Chapter 1. Why Products Exist
What’s Product Design?
What Does a Product Designer Do?
“What’s the difference between a product designer and a product manager?”
The interest in what product design is and what it does has surged in recent years. Now, more than ever, those of us working in—or wanting to work in—technology have become more curious about what product design is capable of and what it even is.
That’s because we need something bigger to describe the responsibilities placed on product teams. As technology continues to force its way into the lives of the global population, the implications of how a product is designed can put not only entire businesses at stake, but the lives of our customers as well.
But product design remains a difficult concept to grasp, even by people who are actually doing the work.
It’s fascinating to see the wide range of responses among the product designers I interviewed. Here’s how they describe what they do.
Josh Brewer, former principal designer at Twitter:
Product designers are people who have a set of knowledge that’s broader. They may be very deep in one or two areas, but they have an understanding of the entire process of bringing a product to life. You have to have a pretty decent domain expertise across things.
Nathan Kontny, CEO of Highrise:
I think product design is becoming more and more this search for friction people have getting [a] task done. As a product designer, I’m trying to really understand a task people have and look at the steps people have doing that task. Then, trying to figure out where I can start removing some of those steps. Is it combining some of those steps? Is it removing some of the steps? Often, I’m finding just removing one step can make a big difference in making a product save people time.
Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt:
[Product design] is a more comprehensive view of what the product is that you’re trying to achieve or solve, and how do we solve that as efficiently and easily as possible for the user. It’s more of a comprehensive view of “how do we craft an experience and solution to meet that particular need?” It involves, I believe, more user psychology and understanding of how to build an interface that’s useful. And how you communicate from a marketing perspective what that value proposition is.
Keenan Cummings, product designer at Airbnb, Yahoo!, and Days:
Product design is about understanding people. We have to get outside our own heads and that means tearing down a fortress of assumptions that keep us feeling comfortable in the world. You have to constantly challenge how the world looks from your cozy spot in it. People will always surprise you. The only assumption I allow myself to entertain freely was something I read in The Internet and Everyone by John Chris Jones: “Design everything on the assumption that people are not heartless or stupid but marvelously capable, given the chance.”
But that is merely the observation part. Discovering and understanding motivations is a process of empathy. This is what I was referring to when I said designers have a leg up in learning product design. Design really is just a practice of empathy. It is about synthesizing culture and movements of ideas and distilling that into something interesting. Designers do this without thinking. They work with the intent to spread ideas. And they are good at making things that are spreadable. That comes from empathy. They get outside their own frame of reference so they can make something that touches the masses.
And “taste” kills empathy. Taste is when you’ve amassed enough of those cultural influences that you start to believe the ideas and the cultural synthesis come from within. The moment that happens you stop observing. You stop absorbing the influences because you see yourself as the source. It’s subtle, easy to miss. But slowly your source material narrows, your resources diminish, and you are left to repeat yourself. Culture goes on, dynamic and ever changing, and you are left with the same material to chew on. This is where “taste” leads you.
Ryan Scherf, product designer at Quirky:
It’s creating something that people want to use. As product designers, part of our job is to create something that’s simple, something that can be motivational at times. Something that’s emotional. It evokes emotion for us. And, ultimately, it has to meet expectations. [Without this], you’re not going to make it.
Sahil Lavingia, founder and CEO of Gumroad, former product designer at Pinterest:
Product design is less about building a company, or raising money, or revenue or profit. It’s really just about identifying the problem and how to solve it. If these are the thirty things we could do that could solve this problem, which one solves it the best way?
I like the phrase “product design” because it’s very physical. I always use the example of a cup. A well-designed cup is not a cup that you look at and say, “wow, that’s a sexy cup.” A good cup is something that does its job. It holds coffee well or whatever. That means maybe the material it’s using prevents the cup from transferring heat to burn your hand, or there’s no hole in the bottom so the coffee doesn’t fall out. Typically, those are the attributes of a well-designed product, or a well-designed cup.
