Racing the Zeitgeist: the pressures competition puts on good design.
Part of a series on Is Good Design Good For Business?
Businesses are comeptitive. They need to be. They have customers, investors and distributors to fight for. As people work on new ideas and products, it is inevitable others will be working on similar concepts. It is the nature of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. And so in order to win over the distributors and investors you have to make sure your product can compete.
Don Norman says there are only three ways that businesses can compete: price, features and quality. And so designers have to inevitably find ways to improve on these. Unfortunately businesses often cut costs to a minimum and add as many features as they can before they even come to consider improving the quality of their products.
Now you can cut costs and make cheap products that aren’t very good. That’s an option many businesses take. But reputation really matters, and it affects success. Your products are the point of interaction between your company and your customers, so you need to ensure their quality. The pressure to cut costs does creep into so many companies, and corners are cut and second class materials and manufaturing used to try and get away with as much as possible. This is sometimes a good thing, not everyone can afford the most expensive products, and there is a line to find between quality and affordability. But affordable and cheap are quite different and in the end customers will see that and reputations will suffer.
The real temptation for serious companies, who care about how people view them, is to add more features. To add things the competition doesn’t have. Maybe not even the competition, but features your past products don’t have in order to persuade people to upgrade. As companies constantly try to one up each other products invariably become really complicated, each iteration with more features than the last. You then end up with what Norman calls featuritis, which I have talked about before on this blog.
Featuritis is when your product has a ridiculous and unreasonable number of features for the sake of it. It makes products difficult to use and understand for someone new to them. Think of big clunky professional software packages. SolidWorks is an example I’m all too familiar with. There are buttons, features, things to do everywhere. It is a nightmare to learn how to use without proper lessons, tutorials and days, even weeks of practise.
The trouble with featuritis is it’s a disease that affects good products. Good human-centred design. What starts out great then becomes cluttered over time, and good design comes second to more features. Not on purpose, I don’t think anyone sets out to push good design down the priorities list. But it happens, slowly and subtly. And it’s addictive. The pressure to compete with other companies and previous versions of your own product means more and more is added. There is no incentive to remove features.
Youngme Moon, a Harvard professor, has written a book called ‘Different’ on the dangers of competition. She says this:
“Going tit for tat and adding features, augmentations, and gimmicks to beat the competition has the perverse result of making you like everyone else.”
Companies constantly trying to one up on each other means they’re only ever one part removed. Instead companies should break away from the heard. To abandon conformity and seek to be an exception. Most companies add features and invest in areas where their products fall short compared to competitors. Moon argues this is wrong, and thinks instend we should invest in our products’ strengths. Make them stronger. Then focus all your marketing on those strengths.
If your product is really, really good at something, the best at it, it can afford to just be ok in other areas. If more companies followed this model then we’d have much more choice available to us and it would be good choice too. The choice wouldn’t just be which veneer and aesthetic do I want to be applied to my phone. It would be much more.
The best thing about focussing on strengths is that it’s wholly customer centred. People centred. What do your customers need and want? How can we best help them? It’s looking to the user not to the competition. Focus on them and everything else will take care of itself. We need to step back and look at our products and making sure the whole thing is coherent and understandable. Good leadership is needed for that. Only companies like Braun in it’s glory days with Rams, and Apple today, who employ designers so high up their own food chains can really do that.
