Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

Both at home and at the office, I have bought, obtained or gotten the use of a number of products lately that have made me think about why they are interesting (or not) to me.

Sometimes it's just fun, sometimes it's a great deal, and sometimes it's exactly what the rote sales and marketing guys say: features. Various of the new HD and Blue-Ray devices are like that; only exciting for feature count, but some balance that out with awful UI or reliability.

The good devices – by which I mean the ones I am still overjoyed to use long after initial acquisition – seem to share two key attributes:

1. Meet expectations – Based on most client briefs ("make something innovative and differentiable") this seems at first like almost a bad thing. But you have to give users a point of departure. They need to know roughly how to use the product, and what they can expect it to do before they can be thrilled by new features or a new experience overall. This doesn't mean everything must be anchored in the past; almost any level setting will work for this. Meeting expectations is about getting the product into customers' hands, and making sure that first experience is productive.
2. Exceed expectations – Simply adding to the specifications or adding a few bullets under the features list does not automatically exceed expectations. Once expectations are set, a good overall (and integrated) experience is a key way to exceed expectations. That experience doesn't have to be delightful and fun; just being productive in an unexpected manner is enough to make your otherwise-standard product stand out in the market. Exceeding expectations is about lifecycle. It keep your customers using the product, buying the next generation (or add-ons, or paying MRCs) and telling everyone else about it.

Those that do not flip my switch fail in one way or the other.

Instead of worrying over niggling details of mobile phones, let me start instead by talking about my new lawnmower. As a homeowner, I have mowed my lawn (or, admittedly, paid someone to do it) for some years. Mowed my parents' house for years, and even worked a lawn crew briefly in high school. I have a solid understanding of lawn mowing. Understanding the target market background is key to their expectations, and as the only consumer surveyed here, that's my background.

I got (cheap, yes) a battery powered mower. It's the black and dark-green one on the right in the above photo. It meets expectations in that:

• Mower shaped – While I could imagine odd solutions to this that might work better (where's Dyson with a mower?) I had no learning curve. It's a lawnmower.
• Same controls – More than just being generally a mower, it has a safety handle thingy, which is at the end of a control arm. Essentially, I can just take off and mow without instruction.
• Simple parts – Easy to fix with simple tools if, say, a wheel falls off. And the battery is replaceable by anyone who carries sealed lead-acid batteries. Nothing is totally unique to the mower or requires special parts or service.
• No gas – Well, yeah. Key attribute is no gas, no gas tank, no purchases of gas, no mess or smell which annoys my wife to no end, etc.
• Quieter – Not dead quiet, but I had seen some, and it's more in the vacuum cleaner range than the mower. I had taken to wearing electronic hearing protection attached to a radio and my phone when mowing, so I could tell what was going on in the house and take calls. And, I have a strange hearing loss so want to protect it. And anyway, I can mow (e.g.) Sunday morning without annoying anyone too much.

But it exceeds expectations in, well, unexpected ways.

• Even quieter than I expected – Note that it's extremely okay for an expected feature to exceed the expectation.
• No vibration – Such that without the noise, you cannot tell it's running. This, as it turns out, was a key problem with the fatigue of gas mowers. This thing is a snap to work for long periods.
• Safety – Before working on a gas mower, you need to unplug the spark plug wire. Often this is hard to get to, and sometimes I've had it move back to resting on the plug. Which isn't really cut off. The battery mower I got has a simple, very sure (I looked at how it works) switch that cuts off all power when you pull the plug. I am totally confident it won't start and cut my hand off when working under the mower.
• Speed of cut – The motor runs faster than a gas engine, so the cut speed it very high. Even with the blade dull (it hits rocks, etc.) it cuts fine, and it generally cuts finer, so clumps left on the surface don't kill my grass.
• Weight – I expected it to weight a lot, since folks complain about batteries being heavy. But overall it is lighter than any gas mower I have used. Also adds to the ease of use, and it's replacing a self-propelled mower.
• Starting – There is none. Like bill-payment is an inherently bad feature of any service with an MRC, it hadn't occurred to me that starting was a pain. It's totally removed now.
• Cleaning, maintenance – Mostly removed as there's no air filter, etc. And there's no issue flipping it over, because it's light and gas doesn't leak out.