Applying that to software means, “what is this thing trying to do?” What is its equivalent of holding liquid, and how do we design it? How do we choose the proper attributes of this product to do that, within whatever constraints we have? The best coffee cup might cost $8,000 to make because it’s made of this crazy material that’s only mined on the moon, [but that’s not feasible]. That’s what I think product design is.
It’s clear that the definition of product design shifts slightly with every new company and challenge. In some places, product designers might need to learn to write code to bring a product to life. In others, a deep understanding of a customer’s psychology is a critical ingredient.
This just shows that product design is the synthesis of different methodologies being pulled together, piece by piece. There’s not just one job involved. And the demand for this type of person is only getting stronger.
But this isn’t the first time that such demands have been placed on those designing products. Digital products aren’t special, and they don’t have any special properties that imply designers can break the basic rules of designing for humans.
We learn not only from new experiences, but by studying the past. Let’s learn more about product design by understanding the work of those who came before us.
Product Design’s Heritage
Five years. Three products. $10 million.
During my ~60 months at a venture-backed startup, my team and I built a new product concept every eight months, on average. And with those eight months came a new target audience, a complete rebranding, and a “burn the ships” focus on moving ahead.
I thought that’s how life at a startup just was. Immense uncertainty. Gut calls after asking customers what they wanted. Full faith in the Lean Startup model. Rushing to get our “minimum viable product” out the door, only to “pivot” when we couldn’t find an audience.
And pivot we did.
What weren’t we getting right?
I was getting beaten down and burned out. The data didn’t make any sense. People were signing up and saying they loved our products...but weren’t coming back. We had no idea why.
Looking for answers, I began to see the same patterns around me: slews of web and mobile apps “failing fast” while venture and angel money burned brightly. And nobody seemed to understand why, either.
As an industry, we tend to fawn over successes at the expense of learning from the failures. There’s a dearth of data out there about startup deaths as compared to what we hear about the rare, unicorn-like successes. Business advice and blogs in the startup and technology realms are plagued with survivorship bias.[3]
And that’s startling. Because from what we can gather from the past 20 years, 62 out of 100 venture capital funds failed to beat returns available from public markets.[4] Even worse, only 20 of 100 funds generated returns that beat public markets by 3 percent annually. Half of these funds began investing—prior to 1995!
You could argue that these companies just ran out of money. Or had bad timing. Or that their technology was too expensive to build.
This may be so. But every one of these scenarios has a common thread: they each failed to find enough customers to keep them alive.
So I decided to study how successful products get made. And in doing so, I realized that our ability as designers to create beautiful, obvious, and, heck, even “viral” apps that, on the surface, seemed immensely popular had no bearing on whether a product actually worked. What did the creators of Facebook know that we didn’t? Why did Dropbox initially succeed despite being launched into a slew of competitors? How has Basecamp survived since 1999 as a simple project management business?
Technology isn’t special, but we think it is. After all, the computer, the mobile phone, and the Internet are among the fastest-adopted technologies in history. The hopeful specter of instant distribution lingers over our heads, because, after all, it’s just so cheap to create something these days (see Figure 1-1).
Why not just throw something out there and see if it works? And if it doesn’t work, why not just ask people what they’d like instead?
But the rules of creating something that people want haven’t changed, even if we are creating products for an industry that barely existed 20 years ago. Our judgment’s been clouded. Easy distribution and a blind dedication to “customer validation” has turned the lot of us lazy or, at worst, into newly spiritual people with prayerful intent.
The practice of creating products that people want didn’t just beam in like an away team in a Star Trek episode. It’s been around for hundreds of years, a heritage enriched by many people alongside the path of an ever-maturing society.
You want to design the product of the future? You’d better know your design history.
So, what if I told you that we can trace how to create innovative, human-centered products to the 1920s, when a woman who couldn’t cook reinvented the modern kitchen?
