Ken,
I don't disagree with your basic point but:
Of course applying numbers to "design failure" is inevitably largely a
fiction. Categorization of the reasons for "failures" will always be
crude at best. Products "fail" for many reasons. Some (most?) have
nothing to do with design unless we expand "design" to cover almost all
business operations. Many, probably most, reasons are of little direct
professional interest for a product's designers.
> "Many products have gone the way of the Edsel."
It is worth noting that the Edsel was the result of one of the first
big attempts at using research to form a product. (Perhaps that is the
point of the article; I don't know.) That is clearly not an argument
against design research, just a cautionary consideration.
Gunnar
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