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There you have it, a great idea for a Meta Product, but will customers value it as much as you do? And are they willing to pay for it? Customer satisfaction is a major concern and prerequisite for competitiveness in today’s global markets. And getting insights into the link between product features and customer satisfaction is the challenge during product development projects. The Kano model could help us shine a new light on the feature analysis. The model is a two dimensional axis model that links product or service feature development to customer satisfaction during prototyping phase, thus after the fuzzy front end of idea generation. The x-axis displays the extent to which a quality element is provided and the y-axis displays the customer satisfaction.

The Kano model divides product or service features into five distinct categories, each of which affects customers in a different way: basic attributes, performance attributes, delighter attributes, indifferent attributes and reverse satisfaction attributes. The basic attributes are taken for granted when fully implemented, but result in disappointment when not fulfilled. A good example is that a window glass must not distort the view. The performance attributes display satisfaction according to the rate or amount that they are implemented. The gas usage of a car is an example, since the less usage the more satisfaction. The Delighters have no influence when not fully satisfied and surprise customers when implemented, like automatic wipers on a car when it starts raining. The indifferent attributes have no influence on the satisfaction whether implemented or not. The reverse attributes lead to dissatisfaction the more they are visible in a product. Products with a too high techie feel tend to dissatisfy customers.

Let’s take a look at how the Kano model can be applied to Meta Products. At first, we must recognize the fact that a Meta Product consists of three parts; the physical part, the web part and the connection between both. Features should thus be divided over both the three parts and the Kano’s attributes, as shown below.

Now, how to value the features of a Meta Product and thereby develop a business model? First, it is known that costumers are willing to pay for performance attributes as well as keeping out the reverse attributes. Next, delighters are money makers if very well implemented. Besides, the unexpected delighters are key to a successful product when not explicitly paid for. And last, the connection part of the product could be seen as merely a usage part and is thus related to the performance attribute. The basic and indifference attributes are no good for cash flows.

At this moment the Meta thing is new, but in the future Meta will be just a basic factor.

Interesting to note is that costumers’ expectations develop over time and thereby the relation between a type of feature and the Kano attributes changes as well. A great example is the remote control on television which was a delighter 30 years ago, but nowadays a basic factor. The field of Meta Products is relatively new and untamed and therefore the fact that it is Meta could now be seen as delighter itself. Yet, today’s delighter is tomorrow’s performer. My advice is therefore to continuously focus on development of new Meta areas.

Concluding, the Kano’s feature analysis gives new perspectives on developing Meta Products:

1. Do not lose focus on the threshold features of Meta Products
2. Search for delighters in the web part of the Meta Product that are better than existing web features
3. Carefully watch trends in features over time to continue feature updates and avoid feature degradation
4. Usage of the connection part is key to cash flow
5. Money makers are the delighters of the Meta Products

Based on recent developments in neuro-technology, Emotiv has developed a new personal interface for human computer interaction, called the EPOC. This device is a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset. It uses a set of sensors to tune into electric signals produced by the brain to detect a user’s thoughts, feelings and expressions. It connects wirelessly to most computers.

The Emotiv SDK (Software Development Kit) is where it starts to be really interesting. With this, Emotiv opens up opportunities for you as developer to create applications that can be controlled by a user’s mind. I think that by crowdsourcing the development of new applications, like the apps from Apple, Emotiv has made the right choice to explore the many possibilities of what you can do with the EPOC.

At Emotiv, they see quite some interesting fields of application for the EPOC:

Artistic and creative expression – Use your thoughts, feeling, and emotion to dynamically create color, music, and art.

Life changing applications for disabled patients, such as controlling an electric wheelchair, mind-keyboard, or playing a hands-free game.

Games & Virtual Worlds – Experience the fantasy of controlling and influencing the virtual environment with your mind.

Market Research & Advertising – get true insight about how people respond and feel about material presented to them. Get real-time feedback on user enjoyment and engagement.

Now that the EPOC has made the leap towards direct brain computer interaction, controlling and manipulating web data is a small step, resulting in exciting new Meta applications. A demonstration of the EPOC can be viewed here.

