What makes a product good
Sit up straight, I’m about to explain the secret sauce behind exceptional products. There is a difference between products that perform poorly and products that perform well that is hard to put your finger on. Designers have been struggling to tell you about it for years. But it turns out it’s not the answer that is the problem, it’s the question. The question is: Is it enjoyable? It’s the difference between functional and great.
For a long time now the tech industry has been struggling with paradigms. Is your product technology driven or design driven? Are your most important people engineers or designers? The pendulum swings every five years or so.
Google is a company driven by engineers, they solve problems. Apple is a company driven by designers, they make experiences. Which company makes the better product? Android or iPhone? For years, journalists and salesmen have been asking the wrong questions, and coming to all the wrong conclusions.
Customers buy products for their features. But they keep them for the experience.
No one doubts that features are important. Every retail box is crammed with specs and every review seems to compare products on feature lists. But features are not what makes customers buy. When you buy a kitchen knife, you probably just grab a cheap one to get the job done, right? But the next time you buy one, you’ll be more likely to invest in quality because it feels better to use, the old one became dull quickly or chipped. Your enjoyment of the product starts to make an impact in your purchase.
What is that enjoyment worth? If your first knife cost $5, would you buy a better one for $50?
Android phones were crappy when Android was first released. Mostly because Android was crap. Google spent millions making sure Android had every feature that the iPhone had. Every function was matched. Every look that could be copied was copied. Samsung even went so far as to make extremely similar phones and UI-skins. But oddly, the consumers were not using Android phones like they did iPhones. App sales were low, internet usage was non-existant.
Only then did the engineers at Google realize that the secret sauce in the iPhone wasn’t so much features, but the experience. Still they couldn’t put their finger on what they lacked. They had to hire a new manager, a designer, to tell them what to do. Now Android is becoming enjoyable to use, app sales are skyrocketing and internet usage is on the rise. People are using their Android phones for the first times.
Enjoyment is hard to bottle. It can’t be checked off on a scrum board or a todo list. It’s the sum of all the parts. And even worse, it costs money. You can’t just finish a feature, you have to iterate on all the parts until they fit together. (To read more about enjoyment or fun, visit my blog on Gamification: Adding the Fun.)
The sooner we start asking the right question the better. What if startups focused on making their features enjoyable instead of just functional? It’d cost more, but their churn would be less and they would get more interest.
Right now the market is focusing on design. Designers are in high regard and design is the measuring stick of the tech industry. But because most companies and organisations still don’t understand this crucial piece of secret sauce, designers will become another checklist on the project management chart. Is it designed? Yes. Tick the box.
If the question had been: is it enjoyable? The answer would have been different. The product would end up different and the market reaction would as well. Next time you read a review, don’t look at the feature list or the score. Find the sentence where the author says if he/she liked it or not.
It’s time to make sure we start asking the right questions and stop looking at features or design as checkboxes.
This list of questions can help you start:
- Does the feature work?
- Does it work every time and in every circumstance?
- Is it enjoyable?
- Is it enjoyable even when you’re in a hurry?
If the answer to any of the questions is no, you need to start over.
Like Steve Jobs so eloquently put it ”Design is how it works”. Sadly, he didn’t stick around to explain how anyone could check for that emotion.