Micah Baldwin in Silent But Deadly:
Yet, there is something amazing, maybe even beautiful in execution. In silently creating something of immense value without the need to be everywhere to be seen by everyone. That our worth as entrepreneurs is built through our products, not through our names.
It’s a great story and a great post.
(link via @PaulCartmel)
Nick Wingfield has a Windows 8 story in the New York times that provides a pretty good summary of everything we’ve heard on the tech blogs over the past few months. This passage from Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button? stood out for me:
Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Microsoft’s new software, Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.
It took Mr. McCarthy several minutes just to figure out how to compose an e-mail message in Windows 8, which has a stripped-down look and on-screen buttons that at times resemble the runic assembly instructions for Ikea furniture.
“It made me feel like the biggest amateur computer user ever,” said Mr. McCarthy, 59, a copywriter in New York.
If your software makes users feel stupid, you’re in big trouble. Quotes like Mr. McCarthy’s is a manifestation of the age-old legacy software dilemma that Microsoft faces with Windows: do you scrap the thing and start over, or evolve what’s already there? Microsoft chose to start over, and we’re about to see if the gamble is going to pay off for them.
My money is on the argument that Joel Spolsky made in April 2000 in Things You Should Never Do, Part I:
When you throw away code1 and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
You are throwing away your market leadership. You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long time in software years.
You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists.
Or to bring it closer to design (and users) — as I argued in The Data-Pixel Approach To Improving User Experience:
The main problem with big redesigns is that, even though objectively the UX might have been improved, users are often left confused about what has happened and are unable to find their way. In most cases, making “steady, relentless, incremental progress” on a website (to borrow a phrase from John Gruber) is much more desirable. With this approach, users are pulled gently into a better experience, as opposed to being thrown into the deep end and forced to sink or swim.
I think we’re going to see a lot of sinking in the coming weeks…
Cliff Kuang wrote an interesting article about design at Airbnb called How Airbnb Evolved To Focus On Social Rather Than Searches:
For a couple years, registered Airbnb users have been able to star the properties they browse, and save them to a list. But Gebbia’s team wondered whether just a few tweaks here and there could change engagement, so they changed that star to a heart. To their surprise, engagement went up by a whopping 30%. The star, they realized, was a generic web shorthand and a utilitarian symbol that didn’t carry much weight. The heart, by contrast, was aspirational.
Cliff goes further to explain how Airbnb followed the data clues to understand exactly why the heart performed better, and then used those insights to make some very successful design changes. The data is there, we just have to measure, listen, and respond.
(link via @iamFinch)
Cliff Kuang has a great article in Fast Company called Why Good Design Is Finally A Bottom Line Investment. He tells a bunch of stories about companies who realized that good design is good for business, and he also covers some of the organizational challenges:
When designers lack influence, superb products become almost impossible. Good designs seldom stay good for very long if they must navigate a gauntlet of corporate approval. That’s because the design process is as much reductive as anything else — figuring out what can be simplified and taken out. Corporate approvals are usually about adding things on to appease internal overseers. When something has been approved by everyone, it may be loved by none.
That last sentence reminds me of the old Seth Godin quote: “Nothing is what happens when everyone has to agree.”
Last week I used a product development theory called the Kano Model to explain why it’s wrong to be disappointed with the iPhone 5. I wrote the article just before the launch event, and lo and behold, it didn’t take long for the Internet to start yawning:
Um, it’s a little bit longer. Really Apple? You spent months in court fighting Samsung and portraying yourself as the world’s only truly innovative company and this is the best you can do? A phone that looks like what would happen if phones were capable of inbreeding?
Today I’d like to explore the fallacy of this kind of disappointment further using a mathematical theory I alluded to in my previous article, Maxima and Minima:
In mathematics, the maximum and minimum of a function are the largest and smallest value that the function takes at a point either within a given neighborhood (local or relative extremum) or on the function domain in its entirety (global or absolute extremum)
More specifically, I want to discuss the idea of the local maximum within the context of product development, and how that relates to innovation. For the purposes of product development, I liken the mathematical concept of neighborhood to product. For example, the iPhone (as a product) will hit a local maximum when the current design cannot be improved any more. This isn’t necessarily the best product you can make in the entire industry, but it is the best iteration of the current product1.
(Image source: 52weeksofux)
To explore this further, we also have to differentiate between the concepts of iteration and variation. In product development, variation is a way to explore a bunch of alternative product solutions. In contrast, iteration solidifies the product idea that gets chosen. To quote Jon Kolko: “Where an iteration moves an idea forward (or backwards), a variation moves an idea left or right.” Or, to put it into the language of maxima and minima, variation surveys the landscape to help companies choose the right neighborhood (product) to move into. Iteration then helps them to find the local maximum in their chosen neighborhood.
Now, let’s look at the iPhone. Because of the Samsung trial we know that Apple did a great deal of variation work before they chose their neighborhood. See, for example, this sketch of different possible designs from a slide show on AllThingsD:
(Image source: AllThingsD)
If you dig deeper into the slide show you’ll see many variations they considered before settling on the basic design for the original iPhone.
It’s not just the hardware though, of course. There’s also iOS. As far as I’m aware there aren’t any early sketches for iOS publicly available, but I’m willing to bet a lot of money that they didn’t just sketch one thing and then designed it that way. It’s pretty safe to assume that the variation process on iOS was every bit as rigorous as for the iPhone hardware.
