Drones. The quickest product endings?
Buy drone ✔️
Fly drone ✔️
Crash drone ✔️
Trash drone ✔️
Walking through my building, and seeing a brand new drone box with a broken drone inside made me think about the consumer experience of these products. Broken quick enough to put it straight back in the packaging you only just unwrapped it from. Is it the quickest ending for a product?
Consumer drones fall in to a wider e-waste. The sort of waste that is hard to define as a consumer experience. Where people know their TV, Vacuum cleaner or computer is e-waste, but maybe not the smaller things like toys they got for their kids, the vape they use, or the drone they just bought and crashed.
A UNITAR (United Nations Institute for Training and Research) and WEEE Forum study “found that of the 74 average total e-products in a household, 13 were hoarded (nine unused but working, four broken).”1 According to the WEEE Forum, “some 7.3 billion individual items discarded annually, an average of about 1 e-toy for every man, woman and child on Earth.”2
Consumer drones fit neatly in to this category. Their short life span means they show up as a piece of broken e-waste pretty quickly. According to a joint Business Insider and News24 South Africa article 10% of drones are destroyed on the first flight.3 The majority are due to simple pilot error. A regional drone repair service in South Africa called Fixology had 1200 drone repairs booked in the first 8 months of 2019.
To help with first time crashing of drones, some helpful companies have started to make flight simulators 4for budding drone pilots. Helping people learn the controls before terminating the product.
Consumer experience
Lots of the products that fall in to the invisible e-waste category, including drones have rich, engaging and emotional stories to purchase them. Drones characterise this well. For many social media influences the possibility of create some magically compelling content with aerial shots is too much to avoid. It also means spending money on an emerging field of technology, which excites many consumer hearts.
Ending types and drones
Reflecting on this, we can image a Venn diagram that places other products alongside drones, that have similar desires from consumers.
Drones fill this sweet spot of consumer desire and destruction that few other disposable products do. But what is different about the high turn over with other products, is that other have an Exhaustion/Credit Out ending. Where the drone ends as part of the onboarding failure with a Broken/Withdrawal type of ending.
Its ending is quick, explosive, exciting and expensive. It is not under control, and often detached from the producer of the product, so the potential of instructed disposal of the material waste is often unavailable. So on many occasions these products sit in product purgatory, waiting for clear next steps. Like the drone in my building.
4 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.makkuzu.simudrone&hl=en_US
