Read Online Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Kahney - Free Book Online
Authors: Leander Kahney
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true of cell phones, DVD players, and MP3 players. More surprisingly, she asked several managers from Philips (the Dutch electronics giant is one of her clients) to take home a handful of products and use them over the weekend. The managers, most of them tech savvy, failed to get the products to work. “Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created,” she wrote.
Den Ouden concluded that the products had been poorly defined in the early design stage: no one had clearly articulated what the product’s primary function was to be. As a result, designers heaped on the features and capabilities until the products became a confusing mess. This is an all too common story in consumer electronics and software design. Engineers tend to create products that only they themselves can understand. Witness early MP3 players like Creatives’ Nomad Jukebox, which had an inscrutable interface that only a nerd could love.
Many consumer electronics products are designed with the notion that more features mean better value. Engineers are often pressured to add features to new versions of their products, which are marketed as “new and improved.” A lot of this feature creep is driven by consumer expectations. Newer models are expected to have new capabilities; otherwise, where’s the incentive to upgrade? Plus, customers tend to look for devices with the most features. More features equal better value. Apple tries to resist this. The first iPod had the hardware for FM radio and voice recording, but these features were not implemented, lest they complicate the device. “What’s interesting is that out of that simplicity, an almost ... unashamed sense of simplicity, and expressing it, came a very different product,” Ive said. “But difference wasn’t the goal. It’s actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.”
A lot of companies like to say they’re customer-centric. They approach their users and ask them what they want. This so-called user-centric innovation is driven by feedback and focus groups. But Jobs shuns laborious studies of users locked in a conference room. He plays with the new technology himself, noting his own reactions to it, which is given as feedback to his engineers. If something is too hard to use, Jobs gives instructions for it to be simplified. Anything that is unnecessary or confusing is to be removed. If it works for him, it’ll work for Apple’s customers.
John Sculley told me that Jobs always focused on the user experience. “He always looked at things from the perspective of what was the users experience going to be,” Sculley said. “But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people what they wanted, Steve didn’t believe in that. He said, ‘How can I possibly ask someone what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphics-based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’ ” 7
Creativity in art and technology is about individual expression. Just as an artist couldn’t produce a painting by conducting a focus group, Jobs doesn’t use them either. Jobs can’t innovate by asking a focus group what they want—they don’t know what they want. Like Henry Ford once said: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
Patrick Whitney, director of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, the United States’s biggest graduate school of design, said user groups aren’t suited to technology innovation. Traditionally, the tech industry has conducted carefully controlled studies on new products, especially interfaces. These Human Computer Interaction studies are usually conducted after a product has been designed, to see what works as
Den Ouden concluded that the products had been poorly defined in the early design stage: no one had clearly articulated what the product’s primary function was to be. As a result, designers heaped on the features and capabilities until the products became a confusing mess. This is an all too common story in consumer electronics and software design. Engineers tend to create products that only they themselves can understand. Witness early MP3 players like Creatives’ Nomad Jukebox, which had an inscrutable interface that only a nerd could love.
Many consumer electronics products are designed with the notion that more features mean better value. Engineers are often pressured to add features to new versions of their products, which are marketed as “new and improved.” A lot of this feature creep is driven by consumer expectations. Newer models are expected to have new capabilities; otherwise, where’s the incentive to upgrade? Plus, customers tend to look for devices with the most features. More features equal better value. Apple tries to resist this. The first iPod had the hardware for FM radio and voice recording, but these features were not implemented, lest they complicate the device. “What’s interesting is that out of that simplicity, an almost ... unashamed sense of simplicity, and expressing it, came a very different product,” Ive said. “But difference wasn’t the goal. It’s actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.”
A lot of companies like to say they’re customer-centric. They approach their users and ask them what they want. This so-called user-centric innovation is driven by feedback and focus groups. But Jobs shuns laborious studies of users locked in a conference room. He plays with the new technology himself, noting his own reactions to it, which is given as feedback to his engineers. If something is too hard to use, Jobs gives instructions for it to be simplified. Anything that is unnecessary or confusing is to be removed. If it works for him, it’ll work for Apple’s customers.
John Sculley told me that Jobs always focused on the user experience. “He always looked at things from the perspective of what was the users experience going to be,” Sculley said. “But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people what they wanted, Steve didn’t believe in that. He said, ‘How can I possibly ask someone what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphics-based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’ ” 7
Creativity in art and technology is about individual expression. Just as an artist couldn’t produce a painting by conducting a focus group, Jobs doesn’t use them either. Jobs can’t innovate by asking a focus group what they want—they don’t know what they want. Like Henry Ford once said: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
Patrick Whitney, director of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, the United States’s biggest graduate school of design, said user groups aren’t suited to technology innovation. Traditionally, the tech industry has conducted carefully controlled studies on new products, especially interfaces. These Human Computer Interaction studies are usually conducted after a product has been designed, to see what works as
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