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Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company | 
 enlarge | Authors: Robert Brunner, Stewart Emery, Russ Hall
Publisher: FT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
Buy New: $15.18
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Rating:  66 reviews
Sales Rank: 11403
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.7 x 1
ISBN: 0137142447
Dewey Decimal Number: 745.2
EAN: 9780137142446
ASIN: 0137142447
Publication Date: August 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
More and more companies are coming to understand the competitive advantage offered by outstanding design. With this, you can create products, services, and experiences that truly matter to your customers' lives and thereby drive powerful, sustainable improvements in business performance. But delivering great designs is not easy. Many companies accomplish it once, or twice; few do it consistently. The secret: building a truly design-driven business, in which design is central to everything you do. Do You Matter? shows how to do precisely that. Legendary industrial designer Robert Brunner (who laid the groundwork for Apple's brilliant design language) and Stewart Emery (Success Built to Last) begin by making an incontrovertible case for the power of design in making emotional connections, deepening relationships, and strengthening brands. You'll learn what it really means to be "design-driven" and how that translates into action at Nike, Apple, BMW and IKEA.You'll learn design-driven techniques for managing your entire experience chain; define effective design strategies and languages; and learn how to manage design from the top, encouraging "risky" design innovations that lead to entirely new markets. The authors show how (and how not) to use research; how to extend design values into marketing, manufacturing, and beyond; and how to keep building on your progress, truly "baking" design into all your processes and culture.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 61 more reviews...
Pretty much on point, but isn't a design book supposed to have more pictures? November 21, 2008
Brian Connors (Cape Cod, MA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a curious book -- an industrial design book where most of the product shots are in black and white and relegated to the margins. I'm not entirely sure how to think of this.
Good design books have an almost porn-like quality to them -- when you pick one up, you expect to see the best the authors have been able to put together, where you can look at the presentation of an object or concept and learn how it's supposed to work and why it does or doesn't. That's because design is inherently visual -- art as interface, the ability to take something and make it accessible to a user or viewer. One of the authors, having spent a great deal of time at Apple in its interface design group, is very strongly aware of this, and in fact if you can find a copy of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines you can learn exactly the background he came out of to make him qualified to write this book.
Overall the book is a very good read for people who don't quite understand why their products aren't self-evidently superior to those of competitors. A lot of examples of how focusing on function as well as form in design permeate this book -- the difference, for example, between Apple's strong emphasis on integration (from the earliest Macs to the iTunes/iPod system) vs. Dell's screwdriver-shop mentality, or the special aspects of Oxo's Good Grips line that have made it such a huge seller for both disabled and fully abled cooks. (In fact, the Oxo spread is probably the best example of a product shot in the book, two pages of their rather innovatively designed ergonomic products. I wish there was material like this on pretty much every sixth page.)
I guess what I'm getting at is there's a lot of words in here, pretty much all of them correct about the requirements to pay attention to various aspects of design (industrial, interface, graphic, workflow, what have you) in business, but very little actual demonstration material. This book is an airplane read, really -- an essay on things that companies with fanatically loyal customers either take for granted or ignore at their peril. In that regard, it should be required reading for both executives and engineers, since it hammers home the critical point that if your user can't do it comfortably and smoothly, your user would prefer not to do it at all. If all you want is an executive summary, this is an excellent summary of something your customers are probably painfully aware of but may not be able to put into words. However, it seems to me that an engineer might want a bit more -- visual examples, charts, that sort of thing. Perhaps a second volume in the series?
 Very enjoyable reading, good lessons to learn November 21, 2008
Nishant Agarwal (Los angeles, ca , usa)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The book gives a very forceful view of Design driven culture,
to make an emotional connection with customer, think about the
customer interaction at all touch points, be it buying process,
usage, trouble shooting, customer service, repair, any part of
the customer interaction chain. Real world latest examples are
given of companies like Apple and BMW. Revolutionary products
like the iPhone to simple ones like Vicks Vaporub are discussed.
Why do customers use your product? Because they have no other
viable choice or because they do have an emotional attachment
to the product and cant live without you, you really matter to
them.
Design in this way can be extended to research, development
or manufacturing process, sales, marketing, CRM, and all the
processes of the company.
The book gives examples of companies like Apple which embodied
Design into their culture and continued evolving, while Motorola
who made a one off runaway hit the Razr, but could not embody
Design into their culture and today are looking to sell their
mobile business.
