Too much design

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A Windows phone design article by Paul Thurrot, summarizing a "ask-me-anything" thread in reddit, reminded me about something that easily goes wrong in design: the design itself becomes more important than the product or medium it's applied to. Meaning, that more work goes into sustaining design as an activity; instead of treating it as an integrated part of making a competitive product.

What kept popping up throughout the article, was the need to differentiate Windows phone from others, through Metro's unique visual and interaction design (mainly focusing on application side though). This resulted in design importance raising out of proportion, disturbing the actual product work (make a great product). The focus was on finding a striking and novel design (too much), instead of making a relevant alternative to iOS and Android.

Alternative can mean being different, but it doesn't have to. A product that's just different for the sake of being different, is bound to have a design overdose. The only way to deliver an industry-breaking products, is by not designing it for the industry (remember what Apple did when it entered the smartphone market). That alone requires you to focus on problems that the industry tries to hide. Too much design will just make things worse.

The mobile industry has a significant ability to resist changes. Look at any usability studies. They all basically state that Android and iOS have reached the pinnacle of touch screen interaction. To put that in some perspective: they say that majority of desktop interaction patterns (the way you use mouse and keyboard to do things) are just as usable on mobile devices, as they were 40 years ago. Nonsense.

Usability studies like that show how amazingly well people adapted to our messy past with computers. Studies can always help to spot problems in both design and implementation, but the they tell nothing about our potential, our hopes, dreams or what we'll do tomorrow.

So, at the end of the day, those studies tell that the industry doesn't want to be broken.

"To go against it (industry) you need to earn it. You need to be far, far better." Being different for the sake of difference, is not enough.

With Metro, Microsoft experienced the hard way what happens when you put in too much design, at the expense of end user value. It failed to be relevant.


Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Responsible product development. Family style.

When creating something, you sign a responsibility pact.

By respecting that pact, your creation has all the potential in the world. Just like a child has.

The same parenting guideline applies equally for new products. You have already developed a deep understanding between your child, and it's your responsibility to make everyone understand and respect that. A small child cannot yet communicate that. Neither can a new product.

It doesn't matter how many of you there are, you're all mutual parents. The whole company is.

You all have valuable information related to the well-being and success of your child. If you share that information with new people becoming involved in your child's life, everyone greatly benefits from that. Especially your child.

The challenging part is, that most of the time, it's people you don't see. People in meetings you never attend. People in cities you never visit. People in companies you've never heard off. They all have expectations for that potential you've been meticulously nurturing.

Therefore it's important that everyone of you understands their role as a parent. All of those new external expectations can be perfect opportunities for your child.

Just remember to ask and also listen if your child wants to play hockey or piano. Break down those expectations to see how they fit the personality and traits of your child. Don't just blindly decide and demand something.

Because that breaks children, instead of helping them to grow. Don't expect opportunities to create a perfect child for you. That's just horribly wrong.

Treat those expectations as goals. Because they'll help your child to grow; to become stronger by overcoming challenges. However, it works only as long as it's the child who's overcoming them. Everyone else around is just a safety net, allowing graceful failing, and encouraging to retry. It's about honesty toward your child and ones potential.

If you solve a puzzle for your child, it's you who did it. No matter how hard you claim otherwise.

So don't make dishonest promises to anyone. Those just end up hurting both the growth of your child, and your role as a parent. Don't ask your child to skip elementary school in favor of dreaming about university.

People will understand if you openly explain your family values to them. What makes your child behave like one does. Also, if your child suffers from a permanent illness, it's only good if people involved are aware of it.

In the same way, every product has their shortcomings and weaknesses. Be open about them to others, and avoid planning the future on those weaknesses. A lifetime of failure will break children as well.

So remember to listen to your children.

Don't force them into being something they're not. Nobody benefits from that.

Because if you do, I sincerely hope that the responsibility pact in question was not signed in blood.

Our children deserve better.

Both in family life and product development.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

What's wrong with multiple home screens

Quite a bit. Hold on to something.

If thinking critically, what does multiple home screens really add? Aside from multiple screens off course. Is there any explanation for their existence?