Once they’ve done a bunch of variation work on the hardware and software for the iPhone, Apple chose their neighborhood and started iterating. There were some major improvement jumps along the way (like iOS2, and iPhone 4), but it’s all still in the same neighborhood.
So let’s get to the crux of the matter. From an engineering perspective, variation is expensive, iteration is cheap. Especially if a product is already out there. Apple is able to give away the iPhone 4 for free because they have been iterating on the hardware for so long that they can manufacture the phones very cheaply. If the iPhone 5 was a drastically different phone (I’m talking about a completely different neighborhood), everything would have started from zero.
From a business perspective, why would Apple choose to make a very expensive move to a different neighborhood, when they know that they haven’t hit the local maximum on the current phone yet? Apple is iterating because they understand this concept, and because they know that the only thing that matters is if customers like it. As John Gruber said:
The collective yawn from the tech press was louder this year; the enthusiasm from consumers is stronger.
There are some important lessons for startups in the story of the iPhone evolution.
First, spend as much time and money as you can afford on variation upfront, because if you move into the wrong neighborhood, it’s really hard to change that later on. Some companies have done it successfully, like when Path completely redesigned their product from the ground up. Other companies are finding it really hard to move, as evidenced by the almost universal disdain for the new Twitter app for iPad2. And the jury is still out on whether Microsoft’s very expensive foray into the tablet OS world will be a success or not.
Second, don’t move to a new neighborhood until you’re absolutely sure that you’ve hit the local maximum right where you live. I’ll say it again - iteration is cheaper than variation. Instead of trying to rethink your product every few months/years, rather spend time to understand how you can make the current variation better. Apple is proof that this strategy pays off.
I have a feeling that Apple isn’t going to move out of their phone neighborhood any time soon. They might send some family members to buy a new house in the TV neighborhood. But when it comes to phones, they’re still on to a good thing, and they’re smart enough not to be tempted by the fake grass on the other side of the “change everything!” fence.
In Is the iPhone good enough?, Horace Dediu speculates on whether the iPhone 5 has hit the local maximum yet. It’s a must-read piece. ↩
I’m not as negative about the app as most people, because I understand where it’s coming from. The Twitter design team are most likely operating under some very specific business constraints, and they are doing everything they can to provide a good experience within those constraints. It’s a business, after all. ↩
Kevin Kelleher in Facebook’s Growing Silent-Majority Problem:
This third group – the silent majority of Facebook users – hold the key to the company’s future. Facebook is never going to win over its harshest critics, and it’s unlikely to alienate the people who see it as part of the fabric of their everyday lives. If the company can persuade that silent majority to become more engaged in the site – interacting with bands, liking consumer brands, clicking on the ads targeted to their surfing habits – its future looks pretty bright.
I always find it useful to think about engagement metrics on the web in terms of the three A’s:
Facebook certainly doesn’t have an acquisition problem (yet), and their ramp-up process is very good, so I also don’t think they have an activation problem. But I can definitely see the argument that they might have a serious activity problem on their hands. Kevin shares some interesting engagement stats, as well as how he thinks Facebook can solve this problem.
(link via @mobivangelist)
Jason Fried has a great interview on Fast Company:
Look at what the top stories are [on TechCrunch], and they’re all about raising money, how many employees they have, and these are metrics that don’t matter. What matters is: Are you profitable? Are you building something great? Are you taking care of your people? Are you treating your customers well? In the coverage of our industry as a whole, you’ll rarely see stories about treating customers well, about people building a sustainable business.
The story about his business icon is great as well.
Cap Watkins says goodbye to getting stuff for free — and celebrates a better way — in Death of the Free Web:
As a result, the web is becoming more localized, more niche. And what startups are beginning to realize is that they don’t need to be the next Facebook or Twitter or Google to achieve success and to grow a large, sustainable business. What they need to do is create products that connect with these small, but passionate groups of like-minded people. Instead of passionate users making up the minority of a product’s customers, the new goal is to make them the majority from the start. Because those passionate customers, it turns out, create even more passionate customers.
Cap gives some good examples as well. His post argues for a similar approach to what I discussed in Imagining a future without traditional marketing.
(link via @bokardo)
I’m trying very hard to understand Samsung’s argument that losing the patent case with Apple is “a loss for the American consumer” and “will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices”. It just doesn’t make sense. Jim Dalrymple states the obvious fallacy of this line of thinking in The innovation argument:
If Samsung is forced to stop copying Apple, there is only one option left — innovate. Instead of sitting back and making their phones and tablets look exactly like the iPhone and iPad, Samsung will now have to do some work. The hardware and software will have to be different, unique and innovative.
Marco Arment phrased it slightly differently:
What’s really going to disrupt the iPhone is going to be something completely different, not something that tries so hard to clone the iPhone that it hits Apple’s patents.
Unoriginal manufacturers will need to pay for their unoriginality. The most reasonable course of action, therefore, is to truly innovate and design products that aren’t such close copies.
Apple’s patent victory is a good thing for consumers. We don’t need companies that try to be Apple. But we do need more companies that solve difficult problems in elegant ways.
Greg McKeown’s The Disciplined Pursuit of Less is an article about careers, but his solid advice also applies to software product development:
If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less. Not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials. Not just once a year as part of a planning meeting, but constantly reducing, focusing and simplifying. Not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but being willing to cut out really terrific opportunities as well. Few appear to have the courage to live this principle, which may be why it differentiates successful people and organizations from the very successful ones.