Sometimes, you don’t need glitz; you need plumbing.

That’s Charles Arthur in Goodbye Delicious, hello Pinboard, explaining why The Guardian is dumping Delicious as their social bookmarking service. Let me ask you a question. Which of the following two screen shots is prettier?

Delicious:

Pinboard:

Delicious, right? Now let me ask you another question. Which site is more useful as a social bookmarking site? It’s ok, I’ll answer for you: it’s Pinboard.

Pinboard’s aesthetic[1] is fairly bland, but the  sparse, table-like layout is the best way to organize the vast amount of information you collect on the Internet. The aesthetic fits the purpose of the app. But wait, there’s more. It lets you import from Twitter, Instapaper, and Google Reader (well, back in the day when Google Reader still supported public sharing). It has browser bookmarklets that work effortlessly. It integrates smoothly with a variety of RSS Readers. Sorry for the cliché, but it just works.

Meanwhile, Delicious has become slow, it has constant availability issues, and the aesthetic keeps getting more extravagant. This actually reduces its utility by obscuring the app’s core features. Social bookmarking is about two things - tagging the things you’re saving, and searching for those thing later on. That’s it. The new Delicious owners are apparently trying to turn it into something more, but whatever that something more is, I’m not buying.

Anyway, back to glitz and plumbing. As I’ve mentioned before, great aesthetic design builds trust, increases engagement, and elicits the appropriate emotional responses to a brand. But glitz is something else. Glitz is about making things shiny without asking what the thing should look like to fulfill its primary purpose.

Social bookmarking is Internet plumbing, not glitz. I now use Pinboard, and highly recommend it.

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1. Time for the obligatory disclaimer. Yes, Design is about problem solving, and it includes elements such as User Research, Interaction Design, Content Strategy, Visual Design, etc. Here I am referring only to the aesthetic layer of the Visual Design component. ↩

Marty Cagan argues that splitting the Product Manager and Product Ownership roles into two positions is a mistake:

This approach has two common negative consequences.  The first is that there is no clear owner (neither person takes responsibility for the product), and the second is a common lack of respect or understanding between the two (the “product manager” doesn’t appreciate the technical complexities, and the “product owner” doesn’t appreciate the customer’s pain).

I agree, and I would actually go one step further. I view Product Ownership activities (representing the voice of the customer, interacting with the development team, managing the backlog, etc.) as a subset of the overall strategic Product Management position (product planning, execution, and marketing). I’ve resisted calling my team Product Owners, and prefer to say that they are Product Managers who fulfill a Product Ownership role on Agile projects.

The problem is that splitting these roles into distinct job titles also splits their goals. It’s easy for one to become all about the market, and the other to become all about internal development tasks. Instead, a Product Manager should ultimately take end-to-end responsibility for the development of product solutions that meet user goals and business needs. That’s the job. Managing the backlog and working with developers on specifications are just part of that overall function, not a thing on its own.

This is one of my favorite stories in the Steve Jobs biography:

The result was that the Macintosh team came to share Jobs’s passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.”

He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany’s example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, “We said to ourselves, ‘Hey, if we’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.’”

See also The difference between Apple and Microsoft: product before profit.

Jared Spool in The Value of Appl’s Knowledge Navigator: Gruber Has It Partially Right:

When teams don’t have a vision [”¦], each person is walking around with a different understanding of what the end of the journey should look like. When ther’s no common understanding on what that end point looks like, each decisions is evaluated on a different criteria and the resulting products end up looking like crap.

This is why I believe that product roadmaps are not evil. As I’ve written before, at our company we are very clear that the product roadmap is a flexible guideline that can (and must) change frequently as needed. But it gives the teams (and the management team) something to work towards. It’s a common vision, a sense of direction that’s more than just fluffy language - it’s concrete evidence that w’re headed somewhere good, and we know how to get there.

I’m a little late to this article that made the rounds last week, but I finally read The inside story of how Microsoft killed its Courier tablet. It’s a bit scattered and sometimes hard to follow the narrative (probably because it was split into two pieces), but it’s still a very interesting story and worth reading. For one, if Microsoft found a way to keep J Allard around, things might have turned out differently for them. He seems like exactly the kind of person they needed to deliver real product innovation in the mobile computing space.

