3
Product Design
3.1. Where is the gap?
You said product? Who designs products? Designers and developers, of course. And they are good at it, since they do it all the time. So, why bother?
3.1.1. Business school
Product design: it is an engineering discipline, out of the scope of a good manager.
Product definition: the marketing defines the products to be developed, the technical teams execute this vision.
Period. And then...
About your catalog: your product catalog will obey the 80-20 rule. Accept this by balancing your earnings.
On packing with functionality: as competition shrinks your market share, add value with more functionality.
3.1.2. Apple
Products must be “insanely great”, which implies a number of choices, not all technical in the usual sense, including form and function. Extreme care is taken to any of them, whether resulting in a visible result or not. Design is iterated on as many prototypes as needed to feel convinced at the end that the best choices have been made, irrespective of costs and delays. The top-level manager is involved and committed in this process. There is no place for “good enough” products.
To heck with the 80-20 rule. Get rid of the useless part. Almost everything should be essential. The 80-20 rationale view is a common tolerance view on lesser quality. You do not educate markets. You stay in the midst of other’s complacencies. An 80-80 rule, perhaps should be your close win. Perfection in what you do.
3.2. Amplifying the gap and progressing
Raymond Loewy published the famous book Ugliness Sells Itself Badly in 1953. Nobody would challenge this statement. Yet, here we have evidence which is, strangely enough, systematically forgotten, at a time when companies desperately strive for the smallest selling point.
Anyone can recognize that Apple products are beautiful, or “insanely great”. Hewlett Packard’s CEO Meg Whitman declares speaking about the PC market:
“The whole market has moved to something that is more beautiful. Apple taught us that design really matters.”
However, instead of humbly recognizing that a lot remains to be done to sustain comparison with Apple, she immediately added:
“I think we’ve made a lot of progress.”
A typical self-satisfactory CEO statement, and a totally unproductive one.
Jony Ives’ role and position at Apple does not deserve a lengthy discussion. Granting a designer such a prominent position in an organization is something unheard of outside of the fashion business.
Some argue that Apple’s obsession for the form factor sometimes goes as far as being detrimental to function. For example, they complain that they would prefer an iPhone with a larger battery, instead of thickness reduction.
Apple tends to adopt a minimalist, Zen-spirit approach: “more” is not necessarily better, and where competitors struggle to enrich the spec sheet, Apple simplifies and strips down to the essential.
Whereas most designers are proud of the list of functionality they have managed to implement, the Apple designer is proud of those he has eliminated.
In its commercials, Apple highlights user experience, and never pure technical specifications (“spec sheet”). There is more: user experience starts from the moment the customer unpacks the products, by holding and looking at the pack. Jony Ives’ recent new assignment extends user experience even further to “customer experience”: customer satisfaction must be the objective, whether the customer interacts with an Apple product, an Apple Website or a physical Apple Store.
In order to decide whether a given functionality must be present in the product or not, Apple performs a detailed analysis of the different interaction contexts (the “use cases”).
Many companies consider that it is best to let the market decide between possible choices. Following a “throw against the wall and see if it sticks” strategy, they disperse their efforts into a multitude of product lines. This is typical of Samsung’s strategy in the smartphone business.
Apple follows this unique path, even though some competitors may begin to realize they would do well in borrowing from it.
Apple products are easy to use, so easy that the user manual is kept down to the bare minimum. They rely on choices which appear obvious, yet ones nobody thought to use before.
Apple competitors probably also have ergonomists, and there is no reason to believe that they are stupid. The difference is that, at Apple, their opinion is considered as valuable, and taken into account, at the right time.
Steve Jobs insisted on the fact that he was taking more pride in what he rejected than in what he accepted:
“I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.”
Too often, the designer is requested to incorporate a long list of features, which leads to compromise and ineffective design choices.
Apple will not hesitate to eliminate features which it considers as heritage from the past (diskettes drive, CD/DVD drives more recently, even USB ports even recently on the Mac Air). At first, strong dissatisfaction reactions can be heard, but rather quickly the Apple choice is accepted and propagates to competitors products. The issue here is, therefore, to be the first who is courageous enough to say no.
Apple’s strategy is similar to the one used by Nature: in living organisms, organs and functions occupy the volume they need, given the advantage they bring in competition for life or reproduction – nothing more, nothing less.
Apple avoids duplicating, like Nature. Whenever Nature duplicates, there is a good reason behind: safety redundancy (lungs and kidneys), or new functionality (two eyes bring stereoscopic vision and two ears bring sound spatial information).
If, for some reason, for example a change in the environment, a function is no longer needed, it simply disappears.
This selectivity, combined with the compactness of Apple design solutions, sparing both material and energy, is the true ecological way of designing products, following Nature’s lessons.
In traditional (often vertically organized) organizations, the company history and the delicate balance resulting from power struggles at the top lead to an implicit hierarchy between functions, valuing some opinions more than others, simply depending on what function in the company executives come from. A de facto situation which preempts products-market preferences independently of …the market.
3.2.1. On packing with functionality
Keep it simple and focus on coherence, since the value of the product is not the sum of the value of the functionality. And the value of the whole catalog is not the sum of values of the products that compose it.
Remember Nokia’s Communicator? The first smartphone equipped with Windows, packing a ton of functions. The result: big, heavy, slower and slower operations as garbage collection was inefficient. Or the first HTC smartphones.
Ken Segall, the former agency creative director for NeXT and Apple, is the guy who put the ‘i’ in iPad. He explained why simplicity is the secret of Apple’s success in Insanely Simple [SEG 13]:
“To Steve Jobs, simplicity wasn’t just a design principle. It was a religion and a weapon. The obsession with simplicity is what separates Apple from other technology companies. It’s what helped Apple recover from near-death in 1997 to become the most valuable company on Earth in 2011, and guides the way Apple is organized, how it designs products, and how it connects with customers. It’s by crushing the forces of complexity that the company remains on its stellar trajectory.”
Complexity requires simplicity. Complications (resulting from the staking of more functions) distract the user, who then loses the perception of “one product”.
In product design, the ergonomist is no less important than the engineer. His role is to bring that final cosmetic touch of “beauty” on the product after it is designed. When it comes to the product, no idea and no people profile are to be disregarded without further examination.
We always like to point out for our children that if Steve Jobs did not have the strange idea to follow calligraphy training courses at an early age, the beautiful fonts which came together with the original Mac would have never appeared so early in computer history.
And that is the “connecting dots” metaphor of Steve Jobs in his famous Stanford speech:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path; and that will make all the difference.”
Steve Jobs, Stanford Speech, June 12, 2005