Successful Products Have a new Must-Have Feature- writedeal.com

Apr 30th 10 Posted by James A Gardner in Ebooks

Successful Products Have a new Must-Have Feature

There is a new must-have feature in tech products, and that is “beauty”. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everyone seems to be advertising their “beautiful” design lately, and I know that when I’m choosing software at home, I always want to see what it looks like before I even bother to download.

It may be that beauty is the new feature, but it is hardly the pinnacle of achievement in the design stakes. That honour goes to Apple, who have gone from Usability, to Beautiful, to Magical. Magical trumps all the competition, of course. Magical implies things that mere beauty doesn’t even attempt. Magical implies a level of sophistication that mere beauty can’t even attempt. Magical is unexplainable, an enigma that amazes just by being.Now, even for Apple, that is a mammoth jump.The rest of us, still doing Usability, can only aspire to Beauty, I suspect, and most of us won’t have even a chance of that. Not everyone can be the prettiest person in the room.

The point of all this is this: in large IT organizations, we always find whatever feature the consumer has now, they will expect and demand in the workplace within two years. Consequently, I’m predicting that we’ll start to have a non-functional requirement around making beautiful experiences when we build systems, and that we’ll be rubbish at it when it happens. Every time technology makes the leap from consumer to enterprise, we never learn.

So, in two years time, we’re going to have a dilemma. Is it the right thing to design “beautiful experiences” for staff, when this will obviously add cost to systems? I mean, its not like large organizations have service designers just sitting around idle, nor do they generally have a design mentality when they build technology. This is all stuff which will cost more, at least at the start.

It will be far too easy for us all to say “that’s not essentially, we should cut it”.

This leads somewhere difficult though: the comparison between what people have at home and what they have at work is only going to get more odious the more the “beauty-feature” becomes a main differentiator. It won’t matter if our systems are “magical’ in terms of functionality when everyone looks at the interfaces and scrunches up their faces.

I predict we will see further deterioration in the perception some users have that their IT delivery partners can’t deliver to save themselves.

The Beauty-Feature is something that has occupied those working in Innovation Management for some time now. For a detailed examination of this, and other things that concern organizational innovators, read the free, online innovation book by the author of this article.