Unless there’s a DeLorean and a crazy, wide-eyed scientist involved, you probably wouldn’t believe me. But let me take you back.
Lillian and Frank Gilbreth: Revolutionizing Industries Through Observation
It’s 1924. Lillian Gilbreth’s husband, Frank, has just died. Together, they’d completely revolutionized the study of how people worked.
Picture this: you’re a factory worker and two strangers ask you to attach mini lights to your fingers. Not only do they make you look like some perverted character from Edward Scissorhands, but they want to film you, with said fingerlights, with some newfangled, expensive camera. There’s no catch. You just do what you do every day at work.
This was the Gilbreths’ pioneering creation: using what they called “motion studies” to analyze workers’ movements in slow motion.[6] With lights attached to their subjects’ fingers, the Gilbreths were able to capture the exact motions workers took to perform their jobs while recording them with a motion picture camera (Figure 1-2).[7], [8]
The point? To improve the effectiveness and efficiency of how people worked. Each observed movement was broken down into what the Gilbreths called “therbligs” (the reverse of Gilbreth)—hieroglyphic-like symbols that they used to document a workflow—to determine the best way to get a job done (Figure 1-3).[9] The end result? Making something happen with the least amount of effort in the least amount of time.
But as it turned out, all this was just buildup to a bigger plot. After Frank’s death, Lillian turned her attention to the kitchen—an underappreciated area of the home at the time—viewing kitchen work as “unpaid labor” that could be optimized like any other factory.
Lillian would become the first engineer to observe the home and bring efficiencies to it, using motion studies to analyze how women moved while they prepared food, cooked, and did the dishes.
It didn’t matter that Lillian couldn’t cook. By studying how women actually worked in their kitchens, she was able to observe the inefficiencies of food preparation and devise her own alternatives. One early test put on by the Herald Tribune showed that using Lillian’s kitchen layout reduced the number of steps from 281 to 45.[10]
The kitchen you’re now used to cooking and eating in is based entirely on Lillian Gilbreth’s ethnographic research, which revolutionized kitchen design forever. By treating kitchens as something that could be optimized for humans, she invented concepts like the “work triangle”—a concept that designers use to determine efficient kitchen and work layouts to this day.[11]
Henry Dreyfuss: The Founding of Human-Centered Design
In parallel to the Gilbreths’ work, the self-taught founding father of human-centered design was making a name for himself in the 1930s: Henry Dreyfuss.
For all intents and purposes, Dreyfuss could be considered the Steve Jobs of the early-to-mid 20th century, transitioning from a career in set design to industrial designer.
He defined the role as one that must embody many people: a researcher, guinea pig, engineer, artist, politician, and builder.[12]
We begin with men and women and we end with them. We consider the potential users’ habits, physical dimensions, and psychological impulses...for we must conceive not only a satisfactory design, but also one that incorporates that indefinable appeal to assure purchase.[13]
It’s this mentality that makes him responsible for many of the most common, long-lasting products of the 20th century. The Bell Model 302 telephone. The Honeywell T87 circular thermostat. The Polaroid Model 100.[14]
When the Bell Model 302 telephone was released in 1937, for example, it was a startlingly innovative design—taking into careful account how people used and held telephones. It’s one of the most iconic designs of the early 1900s, and gained ultimate fame with its frequent use on the set of I Love Lucy (Figure 1-4).[15]
Dreyfuss believed that good design could improve a company’s profits. He was one of the first to market his services to potential clients as such—promoting “his ability to give insider knowledge—thinking about an object from the user end—and not just [to] create prettier objects, but better objects.”[16]
This was a huge shift in thinking at the time. Dreyfuss considered the role of a designer to be more than simply removing unnecessary ornamentation from a product after the fact. Instead, an industrial designer now had to understand how a product contributed to a customer’s well-being to be successful.
He used Lillian Gilbreth’s transformative work in motion studies and observation to define how his clients’ products should be made—observing a vast array of activities such as how trains were driven, how manure was spread, and how phone companies conducted service calls. “There is no substitute for first-hand research in the matter of keeping up to the minute on the sales moods of the public,” he wrote.[17]
Why this obsession with research? Because a company couldn’t afford to risk releasing a product that they didn’t know people wanted. Pretty products didn’t cut it.
The penultimate example at the time was the 1936 Chrysler Airflow, a car that had millions of dollars sunk into its production and advertising. Yet it was a major failure for the company, because “the public’s taste and acceptance had not been accurately assessed.”[18]
Ultimately, Dreyfuss believed that his painstaking study and research would create products where “people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier.”[19]
Neil McElroy: Inventing the “Brand Man”
We can continue to trace the origins of the product designer in business to a typewritten memo from 1931, written by a manager at Proctor & Gamble—who would later become Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower and create NASA.
It’s May 1931. Cincinnati, Ohio. Neil McElroy is responsible for growing sales for the Camay soap brand. It wasn’t going well, and he was being overshadowed by P&G’s Ivory soap.
McElroy realizes that the way his organization is structured is limiting his ability to make Camay successful. He’s unable to get the resources he needs to really understand who Camay is supposed to be serving.
So he types a fateful memo on his Royal Typewriter and proposes a concept that would have a significant ripple effect—even on industries that didn’t even exist yet. He calls this the concept of the brand man (Figure 1-5).[20]
The brand man was a novel idea at the time. At companies like P&G, people were hired for specific business functions such as, say, sales or research or administration.[21]
So what was different? The brand man—later, brand manager—was defined as the person responsible for guiding a product to success. This person would seek to understand the processes that worked and those that didn’t, examining “carefully the combination of effort that seems to be clicking and [trying] to apply this same treatment to other territories that are comparable.” And this person would go into the field to measure the results of these plans, reporting back with data to tweak the group’s approach.[22]
“Where brand development is light...study the territory personally at first hand,” he wrote. “Find out the trouble...develop a plan...outline this plan...prepare...all other necessary material for carrying out the plan...keep whatever records are necessary.”
Soon, P&G reorganized their company around this newly invented role, and McElroy went on to lead the company. Their competitors around the world copied them.
Just like the work of Lillian Gilbreth and Henry Dreyfuss, McElroy’s “brand man” memo would have vast ramifications for product design as we know it. He couldn’t have foreseen that he would set the template for product management in software.
In fact, it was a former P&G brand manager that would introduce McElroy’s concepts to software in 1981: Scott Cook, founder of Intuit. Their first product was Quicken. You may have heard of it.
Scott Cook: Bringing the Brand Manager to Technology
Software companies were on the rise in the early 1980s. As the development of new products got more complicated and engineers stretched too thin, usability tended to suffer. On top of that, products were becoming more and more consumer-oriented.
Scott Cook was one of the first people to implement brand manager-like principles at a tech company. From day one, he sought out to observe customer needs and solve them with a product.
At P&G, Cook learned that researching customer needs throughout a product’s lifecycle was the key to satisfying them. The research even brought him understanding beyond the development of the product to its pitch.[23]
Breaking into software with this mentality brought Cook an advantage at the perfect time. He believed that understanding their customers couldn’t come thirdhand or from management presentations. To combat this, Cook conducted regular user studies and implemented a “Follow Me Home” program where Intuit staff would follow willing, first-time customers home. There, they’d observe how new customers installed and used Quicken.
Cook combined these studies with the dissemination of mailed-in customer complaint cards that were included in every box of Quicken. He also required everybody to answer customer service and support calls for “four hours each month, increasing to twelve hours a month when the company launched new products.”[24]
Finally, he made product managers also oversee the product’s income statement and “all aspects of building the business...acting as champions for their products, embodying the voice of the customer not just for product development and marketing communications for also for technical support.”[25]
Why the History Matters
All of this traveling around in the DeLorean time machine has had a purpose: to show that the idea of designing a product with a human at the center isn’t new—and that the most iconic, long-lasting products in human history were built with the same easily identifiable methods.
The other purpose was to illustrate how difficult this process can be. It requires hundreds of hours of observation to understand what people really do.
And almost 30 years later, we’re now witnessing the rise of product design in software, much in the same tradition of those who came before us—the industrial designer, the brand manager, and those who pioneered their techniques.
It’s not coincidental. Products are failing at more rapid rates than ever. We realize that a more human-centered worldview is required if digital products are going to be successful.
That’s because the rapid adoption of the Internet and mobile technology—and with it the possibility of instant distribution—has turned many of us over to bad habits. Making matters worse, our customers’ attention spans are fracturing. People are becoming lazier. New products need to work harder than ever to stand out and get attention.
That means that digital products need people who understand their customers. The problems they face. And how to improve the product on an ongoing basis to help them be better at what they do. And, if you’re really good, to help them live better lives.
Digital products need people who can then visualize and design the solution. Infuse the product with soul and personality. And steer its existence into reality by guiding the engineers, marketers, and other essential talents required to realize anything substantial.
What the History Tells Us
“Facts are better than dreams,” goes a famous phrase by Winston Churchill.
This was the rationale by which he operated during World War II, even though he was publicly known for his grand, bold visions about how Britain would win the war.
Anybody with an inkling of knowledge about Churchill and WWII would know that he was armed with an incredibly strong personality that, at times, intimidated those who worked for him.
Churchill became so concerned that this would prevent his staff from delivering bad news during the war that he created an office separate from the normal chain of command. Its job? To deliver uncompromising, unfiltered news and facts about the war effort.
Churchill relied on this Central Statistical Office to make every important decision during the war. It was headed by a civilian and tracked essential areas like aircraft production and losses, munitions production, and import/export balances.
Churchill didn’t dream his way into helping the Allies win the war. He relied on observations of his staff to make decisions, using these facts to create a scenario for victory.
That’s a common thread among people like the Gilbreths, Fords, McElroys, and Cooks of our product heritage. They painstakingly conducted firsthand observations of their audience, and understood the context in which they existed even better than their customers did.
Listening, studying, organizing—this common thread has its roots in a form of study called ethnography.
Upgrading Ethnography for a Digital Era
Ethnography’s central premise is that you can learn what people actually do when nobody’s looking. You can tell how people live their lives by observing what they do and listening to what they say. By doing so, you’ll understand how people behave on their terms and not on yours. Ethnography enlightens us about the contexts in which customers might use a product, and how that affects the relative value of your product in their daily lives.
My journey to understand this practice took me to an unlikely place, leading me to the work of two individuals I’d never met: Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman. Their ideas helped me to see the patterns that the most successful products used to find customers.
Hoy and Hillman invented a new approach—based purposefully on ethnography—to creating products people want: observing intently, listening without bias, and analyzing the patterns to invent an endless stream of product ideas.
The lessons are based upon the same ethnographic techniques that researchers have used for at least a hundred years to understand isolated and insular cultures (a concept that oddly resembles many of our customer bases).
But this modern take on the ethnographic process takes advantage of the tools we now have at our fingertips: access to practically any audience we want and the ability to just sit back and listen. Hoy and Hillman taught me that if you observe and analyze without bias, customers will tell you exactly what they wish they could buy.
Hoy and Hillman also taught me that if you look closely enough between the lines, you can observe the principles of listening, studying, and organizing in a slew of successful products—modern, digital products like Dropbox, many of Apple’s offerings, and Product Hunt.
Time-Tested Techniques in Modern Products
Dropbox
Drew Houston’s creation of Dropbox has been labeled for years as the quintessential example of the “minimum viable product.” The story goes that Drew couldn’t get funding for his idea of a seamlessly syncing file service. So he did what any aspiring entrepreneur did in 2008: he made a video and submitted it to the online communities he frequented.
It was an instant hit, driving 70,000 new email subscribers through a simple landing page (Figure 1-6[26]).[27]
But the lore surrounding this launch masks what really happened. Drew didn’t just get lucky. This was the embodiment of somebody who did the work to understand an audience, weaving that knowledge into his product and his pitch.
As an example, he got his audience’s attention by riddling the video with inside jokes and references only somebody who spent time in these online watering holes would recognize.
But even more powerfully, he spoke directly to them, in their language, about the problem his product solved:
The point is that if you’ve ever worked with multiple computers or carried around a USB drive or emailed yourself files from work, you can see that this is a much easier way of managing your stuff.
Normally, if I want to send something, I have to send an email attachment or something like that. But Dropbox has this special public folder where every file you put in here has a URL associated with it.
Luckily for us, the Reddit thread created in response to Drew’s video still lives. The responses are testament to the fact that both the pitch and the product got their attention.
“Apple? You listening? This is how iDisk should work. Your dismal effort is a total embarrassment.”
“So many more references to /b/ and teh interwebz i cant even count them all... :O”
“My Grandma is the sultan of stubborn! She just images partitions into a file using ‘dd’ and uses ‘strings’ to find things that she wants. Still has to use ‘grep’ though! Crazy lady.”
Drew’s takeaways? The biggest risk of creating a product is “making something no one wants” (Figure 1-7).[28] Find customers by knowing “where [your] target audience hangs out & speak to them in an authentic way.”
Apple
Mentioning Apple here might come as a shock to you. Can’t they get away without talking to customers because they’re special? Don’t they have a cult-like following that will buy absolutely anything?
Of course, Apple has a massive following that’s only expanded in the past few years. But while the company may have zealots, its ambitions aren’t to cater just to this crowd. To remain in business, Apple has to listen to its customers and immerse itself in their worlds.
When it comes to Apple, we can easily get swept away by anecdotes of perfectionist tantrums or demonstrations of borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder (Steve Jobs, according to one account, had the marble for the New York Apple Store floor shipped to his office in California to inspect the veining[29]). This makes it hard to analyze what’s staring us in the face: Apple builds products not by asking what people want, but by observing how they behave and imagining what could change their lives.
“We do no market research,” Jobs famously once said. “You can’t go out and ask people what the next big thing is.”[30] We frequently misinterpret this quote to mean that Apple simply trusted completely in their own sense of taste and refinement to choose what products to build. Instead, Jobs was saying that you can’t understand how to serve a customer by asking him—you understand how to serve him by watching.
Jobs’s “own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide.”[31] None of us are or ever will be Steve Jobs—but we can learn from actions here. Jobs didn’t give away Starbucks gift cards or take people to lunch to get their opinions and feedback. He didn’t send out email surveys to figure out what product to build next. He analyzed how people used technology, learned what brought them joy, and understood especially well what pissed them off.
We see parallels to this approach from other Apple members. Mitch Stein, who was the director of human interface technologies for Apple in the 1990s and coined the phrase “user experience,” explained a very similar process:[32]
This is key. First, assimilate: You don’t ask the user what they want—you go out and live with them and literally become the user. You do it with a wide-angle lens. You do it not just to tackle the problem you think you’re solving—you need to understand the culture they live in, what motivates them, that sort of stuff. I know that sounds touchy feel-y, but it really works.
Time Machine, the original iPhone, and iPhone 6 are three strong examples from Apple of observational research in action.
Time Machine
Apple’s Time Machine is one of those easily overlooked products from the hardware and software giant. It’s not flashy, it’s embedded within the desktop operating system, and it’s only important when you really need it.
But that’s the beauty of the product. It solves a searing pain that we all face using digital storage: what happens when your hard drive goes bad?
Steve Jobs introduced Time Machine in 2008 with OS X Leopard.[33] Here was his pitch:
We’re using our computers not just to store our work documents but really our digital lives. We’ve got things on our computers now that used to be in our precious shoeboxes that would never get lost. But if you just lose one precious photograph you’d be really bummed. Imagine if you lost your whole library of photographs...and yet almost no one backs up their computer automatically. Almost all of us do not.
We are just walking time bombs waiting to happen in terms of having something go wrong and misplacing some information. Mistakenly deleting it. Or worse.
This is what Time Machine is all about. We’d like to solve these problems in such a simple way that everyone actually uses it.
How did Jobs know that people had shifted away from shoeboxes in the closet and began using their computer hard drives in their place? How did he know what would get people to actually use a backup solution? Total immersion within his audience.
Time Machine has been included in every single OS X release since 2008, and it’s inspired products like iCloud backup and iCloud Photo Library.
iPhone
We all had cellphones. We just hated them, they were so awful to use. The software was terrible. The hardware wasn’t very good. We talked to our friends, and they all hated their cellphones too. Everybody seemed to hate their phones.[34]
Call it talking to “friends” and family, but Apple didn’t ask their customers to imagine OS X on a mobile phone. When you’re Apple, you have access to people in the upper echelons of music, video, mobile, and computing. They’re able to ask lots of “why” questions while immersing themselves in this environment, exploring their friends’ problems, needs, and wants, and how they make decisions. But just because the people who work at Apple have different friends than the average person doesn’t mean that they don’t have to do the work to understand what people want.
Jobs revealed in an interview that the decision to create the iPhone could be broken down into this simple framework:[35]
What do we hate? (Our cellphones.) What do we have the technology to make? (A cellphone with a Mac inside.) What would we like to own? (You guessed it, an iPhone.)
iPhone 6 and 6 Plus
Fast forward to 2014. It was a different world from the one in 2007 when the original iPhone was released. Larger screen sizes had become a major form factor in mobile usage. And, much to the chagrin of iPhone customers, Apple had stuck stubbornly to the 4” form factor of the iPhone 5 released in 2012.
But Apple was listening. A leaked sales presentation revealed that Apple had been listening for at least a year. Growth rates were slowing. The strongest demand was coming from phones with larger screens that cost less. And competitors were spending “obscene” amounts of money to gain market share while simultaneously improving their hardware. “Consumers want what we don’t have,” a slide declared (Figure 1-9 and Figure 1-10).
Just a year later Apple retooled its entire line of iPhones. The 6 and 6 Plus sported 4.7” and 5.5” displays, respectively—almost an inch larger than the iPhone 5.
The result? The biggest profit in corporate history after the iPhone 6’s launch. A quarter-over-quarter growth of iPhone sales of 57 percent (74.5 million phones sold). And a drop for the first time ever in Android unit shipments (Figure 1-11).[36]
Devices, though, are only one side of Apple’s products. The company has always prided itself on integration within both hardware and software. So it’s important to make note of a perceived degradation within Apple’s software efforts, as noted by user interaction expert Don Norman. He established the User Architect’s Office at Apple, and rose to become vice president of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group. He writes:
I was once proud to be at Apple, proud of Apple’s reputation of advancing ease of use and understanding. Alas, these attributes are fast disappearing from their products in favor of pretty looks, or as designers call it “styling.”
Apple has gotten carried away by the slick, minimalist appearance of their products at the expense of ease of use, understandability, and the ability to do complex operations without ever looking at the manual.
Today, the products are beautiful, but for many of us, confusing. The fonts are pleasant to the eye, but difficult to read. The principle of “discoverability” has been lost. The only way to know what to do in many situations is to have memorized the action.[37]
Product Hunt
What started as an email list for friends and colleagues to share and keep track of new tech products is now one of the most fertile places for new products to launch, and for investors to seed new investments.
Ryan Hoover started Product Hunt after repeatedly being asked by people in forums and on social networks about what he thought of new products.[38] Hoover was spending so much time talking about these new releases, but the experience was fractured. He had to scan places like Reddit, Hacker News, TechCrunch, and Twitter to get the news and discussions he wanted.
