by Don Norman
The same pressures that the startup faced also impact established companies. But they have other pressures as well. Most products have a development cycle of one to two years. In order to bring out a new model every year, the design process for the new model has to have started even before the previous model has been released to customers. Moreover, mechanisms for collecting and feeding back the experiences of customers seldom exist. In an earlier era, there was close coupling between designers and users. Today, they are separated by barriers. Some companies prohibit designers from working with customers, a bizarre and senseless restriction. Why would they do this? In part to prevent leaks of the new developments to the competition, but also in part because customers may stop purchasing the current offerings if they are led to believe that a new, more advanced item is soon to come. But even where there are no such restrictions, the complexity of large organizations coupled with the relentless pressure to finish the product makes this interaction difficult. Remember Norman’s Law of Chapter 6: The day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget.
FEATURITIS: A DEADLY TEMPTATION
In every successful product there lurks the carrier of an insidious disease called “featuritis,” with its main symptom being “creeping featurism.” The disease seems to have been first identified and named in 1976, but its origins probably go back to the earliest technologies, buried far back in the eons prior to the dawn of history. It seems unavoidable, with no known prevention. Let me explain.
Suppose we follow all the principles in this book for a wonderful, human-centered product. It obeys all design principles. It overcomes people’s problems and fulfills some important needs. It is attractive and easy to use and understand. As a result, suppose the product is successful: many people buy it and tell their friends to buy it. What could be wrong with this?
The problem is that after the product has been available for a while, a number of factors inevitably appear, pushing the company toward the addition of new features—toward creeping featurism. These factors include:
•Existing customers like the product, but express a wish for more features, more functions, more capability.
•A competing company adds new features to its products, producing competitive pressures to match that offering, but to do even more in order to get ahead of the competition.
•Customers are satisfied, but sales are declining because the market is saturated: everyone who wants the product already has it. Time to add wonderful enhancements that will cause people to want the new model, to upgrade.
Featuritis is highly infectious. New products are invariably more complex, more powerful, and different in size than the first release of a product. You can see that tension playing out in music players, mobile phones, and computers, especially on smart phones, tablets, and pads. Portable devices get smaller and smaller with each release, despite the addition of more and more features (making them ever more difficult to operate). Some products, such as automobiles, home refrigerators, television sets, and kitchen stoves, also increase in complexity with each release, getting larger and more powerful.
But whether the products get larger or smaller, each new edition invariably has more features than the previous one. Featuritis is an insidious disease, difficult to eradicate, impossible to vaccinate against. It is easy for marketing pressures to insist upon the addition of new features, but there is no call—or for that matter, budget—to get rid of old, unneeded ones.
How do you know when you have encountered featuritis? By its major symptom: creeping featurism. Want an example? Look at Figure 7.1, which illustrates the changes that have overcome the simple Lego motorcycle since my first encounter with it for the first edition of this book. The original motorcycle (Figure 4.1 and Figure 7.1A) had only fifteen components and could be put together without any instructions: it had sufficient constraints that every piece had a unique location and orientation. But now, as Figure 7.1B shows, the same motorcycle has become bloated, with twenty-nine pieces. I needed instructions.
Creeping featurism is the tendency to add to the number of features of a product, often extending the number beyond all reason. There is no way that a product can remain usable and understandable by the time it has all of those special-purpose features that have been added in over time.
In her book Different, Harvard professor Youngme Moon argues that it is this attempt to match the competition that causes all products to be the same. When companies try to increase sales by matching every feature of their competitors, they end up hurting themselves. After all, when products from two companies match feature by feature, there is no longer any reason for a customer to prefer one over another. This is competition-driven design. Unfortunately, the mind-set of matching the competitor’s list of features pervades many organizations. Even if the first versions of a product are well done, human-centered, and focused upon real needs, it is the rare organization that is content to let a good product stay untouched.
FIGURE 7.1.Featuritis Strikes Lego. Figure A shows the original Lego Motorcycle available in 1988 when I used it in the first edition of this book (on the left), next to the 2013 version (on the right). The old version had only fifteen pieces. No manual was needed to put it together. For the new version, the box proudly proclaims “29 pieces.” I could put the original version together without instructions. Figure B shows how far I got with the new version before I gave up and had to consult the instruction sheet. Why did Lego believe it had to change the motorcycle? Perhaps because featuritis struck real police motorcycles, causing them to increase in size and complexity and Lego felt that its toy needed to match the world. (Photographs by the author.)
