adrian_mrd

Nintendo is often derided for being a ‘toy’ company - as opposed to, say, Apple which is a ‘real’ hardware company.

Yet look at the big N’s track record of innovative hardware and software integration: Wii motion controls, Switch’s Joy-Cons and (soon) the cardboard Toy-Cons, N64 rumble pack for haptic feedback, battery backup in NES and SNES cartridges, etc.

(And yeah, lots of misfires along the way like the Wii U, Power Glove, Virtual Boy, etc).

A massive advantage of being a ‘toy’ company is what I would call the Pixar effect: products work for kids and adults alike.

Lego is also worthy of a look, but made a major strategic error IMHO by not purchasing Minecraft and letting Microsoft snap it up.

hat tip to Google Cardboard, of course.

or maybe that was a success, given its marketing impact post ‘The Wizard’ :)

// edited a few spelling mistakes and added the gCardboard ref and Lego appendum

Agree, Lego’s Serious Play is a great set of ‘starter toolkits’ for prototyping and design thinking sessions.

Somewhat pricey (as all Lego is), but worth it for many scenarios IMHO.

Just noticed this myself, with many assets receiving 404s instead of the official incident notice of: "We are experiencing an issue with Firebase Hosting where 503/504 errors are being returned upon accessing the domains."

Comms could have been much better.

Very true. "Let's pretend" is a fun game, but it's no substitute for real, rolled gold user research :)

Agree, unfortunately that is the tricky aspect: evaluating the cost/benefit of undertaking user research (with personas as one aspect, along with diary studies, interviews, observational studies et al - depending upon the nature of the tasks/problem to solve.

What definitely costs companies a huge amount of time and money is launching new products or concepts into markets - especially without some form of pre-qualification i.e. is there a need? does this solve a problem? will customers actually pay for this service? etc.

As the old user experience adage goes: "spend $1 on usability and save $100* down-the-track".

* made up numbers :)

Important to differentiate between personas as archetypes and those based on stereotypes. The difference? Solid, hard-yards user research that comes from a large enough sample set.