The problem with product development

The iPhone is one of the least usable phones for sending text and email but gets the highest consumer satisfaction of any smartphone. Why?  It’s product design that’s based around experience not features.

Small usability, big love

An average iPhone user makes almost three times more errors per text message than someone using a hard-key QWERTY phone (see
usercentric.com).  But googling the terms “iPhone love” gets about 336 million results and the iPhone has higher customer satisfaction than any other smartphone (see JDPower consumer research, here
).

Experience not features

It’s not just less usable.  If anything, the iPhone has less features than many competitors.  Mobile email, voicemail and mobile web browsing are hardly new, you can’t forward a text or voicemail and the camera is positively primitive.

But it does have Apple’s trademark obsession about experience.  This isn’t just in the fluidity of the interface or the resolved simplicity of the case.  If you buy one in an Apple store it will be “served” to you with a flourish like Michelin-starred food.

Product developers spend lots of time benchmarking product features and prioritising them using techniques like conjoint analysis.  What we need to do more of is design, customer ethnography and journey mapping to build experiences out of our products.

Related posts:

1. How to time product launches perfectly
2. How to have disruptive ideas
3. How service teams can inspire product innovation

Premature genius and the art of timing

The change curve in product development

Premature genius is one of the most overlooked challenges of product development.  To visualise the problem, think of a change curve.  Launch too early and no amount of marketing and development spend will get you to take off.  Launch too late and you may not catch up with competitors.

There’s an important nuance in the story about the Apple Newton.  It may have seemed like a failure.  But, an ex-Apple staffer tells me that there’s a direct line of sight between the technical and human lessons which Apple learned on the Newton and the huge success of iPod and iPhone.  No Newton, no iPod, no iPhone.

Three key disciplines for perfect launch timing

New product development needs to be framed in the present and future.  There are three key disciplines for achieving that:

1. Trend analysis.  Create private foresight out of public knowledge by identifying precisely what trends affect your product idea and understanding exactly where you are on the change curve.
2. Invest in corporate memory of rejected ideas and failed products.  Put in place structured PRINCE2 style lessons learned documentation.  Put old concepts on ice and review them regularly.
3. Identify the modular“components” of innovation be it an insight into customer needs, a process or technology.  An entire concept may not have worked, but many of its building blocks could be entirely sound.

Related posts:

1. Design for experience, not features
2. How service teams can inspire product innovation
3. After Eureka: 7 questions to test innovation for big and unreasonable profit potential