Jun 27 2007
The Laws of Consumer Products
The first three laws of consumer products are:
- The chord probably isn’t long enough;
- The interface probably sucks. Fix it; and,
- Things don’t need to seamlessly integrate.
The First Law: The Chord Probably Isn’t Long Enough
It took five consoles 10 years to produce the Xbox with deliriously long chords. Was that really hard to do?
What it is meant by the first law is if you are in a meeting discussing a design consideration take it home. Do a paper prototype. It’s cheap, and you can do all the prep work and ready Slashdot at the same time.
Better yet, get a representative user and plunck them down in front of the new prototype Widget IIe and let them use it. Not in a lab, not in your office, but in a representative space, like their livingroom.
The Second Law: The Interface Probably Sucks. Fix it.
Ever use a router? Ever need to configure it, via the easy web interface? It’s hard. The UI is always painful.
Wow! I can configure individual firewall rules, to open ports and IP addresses for specific machines in my network. Neat.
But once you have created exactly 5 to 7 rules, you log back in and say “Huh? Why did open port 4537 for yankeessuck.redsox.com? Was it for my sister?”
It’s great you can create dozens of granular rules restricting IP access – it’s a wet dream for a programmer. But if you can’t annotate the rules, it’s worthless.
You can just imagine the Netgear hardware team trying to push the latest router to market:
Project manager: Hey Bill, is the router ready?
Netgear hardware guy: Oh, yah. It’s completely finished, except for the admin screen.
Project manager: You’ve been putting that off for months! Meh. Just port the interface from the other router and tweak it so we can ship the damn thing. Quarterly earnings are coming up.
The Third Law: Things Don’t Need to Seamlessly Integrate
Wait! Product integration rocks, it’s like synergy x 1000!
A discussion of the popularity and complete uselessness of synergy in the corporate world is outside the scope of this blog. However, in the realm of software and technology, we find synergy disguised as product integration.
Take what Microsoft did to re-organize it self as a lesson: When the browser wars were over, Redmond rolled the IE team into the OS team, allegedly to increase integration between the applications.
Really? To increase integration? What does that even mean? Integrate so much the browser goes away? Sure, we’ll get there. But in about 15-20 years.
What the user got instead was feature stagflation stagnation. No new ideas and no new features. Development all but stopped (it took the appearance of a little red fox to stir Redmond back into action).
Photoshop + Illustrator = Photoshop + Illustrator!
Take another example: Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is an outstanding software product suffering from feature stagnation. The last helpful new feature introduced was the crop tool, which came out about 4 years ago. No new features have been included since that are worthwhile.
(Wait! You forgot about the X feature! I use that daily! You are probably the only person that does. Don’t be concerned with the 5%, be concerned with the 95% rule- serve 95% of the work flow of 95% of your customers and you’ll have a great product.)
What has Adobe spent it’s time doing instead? Integrating with Illustrator. The Photoshop team spent hours dreaming and coding up ways to integrate the two applications. The problem was the applications were already as integrated as they needed to be: you could just save the file in Photoshop and then open the file in Illustrator when you were ready.
No one needed this feature, no customer asked for this feature and no one today uses this feature, intentionally. The only time it’s used either when:
- You open up the software for the first time and you wonder what the hell does that odd looking button do? and you click it; or,
- You accidentally click the jump to illustrator feature.
But if they can make file > save and file > open easier, doesn’t that help?
Integration Just Isn’t Compatible
So why isn’t integration needed most of the time? Because users don’t really multi-task. A user works through a series of linear tasks towards one goal, one software tool at a time, using one brain, one keyboard and one mouse.
The brain doesn’t process a work task naturally if you have to bounce between tools to get something done. It’s much easier to just think through your steps with one tool.
If you have to constantly go between tools to complete a common task then the software developers should be asking themselves if their tool is really serving their customers needs.