Designing something nobody wants (yet)

Is the user always right?

At the turn of the 20th century, the mantra of "the customer is always right" started to gain prominence as economies were rapidly industrializing and the consumer market as we know it today started taking shape. Frequently attributed to retailing pioneers like Harry Gordon Selfridge and Marshall Field, the motto marked a deliberate shift towards taking customer satisfaction levels (in particular, their complaints) very seriously. It was quite a novel (and welcome) change from the "buyer beware" reigning paradigm at the time.

Since then, the slogan has gone through various iterations, such as:

• "Le client n'a jamais tort" (The customer is never wrong). - Cesar Ritz (of the Ritz hotel chain)
• "Der Kunde ist König" (The customer is king). - German variation
• "Okyakusama wa kamisama desu" (The customer is a god). - Japanese variation (and my favorite!)

What a complete change of pace it must have been to go from the customer being viewed as a sucker (caveat emptor!) to (in the case of Japan) a deity! Talk about a 180!

Now, we have the benefit of hindsight and a century plus of actual datapoints to bring us to our modern-day consensus that actually...the customer may not always be right. They can misrepresent things, make unreasonable demands and expectations, and/or otherwise attempt to take advantage of companies and services that strictly adhere to such policies. In fact, behavioral economist Richard Thaler won his Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017 by proving that people are actually NOT very rational economic actors, after all.

Formula 1 racing and the Halo

Formula 1 (often just abbreviated to F1) is one of the most popular motor racing events in the world, but it is also one of the most dangerous. Although it's become much safer since the 70s (their worst decade in terms of fatalities), the deaths of Henry Surtees in 2009 and of Jules Bianchi in 2014 show that the dangers are ever-present.

It wasn't until the 2010s when F1 design teams started floating around the idea of some form of cockpit head protection. What's truly mind-boggling about this fact is that smart people who were paid big bucks to design the world's fastest, most aerodynamic cars didn't get around to protecting driver's heads until only a decade ago! (As if a helmet on a driver's head was all that was needed in a sport where cars reached speeds of 200mph and crashes occurred quite regularly!)

It wasn't until the Mercedes team came up with the Halo in 2016 that this issue was finally addressed. Even then, it met with staunch opposition from everybody from the drivers to the fans to even the F1 management teams.

Below is a picture of the halo on a racing car. Weighing in at only 15 pounds, It is designed to withstand up to 12 tons of force!

They ran trials with it from 2016 until 2018 but can you guess the reaction it got from the professional drivers themselves?

2-time World Champion Max Verstappen (Red Bull Racing):

“There needs to be a certain element of risk. You can improve the car but we don't need this thing on top of it. It's not just the looks, I don't think it is necessary."

7-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes AMG):

“This is the worst looking mod in Formula 1 history. I appreciate the quest for safety but this is formula 1, and the way it is now is perfectly fine."

Suffice it to say, a lot of people hated it. Fans complained they could no longer see the drivers behind the metal bar, drivers thought it was overkill when it came to their safety, and even the F1 boss, Bernie Ecclestone, thought it was useless and unnecessary.

Fast forward to 2021

Remember Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton? Yes, they're the two champion drivers who were just quoted above. Well, as fate would have it, their cars collided during the 2021 Italian Grand Prix and, as you can see from a tweet that Lewis Hamilton himself put up after narrowly escaping death, he was literally saved by the halo.

In case you missed it, that's the wheel of Verstappen's car resting on top of the halo of Hamilton's.

And he wasn't the only one. To date, there have been at least 3 other incidents in which the halo made the difference between life and death:

• Fernando Alonso's McLaren deflected away from Sauber driver Charles Leclerc's head at the 2018 Belgian Grand Prix
• Romain Grosjean escaping decapitation when his Haas crashed into a barrier in a fiery crash in 2020 in Bahrain
• Zhou Guanyu's Alfa Romeo car flipping several times at 200mph and landing upside down at the 2022 Silverstone Grand Prix

Takeaways

Had the design team decided to interview their end-users (the drivers) before inventing the halo, it's almost certain that there would be no halo today. So what do we do in these cases?

The F1 Halo example I talk about above strikes me as being less of a design issue and more one of innovation. In specific, it's about the challenges of introducing something that deviates so far away from what people have come to know and expect. Even if you can connect the dots (and can see how obviously valuable your innovation is going to be), you should never underestimate the powerful forces of homeostasis, habits, and tradition, especially if your innovation seeks to upend all three.

Unless you have someone like Charlie Whiting to go to bat for your idea (F1's racing boss who backed the halo rings from the very beginning against all opposition), it's best to chunk your big innovative idea down into a series of bite-sized steps. This allows users to take time to warm up to the idea and see versions of it in action. The F1 drivers, after all, were initially worried that the halo bar would obstruct their vision; but it turned out that they were able to work around it without it adversely affecting their driving.

So the takeaway here isn't to ignore your users because you think you know better. It means truly empathizing with their situations and understanding the big changes to their habits that you are asking them to make (no easy feat for anybody, as you can imagine).

Chunk your big idea down into increments that are more likely to pass adoption. After a time, it will become the new norm, at which point, you implement the next stage. Rinse and repeat until it will seem like the innovation just...happened all on its own!