Designed by DIY Kyoto, Wattson helps you do more for the environment. And, as DIY Kyoto says itself: Do that in style. With Wattson, the company claims you can save up to 25% on your annual electricity bill. Together with the accompanying web platform, called Holmes, the system monitors the energy your home is using, shows you usage in graphs and charts, and helps you figure out ways to save electricity.

The physical part consists of a sensor clip, transmitter and the actual device. The sensor clip attaches to either of the mains electricity cables leading from your home’s meter box to your fuse box. The sensor clip and transmitter measure the electricity coming into your home. The device shows either in watts or in cost how much electricity your home is using. Coloured lights underneath the device indicate the same in a more ambient way. When the lights glow blue, you’re using less electricity than normal. When there’s a purple glow, you’re using the average for your home. And when they’re red, you’re using more electricity than usual.

The web part (Holmes) was created to interprete Wattson’s information and give you more indepth insights by means of graphs. They show you how you’re doing on energy use over hours, days, weeks or months. It also lets you set a target for electricity use reduction, so you have something positive to work towards.

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How to be truly innovative? Let’s take a look back into the greatest technological innovations of all times. The machine based manufacturing, followed by the steam power, the internal combustion engine and finally the electrical power generation. All of them promoted the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Every single human in the world was touched by this revolution and with this, the history of humanity changed. As Harold Perkin observed, “the Industrial Revolution was no mere sequence of changes in industrial techniques and production, but a social revolution with social causes as well as profound social effects”. Why did the Industrial Revolution happen that way? Why was it truly innovative? Well, there was the influence of great thinkers at that time such as Alan Smith, Diderot, Voltaire and Marx, among many others, who embraced and promoted the idea of mankind’s progress, and the society was eager to see the tangible manifestation of such knowledge waves seen before since the Reformation or the Scientific Revolution (14th century).

The only way to achieve the so desired progress was to understand that strong ideas that work isolated are not strong enough, and that even ordinary ideas integrated into a whole can be collectively powerful. This way, the Industrial Revolution offered a platform of broad capabilities for continuous development. An empowerment platform where companies, industries and organizations could create more and more products and seek for sustained growth by selling those to us.

It was only a matter of time for this growth to reach new levels that would change again the history of humanity: the Internet. It all started in the governments and universities with particular interests on retrieving documentation. Their interests and a combination of ideas from hobbyists, scientists and industries made the internet possible the way we know it. A platform where even contradicting ideas could exist and where the capabilities for continuous development seemed broader as ever before; democratizing knowledge and transgressing geographic frontiers to reach other people and their information… a whole new world where not only companies and governments but also you and me, and everybody could be actively part of. I don’t have to tell you the rest because you are witnessing it everyday, but I can say that Internet is potentially the ultimate technological innovation capable to create more platforms to express, to learn and to understand and shape ourselves and our world.

Now, the tangible is just an element in a system of value where the connections, virtual or real are the focus of attention.

So, what we can see is that both the Industrial Revolution and now the Internet are platforms with apparently unlimited ambitions. Both set suitable conditions and systems that enhance our capabilities and gives us resources in a particular environment. Both socially pulled and with many elements conforming a meaningful whole, but with the difference that in the Industrial Revolution the atoms (the tangible) were the subject of most value and therefore the focus of our attention. Now, the tangible is just an element in a system of value where the connections, virtual or real are the focus of attention. So far, the platform of internet has allowed an ever growing digital representation of our world, our dreams and fears, our right and wrong… and it still has even bigger ambitions. For instance, Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, is in the quest of making all knowledge computational and developed a search engine called WolframAlpha which has the goal of modeling and explaining the physics underlying the universe. This may sound a bit too much, but it shows that there are great ambitions to retrieve and manipulate information and knowledge in better, ubiquitous, real-time and mobile ways, and this can only be done on top of proper platforms. With these improvements new systems and new connections of Internet to-and-within the real-world are foreseen.

The connection of bits and atoms is the beginning of a platform to empower real things in the world that couldn’t interact before with us, they are called Meta Products. But this can be also a bit tricky; it is very easy to fall into the product-narrowed vision, because that was the way old platforms from the Industrial Revolution used to work, but if you just focus on the product, you might render gadgets that will not be relevant in people’s lives. But if you think in new platforms, you’ll reflect on the systems that compose them, their connections and you’ll be able to see the big picture. By looking at the overall service environment and its interactions (platforms and their systems) rather than just focusing on the isolated output (product) we can understand the contexts, the main actors and the real drivers of innovation.