To make sure this blog post meets expectations, let's talk about the iPad. Disclaimer: I don't own one. I have played with a couple, have the office iTouch in my bag all the time, and certainly read up on it and all Apple product development plenty. Which is fine for at least the "meets expectations" round; that's the key part of selling the product to get it in consumer's hands.

As far as the rest of my level setting, I have pined for a good pen/touch tablet for around 25 years. Yes, they have been around at least that long. If I had the money in college, I would have bought a specific 386 tablet (but later saw it and would have been disappointed). I have a ruggedized touchscreen laptop, basically because it was cheap and tablets are much more expensive. More recently, I have worked on an eReader, and we specifically got pretty much all the other ones, so I've experienced the state of the art for lightweight consumption devices as well, and spent a lot of time thinking about what I want an ideal device to be.

Regardless, looking at the advertising (and other marketing), the iPad meets expectations in that:

• It's a big iPhone – I know how it works. Everyone I know personally who has one has an iPhone and is rather an Apple aficionado (I'd say "fanboi" but that's apparently a pejorative).
• It's a mass-marketed eBook reader – And I also know what those are. There has been plenty of advertising and even more writing about what eBooks will do to print some day.
• It's colorful and responsive – Beating all ePaper devices, it's got a TFT screen of some sort, so is immediately responsive, helping with interactivity expectations. I don't have to learn a control set or patience while it reacts as most eBook readers make me.
• It'll be popular enough – Maybe not with consumers, but certainly with developers and media companies trying the next big thing. It'll have content (whether media or actual apps for other purposes), and not all will be made by Apple.

For me, it exceeds expectations in the following ways:

• orientation lock

For me, really, not a one. I won't outline what some of my needs would be a for a disruptive tablet device (and mostly they are outlined here). I don't really want an eBook reader, basic productivity stuff I do with my mobile phone, and way too many folks use the external keyboard, which looks pretty kludgy for something supposed to be amazingly portable.

Now, it does seem like it might encourage good media, so if I see more book/magazine projects I like, that could sway me. And it has some value as a browser, so I might get one some day after all. But not now.

The lesson here is not that I don't like the iPad. Or prefer batteries to gasoline. Or anything product-specific. It's that there is a tight relationship between product design and marketing of a product.

And even more importantly that usability/UX/design types need to be aware of the value of product design, sales and marketing to the success of your product. We all like to at least give lip service to taking business as well as user needs in mind, but really paying attention to this takes some work, and is foreign to a lot of designers. You have to be conscious of your process, and organize design around these goals.

Naturally, the end result has to meet those needs. But I still get lots of requests for something cutting-edge, fresh, edgy, unique, and that will differentiate the product in the market. Often, this happens at the expense of good design. An interface for a mobile phone that fails in as simple a way as reversing softkey positions is a serious failure. Users will make mistakes, become frustrated, and probably stop using your product. This is a "meet expectations" task.

Lots of neat products have failed because they didn't meet expectations. There was a spate of weird mobile phone form factors (e.g. the Moto V70, the original Nokia N-gage) that went nowhere, I feel partly because they departed too widely from the expectation of a phone.

Early musicphones failed because they were hard to use even compared to the junky pre-iPod MP3 players. To bang on Apple again, the Apple TV has languished because it does a very narrow set of things, but not many others (internet radio, PVR, even just play disks) that are expectations of media devices. For each of these, initial exploring, or even the post-purchase experience is not followed up with sufficient satisfaction.

Meeting expectations is not enough – you have to make the experience and the features exceed expectations to provide real satisfaction with the product. Success comes when you meet expectations then exceed them. The original PalmPilot created a mass PDA market by replacing the datebook, in a pocketable size, then exceeded expectations with a unique pen-input system, and an easy to learn interface. The original iPhone, even when a featurephone, created a market for itself by taking the then increasingly complex and boringly business-like PDA-phones and exceeding expectations with superior industrial design and a seamless and pleasurable interface.

Design holistically, both in the sense of the product and the total environment in which it will exist, to provide your product the best chance of survival.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Design, Design Tips, Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.