This post is about an invaluable marketing lesson that I learnt from my personal experience. Back in 2006, when I was studying pre-final year of my under-graduation, I used to build micro-controller projects. I like electronics, gadgets and programming stuff.

I belonged to the stream of Electronics and Communication Engineering in a university in Chennai, India. I enjoy playing with electronic circuits in the college lab, building circuits on my own at home. It was lot of fun giving life to a dead electronic circuit.

I got better and better at the skill of building electronic circuits. I started to work on advanced electronic circuits that involved micro controllers. Micro controllers are amazing creations of man. Using them, you could add intelligence to a dumb electronic circuit.

Soon I realized that I could make money out of my hobby. I with the help of four friends started a Project Center that assists college projects to students. There was this project called “Hand-held Video Game” that we were helping out one of our college mates. The aim of this project was to replicate an old style hand-held (made-in-china style) video game. The game that we wanted to build was the famous Snake game that usually comes in Nokia Mobile phones.

This project used the latest technology, a latest micro-controller called AVR-32, which was pretty new in Indian market of Embedded Systems projects. I was very confident that this project would be the most popular one and most talked about project in our college. There is a great deal of technicality put into the project, so I thought it would be cool to boast about this project in the college.

I soon finished the project in a kind of raw, unedited draft. This is how it looked after completion. (Look at the picture). We took it to college for a review from our project in-charge and came back disappointed that nobody was bothered to look at or talk about this project. Some people said that our project looked like a mess and it sucks.

In a couple of days, my friend who owned this project, came with an idea of uncluttering this circuit and making it look neater. He went to a departmental store, bought few plastic boxes, cut the boxes to fit the LCD screen, fit the navigation buttons. I helped him with the technicalities, I got a customized Printed Circuit Board done for this project, we soldered the circuit. Finally finished the uncluttering exercise.

This is how the project looked after my friend's effort of organizing it. I was amazed looking at it. Suddenly the project started looking as if it was a timeless piece of invention. We took it to the college to test the reaction. And hey, people started loving this project, students and teachers talked about this project.

Nobody bothered to ask which technology I used, or how complicated is the code inside it. People were totally impressed by this cool looking project. When I went home and reflected on what made this project suddenly cool, it struck me that the outer look of a product is much more important the actual product.

Average users of any product do not understand the technicalities involved in the product. If an average computer user uses Microsoft Word, he has no idea what was the technology used to build it or how many lines of code was written to make word work. All he is bothered about is how it looks, how it works for him.

Take the case of any product, may it be a detergent soap or an ice cream, an average user looks for its features, look and design. So it struck me that design was Extremely Important part of selling a product. From then on whatever I did, may it be a blog or a website or a computer application or a greeting, I give utmost important to the design of it. I double check whether what I built looks visually pleasing or not.

I take the review of my friends, colleagues to make sure that the design looks aesthetically pleasing. This was one the first practical lessons that I'd learnt in my life.

Hope you liked it. Do add your comments about your thoughts on importance of design for a product.