The Toast Principle of Product Design
Ah, San Francisco. The promised land of tech. The place where we, the enlightened technorati, build massive-scale products that touch the hearts of millions and make everyone’s lives better.
I don’t know about all that. Since moving here I’ve come to believe that the best, most compelling product in the Bay Area isn’t a new Platform as a Service. It is toast.
You may have heard about this toast phenomenon. My own journey started about four years ago, when I became obsessed with the Toast served at GTA in Los Angeles. Not long after, I visited San Francisco and had a new toast experience at a place called The Mill, which bakes their bread fresh, cuts it thick, and slathers it with something delicious. Another few months after this, I heard a story on This American Life about the toast served at a weird little place called Trouble Cafe, which is the alleged birthplace of $4 toast.
Clearly the word has gotten out. This is what the line at The Mill looked like this morning:
The line was about 20 minutes, plus another 20 minutes to actually get your toast. Most entrepreneurs would do anything to have people lined up like this to buy their product.
Toast looks like this:
How does something so simple attract so much attention? There are no secrets to the recipe: bread, apply heat, butter, cinnamon, sugar, and salt flakes. You could put them together at home and each slice would cost less than 50¢ and take about 4 minutes. So why do people come here, wait 40 minutes, and spend $4–5 per slice? Simple: because it is perfect.
Have you heard of Dieter Rams? If you haven’t, you’re at least familiar with his work. Mr. Rams was the Chief Design Officer at Braun for 34 years, overseeing the industrial design of products ranging from modular shelving systems to transistor radios. He’s also widely considered to be a major influencer of Jony Ives and design at Apple in general.
So what does he have to do with toast? Well, the other thing that Dieter Rams is famous for are his 10 Principles of Good Design, which culminate in what I believe to be one of the most powerful guiding principles of good design:
Less, but better.
From my perspective as a product designer, this perfectly explains the toast phenomenon. Places like The Mill and Trouble don’t have large menus—they do very few things exceptionally well. They leverage their strengths, such as the ability to bake amazing bread in-house, to create a simple, strong, and differentiated product. They target a niche audience (local hipsters) in an extremely large market (people who eat toast for breakfast).
To me, toast is the quintessential MVP: simple, lovable, and worth paying a premium for.
This simplification and focus on creating a clear, compelling experience can and should be applied to any product. I think the days of creating one-size-fits-all software products are over. Consider 37signals’ divestiture of all of their products except Basecamp; consider Facebook’s movement toward breaking out features into (or acquiring) simpler mobile products; consider Slack’s rapid adoption, owed in part to perfecting chat and integrating with (instead of building) everything else. To compete, you have to find that thing that you can do better than anyone else.
So, before you start hacking away at that endless backlog of features, think about what your toast is, and get it perfect.
