The Homer Simpson car is a great lesson in building products

One of the first things I do in all of my classes is show this clip of Homer Simpson trying to design a car. I’m serious.

It’s a great lesson in how not to build a product.

Watch it, and then let’s walk through why it has so many great lessons for product design and development.

One of the things that makes the Homer Simpson Car clip so interesting is that Homer has real desires in a car that are perfectly reasonable. As designers our job is to figure out people’s problems and desires and translate those into great products.

Homer wants a large car because he is a family man with three kids and two pets. He’d also like ways to not be distracted by his three kids while he is driving. He wants places to put his drinks.

Homer often struggles to find his car when he parks in a large parking lot. Homer wants a car that is pretty quick because he wants to feel alive every now and then in his suburban dad life.

All of this is great feedback from a user. Understanding the problems Homer faces and understanding his life is a great way to inform design. By utilizing contextual inquiry and user interviewing, we can find out the problems that people like Homer face and synthesize that data and translate it into actionable requirements to build again.

Where the Homer Simpson Car implodes is that it lets a user actually design the car. Homer is not a designer. He has no idea how to design anything.

So it ends up that Homer has really bad solutions to his problems. He can’t take sensible requirements and make them into good product design. Almost no user can. Don’t let users design your products for you.

But good product design is not about letting your users design your products for you — it’s about solving users problems and making their lives better.

A lot of you are allowing Homer Simpson to design your products