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May 24, 2007
Buyers versus users - and the challenge of design
Some time ago, I posted a piece on how many products are returned simply because people can't figure out how to use them. This was, I said, an opportunity for improved design.
But,as Shakepeare said, the fault lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. We demand that complexity. As James Surowiecki's latest column in the New Yorker (Feature Presentation) explains:
You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity.
This is presents an extraordinary challenge to designer:
The fact that buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple creates a peculiar problem for companies. A product that doesn’t have enough features may fail to catch our eye in the store. (A cell phone that doesn’t offer a Bluetooth connection, for instance, may be dismissed as underpowered, even though relatively few Americans use Bluetooth headsets.) But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers and generate bad word of mouth, as BMW’s original iDrive system did. Intended to give drivers unprecedented control over navigation, temperature, and entertainment through a single device, it was so hard to use that it has been described as “arguably the biggest corporate disaster” since New Coke.
Great products, like the iPod, rise to that challenge. Others are simply swamped by it -- destined to be returned to the store by a buyer turned user who won't spend more that 20 minutes figuring out how it works.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at May 24, 2007 9:08 AM
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