Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [66]
In Herman Miller’s years of working with consumers on seating, they had found that when it comes to choosing office chairs, most people automatically gravitate to the chair with the most presumed status — something senatorial or thronelike, with thick cushions and a high, imposing back. What was the Aeron? It was the exact opposite: a slender, transparent concoction of black plastic and odd protuberances and mesh that looked like the exoskeleton of a giant prehistoric insect. “Comfort in America is very much conditioned by La-Z-Boy recliners,” says Stumpf. “In Germany, they joke about Americans wanting too much padding in their car seats. We have this fixation on softness. I always think of that glove that Disney put on Mickey Mouse’s hand. If we saw his real claw, no one would have liked him. What we were doing was running counter to that idea of softness.”
In May of 1992, Herman Miller started doing what they call use testing. They took prototypes of the Aeron to local companies in western Michigan and had people sit in them for at least half a day. In the beginning, the response was not positive. Herman Miller asked people to rate the chair’s comfort on a scale of 1 to 10 — where 10 is perfect, and at least 7.5 is where you’d really love to be before you actually go to market — and the early prototypes of the Aeron came in at around 4.75. As a gag, one of the Herman Miller staffers put a picture of the chair on the mock-up cover of a supermarket tabloid, with the headline chair of death: everyone who sits in it dies and made it the cover of one of the early Aeron research reports. People would look at the wiry frame and wonder if it would hold them, and then look at the mesh and wonder if it could ever be comfortable. “It’s very hard to get somebody to sit on something that doesn’t look right,” says Rob Harvey, who was Herman Miller’s senior vice president of research and design at the time. “If you build a chair that has a wiry frame, people’s perception is that it isn’t going to hold them. They get very tentative about sitting in it. Seating is a very intimate kind of thing. The body comes intimately into contact with a chair, so there are a lot of visual cues like perceived temperature and hardness that drive people’s perceptions.” But as Herman Miller tinkered with the design, coming up with new and better prototypes, and got people to overcome their qualms, the scores began to inch up. By the time Herman Miller was ready to go to market, the comfort scores were, in fact, above 8. That was the good news.
The bad news? Just about everyone thought the chair was a monstrosity. “From the beginning, the aesthetic scores lagged way behind the comfort scores,” said Bill Dowell, who was research lead on the Aeron. “This was an anomaly. We’ve tested thousands and thousands of people sitting in chairs, and one of the strongest correlations we’ve always found is between comfort and aesthetics. But here it didn’t happen. The comfort scores got above eight, which is phenomenal. But the aesthetic scores started out between two and three and never got above six in any of our prototypes. We were quite perplexed and not unworried. We’d had the Equa chair. That chair was controversial, too. But it was always seen as beautiful.”
In late 1993, as they prepared to launch the chair, Herman Miller put together a series of focus groups around the country. They wanted to get some ideas about pricing and marketing and make sure there was general support for the concept. They started with panels of architects and designers, and they were generally receptive. “They understood how radical the chair was,” Dowell said. “Even if they didn’t see it as a thing of beauty, they understood that it had to look the way it did.” Then they presented the chair to groups of facility managers and ergonomic experts — the kinds of people who would ultimately be responsible for making the chair a commercial success.
This time the reception was downright