I hear this even in my sleep already: "Everyone thinks they're amazing / Everyone is used to them." But, that's just repeating an opinion. It doesn't explain why do people need them?

Another common one is: "Statistics tell us that people like products with multiple home screens in them." With that logic, you can say that statistically people also like seats with feces in them, because they use bathrooms several times a day. Sorry, people would be happier without the poo being involved if it would be possible.

This as well: "We have done extensive consumer studies to prove it's a must feature to have." Sigh. On paper, you can make people like poo just by asking them the right questions.

This comes up every now and then: "It's for everyone to personalize their devices." I'm pretty sure the device is already a personal one, and what user does with it, will make it even more so. Also, there's countless other ways to make the interface a personal one.

But the winner is: "What is this heresy I hear! From the beginning of time as we know it, home screen content has always been arranged in horizontal pages!" From the beginning of 2007. But then why is pretty much every other content browsed in vertical direction? Web pages, content streams, call histories, messages and gallery grids. All vertically arranged.

So really. Why does a smartphone need multiple horizontally arranged home screens? How do they make a smartphone smarter? What is the user need they fulfill?

Anyone?

I think it's actually the other way around. A smartphone would be smarter if it didn't have multiple home screens. The main issue is in the thinking that adding more, automatically equals a better product. And as usual, people are blind to the opposite.

It's a better product, that equals more. Let's try it out.

You give a user seven home screens, instead of five. Did it make a single home screen any better? Is it easier to move or find things between seven home screens? Are seven screens easier to decorate with widgets? Is it easier to find nice widgets that don't look horrible? Is it more personal solution? Did the product become smarter than before? Does it free system resources for actual user tasks?

Nope.

Then try removing all but one home screen. Make that single remaining home screen better. Make it smarter. So that it adapts better to what user is actually doing with the device, removing the need to juggle between multiple home screens. Because everything you did and worked on, is found from the same home screen, everything becomes much faster. You launched a music player, and suddenly the controls are also there. You arrived at work and your email account summary is greeting you on your home screen. Suddenly the behavior feels more helpful and smarter, since you can do more by actually doing less.

Do you spot a pattern? Better, equals more.

There's even the age-old saying about quality trumping quantity. Well, marketing was clearly invented as an counter-argument. Because smart is hard to do. Just adding more is easy. A hammer with three heads instead of a single good one: a great idea everyone can boldly stand behind of. And with a good marketing campaign, nobody notices it's heavy as hell and unbalanced beyond practical. The rendering looks amazing, though.

So compared to doing smart and meaningful things, marketing is dirt cheap. Guess which path big manufacturers favor?

So let's try one more time: Does adding more home screens make a product easier to sell?

Hell yes it does!

If I buy a hammer, I want a better hammer than I had before. One that allows me to work faster, more efficiently and comfortably, not to forget improved safety. I don't want to buy an inferior hammer, just because it's easier to sell to other people; who at the end of the day, would also prefer a better hammer with a single good head, instead of having the option for multiple ones.

That means the product was intentionally made to perform poorly, just to make it sell more. Since the modular-wonder-hammer has the option to add more heads to it, the potential to develop a single good head is lost for the sake of a nonsense feature.

If Sailfish OS would have multiple home screens next to each other, it wouldn't be possible to have cover actions as explained in my previous post. It would mean that the ability for user to interact with tasks would be reduced.

For the sake of having a modular-wonder-hammer, that's heavy as hell and unbalanced beyond practical.

To be honest with all of you. Making a better product is really hard and painful. It's because the industry around you keeps repeating how more equals better. Especially when the rendering looks awesome.

The dumbest thing I've heard.

In the smartphone industry.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Keep moving forward

When launching a new product, you have already analyzed existing products and planned the best place to operate from. Due to customer base size, you compensate the overall offering by focusing hard on areas other products fail to excel in.

This justifies your claim to the land for now. Other manufacturers have to work much harder to offset your offering in these neglected areas.

But they most likely have already started to plan their move. Their problem is your strength in area, so you've got some time. But the last thing you want to be doing is to sit down and admire the scenery.

First and foremost, you need to move forward.

