The Power Of Design a business week cover story highlights some of the value that comes from a focus on customer experience. Comments on some of IDEO’s insights from observational research falls rather flat for me. I mean commedians have for many years been making observations about the ludicrus customer experience that we get from doctors, and the way they’ve written about it in business week doesn’t even benefit from decent comic timing.
ìIDEO’s sociologists explained that patients hated Kaiser’s examination rooms because they often had to wait alone for up to 20 minutes half-naked, with nothing to do, surrounded by threatening needles. IDEO and Kaiser concluded that the patient experience can be awful even when people leave treated and cured.î
Well as practitioners we wonít be going far in the business world unless our insights are, well, a little more insightful 
Needless to say I have loved IDEOís past work and have a great deal of respect for their methodology and leadership, they just could have used a better example of insights that come from the “deep dive” research that they do.
I had hoped that the story was just massively simplified by Nussbaum for the audience. What was most disturbing for me was the fact that Bruce Nussbaum, who hangs around the IDSA endlessly, writes about design regularly, knows everyone in the business, etc. etc. would still let IDEO write the story for him so egregiously. There’s no journalism in the man, he’s simply a PR pass-through. By the end of the article, when he mentions that there are in fact other firms who (gasp) do some of the same work, he spins it so you think that IDEO invented everything described, that other firms started copying this type of thing in order to compete with IDEO. So the props to other practitioners are very weak ones.
The thing is, there will be another article or TV show just like this about IDEO in another 6 months.
My impression is that this type of PR helps IDEO enormously, but it helps the rest of us significantly as well.