Most companies compare features with their competition to determine where they are weak, so they can strengthen those areas. Wrong, argues Moon. A better strategy is to concentrate on areas where they are stronger and to strengthen them even more. Then focus all marketing and advertisements to point out the strong points. This causes the product to stand out from the mindless herd. As for the weaknesses, ignore the irrelevant ones, says Moon. The lesson is simple: don’t follow blindly; focus on strengths, not weaknesses. If the product has real strengths, it can afford to just be “good enough” in the other areas.
Good design requires stepping back from competitive pressures and ensuring that the entire product be consistent, coherent, and understandable. This stance requires the leadership of the company to withstand the marketing forces that keep begging to add this feature or that, each thought to be essential for some market segment. The best products come from ignoring these competing voices and instead focusing on the true needs of the people who use the product.
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, calls his approach “customer obsessed.” Everything is focused upon the requirements of Amazon’s customers. The competition is ignored, the traditional marketing requirements are ignored. The focus is on simple, customer-driven questions: what do the customers want; how can their needs best be satisfied; what can be done better to enhance customer service and customer value? Focus on the customer, Bezos argues, and the rest takes care of itself. Many companies claim to aspire to this philosophy, but few are able to follow it. Usually it is only possible where the head of the company, the CEO, is also the founder. Once the company passes control to others, especially those who follow the traditional MBA dictum of putting profit above customer concerns, the story goes downhill. Profits may indeed increase in the short term, but eventually the product quality deteriorates to the point where customers desert. Quality only comes about by continual focus on, and attention to, the people who matter: customers.
New Technologies Force Change
Today, we have new requirements. We now need to type on small, portable devices that don’t have room for a full keyboard. Touch-and gesture-sensitive screens allow a new form of typing. We can bypass typing altogether through handwriting recognition and speech understanding.
Consider the four product
s shown in Figure 7.2. Their appearance and methods of operations changed radically in their century of existence. Early telephones, such as the one in Figure 7.2A, did not have keyboards: a human operator intervened to make the connections. Even when operators were first replaced by automatic switching systems, the “keyboard” was a rotary dial with ten holes, one for each digit. When the dial was replaced with pushbutton keys, it suffered a slight case of featuritis: the ten positions of the dial were replaced with twelve keys: the ten digits plus * and #.
FIGURE 7.2.100 Years of Telephones and Keyboards. Figures A and B show the change in the telephone from the Western Electric crank telephone of the 1910s, where rotating the crank on the right generated a signal alerting the operator, to the phone of the 2010s. They seem to have nothing in common. Figures C and D contrast a keyboard of the 1910s with one from the 2010s. The keyboards are still laid out in the same way, but the first requires physical depression of each key; the second, a quick tracing of a finger over the relevant letters (the image shows the word many being entered). Credits: A, B, and C: photographs by the author; objects in A and C courtesy of the Museum of American Heritage, Palo Alto, California. D shows the “Swype” keyboard from Nuance. Image being used courtesy of Nuance Communications, Inc.
But much more interesting is the merger of devices. The human computer gave rise to laptops, small portable computers. The telephone moved to small, portable cellular phones (called mobiles in much of the world). Smart phones had large, touch-sensitive screens, operated by gesture. Soon computers merged into tablets, as did cell phones. Cameras merged with cell phones. Today, talking, video conferences, writing, photography (both still and video), and collaborative interaction of all sorts are increasingly being done by one single device, available with a large variety of screen sizes, computational power, and portability. It doesn’t make sense to call them computers, phones, or cameras: we need a new name. Let’s call them “smart screens.” In the twenty-second century, will we still have phones? I predict that although we will still talk with one another over a distance, we will not have any device called a telephone.
As the pressures for larger screens forced the demise of physical keyboards (despite the attempt to make tiny keyboards, operated with single fingers or thumbs), the keyboards were displayed on the screen whenever needed, each letter tapped one at a time. This is slow, even when the system tries to predict the word being typed so that keying can stop as soon as the correct word shows up. Several systems were soon developed that allowed the finger or stylus to trace a path among the letters of the word: word-gesture systems. The gestures were sufficiently different from one another that it wasn’t even necessary to touch all the letters—it only mattered that the pattern generated by the approximation to the correct path was close enough to the desired one. This turns out to be a fast and easy way to type (Figure 7.2D).
