Successful user experience innovations are rarely characterized by being first to market, but rather by being done right. In other words, innovations become successful when the user experience is great. Copying your competitors or other businesses is a great opportunity to create successful user experience innovation. But when copying, you really need to focus on doing it right.
The steps are pretty straightforward. You first need to find user experience innovation in competitor products, and then you need to improve these to make them successful. The methods for making the innovations successful are not much different from those described in previous chapters. The four steps needed for creating user experience innovation around competitor solutions are as follows:
- Identify potential solutions from a competitor product.
- Categorize competitor solutions.
- Innovate solutions.
- Verify solutions.
Anecdote
In the beginning of the mobile phone era, phones were most often operated using keypad buttons for each of the functions. Some devices used a function key that, when pressed at the same time as a digit key, would bring up a menu or execute a function (just like a shortcut on your computer). These devices were highly complex to use.
There were a few user experience pioneers, though, who invented the use of soft keys for mobile phones. You may be thinking Nokia, but that is wrong. The first mobile phones with soft keys came from either Siemens or Cetelco/Hagenuk. Even I am not sure who gets the real credit for the initial innovation, and I have worked with both companies. But it was for sure not Nokia. Nokia launched its first soft key–enabled device (the 2110) in 1994 and it was a big success, even though the first devices with soft keys came out in 1992. Figure 14-1 shows the Hagenuk MT 900.
Even at that time, the soft key concept was wasn't new. It existed for some very technical devices, such as oscilloscopes, but Siemens and Cetelco/Hagenuk were the first to bring it to the mobile phone market.
Even though Nokia was not the biggest mobile phone manufacturer at that time (it was number 3 after Motorola and Ericsson), it managed with the 2110 and its following products to make users and the industry believe that the soft key concept was invented by Nokia. Remember that history rarely remembers those who were first to do something; it usually remembers those who were first to do it right. (Admittedly, the fact that the Nokia 2110 was half the size and weight of the Cetelco/Hagenuk device probably had an influence here also.)
Figure 14-1. Hagenuk MT 900 with soft keys, from 1992. Created by Cetelco/Hagenuk. Photos used with permission from vintagemobilephones.com.