Does the user really know what he wants?
The new Apple Park, designed by por Norman Foster and in the final stages of construction, is proving more controversial than expected for a corporate campus built with virtually everything money can buy and everything the company with the biggest reputation for design can come up with.
An article by Anil Dash in Medium, “Apple is about to do something their programmers definitely don’t want”, reflects what appears to be a growing discontent among Apple developers, annoyed, it would seem, by the fact that the spaces they will occupy in the new building are organized in open plan format, large spaces without partitions that are common in most workspaces, but are usually hated by developers, who claim they are noisy, distract them, and prevent them from concentrating.
In his article, Dash cites studies that claim these types of spaces distract, frustrate and generally make workers unhappy, ignoring one fundamental fact: most of these studies are carried out at companies that did not apply open planning properly, and generally involved little more than removing partitions and seating more people in less space while maintaining previous working conditions.
The correct application of the open plan model requires a change in working conditions. For the open plan model to work, workers must feel that the office is a place where they can go to do certain things and that, in fact, encourages them to go there: in the case of Google, whose staff know that technology allows them to work wherever they want, that can mean great food, along with laundry, massages, and play areas but that when they need to concentrate they can work wherever they please. Open plan require common and private use areas.
Anil Dash’s assessment of open offices is completely outmoded, a cliché that lost its meaning when we learned to optimize these kind of spaces and especially when we decided to accompany them with the necessary dose of freedom, flexibility and versatility that they obviously require. When Dash says “the science is settled. The answer is clear. The door is closed on the subject,” he is ignoring the huge numbers of open plan offices where workers are happy and that, in addition, are driving digital and cultural transformation. To say that “developers are unhappy in those spaces” is simply a cliché. That said, clichés have great influence and it is perfectly possible that there are Apple developers expressing their discontent in the various forums Dash has visited.
Let’s ask another question: should a company like Apple listen to those developers and give them exactly what they ask, enclosed spaces that are an exception to the conditions they have designed for their corporate campus? Let’s not forget that we talked about the company whose leader affirmed things like
“It is not the customers’ job to know what they want”
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of the times, people do not know what they want until you show them to them”
“You can not just ask customers what they want and then try to give them to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new”
Or what Henry Ford said a century ago:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”
And can these principles be applied to the workforce that designs those products?
Do Apple’s developers know what they want? While the vast majority of developers would say they are tired of hearing about what kind of conditions and spaces they perform best in, and surely such sentiments are more rooted and radical the higher the level of experience, it is also true that there may be designs that, combined with the appropriate conditions of flexibility and autonomy, would allow developers to work in conditions they have not experienced yet. Does Apple wants to create a more cooperative, more open type of development, where the office is a place to exchange ideas but also somewhere that also allows people to focus on what they need to, where and how they need to? There are any number of very successful companies where people work under such conditions, or even decide that working from home is the only way forward and have closed their offices.
Google prefers to give its workers a location they can adapt to their liking, and believes that if engineers want three monitors, a keyboard of a certain type and posters in their cubicle, then why not? The result is open plan, but with assigned desks, and with shared infrastructure for other uses. It is possible that when developers from Google or other companies talk to their colleagues at Apple, the latter will express their frustration over the open office awaiting them.
Should the company give up on its vision as to how its developers should work? On the vision of Jony Ive, now Jobs’s prophet on Earth? Again, do any of us really know what we want, or are we simply reluctant to leave our comfort zone and only listening to other people’s horror stories?
Should all this be a concern for companies when they are looking at ways to attract and retain talent? Would Apple be where it is today if it had always paid attention to what people said they preferred?
(En español, aquí)
