What happens when engineers rule your world?

Look for the little black box in a corner of the room that connects to a socket in the wall. It's the one that pumps the internet into your house. Now try to answer this question without checking first: how many blinking lights does your router have? Take a wild guess. Five? Ten? Now the bonus question: do you know what those lights are for?

Even if you do, you probably don't care.  A modem is a boring black box, and you rightfully expect it to work silently and unobtrusively. Even if these lights can inform you that your orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing has some errors, what would you do about it? It is not like you are going to break out the soldering gun and multimeter and go to town on your home network. Chances are you will unplug, reboot, call the phone company or throw it away altogether and just buy a new one. Life is just too short.

So why do almost all modems have these bands of flashing Christmas lights on them? Is it because consumers want a 24-hour light organ playing behind their sofa? Do the lights really add to their functionality and ease of use?  The answer, of course, is "no" to both. Modems have a string of lights because they have been designed by engineers, manufactured by engineers and marketed by engineers. At no point in the journey from design to manufacturing to marketing, has anyone ever asked: "Do people actually want these lights?"  In fact, my own modem lights are covered with a strip of black tape, because I like my bedroom dark and don't care much for a lightshow that looks like mice are operating a disco behind my bed's baseboard.

Think about how strange that is. In a marketplace, the development of consumer products tends to flow with the wants and needs of consumers, trying to deliver what the end user is asking for. And yet here is a box full of electricity-wasting, resource-wasting lights that nobody asked for. I'm not saying that my modem is personally responsible for melting the polar ice cap, but it does add up. The user of the modem pays for the LED lights, for the unnecessary electricity they use and for the potential future costs of recycling the rare Indium and Gallium metal compounds used to make them. Why go through all the trouble for something nobody wants?

The underlying problem is an engineer-driven culture that churns out tech products with little consideration for what the user actually wants and needs. For years, we have been putting up with ugly black electronic boxes with lumpy, awkward chargers that block other outlets; heaps of long, snaking cables behind our desks, unnecessary switches and buttons disguised as "features", fat, useless manuals in twenty languages.  And, yes, unnecessary lights.

It is not the feature creep or the waste that bothers me; it is the fact that it ignores the wants and needs of the buyer.  The future belongs to innovative products that deliver a simple message to the consumer: "I listened to you. I understand what you need and now I deliver what you want."

Just imagine the blessed relief of a router that has no lights at all: no more black tape or mouse disco. Now imagine the possibilities of marketing this (undoubtedly cheaper to produce) modem as a premium planet-friendly product with eco-friendly packaging: a unique selling proposition in a crowded market.

So to all you engineers and product designers out there, here is a call-to-action for you: go out there and find your audience. Listen to them, and find out what they actually want -  and then build it. You might be surprised how popular you will become.