Kensington's Peripheral Challenge

Focusing on customer experience, the computer accessory purveyor turns out a stylish and crowd-pleasing new collection of wares

by Jesse James Garrett

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Kensington Technology Group, the U.S.-based maker of computer peripherals, may seem to have little in common with Japanese video game company Nintendo (NTDOY). But I have noticed some interesting parallels. Like Nintendo, Kensington has found itself in third place, chasing two much larger competitors, one of which is Microsoft (MSFT). Like Nintendo, Kensington's resources are far exceeded by its two competitors (the other one is Logitech (LOGI)).

Like Nintendo, Kensington's competitors are locked in a battle to deliver more sophisticated technology and longer lists of features. And like Nintendo, Kensington has chosen to opt out of the technology arms race and turned to product experience as a competitive advantage.

The result is Kensington's Ci Lifestyle Collection, a new line of mice and keyboards for home and mobile users designed with extensive field research on customer experience in mind. But as Juan Ernesto Rodriguez, senior global product manager for Kensington explained to me, shifting Kensington's thinking from a technology-driven approach to an experience-driven one wasn't easy.

Everybody Sees the Same Product

Kensington's market research had uncovered a disheartening fact: Consumers didn't understand the value of product features, and couldn't tell the difference between Kensington's products and those of its competitors. "No matter what we put beneath the hood, everybody sees the same product," Rodriguez said. That finding led them to a strategic shift in direction.

"We typically would lean toward asking ourselves, 'Where's the next technology?'" Rodriguez told me. "As a technology company, you want to go find that next, better, faster thing to build your products on. What we needed to do as a company was come to a complete stop and say, 'They can do that better than we can. We might not win this battle through technology alone, so we've got to look to something else.'"

For help in identifying that something else, Kensington brought in San Francisco design firm One & Co. "We knew we were too close to the problem," Rodriguez explained. One & Co partner Jonah Becker lead a small team combining Kensington and One & Co staff on a field research study to uncover the behavior and psychology of home and mobile users. "It was about talking to people and seeing what their perceptions were—but it was also about getting into their homes and seeing what their problems were," Becker said.

Focus on Emotion

Having product designers instead of dedicated researchers conduct the study gave the designers a head start in thinking about the creative problems they'd be facing—and strengthened the research because designers asked questions and noticed details that might have gone overlooked by someone else. "There's an emotional connection that people have to products," Becker told me. As a product designer observing users firsthand, "you're just more in tune to how people interact with the product. You notice how someone holds it, notice all these different subtle interactions," Becker said.

But the team didn't follow the research by going straight into design. Instead, they took a step back and formulated a product experience strategy that "basically became the foundation of every thought throughout the process that we put into the product," according to Rodriguez. The strategy eventually took the form of three "design pillars," which were used to guide the work of the team as the design evolved.

The first of the team's design pillars was "thinness." The team saw the trend toward thinner technology products, such as laptops and LCD displays, as an opportunity that hadn't yet been explored for input devices.