Archive for March, 2010
Satiation of Desire : Be Good-Enough First
Mar 28th
You’re walking through the desert, the sun beating upon the back of your neck. You are sweating, or at least you were, until the dryness in your throat seemed to dry up your skin as well. With sand in your eyes, you see a store on the outskirts of town selling bottled water. You pay whatever price the clerk asks for a couple of bottles. You sit and down a couple of liters of water. Feeling much better, you get up to go find something to cure the ache in your stomach. On your way into town, a clerk runs out and asks if you’d like to buy some really amazing tasting water from a magical spring nearby. He guarantees it’s the best water you’ve ever had and it will only cost you a little more than you paid for that generic water you’ve just finished. What do you do?
There are many startup companies that act like this second clerk. They believe that just because they’ve got a better product, they will succeed. They neglect the fact that timing matters. Any thing that brings comfort at the peak of desire and relieves it, is good enough. As a result, when a better solution comes around there is no longer a motivation to choose it.
This is why, in many instances, an inferior technology wins in the market against the superior one. When you’ve finished drinking a liter of tap water, it doesn’t really matter how purified and electrolyte filled the “better water” is. They’re no longer looking for it. Many times they don’t even want to think about it because it just gets in the way of solving a new problem. When there is a pain that customers are feeling, the one who offers the good enough solution soonest is often the one that wins.
There is a possible exception to this. There are some desires that recur, providing additional opportunities to address them. If a product not only meets the initial need, but other needs as well, it can break in. The next time you’re thirsty after your walk through the desert, you wait for the man with the magic water. When you find out that not only is it better, but it also cures your hunger — you’ll never look back.
Another more practical example: Relief from boredom is a recurrent desire. Even if you owned a Creative Zen MP3 player, the iPod still wins because it not only provides you with an escape, but it also make you feel cool. It’s more than a one trick pony.
As one of my friends says, some things are only worth doing good-enough. There isn’t money to be made in being perfect, but there is lots of money to be made by being the water salesmen on the outskirts of town, providing the good enough solution soonest.
When Customers Hate Innovation
Mar 22nd
I’ve started to loathe renting cars. Not because they aren’t high quality nor because of the ridiculous hoops that agencies make you jump through. Rather because each car was designed to “innovate” on a bunch of things that were already good enough. Does it really make a difference if the open trunk button is to the left of the steering wheel, near the radio, or on the floor near the seat? Either designers considered the problem and believe they invented the best place for this button or they didn’t give it a second thought. Either way, the fact that every car puts many controls in different “innovative” places means that every time I get in a car, my head spins (literally) trying to find the one I need. This is when I consider innovation a curse, and this is but a trivial example of something that occurs all the time with startups.
Startups begin with a Big Idea that will make the world a better place by providing their customers with something that they need; however, too often, those who have the vision to start companies, also see just how inadequate or ill-designed many other things are as well. Fortunately, they have a solution and so they set out innovating not only on the “Big Idea”, but on all those little things that should be better.
The result is that in addition to providing a breakthrough for their customers, they also provide innovations that improve the many things that were already good enough. This places a huge burden on their customers because now they have to invest time relearning things that they didn’t think needed any improvement to begin with. While some customers (especially early customers) will push through this and be delighted at all of the innovations, the remainder will see your product as too complex and cling to their existing well-known solution.
A long time ago, a venture capitalist friend mentioned advice he received when starting his fund: The Three Change Rule. He was told by an astute advisor that his fund can be different in no more than three ways and in everything else needed to be exactly the same as others. This does two things. First, it provides a foundation for investors to compare the key areas that you are different (since many things are the same). Second, it forces you to pick only the most important differences to focus on.
As innovators, we think that because we know a better way, all we need to do is educate our users about why they should change and how to change. In this, we try to solve the problem of unfamiliarity by providing documentation. Clearly, the user will see the incredible value of our solution once they read about it. We assume they are going to be as excited about our innovations as we are.
But they aren’t. In fact, the necessity of reading documentation in order for them to use your product, will either scare them, or worse, cause them to look elsewhere. Sure, customers are interested to learn the minimum they need to in order to take advantage of “The Big Idea” but everything else just gets in their way. I’ve begun to view the size of the documentation as a good way of measuring how much you’ve failed to design the product with your customers in mind. Poor design that is documented is better than poor design without documentation to be sure, but the more documentation that is needed, the more the solution will be rejected by the market.
Just because there is room for innovation in a particular area, doesn’t mean that it needs to be improved. Pick three differentiators, and in everything else, be the same.
What Do You Take Pictures Of?
