To be truly great in the world of product design, you need to transcend the mere object, and be an experience designer. Think about how your product will weave its way into the life of the person who adopts it.

A great man once said of the design process:

“When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop…

But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem—and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.

That’s what we wanted to do with Mac.”

—from Insanely Great, written by Steven Levy

Steve Jobs wasn’t talking about the ipod or even the iphone here, he said this in 1984. This kind of thinking demonstrates the common thread within Apple that has allowed them to conceive of and execute products that become quietly indespensible, both on an individual and cultural level.

This article by user experience demi-god Peter Merholz expands beautifully on the above.

Peer reviews are one of the main drawcards here, its not what Amazon has to say, or how the website frames the product that matters, its what Amazon’s community of contributors are doing around these products, and how that information is aggregated that draws the traffic to the site.

And reviews are not the only way that Amazon are adding context to their products.

Showing the other products that were purchased with any particular item, as well as the myriad other rich user-derived data that Amazon surround their wares with – this is where they are adding value that, right now, other sites cannot compete with.

There is a lot to be said for the cultural contextualisation that is going on here – positioning the product in relation to the mindset of the user’s peers.

Whether the item is ultimately purchased on their site or not – and clearly a lot of the time it is – is not really the only factor to consider here. CEO Jeff Bezos knows this better than anybody, which is why he’s sunk so much time, money and energy over the years perfecting the customer experience on his site.

The brand value associated with hosting the web’s most authoritative page for so many items – essentially a massive social network for inanimate objects – cannot be measured in transactions. Amazon’s repeat business, as well the average spend by Amazon users is growing at more-than-healthy rate, and in today’s experience-driven economy, that’s a sign of healthy business principles.