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

Don't Over-Engineer

It's tempting when designing systems to specify every last detail. Some believe that to ensure the smoothest experience they must control all of the elements. However, it's important to remember that we are not and should not be completely in charge of these experiences. While it's important to coordinate your efforts to craft coherent, coordinated systems, when it comes to designing for experience, there is a surprisingly fine line between delight and dictatorship, between total experience design and totalitarianism. You have to be careful not to over-architect or over-engineer experiences and the systems that drive them.

A cautionary note comes from Adam Greenfield, author of the book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, in an essay in which he describes what has ultimately been the failure of Amtrak's Acela train service, in spite of the fact that the experience was designed from end to end by IDEO.^[22]

IDEO divided [the train riding experience] into ten distinct phases; their conception of an Acela trip began even before passengers had necessarily settled on traveling by train, accounted for the rituals of arriving at the station and purchasing tickets, and followed until they had transferred to another mode of transportation upon arrival at the destination...

The assumptions embedded in the plan are too tightly coupled to one another. They feed from one to the next—remember the word—seamlessly, like brittle airline timetables so tightly scheduled ...