If you're not moving forward, you're staying still; but since the competition will be always moving forward, it makes the time spent on sitting still, look like moving backwards from the consumer perspective.

What causes a company to stay still? Most of the time it's caused by obscure company targets, but the biggest threat usually comes from within. We're all sources of potential disaster. Everybody might know that there's a need to sustain the movement.

But instead, somebody gets an idea.

Most of the time, ideas are harmless, abundant and pop up everywhere. Everyone has them and there's always good ones in the lot. The problem with ideas is usually in both what affected to the idea creation and how we treat that idea.

How an idea is processed.

The most common type of an idea is a borrowed one. And the cheapest too, in many ways. It's easy to take something that already exist and swallow it as a whole. Hope that nobody notices. However, if everything is copied from existing products, there's no way they fit together and form an enjoyable product to use. At least don't market it as such.

To make it easy for you in a long term, take the idea apart, see what's inside that makes the idea valuable (how does the idea create value with the end user). Grab that, and move on.

From an idea, salvage only what you can carry. Don't carry a car wreck if you only need a spare fuse.

By doing that, the idea is easier to fit to everything around it, so that you don't fit your product into the new idea you had/found/borrowed. That's insane amount of work. You don't want to do that when you need to advance.

Treat all ideas as means to expand towards a new areas, not to move your whole camp. Remember to strip ideas down, so you don't have to deal with any of that dead weight. Then, look at those areas (cloud storage as an example) and see how you can replicate the end result and value that competing products create, but do it from your direction. Do it with your tools and ways.

It's much easier for you, and it will reinforce and harden your existing product. The idea will work together with other ideas.

This is what moving forward means. Moving without risking your foothold. Because the direction you approach an area, is on the opposite side from the competition perspective, and it will be difficult for them to come knocking hard on your doorstep. Creating value is not patented. Creating it with their way usually is.

Having your own direction to look at things, solve problems and empower user, builds on top of your existing strength. You appear moving without leaving the place you struck down your flag. And the longer you keep doing this, the deeper to the ground the pole goes.

But

Sometimes things don't work out like planned. An idea slips past. It doesn't get properly dissected and analyzed. If you end up integrating the unprocessed idea into your product, you'll be adding all that dead weight of the car wreck as well.

Even if you just needed that spare fuse.

It can sometimes be intentional. It can be driven by someone who thinks the car wreck plays an important role in the user experience. Or that the user experience is not relevant, and the wreck is welcomed to stay. Horrible things are set in motion. It usually starts with these words.

"Taking just what you need is not enough"

It's no joke folks. Fear it like the Plague. When you hear those words, things are about to take an irreversible turn to the fiery purgatory. A new entry will be written in the book of atrocities, under the Eternal torment chapter.

The idea has become more important than reaching the value it represents.

And the idea, at the end, will consume you, your product and everyone else working with it. I tried to make as accurate image as I could, of an unprocessed idea gone bad, so you can avoid it when you see it.

Behold.

Still, hyperbole aside. Process your ideas, treat them as ways to enter new areas from your direction and stop integrating dead weight.

Carrying dead weight is stupid.

What makes things unsustainable is the complexity and unnecessary amount of code it introduces. It will be there forever and you just have to deal with it. Maintain it, fix it and love it.

Unconditionally. Look at the previous picture. Make piece with it and give it a kiss.

If you're a developer working with that idea, or next to it, be afraid. Be very very afraid. You're not going to be moving anytime soon.

And when you finally nudge into motion, with all that weight you've picked up and maintained over the years, your product will be extremely complicated. It had to overcome unnecessary software complexity, horrible legacy, and also bypass and re-route countless user flows to hide it all. For what?

Good luck quickly entering any new areas or responding to business opportunities. Even a team of seasoned software exorcists will not be able to mop up that stuff anymore.

Finally, after a hard lifetime of slowly pushing a software behemoth like that forward, you'll probably ask yourself, and your thousands of in-house brethren: Why didn't we just take what we needed?

Something as simple as a spare fuse, can make a difference between moving forward or staying still.

Make sure that everybody in your company understands that.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.