Mar 16th
This weekend we attended a birthday party for my Spanish teacher here in Guadalajara. Her friends brought a simple point-and-shoot digital camera and were taking lots of pictures of everyone there. They themselves posed for many pictures. I realized that the pictures I’ve seen from Mexican events are pretty much exclusively of the people that were there, and not of the location. And the pictures aren’t just the generic “3-2-1 Cheese” poses, but pictures of people watching TV, or even sleeping. At one point, my teacher showed me pictures of a trip that she and her boyfriend had taken, and each picture was only of the two of them, with slightly different backgrounds.
Most American birthday parties have their fair share of people pictures too, but they’re very likely to contain many pictures without people too (of the cake, of the location, etc). The location of this birthday party was at very well decorated restaurant and I was picturing myself (and my American friends), taking artsy photos of the candles or of the beers on the table. American family-vacation photos also have people pictures, but the vast majority are of the location they went to and what they saw.
I mentioned this difference to my teacher and her Swedish boyfriend. She said that her boyfriend’s pictures were also mostly of the location. While going through them, she would keep asking “Where are you?”. Upon recalling this, she exclaimed: “They’re so boring!”
It made me wonder if what we take pictures of when we are on a trip reflects the relative importance that we place on those things. It’s clear the Mexican culture is far more interconnected personally and that the people are what matter on a trip. For Americans, it seems more about the destination, but you may recall that I have a Mexican friend, who takes fantastic photos, both of people and things, so perhaps it’s just a male/female difference.
[Update: I met some friends for breakfast today (3/21): Two from Mexico, one from Italy and one from France. I posed this question to them: When a traditional family from your country goes on vacation, are the pictures mostly of the people or of the place? Both Mexicans agreed that family photos are pretty much entirely of the people. The two from Europe stated it was more about the place. My Mexican photographer friend who has a photo blog said that his family wouldn't let him take pictures on vacation because they would end up with totally unusable pictures and when he shows pictures of trips to people, he has to excuse the "junk pictures" (pictures taken of the place without people). In response to this blog, one of my American photographer friend, tweeted his flickr account, which has some awesome pictures with a mix of people and place. I continue to find this cultural difference fascinating and thought I update this entry with the latest information.]
The Fine Line Between The Great and the Amateur
Mar 11th
What makes a dancer, singer, or speaker great? I mean really great, like genius-level great?
There are three things that make the great different:
First, they stand out. They break conventions. No one gets excited if they play it safe. In fact, they know “playing it safe” is one of the most dangerous options around because at best, no one even notices your existence.
Second, they perform with confidence. When a performer takes the stage and is reserved about their performance, hoping for greater acceptance by not going too far into the extreme, we sense the tension, and it makes us all feel uncomfortable. As a result, it feels like an amateur performance — someone who wants to be great, but simply isn’t.
Third, it requires polish and class. It’s amazing how often you see someone go out and try to push the boundaries, but something is missing and as a result, they fail, and usually, they fail badly. When someone without skill tries something new, they lack the experience to add polish. On the other hand, the genius has an intuitive sense for why the convention exists, and thereby knows how to circumvent it with class. We still find their rule breaking shocking; but we are also extremely impressed.
Sometimes it’s easy to tell the great from the amateur and enumerate why, but most of the time, there is a fine distinction between the two. Its something we sense when we witness it, but can’t exactly put our finger on it — you know it when you see it.
As the world increasingly moves toward commoditized ho-hum, we must instead be great at our jobs like any great performer: Pushing the limits, not settling for safe, and breaking the rules with both confidence and class. However, we must be careful of becoming excited simply because we are breaking free of convention. Too often people think that being different is enough and as a result, they get lazy about their execution. Being different is not enough. You have to be different and you have to do it well.
[Side note: Even though dancing is not really my thing, I've found the videos by the LXD pretty incredible. The mixture of the extraordinary dancing coupled with storytelling is very compelling. In case you haven't seen any of their performances, here was their presentation at TED this year.]
The RapidChip Fallacy
Mar 7th
“The market is going to face this big, nasty problem and they will have no other choice but to use our product to solve it.” – Excited Entrepreneur
Most of the time, this entrepreneur is committing the same fallacy that we faced when working on a failed project called RapidChip.
This fallacy is related to, but different from the “If you build it, they will come” fallacy. This one is committed by excited technologists assuming that simply building the superior technology will draw customers. It leads to a rude awakening when, even though the technology is amazing, no one wants to buy it.
Instead of committing this fallacy, our excited entrepreneur knows that success comes from reducing a customer’s pain. Unfortunately, his excitement about his own solution creates a blindspot when regarding how the customer sees his solution. Solutions not only need to solve a customers pain, but also need to solve it in a way that the customer is expecting.
