Lateral Innovation
Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology
This article is part of a three-chapter Enterprise Design guidelines .
Start reading here.
Nintendo has a product-development philosophy called “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.” It led to the Game Boy, the 20th century’s most successful game console. Basically, you can innovate with old and cheap technologies instead of obsessing over the cutting edge. [2]
Lateral innovation is a principle that Designers might found counterintuitive or blocking creativity and innovation. In enterprise systems, it is often the other way around — the best inventions happen from lateral innovation and smart integrations to the level the technology fading away to the background. In the world of professional apps, our goal is not to innovate for innovation, but to support individual professionals and organizations’ goals.
Constraints as limitations
Most product designers start their journey by ignoring specific platform constraints and applying tools and methods that they saw working in different environments. They execute generative user research, facilitate design thinking workshops, form bold objectives, and start most of the UI design from scratch following people’s first technology second approach [3].
We often see friction between business, design, and development functions that trigger endless debates on Twitter, such as the ultimate tool for design-development handoff or if designers should learn to code. This mostly comes from the attitude of treating constraints as limitations. You know you have reached that spot when you see a design deliverable presented to any other domain expert with a single question, “Is this possible?”.
There is no need to ask that question. My favorite catchphrase and universal answer to this question are, “Yes, everything is possible — it is just software. We are not sending a man to a moon here.” If you can draw Mona Lisa in Excel, you can undoubtedly code a custom 3D engine into a SharePoint or ServiceNow portal and make it look red or pink.
Embracing Constraints
Design is all about finding solutions within constraints. If there were no constraints, it’s not design — it’s art. Matias Duarte
I found the most satisfying approach to enterprise systems design when I embrace constraints as opportunities. If I see a particular user interaction pattern that might require significantly higher effort than initially anticipated, I challenge myself to come up with alternatives matching the same goal. ServiceNow, Box, Office 365 are all making their IxD constraints available. Studying Now Experience framework [4], Box UI Elements [5] or Fluent UI Framework [6] is equivalent to studying Apple Human Interaction [7] or Windows Interface [8] when designing native apps.
Even when we gain deep insights and know our playground, it will still be a world of enterprise software. We will find out-of-the-box solutions that are wicked, and we will face limitations. There is no better answer than being intentional about what particular constraint we consider as a limitation and not treat all outside input as a problem. If we have a clear cost-value -risk analysis, the same design principles apply to the platform itself. It’s still just software, and if it does not work, we shall improve it using all the appropriate tools and methods available to us.
Resources
[1.] Disruptive Innovation via Old Technology — Razvan Calin
[2.] Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology — Matthias Ott
[3.] What is desk research? — David Travis
[4.] Now Experience Framework — ServiceNow
[5.] Box UI Elements — Box
[6.] How Fluent UI Unlocks the Next Generation of Microsoft 365 Experiences — Benedikt Lehnert
[7.] Human Interface Guidelines — Apple
