What are you wasting your time on? The terrifyingly simple way to earn more by doing less.

Knowing when to move beyond a process or product that once seemed indispensable isn’t easy, but it’s an essential skill for a company’s long-term success. Find out how your focusing your User Experience and Business Experience Strategy can help.

Remember the floppy disk? Maybe, like me, you remember having a wallet full of them, crossing your fingers every time you pushed one into the disk drive that you wouldn’t see the dreaded “Disk Error” message that meant all was lost. Maybe you even remember back when they were actually floppy. Anyway, for the first two decades of the existence of the personal computer every single one had a floppy disk drive (or two or three) right on the front. In the days before ubiquitous networking, that was how data moved around.

Then in 1998 Apple unveiled their comeback vehicle, the iMac. It was colorful, compact, powerful, inexpensive — and had no floppy drive. Industry experts cried folly and predicted doom, but the iMac few off the shelves and brought Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy. People realized that they could, in fact, live without a floppy drive in their PC. It just took someone taking it away to prove it.

Since 1998 Apple has done this again and again: released a brand-new operating system that instantly made 20 years worth of Mac software obsolete; replaced the 30-pin iPod/iPhone connector used by millions of accessories with the brand-new Lightning Connector; released a new MacBook with only one port and no CD/DVD drive. And yet customers have not deserted them and their profits just get bigger. How do they get away with it?

They get away with it because their overall, core User Experience and Business Experience Design is not about being all things to all people. Their UX and BX Design depends on the discipline to know when to say “no” to a feature that isn’t 100% ready, or to leave behind an established standard that is holding the rest of the platform back, all in the service of building the best product possible.

Take a minute to think about what your company’s floppy disk is. What is the process, or product, or feature that you keep around out of inertia, because that’s how things have always been? If you could give it up, what opportunities for efficiency, or growth, or innovation would its absence reveal?

Sometimes the answer is obvious, but more often it feels like a tough call. But a strong vision for your User Experience and Business Experience let you approach the question confidently: is it serving your Vision? What if it went away? What possible outcomes can you ideate, prototype, and test?

Successful businesses don’t just learn to change with the times. Successful companies lead the change, and to do that you have to have the confidence and discipline to know when it’s time to say goodbye to things that might have once been essential and embrace what’s next. A Business Design based on well-defined, well-executed User Experience and Business Experience Designs help give you that confidence and discipline.

So, what is your floppy disk? It’s time to hit the eject button for the last time: read more about creating your Business Design in my blog post “Don’t Write a Business Plan (Until you’ve answered these 3 Questions)”

Photo credit: Rama & Musée Bolo via WikiMedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0 FR