Motorola’s got some really talented designers and research folks.
“The RAZR, a design victory as much as an engineering one, only came about due to the gumption of chief marketing office Geoffrey Frost. Following the RAZR’s overnight success, Moto commissioned an in-house team to research the company’s next step. Countless hours were spent pulling together focus-group studies and carrier feedback, but it was all for naught—the research was simply ignored by Motorola’s top brass. “They have this attitude of, ‘Well, I’ve built phones for 20 years, I know what I’m doing,” says a frustrated member of that team, who noted that once Frost died in 2005, there was no one left with the chops and political capital to route around Moto’s stick-in-the-mud managers.”
Link: Motorola Insider Blame Game: Engineers Shoved Designers Aside (gizmodo.com)
Related:
- An interview with Motorola’s director of design
- Design for the other 99%
- I don’t want to read about phones
- Ethics: good and bad design
- Design for the urban environment
Tags: design, engineering, management, motorola, organisation, products, razr