The most interesting part for me is how the article shines a light on the differences between Microsoft and Apple’s approaches to product development. Here’s Jay Green in the CNET article about the Courier tablet:

Courier’s death also offers a detailed look into Microsoft’s Darwinian approach to product development and the balancing act between protecting its old product franchises and creating new ones. The company, with 90,000 employees, has plenty of brilliant minds that can come up with revolutionary approaches to computing. But sometimes, their creativity is stalled by process, subsumed in other products, or even sacrificed to protect the company’s Windows and Office empires.

Microsoft has a fear of not doing anything that could cannibalize their cash cows (Windows and Office), even if that means they have to do things that don’t create value for users. It’s an organization that’s optimized for profit, not product. Contrast that with Apple’s approach:

Apple hasn’t optimized its organization to maximize profit. Instead, it has made the creation of value for customers its priority. When you do this, the fear of cannibalization or disruption of one’s self just melts away. In fact, when your mission is based around creating customer value, around creating great products, cannibalization and disruption aren’t “bad things” to be avoided. They’re things you actually strive for ”” because they let you improve the outcome for your customer.

Kyle Baxter adds the following perspective on an approach that places product before profit:

[N]ot only does focusing on the product make for better products, but it completely changes the corporate, business and organizational decisions you make, too. If you are focused on maximizing profit (in the short or long-term), you end up making choices that inhibit great products and great success at best, and destroy your ability to succeed at worst.

The Courier project should serve as a cautionary tale about what happens when the fear of losing profit gets in the way of developing a potentially great product. A product that could have resulted in a very different tablet landscape than the one we have today.

Peter Merholz describes Instapaper creator Marco Arment’s approach to design in Craft in Interaction and Service Design:

Instapaper shows the power of approaching experience design as a craft, as opposed to some kind of massive organizational process. Too often companies launch something and then move on to whatever’s next. Instapaper shows what happens when you go deeper and deeper and deeper into something. Unlike Microsoft or Adobe, who simply tack on features with every new release, Marco, instead, refines the design, honing it, polishing it, like his app is some jewel. I’d love to see companies approach service design the way Marco has. It would require a fundamental shift in how they work, but the results could be quite beautiful.

How often do you hear the words “We’ll get to that in Phase 2”? And how often do you actually get to do “Phase 2”? It’s a running joke in the software industry that calling something a “Phase 2 feature” is another way of saying it will never happen. There are just too many squirrel projects, too many Shiny Things that need to get done.

It doesn’t have to work like that, though. Small, dedicated teams who have autonomy and a clear decision maker can focus on one area of an experience for an extended period of time. This can work even in large organizations, but it requires trust and a long-term vision, both of which can be hard to find in big companies. It is the only way to bring craft and care to a design cycle that’s often treated too much like a conveyor belt.

Dan Frommer has a nice graphical overview of Apple’s September quarter results. As he points out in a follow-up post:

Weaker than anticipated iPhone sales last quarter forced Apple to miss earnings expectations tonight ”” a rare showing for the company. As a result, Apple shares are getting whacked right now, down about 7% in after-hours trading.

Here’s the thing about those “weaker” iPhone sales. If Apple released the iPhone 4S in September like most people expected, the 4 million units they sold last weekend would have happened in time to beat analyst expectations (note that Apple still beat its own guidance).

Instead of releasing something sub-standard to keep the analysts happy, Apple decided to wait until the hardware and software were both ready and up their own quality standards. That’s what long-term strategy looks like.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised when corporate executives say silly things without the slightest sense of irony, but it still floors me every time. Here is Andy Lees, the head of Microsoft’s Windows Phone business, talking about the iPhone 4S in the Seattle Times Newspaper:

From a pure hardware perspective, I was surprised they’re not giving the consumer more choice. People want a variety of different things.

When you read that statement next to this Apple press release, you’re left scratching your head:

Apple today announced pre-orders of its iPhone 4S have topped one million in a single day, surpassing the previous single day pre-order record of 600,000 held by iPhone 4.

