Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
“The only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that, they’re all learned.” – various attribution, most commonly to Bruce Ediger
While there is some debate (especially among new mothers!) how intuitive the nipple is, the nipple is the perfect product. It fits exactly to spec, even without user testing and with a variable user group. It’s extremely portable and instantly available in a wide variety of environments (hot, cold, wet, dry, etc). It’s (mostly) instant on, and (mostly) intuitive, and works without even thinking, when one or both users are half asleep. But best of all, it was designed with a singular purpose for a very select audience segment, and, for that segment and that audience, it is a wholly complete solution.
Product designers have a horrible tendency to creep scope. When they come upon a problem (my pancakes burn on one side and a raw on the other) which cannot be filled with the stuff people have (should I hold the pan upside down? should I grab the pancake with my hand?), and build a very useful tool which is pretty good at solving said issue (a spatula). Unfortunately, rather than stopping there, they proceed to add a whole bunch more features (slots, ultra sharp edge, clock radio) until it barely solves what for what it was initially designed, and most definitely does nothing else well. If they had just stopped after their first pass, and moved on, every one would have been so much happier – and their pancakes would never have been so well flipped.
What’s the solution to this? Allow me to build on the post of my Seattle 2.0 colleague last week, “You Are Not Your Target Market (Even Though You Used to Be)“. The most important thing in designing products is focus focus focus. New features are fine, new audience segments are not. The more focused your solution, the more successful you will be. Let me give you some examples:
– The G.E. Volusion E8 Ultrasound Scanner – If you’ve never had an ultrasound, you’ve missed a truly amazing display. In complete darkness, Ultrasound technicians are able to move a wand with one hand and make detail measurements with the other, zooming in and out, recording locations and spotting for landmarks. It’s not just that they are well-trained, it’s that the designers of the machine knew exactly what challenges the users would be facing. You can’t require key combinations, for example, because you have one hand holding the wand covered in goo. How, then, can they make the most of the five fingers their users have left? Trust me – they do.
– Avid Media Composer – Within twenty years, Avid moved an entire industry to a new technique, and became the ONLY solution for the space. Avid Media Composer is the reason why. In complete darkness, a master editor can fly through any length of video, faster and more accurately than you can imagine. The keystrokes and techniques are not obvious, but when you watch someone trained, the machine is like an extension of their arm.
– Oxo Measuring Cup – Ok, I’ve written about this before. However, it’s worth bringing up again: this measuring cup indicates such creative and such a perfect solution, the designers should be nominated for the Nobel equivalent of product design. A chef no longer has to bend over to look at how much stuff is in the cup – you can see from the top. My God is this brilliant. The designers must have been looking at themselves trying to figure out why someone else didn’t come up with this in the past 100 years, and not even realizing it’s because it required a genius to think of something this simple.
I note, with some dismay, that it was basically impossible to come up with a candidate for this list that was software or Web software only (Avid is obviously software, but it really only shines when you pair it with the hardware workstation). It’s not that software and Web sites don’t make good UI and UX examples, it’s just they are so broad, and do so many things, that it’s very challenging to view them through the lense of a single user group. And, therein lies the failure of software development when it comes to developing the perfect product.
Because hardware is much more rigid (pardon the pun) in how much you can develop, it forces lots of decisions up front. How big is your device going to be? How many people can use it at once? How much are the raw materials going to cost (and thereby set your margins)? Software, on the other hand, is way too flexible – you can justifiably say that there are products that are designed to address a market of three billion people. But by doing so, you no longer have a perfect product – since three billion people cannot possibly have even remotely similar needs, you are guaranteed to have a whole bunch of unhappy users. They’ll use your product, but they won’t love it.
This may not be the worst thing in the world – I’d be happy to have the Google search business, for example. But you’re not Google today, or tomorrow – and you won’t be Google, likely ever. If you start out gunning for three billion, you’re just going to generate unhappy users who are so-so on your product and who will leave you in a nanosecond for the new new thing. If you want to succeed, don’t build Google – build the perfect product for a VERY specific market. Only when you satisfy them have you earned the right to build any bigger.
