When JCB decided to investigate the tractor market, the company asked the question "what is a tractor actually used for?"

JCB announced a major order from the US army this week for 500 "high speed diggers". The 12-tonne High Mobility Engineer Excavators (HMEEs) have a top speed of 57 miles per hour, can lift more than two tonnes and dig to a depth of almost four metres. What makes this particularly interesting to me is that it's another spinoff from a great piece of market-research-led design a few years ago. The company's "Fastrac" tractor (from which the HMEEs are derived) is now a familiar sight on Britain's roads - and it's the word "roads" which is the key to the design's success.

When JCB decided to investigate the tractor market, the company asked the question "what is a tractor actually used for?" The answer, after some research, was not what you see in every primary school child's picture books - ploughing. The majority of a tractor's working hours turned out to be spent pulling trailers, particularly on public roads. Yet few were primarily designed for this purpose; they had the power, but rarely the speed. The Fastrac was designed with this in mind.

The rest of course is history, but it's a wonderful example of how sometimes the best designs come about by remembering to ask what the users are going to want to do with the product. The electronics and telecoms industries seem to be pursuing a policy of developing every product idea that comes out of each brainstorming meeting, and seeing what sticks, quietly retiring the failures. But in most markets, designers don't have that luxury. It'd be fun though, wouldn't it?