I am a Senior Software Engineer, and am responsible for Architectural
design of our software product, and this book has definitely given
me a fascinating change of heart and insight into Design for software
too.
 Gets you thinking November 20, 2008
Michelf (Orange County, CA)
Personally, I really like books that are more about getting you thinking then telling you what to do. That is what this book does. If you're looking at this book because you want to know exactly what steps to take to incorporate design into your product you will probably be disappointed. But it can still be valuable to you. It's not a list of instructions it's "food for thought". And, in my experience, thinking is a really good idea.
Not a bad book, but not a real good book either November 19, 2008
Edward Durney (San Francisco)
I enjoyed reading Do You Matter? It's not a bad book. Easy to read, written in a stream-of-consciousness style like hearing a lecture. Good examples, from the wealth of experience of two designers of renown.
But it's not a good book either. Very rambling, with each chapter covering much the same topics as the others. The organization is poor. Points are made too emphatically - out of the blue - with no buildup or denouement. Like this: "The point is, design is do or die. You have to do it." Those kind of statements give little help to us readers. We need more.
It looks like this book was ghost-written by someone who took notes from the two main authors and wove the text together from the notes. The book reads like that. Not like it was written by an authority, but like it was written by an interviewer of an authority. Not that it is poorly written. But it does not read well, either.
I agree with some of the other reviewers that the design of this book is poor. The narrow columns with the wide outside margins make the book hard to read, but give no benefit, since the margin notes add nothing. There are no helpful illustrations or graphs, although I can imagine many places where there could have been.
And the title - "Do You Matter?" - is hard to figure out. What does the question mean? What is the authors' answer? Are they really talking about design? Or about brand? It takes a lot of work to figure all that out.
That sums up my feeling about this book. You need to put in a lot of work to get much out of this book. If you want a book that helps you build your business, you can find a better book elsewhere.
 Designed for Redundancy November 17, 2008
Jerry P. Danzig (New York, NY USA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The basic premise behind this book is valid, and I will state it here to spare readers from having to read it repeatedly in this lazy and poorly organized business book:
1) To make customers truly care about your company and your products, you must focus all your efforts on providing a superior customer experience at every point in the purchase cycle, from unpacking a product to using it to getting it repaired or replaced.
2) This commitment to customer satisfaction must permeate every employee at the company (and their vendors), from top down.
3) Providing customer satisfaction requires constant vigilance and attention to detail, admitting no obstacles, whether from bean counters, researchers, or engineering types.
4) Objective measurements of progress may be misleading; the subjective is king, which apparently means designers are just the ones to lead the charge, with all customer satisfaction efforts emanating from their design concepts.
That's about it. Along the way, the authors throw in some very subjective and mostly obvious observations about companies who matter to customers and companies who don't.
They love Apple, Ikea, and BMW. They think Motorola, Microsoft, and Circuit City have a lot to learn. I'm shocked at these conclusions! SHOCKED!
The careful reader can derive amusement from the authors' disdain for the electronic controls on a Lexus SUV. The same reader can also recognize the discrepancy when the authors fail to mention similarly unworkable electronic controls on some models of the BMWs they so revere. (And BMWs these days are nowhere near as reliable as any Lexus.)
And so on it goes through page after interminable page of this unnecessary tome. Though the book is divided into chapters, they all make the same points; one can start reading on any page and soon catch up on the central thesis, stated above.
There are few hard facts and fewer precise recommendations for implementation other than hiring a design firm to sort all this out for your company. The authors clearly have little love for focus groups, but then fail to explain what sort of research on customer interaction with the product they do suggest -- perhaps observing individual customers from a concealed vantage point? Reading critical comments on a consumer blog?
No less than three editors are credited with having worked on this book. I have to believe that each one of them threw up her hands at trying to make something logical, persuasive, or entertaining out of this meandering mess.
And then the reader occasionally encounters a sentence that makes no sense at all, like this one: "These will be real things -- models, boxes, displays, stores, and so on, but also shares your ideals, your philosophy, and your boundary conditions for your experience." Huh?
In conclusion, I never would have finished this book if I weren't reviewing it for Amazon Vine and looking to have done with the assignment some time in my present lifetime so I can request a free box of cookies or something more appetizing.
I give the book one more than the minimum one star because the cover does catch your eye. If only the contents held your attention...
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