The best products aren’t the ones with the most features. The best products are those whose features are tightly integrated with the solutions they provide, making them the most usable.
Apple Inc, "Making Design Decisions," Apple Human Interface Guidelines, 9 Jun 2008, p. 28, developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGDesignProcess/chapter_3_section_3.html.
"Leopard is magnificent code architected from the user in, rather than from core technology out."
Tom Yager, "Apple OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrade," InfoWorld, October 17, 2007.
"But field studies are still invaluable; they show us a wider range of behaviors than we see in the laboratory and let us assess the impact of changing contexts and other ethnographic variables."
Jakob Nielsen, "Intranet Usability Shows Huge Advances," Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, 9 Oct 2007, www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet-usability.html.
Of course, too much detail can undermine credibility, for the same reason: we know there’s only so much a person can remember about a scene or event, so we believe they’re making stuff up when they start overwhelming us with detail. (Plus, we get bored – a very important thing to keep in mind!) In On Writing, Stephen King, whose been known to create a sticky idea or two in his time, puts it like this:
Thin description leaves the reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted. Overdescription buries him or her in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium. It’s also important to know what to describe and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job, which is telling a story.
Too much detail distracts from the point, which is getting your audience to believe something.
"Every industry and every company needs to learn from the periphery rather than the core. Change always happens at the periphery."
Jessie Scanlon, "Chrysler and the Innovation Basement: What Robert Nardelli needs to do in order to change the Big Three automaker into an innovator," Business Week, 8 Aug 2007, www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2007/id2007088_296221_page_3.htm.
"People come back to places that send them away."
It's the basic trust proposition of the Internet. People will only trust a service that gives them complete freedom to come and go as they please. Further, they'll want to come back if you send them to cool places. It's why people like Facebook today, and why they'll be tired of it tomorrow, if it only sends you to places within the Facebook silo.
Dave Winer, "Lock-in and the web, day 2," Scripting News, 3 Aug 2007, www.scripting.com/2007/08/03.html.
SiliconValley.com - Takahashi: Microsoft's tabletop computer breaks creative ground: "The team built 85 different prototypes."
But Mr. Singhal often doesn’t rush to fix everything he hears about, because each change can affect the rankings of many sites. “You can’t just react on the first complaint,” he says. “You let things simmer.”
Matt Linderman, "Amit Singhal and Google's secret search sauce," Signal vs Noise, 4 Jun 2007, www.37signals.com/svn/posts/444-amit-singhal-and-googles-secret-search-sauce.
See the original story: Saul Hansell, "Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine," New York Times, 3 Jun 07, www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03google.html.
The best ideal experience eliminates frustration and instills delight. This becomes the foundation of our vision.
The space between the current experience and the ideal experience is where the insights come from. Innovation happens here.
http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2007/articles/experience_vision/
David Pogue, "Apple TV Has Landed," New York Times, 22 Mar 2007,www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/technology/22pogue.html.
Companies like Dogster that constantly examine user data - especially the discouraging stuff - are finding the information increasingly vital online. 'Instead of working on a feature for months trying to get it perfect,' Rheingold says, 'we'll work on something for two weeks and then spend two or three days listening to users and fine-tuning it.'
Tom McNichol, "A Startup's Best Friend? Failure," Business 2.0, 1 Mar 2007, money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/03/01/8401031.
"Connoisseurs of anything discern between trash and class. They know that understatement is class’s hallmark: it’s a product, person or design that knows it has substance, and does not need to go far out of its way to prove itself: its core is good. This is part of what drives the lust for Apple’s aesthetics. The trash, the wanna-be, the knock-off has to parade distractions, buttons, gadgets, and modes to compensate for its lack of core design integrity."
“I remember coming across this remarkable product. It was easy to use, and you could do little things like change the noise when you made a mistake,” he grins. “It sounds small, but at the time that was remarkable. I went from feeling stupid to feeling empowered – I somehow connected to the people that made it. The object testified to the care that went into it.”
Soon after graduating, Ive was to make ever closer contact with Apple and his mentor Steve Jobs through Tangerine. They were clearly impressed, and by 1992 he’d moved in with them in San Francisco. Six years later he was turning their fortunes around with the first iMac. Then the well-trodden tale begins: not only did it shift two million units in its first year, it made its beige boxy rivals look moribund and so last millennium.
It’s no coincidence that it was tender loving care and attention to detail that first attracted Ive to the brand that’s now synonymous with his career – the difference between superficial differentiation for its own sake and genuine investment in a better and more innovative product. From hidden horseshoe feet to the celebrated iPod one-touch navigation, his design team pours time and resources into getting it right.
Nick Carson, "Jonathan Ive," ncarson.wordpress.com, 12 Dec 2006 via Signal vs Noise
“A prototype should be an invitation to play."
Michael Schrage, Serious Play - Quoted by Carolyn Snyder in a UIE Virtual Seminar 6 Feb 2007
A user interface solution that thoughtfully places complexity on the system side, rather than the user side, is typically referred to as “simple.” To get to such a solution, the design team will need to deal with issues of complexity, rather than leaving it to the end-user of the resulting product.
Rob Tannen, "Simplicity: The Distribution of Complexity," Boxes and Arrows, 30 Jan 2007, www.boxesandarrows.com/view/simplicity-the: