shorter, and 3) I needed to figure out a way to increase the tilt angle to avoid the sliver of light that would catch the users peripheral vision. To improve the tilt angle, I welded a solid section of rod just below the ball joint. This allowed the stem to be undercut below the spherical joint and increasing the tilt angle by about 15°. One thing that I love about working with stainless steel (or really any homogeneous metal process) is that you can add and remove material pretty easily. Because the weld filler and base material are so similar you can fill an area in with weld and grind/polish away the excess with ease. Because of this property it’s easy to weld two sections of stainless together, blend them, and the result really is seamless. Cycle through the images below to see the V1 lamp on the left side and the improved elements of V2 on the right.
One final piece that I knew I had to get right in this design was the base. It’s important that the base doesn’t wobble and maintains contact with the table. You have to apply a torque to rotate the head of the lamp. This torque is reacted out through the table and if the contact between the base and the table isn’t solid, the use will feel the base wobble, rotate, or slide. It’s really critical to design mechanisms that have constrained and repeatable patterns of motion. When mechanisms are not properly constrained (think door handles with lots of backlash, drawer slide bearings with grit or corrosion in them, cheap sheet metal mechanisms that flex too much) the user senses it. They may not explicitly notice it but it’s going to add to the underlying tally of negative feelings that they have about using something.
On the lamp, the answer was to chuck the formed brass base up in the lathe, turn it flat, and then machine a dovetail groove in it. The dovetail groove secures an o-ring that increases the friction between the lamp base and the table along the outer perimeter of the base. I mocked this up by placing a piece of rubber mat in between the table and lamp base to make sure that the increased friction would do the trick. I chose to use an o-ring groove rather than an adhesive backed rubber. Adhesive backed rubber would have been far less work upfront but much more difficult and messy to replace when the rubber inevitably fails. The rubber o-ring will take between 50-100 years before it breaks down to the point where pieces come off. Standard o-rings are used in so many parts today that I don’t think a user will have any trouble finding o-ring material 50-100 years from now and the replacement will take about 3 minutes - simply pop the old one out and pop the new one in.
One of my favorite things to think about during the design process is how to make something that lasts forever. The o-ring here illustrates a common limit to how long certain materials will last. Sometimes it’s necessary to use these materials (in a lamp for instance you also have insulated wire) but I try to limit their use and also make sure that I think about how to construct things in such a way that it’s well worth the trouble of replacing in the future. Eventually everything becomes obsolete, replaced with something more advanced and with less wear. But there are certain designs that have remained standing even after their replacement comes along. A big part of what keeps these creations relevant has to do with what the design is communicating - how much original thought and sweat went into creating the thing.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this post peaked your interest. As always if you have any feedback, questions, or comments please head to the contact us page and send me a note, I would love to hear from you.