Product design

The physical part of Meta Products asks for product designers, who deal with material characteristics, aesthetics, ergonomics, mechanics etc. while designing their products.

Interaction design

Considering the online part of Meta Products, it mostly comes down to interaction design. Thinking in terms of navigation, interfaces and usability are key topics in this field.

Service design

Service design is a discipline that took off not too long ago. Originating from marketing and management fields, the activity of designing a service is demanded more and more in our service economy.
And it is true that with the Internet of Things we are in fact in the service business, and Meta Products are just the means to deliver the intented service to consumers.

In order to successfully design Meta Products, I think it’s all about orchestrating these expertises in the right way in order to come to that astounding Meta Product.

1—Sensing wearables

photo by Alper Çuğun (illustrir) CC 2010

This field consists of wearable devices that measure characteristics of the human body and/or the environment by means of sensors. The accompanying web part often consists of data visualisation and analysis of what has been measured.

Examples: Eco Sensor, Fitbit, Nike+, Rationalizer, Switch2Health

2—Ambient intelligence

Intelligent systems that operate in the background (therefore being ambient) within an environment without people noticing it. These systems often consist of multiple sensors and actuators communicating with each other.

Example: Smart Home

3—Ubimedia

The world of Ubimedia is all about tagged objects, mostly by means of RFID-tags, AR-tags or QR-codes. Readers must be used to retrieve the information within the tags. These readers can be mobile phones, RFID readers etc. The information that’s being retrieved is mostly URLs, linking to rich internet content.

Examples: Skål

4—Identification

Retrieving the identity of an object (think of packages in mailing logistics) is increasingly done with the help of web databases. Mostly through RFID-tags an object is scanned and matched with an online database to retrieve its identity. A spin-off group of this field consists of so-called ‘digital business cards’. They swap contact information and identities of social accounts between persons.

Examples: Poken, My Name is E

5—Navigation & location

Navigating while on the road involves GPS and physical interfaces for pinpointing your location. Dynamic information such as traffic info is downloaded directly from the web, which makes these systems true Meta Products.

Examples: TomTom

6—Monitoring & tracking

Monitoring and tracking systems often consist of a combination of sensors that measure the condition or the state of certain objects. The results are uploaded and plotted in a web interface. Much like the sensing wearables, but instead, these systems focus not so much on the human body, but moreover on objects and their environments.

Examples: eco:Drive, SenseAware

7—Toys & games

An evergrowing group in Meta land is the one of toys and games. Combining physical products with the web in whatever kind of way seems to open up great opportunities for both toys and games.

Examples: AR.Drone, Nabaztag, Siftables, SmartUs, Social Mutator, Webkinz

This monday (march 29th) we presented our vision on the Internet of Things (IoT) at Mobile Monday. Our talk was about what the phenomenon IoT really is, where this trend came from and in what fields it can be applied. It also featured our case project of the Social Mutator carried out together with students of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology.

Great conference, great other speakers as well. If you get the chance to attend to the next edition, be sure to get tickets on time. Thumbs up to the organisation of Mobile Monday! Photos of the event can be viewed on Flickr.

Browse through our presentation:

Last year I attended an Adobe User Group meeting at which Rick Williams from AKQA gave a presentation about their project eco:Drive for Fiat. This application helps a Fiat driver to improve his or her driving efficiency. It analyses the driving style and recommends the driver how to reduce CO2 emmisions and save money at the same time.

Apart from owning a Fiat with integrated Blue&Me system, really all you have to do is to download the app on any kind of USB stick and then plug it into the car port. During your ride it will automatically store your driving data. Back home, you can upload the saved information to your online Fiat account and start looking at the statistics. eco:Drive communicates your driving technique in a so-called Eco Index. Online tutorials help you improve your Eco Index score along the way. Furthermore, you can monitor stuff like your total number of miles, the money you’ve been saving and set yourself some challenges as well. An interesting add-on is Ecoville, a community of all eco:Drive users where you can share your experiences and do many other things.

Fiat eco:Drive is a nice example of a Class 2 Meta Product, and as Rick put it during his presentation: “With services like eco:Drive, we’re making the web just a little bit more meaningful”. We think so too.