You can image an entrepreneur selling bionic feet believing he has the perfect solution to foot pain. Simply amputate the foot, and use this amazing bionic replacement. Unfortunately, this fails to consider how people think about solving foot pain (usually something other than cutting it off).
A more real world example was RapidChip. The intent was to solve a big industry problem: as transistors continue to shrink, manufacturing the silicon gets more expensive. RapidChip provided a solution. Essentially, we would manufacture half of the chip, allowing customers to customize the other half. Because the cost of manufacturing half of the chip would be shared between multiple projects, the overall cost of each project would be significantly reduced.
At first glance, this appeared like a great solution, but it overlooked the perspective of the customers. We assumed that customers would continue to create products that relied on custom chips. But this wasn’t their only choice. One option was for them to buy another companies chip; another was to make their next product applicable to a wider class of customers thereby justifying the cost. Our solution was only attractive if the customer had already decided to look for a new technique for manufacturing chips and knew that we existed when they were doing their planning. Our solution only works if multiple projects can share the bottom half, unfortunately, this means designing your chip around a specific half that already exists. This was a constraint they never had to deal with before, and so they were solving the expense problem with other solutions, or demanding we create a custom bottom half just for them, which unfortunately eliminates the entire value proposition.
This wasn’t the only reason that RapidChip failed, but once the above fallacy took root in the minds of those working on it, we failed to consider what other alternatives customers would use, nor had we considered how to convince them to accept the additional constraints of RapidChip. We didn’t seek to design the technology to be easy for customers to move to. It is easy to become so enamored with the elegance of your own solution, that you fail to consider the way a customer will see it.
Every solution introduces its own set of constraints. Just because your customer has a critical problem and you have a solution, doesn’t mean yours is the only solution. More importantly, never underestimate the ability of a man in desperation to find a solution no one else had considered.
Always, always, always consider the alternatives that a customer may already have to solving their “unsolvable” problem and be honest about the constraints that your solution imposes on your customer, and then design the solution so that the customer sees it as an obvious choice.
Further reading:
- Customer development – A process described in detail by Steven Blank
- If it walks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it’s a duck – A good discussion of lessons learned from a failed start-up. His paragraph with this title is related to the above.
Book Worth Reading: The Inmates Are Running The Asylum
Mar 1st
This week I got a rental car that had three buttons on the front of the dongle with the keys. In most cases, it’s lock, unlock, and open trunk. On this key chain, it was lock, unlock, and alarm. Seriously, the alarm was front and center and exactly where you would normally expect another function. At least twice in three days, I hit the alarm button while thinking I was unlocking the trunk. And there’s nothing that feels more foolish than drawing everyone’s attention as you scramble to turn the stupid thing off.
No one likes to feel stupid, and yet that’s exactly how so many computer interfaces make us feel. Making matters worse, computers are now integrated into almost every part of our lives – from our car remote to our kitchen appliances.
But why are computer interfaces so bad? Alan Cooper explains why in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Unfortunately, computer programmers build interfaces that they would like to use personally, but computer programmers are not like everyone else, and they see the world differently. Cooper points out 4 key differences:
- Programmers trade simplicity for control:
Cooper explains the difference by comparing it to the direction you take as you board a plane. When programmers enter the plane, they turn to the left and sit surrounded by controls and gauges in the cockpit. They want to see and be able to control as much as possible the system in front of them. Everyone else turns to the right, they just want to get to where they are going. The result is that most of our software has about as many or more options than a plane cockpit. - Programmers exchange success for understanding:
Cooper asked a large group of programmers: How many of you took apart an alarm clock when you were young? Almost everybody. Okay, now how many of you put it back together. Three. Programming is about problem solving and in the process, you end up with many failed solutions before finding the one that works. Programmers delight in this process of understanding and subsequently solving this complex problem. Because complexity is fascinating, they assume the user will be as fascinated with the complexity as they are and want to understand all of the nuances. Reality: they don’t. - Programmers focus on what is possible to the exclusion of what is probable:
In computer programming, if you don’t consider all of the corner cases, your program will fail. As a result of the focus on edge cases, the interface prioritizes the possible (there might be some customer out there that wants to do this) vs. what is probable (Most of our customers will want to only run this operation). This is why most of the software you use has menus that contain 90% more items than you likely use. - Programmers act like jocks:
While I know many people in computer programming who behave exactly this way, this one didn’t resonate with me, but is probably summarized by a quote occasionally heard: “It was hard to write, therefore it should be hard to use”.
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum provides an excellent explanation and defense for why user experience design is needed in order to create a product that is actually desirable rather than simply being functional. Most of the process employed by User Experience Designers is to develop a sense of empathy for the customer that can be shared within the entire company. The result is a product that people love to use instead of put up with. An iPod instead of a key dongle that makes lots of noise.