Design 101
Experience design, I thought, was a staple of the design community. Phone design, airplane design, coffee shop design, car design, everything design - I just assumed that designers made sure to actually conduct basic user research and usability testing before investing hundreds of millions into a product potentially nobody will buy.
As it turns out, Ford is a little late to the party.
Persona design and straw man exercises drive the majority of product development efforts in the software industry; from Cisco to Oracle to Dell and everything in between, everyone does it. Indeed, designing a product without imagining who might actually use it (and more importantly, why and how) is akin to cooking stir fry with a blindfold on - potentially very interesting, but more likely than not, a colossal mess.
So it's definitely good news that Ford Americas is finally taking design seriously, even if they did just transplant Ford Europe's persona - a fictitious beauty called 'Antonella' who "is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome...[whose] life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties" - without considering that people in the US are a little...different, perhaps?
Driving Experience Prototyping?
This all leads me to wonder what kind of user research and testing car companies typically do these days. My guess is that BMW does this: they invite current car owners and auto journalists to a focus group hidden at some remote location in the German hinterland, let them drive the newest models on the Nurburgring, give them Beemer schwag, and then as they head out the door, present them with a Likert scale that looks like this:
