Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

Technology, Features, Experience

Apple is a company that has parlayed design into phenomenal business success, driven by its CEO, Steve Jobs. Here's what he has said about delivering beautiful solutions:

"When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop. . . . But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem—and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works. That's what we wanted to do with Mac."

– Steve Jobs^[1]

In that quote, uttered 17 years before the introduction of the iPod and 23 years before the iPhone, Jobs neatly captures the evolution of product offerings. You can strip it down even further to just three key essentials: technology, features, and experience.

Products necessarily begin with the technology that makes them possible. And the introduction of a new technology can establish a company in the market. When VCRs came on the consumer market in the late '70s, all that really mattered is that they did something you could never do before—record television shows so that you could play them back on your own time. It didn't matter that a VCR took up a lot of space and didn't look pretty and wasn't particularly intuitive. It's an example of the walking dog syndrome: a dog doesn't walk very well on its hind legs alone, but we're fascinated and thrilled because it can walk that way at all.

Eventually competitors mimic your technology, and features become the important differentiator. You load your offering with more stuff, and it fills the product's packaging with bullet points. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, VCRs began loading up on functionality by adding VCR Plus, on-screen menus, various playback speeds, child locks, jog wheels, 21-day timers, the ability to record one frame at a time, and more. As Jobs said, "Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop." It's for this reason the blinking 12:00 became the icon of poorly designed consumer electronics, and most folks used the VCR as simply a videocassette player, viewing whatever they rented.

"But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem—and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works." At some point, to stay viable, product categories require a quantum evolution that takes them beyond technology and features and on to the satisfaction of a customer experience. The VCR begat the DVR, and TiVo, the leading DVR brand, is successful because the designers began with an experience-focused mindset, and developed the product to fulfill those needs (Figure 1-5).

Figure 1-5. The friendliness and approachability of the TiVo logo demonstrates the company's desire to connect with emotion and experience.

In some ways, it's unfair to compare TiVo with earlier VCRs because the underlying technology is fundamentally different. But, as with George Eastman and his roll film, TiVo took a new technology (hard-drive based, digital video recording) and realized they could change the game if they focused on the customers' experiences. So rather than simply shoving this hard drive inside a VCR, their experience orientation led to a fundamental rethinking of people's relationship to television. And even though TiVo hasn't been the runaway success that its early advocates hoped, this experiential approach has made TiVo the only successful independent DVR after its primary competitor, ReplayTV, went bankrupt.

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^[1] Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (Penguin, 2000), p. 139.