He realized that others had the same problem.[39] Product addicts like himself were also spending hours a day skimming these sites, including technology investors and founders eager to connect with willing audiences.
“What cool new products are you using?” We all ask this question. It’s a common conversation starter, especially in the startup community. I’m particularly fond of this topic—I enjoy geeking out about products, writing design deconstructions, and swapping discoveries with smart folks. But these conversations provide more than just entertainment value: They are also a great learning opportunity. Understanding the subtleties of good and bad products is critical for product builders.
Immersed within the audience, Hoover launched an early version of Product Hunt that was a simple email list. He reached out to people he knew would be receptive.
Years of blogging, relationship building, and projects like Startup Edition have given me an audience and network of supporters. The term “startup” is deceiving. Successful companies don’t start up overnight; they are founded upon years of experience and help from others that must be earned.[40]
A year later, Product Hunt announced a $6.1 million Series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz.[41]
So What?
So how does all of this help you? How does reading a bunch of history enable you to end the cycle of throwing stuff against the wall and hoping that it works?
You don’t have to be a statistic of failure. You don’t have to be a part of the “fail fast” culture. You can change the trajectory of the technology industry by using the principles that worked for those who came before us—Dreyfuss, the Gilbreths, McElroy, and Cook.
Just because technology enables rapid adoption and instant access to audiences doesn’t mean that humans have changed. People have problems. And people want other people to make those problems go away.
If this idea appeals to you, then you’re going to love the next section. We’re going to explore a modern version of ethnography invented by two entrepreneurs who were fed up by the culture of failure. Called Sales Safari, it’s an entirely new brand of observation that takes place online.
Ready? Let’s go.
Shareable Notes
The idea of a product “failing fast” isn’t the only way products get made. This technique, in fact, runs counter to the way products have been made for over a hundred years. It’s a relatively new phenomenon brought about by technology’s ability to distribute ideas around the world faster than any time in history.
We can trace the origins of modern digital product design to our product forebears of the 20th century: Lillian Gilbreth, Henry Dreyfuss, Neil McElroy, and Scott Cook. Each conducted painstaking, extensive customer research in the field and used it to shape the products they made.
Ethnography’s central premise is that you can learn what people actually do when nobody’s looking. You can tell how people live their lives by observing what they do and listening to what they say. By doing so, you’ll understand how people behave on their terms and not on yours. It enlightens us about the contexts in which customers might use a product, and how that affects the relative value of your product in their daily lives.
Dropbox, Apple, and Product Hunt are organizations that each demonstrate a deep understanding of their target audience and explicitly craft products to serve them.
Do This Now
Spend some time researching Lillian Gilbreth, Henry Dreyfuss, Neil McElroy, and Scott Cook. Read their work. Research their methods. Look at the products they created as a result.
The next time Apple has a keynote, listen to how they pitch their product. Where do they get their information? What data do they provide? Reading between the lines during these presentations can teach you a great deal about the value and practice of research.
For the penultimate cautionary tale about the pitfalls of asking people what they think instead of observing what they do, research Margaret Mead and the controversy surrounding her study in the book Coming of Age in Samoa.
[9] Ibid.
[10] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2012/10/lillian_gilbreth_s_kitchen_practical_how_it_reinvented_the_modern_kitchen.html
[12] Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955)
[13] Designing for People, 219.
[17] Designing for People, 67
[18] Ibid., 68
[19] Ibid., 24
[23] Suzanne Taylor and Kathy Shroeder, Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized an Entire Industry (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003), 6.
[24] Ibid., 73.
[25] Ibid., 67.
[26] http://www.slideshare.net/adamsmith1/from-zero-to-a-million-users-dropbox-and-xobni-lessons-learned
[31] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/business/steve-jobs-of-apple-dies-at-56.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[36] https://theoverspill.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/android-oem-profitability-and-the-most-surprising-number-from-q4s-smartphone-market/
[40] Ibid.
Get Designing Products People Love now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