If you say something like “people want a variety of different things”, you should probably back that up with the number of Windows Phone phones (is that how you’re supposed to say it?) that have been pre-ordered or sold. I haven’t seen that press release from Microsoft.

Update (10/13): Looks like we now have those numbers. Horace Dediu reports that Windows Phone has sold just a few more units in 3 months as the iPhone 4S sold in 24 hours:

During the last quarter for which we have data (ending June) I have an estimate that Windows Phone sold only 1.4 million units (Gartner’s sell-through analysis suggests 1.7 million). That gives Microsoft a 1.3% share of units sold (Gartner 1.6%), a new low.

The other problem with Andy’s statement about people wanting more options is that it’s just, well, not true. Harry Marks aptly points to this TED talk on the paradox of choice, and quotes Barry Schwartz:

With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all.

You want an iPhone? Here it is. Choose your storage size and have fun. You want a Windows Phone phone? Here are a variety of models to choose from. Try to enjoy figuring out which one is best for you.

All of this reminds me of a classic answer on Quora to the question Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality? Michael Wolfe makes the point that Dropbox is so successful because it focuses on one thing, and doing that one thing really well. That one thing is a folder that syncs your stuff. That’s it.

“But,” you may ask, “so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!”

No, shut up. People don’t use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.

The root cause of the problem is the lingering fallacy that more features = a better product. For all the talk about the importance of simplicity, and the growing list of successful products that just do a few things well, we just can’t seem to get rid of this belief that more = better. Andy Lees also falls into this trap in the Seattle Times interview:

The more capabilities we add into our phone, the more delightful it becomes to use because you seem to have more at your fingertips without this clutter and confusion of the other platforms.

More capabilities = less clutter and confusion? Really? To bring this all the way back to Design and the problem with this type of thinking, here is Scrivs in Focus:

The best designs always have a singular focus. The prettiest designs might have multiple things you can focus on, but that doesn’t make them the best designs.

We live in a time where there is so much happening around us that when we are able to use anything that has a singular focus it makes it easy. When we don’t have to make a decision on how we are supposed to use a design it makes it easy. You can’t beat focus. More features don’t beat focus. More doesn’t beat less unless the less is crap.

Turns out that when it comes to technology, in most cases people don’t want a variety of different things. They want one thing that works really really well. And that’s why the iPhone 4S got more than one million pre-orders in a single day.

Cennydd Bowles makes a good point about the intangible benefits of user-centred design in “Why aren’t we converting?”:

I do suggest seeing user-centred design as something wider than just a means of optimising a conversion rate. While there may not be a noticeable uplift in any specific metric, the raw material of design is frequently intangible: trust, loyalty, engagement, etc. These things are much harder to measure, but they still make themselves felt indirectly in other metrics: support costs, referral rates, customer retention, and so on. Separating the effect of design from these long-term figures is, of course, pretty much impossible, but the long-term aggregated data makes it clear that the effect is genuine (see Apple, etc).

It’s a real shame that the results of UX can’t always be measured in a direct uplift in revenue and/or conversion metrics. But it shouldn’t be an excuse not to invest in good design, or worse, to resort to dark patterns.

In Beauty Is Free, Mimi Zou argues that quality has become a given in most products, so beautiful design is one of the primary ways to differentiate in a crowded market:

In a time when products outlast their reliability expectations, has aesthetic longevity become the new expiration date? While it’s not viable to design for changing tastes, it remains that the aesthetics of a product should always be given great emphasis: be it physical, digital or a manifestation of both. Keeping vitality in mind, the aesthetics of a good product should complement its functionality and be made with full intent. The most insightful designs are those which are not only competitive in quality and cost, but also uncompromising in aesthetics.

I’ve always defended aesthetics in web design in particular by arguing that it builds trust, increases engagement, and elicits the appropriate emotional responses to the brand (i.e., consistent with the brand promise).

This article gives us another reason to push for a relentless focus on good aesthetics: since most products now have a baseline quality that is good enough, users expect beautiful products.

Also, this.