I agree that Apple is very rare in a lot of ways, which is why I used them as an example. I want to emphasize however that the type of design that I am talking about isn’t about art at all. Something can be very pretty yet entirely unusable — that would still be poorly designed. I don’t think we (the general we, not we @ Grooveshark) need CEOs who are artists, or even designers, we need people who understand design principles and ergonomics, and companies willing to invest the time and resources into making the products usable.

Part of the problem is actually that the looks of products get far more focus than their usability. From a short-term economic standpoint, this makes sense. Most people make purchase decisions based on things like price and how the product looks. It’s generally very difficult for consumers to test out the usability of a device and weigh that in with their purchase decision. But obviously well designed products can gain more momentum long-term. When the people who buy those products start raving about them and evangelizing, and people buy your device (i.e. an iPod) instead of something with a worse design (i.e. a Sansa) because everyone loves them and hey, they had a Sansa once and they hated it, then emphasis on design can really pay off.

But it’s easily overlooked in many cases, and who’s going to evangelize a coffee pot anyway? Our coffee pot looks pretty decent as far as cheap coffee pots go. It’s somewhat sleek, it looks to be pretty self-contained and un-complicated: I’d imagine that whoever bought it probably made the decision based on price and looks, just like I was talking about. But it’s still a horrible coffee pot and I would certainly avoid similar designs in the future. If it wasn’t the same exact brand as my old coffee pot that’s well designed, I’d actually avoid the company altogether, but they’re obviously capable of making a decent product.

So for this coffee pot the executives decided they wanted to produce a coffee pot, accountants told them they could only spend $3 to produce, engineers added in 15 different features and when it comes to designing it there are already so many cooks in the kitchen and constraints that a designed-focused product is impossible.

Apple is very rare in that their CEO is an artist, how many other consumer products companies have design-oriented CEOs.