Michael Kanellos, "The elements of style," CNET.com, 16 Jul 2001

How does the focus-group testing work. When do you start marrying your ideas with the average person's behavior?

We are mostly interested in where are people using these things, what are the tasks they are trying to accomplish, what are their key frustrations, how much space do they have.

A good example of that is the ThinkLight. That whole idea came out between collaboration between human-factors engineering, industrial designers and marketing. We were trying to figure out what user benefit we could link to our product. It was along the lines of making a better dashboard rather than a better engine.

One of the things we came up with was that often people were trying to use these things in places you wouldn't ordinarily think of, in a dark lecture hall, or maybe in the back seat of a car on a trip in the middle of the night, and you are trying to write a report. Everybody talked about, "Well, you can tilt the screen down and light your keyboard and lift it back up again." But then we thought, "Wouldn't it be great if there was a light that would illuminate the keyboard?"