When Tom Kelley talks tech-product innovation, as he does on TechTV's "Big Thinkers," he comes equipped with numerous anecdotes about good design, bad design, and even lifesaving design. As general manager of Ideo, the legendary firm that helped develop Apple's first mouse, the world's first laptop computer, and the Palm V handheld device, he's an authority on the subject.

"I think one feature of good products is that they make the simple stuff simple," Kelley says. "Sometimes it's a consumer product, like a cellphone or a PDA, and sometimes it's a life-and-death product."

Good design saves lives

Kelley, who penned the bestseller The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm, recalls the portable defibrillator Ideo worked on for Heartstream.

The first version looked like a clamshell-shaped notebook computer with a little latch to keep it shut. But the designers ran into trouble when they found that even a simple latch can befuddle a stressed-out emergency medical technician.

"It just wasn't obvious to them," he says, emphasizing how intuitive the device seemed at first. "We're in a situation where seconds make the difference between life and death. If it takes an extra 10 seconds to open that latch, that's a terrible design."


Ideo ended up going with what Kelley calls a brick design with a simple, three-step interface. The first man it saved had collapsed from cardiac arrest on a train platform in New York City's Grand Central Station. The EMT on scene set up the device correctly, but then panicked when it came time to send a shock to the man's heart by pressing the bright orange button.

"But an off-duty firefighter who had never seen the device before came up, looked over this person's shoulder -- it was very obvious what to do next -- pushed the orange button, delivered the shock, saved this guy's life," Kelley says.