No one cares about your product's features
They really don’t. They care about its benefits.
The advert on the left is for Sonos. I’m a huge fan of Sonos. Sonos speakers sound amazing, they us WiFi, and the Sonos App puts so many music streaming services and your own music library under one roof. You can control it from many devices. You can listen to the radio on it. But the advert isn’t selling any of those features. It’s not showing you the Apps usability or the technical advances that allow them to have such great sound in such a tiny speaker. The advert is all about having music in your home. Giving your home life. Giving you a happy home. It is all about the benefits that music can bring you. They don’t mention Sonos once, and yet you want one. Because you want that house filled with music. You want a happy home where even mundane tasks fill you with joy.
Pretty much all adverts are showing you benefits, not features. FitBit ads don’t show you the advances in BLE technology that means their battery can last for ages, they show you that wearing one all the time will help motivate you to live healthier.
A couple of weeks ago I was at a conference held by the Scottish Institute for Enterprise. In one of the sessions Dr Kevin Parker, a man who trains young people to start businesses, spoke of the importance of switching our thinking from features to benefits. We should think of what the benefits to the user are, not what the features are.
Now Kevin was speaking in terms of marketing and business, and how to sell ideas to people. And it’s really useful to think of then. But it is also valuable for designers as we create the ideas that are to be sold.
It is useful for us as we try and think about how we might sell our products. People don’t buy features, they buy benefits. We don’t just want to offer features to people on a plate, we want to benefit them. We want to think in terms of what they want, and what is best for them.
But is is also useful in helping focus us during our design process. Donald Norman talks about featuritis in his brilliant book, ‘The Design of Everyday Things’. He says changes are “forced upon us through the invention of new technologies.” As we discover and create new technologies we are eager to use them. The trouble with new technologies is that they often solve problems we didn’t know we had. We don’t need everything all at once in the same product. Let’s hear again from the good old Don (Norman) of design:
“Complexity probably increases as the square of the features: double the number of features, quadruple the complexity. Provide ten times as many features, multiply the complexity by one hundred.”
As we strive to add more and more features, and be more and more innovative, we can clutter our designs. Our products often become harder to use, not better. This is perhaps why the iPhone continues to dominate the mobile phone market, despite often having less ‘features’ than its competitors. The iPhone is simple, it does what it does very well. As a result it is a pleasure to use, and is easily accessible for someone new to it.
But obviously new features are great. New technology is great. And often those problems that we didn’t know we had until they were solved are real problems; we just didn’t dare consider they might be real as we had no solution for them. And it is the job of designers to work out what those problems are. I am in favour of all of this.
I guess what I am really concerned with is when we lose sight. When we can’t see the forest for the trees. That’s when it’s vital we remind ourselves what the real benefits of our product are. When the features we are adding detract from the overall intended benefit of our product we should think twice before adding them. Not every product has to solve every problem. When you’re designing a mug, it doesn’t need flashing lights, internet connectivity, and sensors to identify the molecules in your drink. Although that’s a pretty interesting idea.
