By Mike Willshaw, Director, Radius Creative

I recently came across an article which centered on the beta principle: the idea of launching a product early, knowing that it is not completed, but instead is pushed out early for people to effectively act as guinea pigs for the companies prototype.

For many software and web based applications, this is something we have come to expect, Google labs and beta releases of everything from applications to Microsoft operating systems are generally launched as Beta trials before later being tweaked into an ostensibly more coherent product offering.

The idea of this extending into physical product offerings whereby a knowingly imperfect product is released seems, at first, a bizarre move from a business perspective. The thing is, we see this all the time.

We have the phrase “early-adopter” which the smug “second release” buyers see as the fools who leap onto the new technologies, putting up with all the foibles and bugs, and paying over the odds for the privilege.

The company may later drop their prices as competition kicks in, and the wise consumer has more choice, a better product offering and a cheaper price once it hits the mainstream market.

Technology-based products are the best examples of beta-consumerism with things like flat screen TV’s, home theatre projectors and such, which we have seen the technology develop both in quality and usability — and become cheaper, in a Moore’s law sort of way.

In one guise or another, the early adopter has been putting up with inchoate ‘beta’ technology and literally helping the company direct it into an offering that fits the golden chalice of the mainstream consumer.

Perhaps the early adopters should be paid for the R&D work they do in carrying companies to their real target market.

My point is that we have now seen the acceptance of paying human guinea pigs in software and hardware; is this really an acceptable principle to export to other areas of industrial design?

A product may not offer all the features it should but it hits the market six months early. What about a product which simply doesn’t look right, but has been blasted through the product development process in order to beat competitors to a launch date?

As designers, we’ve all seen how increased pressure has been placed on the speed of the product design cycle in most industries, but what concessions will need to be made in order to take this to the next level?

And, if we do decide that the business case for a beta product is commercially feasible, is it really the way we would like to see the industry heading? Is it just cheating?

How long before the early-adopting end user, commercially-driven by a manufactured need for ‘new, innovative stuff,’ kicks back due to a lack of respect from companies charging them to essentially be prototype evaluators?

Again… Just a thought.

Mike Willshaw is a director at Radius Creative. Check out his Designer’s Digest blog at http://designersdigest.wordpress.com/. Comment below or email thoughts to mike@radiuscreative.co.uk.