How many users fumble with the foil?
Products with high net utility leave users with a strong sense of having gained time, or money, or productivity
The net utility of a product exists on two axes — value to the user and cost to the user in terms of price, time to learn, or effort to use.
The costs associated with tasks that we perform often are much less important than the costs associated with tasks we perform rarely. We’ll pay more for a tin opener that we use every day than for a wine opener we use once a month. If we drink a lot of wine though, and open very few cans, then the calculation is reversed.
In products that assist with tasks performed very frequently, the value to the user is quite high. So those products can get away with considerable learning costs. For tasks performed rarely, a product needs to be low cost. But remember — cost includes not just price, but also ease of learning and ease of use. Any product that’s easy to learn and easy to use has some room on the cost side for price.
To open a bottle of wine stopped with a cork, I need to engage in three steps:
- Remove the seal around the top.
- Insert the corkscrew.
- Steadily pull the corkscrew to remove the cork.
For the first I have to get a knife and cut the foil away. Depending on how well I do this, it sometimes leaves a jagged edge of foil around the bottle opening.
Of course, there’s a device that does this for me called a foil cutter. I simply put the top of the wine bottle in its mouth and rotate, and it removes the foil perfectly every time. It costs maybe £1 to manufacture and sells for £4 to £21. If you open a bottle of wine every night, that price is a bargain. If you open a bottle once a week, well, it’s still bargain. If you only pop the cork once a month, is it a bargain? Probably not — especially if you have to find and read the instructions each time you use the damned thing, or if you have to remember which side of the device is up, or if you have to remember where you put it away last time you used it. But a foil cutter is very easy to learn and very simple to use, so its cost is actually pretty low and its net utility is pretty high.
Products in the upper left of quadrant B have very high utility at very low cost. This is where we want products to be. The lower right of quadrant D represents very low utility and very high costs — here be death.
Net utility is strong to the left of the diagonal line. To the right, it’s weak. Where we focus innovation is a guess we make. Where users put it is the deciding factor for whether a product succeeds.