With gesture-based systems, a major rethinking is possible. Why keep the letters in the same QWERTY arrangement? The pattern generation would be even faster if letters were rearranged to maximize speed when using a single finger or stylus to trace out the letters. Good idea, but when one of the pioneers in developing this technique, Shumin Zhai, then at IBM, tried it, he ran into the legacy problem. People knew QWERTY and balked at having to learn a different organization. Today, the word-gesture method of typing is widely used, but with QWERTY keyboards (as in Figure 7.2D).
Technology changes the way we do things, but fundamental needs remain unchanged. The need for getting thoughts written down, for telling stories, doing critical reviews, or writing fiction and nonfiction will remain. Some will be written using traditional keyboards, even on new technological devices, because the keyboard still remains the fastest way to enter words into a system, whether it be paper or electronic, physical or virtual. Some people will prefer to speak their ideas, dictating them. But spoken words are still likely to be turned into printed words (even if the print is simply on a display device), because reading is far faster and superior to listening. Reading can be done quickly: it is possible to read around three hundred words per minute and to skim, jumping ahead and back, effectively acquiring information at rates in the thousands of words per minute. Listening is slow and serial, usually at around sixty words per minute, and although this rate can be doubled or tripled with speech compression technologies and training, it is still slower than reading and not easy to skim. But the new media and new technologies will supplement the old, so that writing will no longer dominate as much as it did in the past, when it was the only medium widely available. Now that anyone can type and dictate, take photographs and videos, draw animated scenes, and creatively produce experiences that in the twentieth century required huge amounts of technology and large crews of specialized workers, the types of devices that allow us to do these tasks and the ways they are controlled will proliferate.
The role of writing in civilization has changed over its five thousand years of existence. Today, writing has become increasingly common, although increasingly as short, informal messages. We now communicate using a wide variety of media: voice, video, handwriting, and typing, sometimes with all ten fingers, sometimes just with the thumbs, and sometimes by gestures. Over time, the ways by which we interact and communicate change with technology. But because the fundamental psychology of human beings will remain unchanged, the design rules in this book will still apply.
Of course, it isn’t just communication and writing that has changed. Technological change has impacted every sphere of our lives, from the way education is conducted, to medicine, foods, clothing, and transportation. We now can manufacture things at home, using 3-D printers. We can play games with partners around the world. Cars are capable of driving themselves, and their engines have changed from internal combustion to an assortment of pure electric and hybrids. Name an industry or an activity and if it hasn’t already been transformed by new technologies, it will be.
Technology is a powerful driver for change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes to fulfill important needs, and sometimes simply because the technology makes the change possible.
How Long Does It Take to Introduce a New Product?
How long does it take for an idea to become a product? And after that, how long before the product becomes a long-lasting success? Inventors and founders of startup companies like to think the interval from idea to success is a single process, with the total measured in months. In fact, it is multiple processes, where the total time is measured in decades, sometimes centuries.
Technology changes rapidly, but people and culture change slowly. Change is, therefore, simultaneously rapid and slow. It can take months to go from invention to product, but then decades—sometimes many decades—for the product to get accepted. Older products linger on long after they should have become obsolete, long after they should have disappeared. Much of daily life is dictated by conventions that are centuries old, that no longer make any sense, and whose origins have been forgotten by all except the historian.
Even our most modern technologies follow this time cycle: fast to be invented, slow to be accepted, even slower to fade away and die. In the early 2000s, the commercial introduction of gestural control for cell phones, tablets, and computers radically transformed the way we interacted with our devices. Whereas all previous electronic devices had numerous knobs and buttons on the outside, physical keyboards, and ways of calling up numerous menus of commands, scrolling through them, and selecting the desired command, the new devices eliminated almost all physical controls and menus.
Was the development of tablets controlled by gestures revolutionary? To most people, yes, but not to technologists. Touch-sensitive displays that could detect the positions of simultaneous finger presses (even if by multiple people) had been in the research laboratories for almost thirty years (these are called multitouch displays). The first devices were developed by the University of Toronto in the early 1980s. Mitsubishi developed a product that it sold to design
schools and research laboratories, in which many of today’s gestures and techniques were being explored. Why did it take so long for these multitouch devices to become successful products? Because it took decades to transform the research technology into components that were inexpensive and reliable enough for everyday products. Numerous small companies tried to manufacture screens, but the first devices that could handle multiple touches were either very expensive or unreliable.