When it comes to inventing, bigger isn’t always better. There seems to be a trend with Inventors to put everything including the kitchen sink into their invention. What you need to understand is the more you add the higher the cost of the product. The more parts you add the greater the risk of a part failing rendering the product useless. You want your product to be as user friendly and streamlined as possible. Don’t add features to your product just because you can. You want your product to catch the consumers’ eye as something they need.
We have all seen products on the shelf that do multiple functions that we would either never use or maybe use twice a year. Does it really enhance the product or is it just another thing to go wrong? Some things just shouldn’t go together, like a coffee mug and a hair dryer. Separately they are great products. Together they make no sense.
Unless you are designing the Space Shuttle keep your ideas simple and functional. You need to be as consumer friendly as possible to make significant sales. High tech is great, but can scare a consumer from a purchase if they think it will be complicated to learn to operate, break easily or be extremely costly to repair.
You need to consider your product from the manufacturer’s and consumer’s side of the street. If you add more bells and whistles they have to cut costs somewhere else to maintain the shelf cost to remain competitive. This can mean using an inferior grade of materials versus quality materials to stay within budget. All this does is give you a product that will have a short shelf life once consumers realize the quality is not there.
Some Inventors feel they have to show the world how smart they are by crowding every inch of space with some type of gadget or button. Functionality over practicality is not always the best route to take. Look at the T.V. DVD combo. It is a great product until one of the two components breaks. If you take it to get fixed you are out the use of both items. If you decide to just buy a new one because the repair price is too high, you have another issue. You are throwing out one item that works perfectly fine just because the other doesn’t. You are better off buying each item separately.
You have to look at your product and make sure it meets the consumers’ needs, not what you want the consumer’s needs to be. Make sure your product solves the problem you stated and does it from a user friendly approach. If you do this you will see consumers buy it. Over engineering a product can be the kiss of death for your product if you are not careful. You don’t want to cross that line between a great useful product and a product that costs too much to afford and doesn’t perform as expected. Always look at your product from a consumer’s point of view and you can’t go wrong.
The same issue of over inventing can fall on the manufacturing side as well by your choice of materials and parts. Making a product out of stainless steel versus a high density plastic or other material can make the end product too costly for the market. Adding intricate design where none is needed can add to the cost of molds, amount of material used. All of these add to the final cost.