Change can be a painful thing.
Remember the hubbub when Apple introduced iMacs without a disk drive?
The critics were not silent. It has no floppy drive, they howled! How could anyone be so stupid as to forget something like that? How will people move their files? What will they do? How will we ever live without that drive? THE WORLD WILL END!
Well, the world didn’t end. Apple was ahead of the curve and decided to push forward with the change, even if it upset some customers.
Companies that lead need to be willing to say that occasional growing pains are ok. If a company only listens to what customers think they need, it won’t be able to innovate. As Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can just be a dick about it. You’ve got to explain to people what’s happening. This is where trust and communication are key. If you have a conversation with your customers, they know where you’re coming from. They know what you stand for and why you make the decisions you make.
For example, you may not always agree with our UI choices but the design decision posts here at SvN hopefully give you the context to understand why we make the choices we make. We’ve found this sort of conversation along with the interaction at our forums goes a long way in building rapport and confidence. Once customers know and understand you, they’re a lot more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt — even if what you’re doing seems counterintuitive at first.
You’ve also got to be willing to lose people occasionally. Some people need what they need. If you simply had to have a floppy drive, then that new iMac was no good for you. You can’t be all things to all people.
Related: Why Is It So Hard For Innovators to Keep It Simple? discusses Jason’s recent talk at BIF-3 — “If you try to make everyone happy with your products, you end up with mediocrity.” — and offers up more examples of opinionated companies.
The worst thing a CEO or the head of engineering can do is to overreact whenever a customer, even an important customer, demands a new feature or insists on a new service—especially if that new feature or service risks cluttering the simplicity of the offering. In other words, one of the most important jobs of a leader or an entrepreneur is knowing when to say no—even to important constituencies.
How Southwest and ING go against the grain…
The folks at Southwest Airlines, the great innovators in the sky, really get this point. Back in September, Southwest announced that it was going to retain its controversial policy of not assigning specific seats to passengers. Instead, it was going to make minor adjustments in its first-come, first-served policy to cut down on mad rushes at the gate. The media coverage was enormous. And what was interesting was how eager newspapers were to find passengers who hated Southwest’s open-seating policy and were disappointed that the airline didn’t adopt a more conventional (and complicated) process.
But this negative reaction wasn’t a sign of problems, as many of the articles suggested. It was a sign of strength. Great brands, by definition, aren’t designed to appeal to everyone. Not all customers are created equal—and in the case of Southwest Airlines, customers who value more of the amenities, policies, and procedures of the legacy carriers aren’t ever going to be passionate about Southwest. Customers who are passionate about Southwest don’t just value the low fares that open seating supports, but have come to expect and enjoy the organized chaos that the experience involves. One test of how committed a company is to keeping its offering distinctive and simple is how fearless it is about ignoring (even offending) vocal customers whose needs don’t conform to the core mission.
Arkadi Kuhlmann, founder and CEO of ING Direct, the company that has almost single-handedly made Internet savings a mainstream sensation, has built the fastest-growing bank in the United States around that same attitude. Everything about the ING Direct experience is absurdly simple. The bank offers a few savings accounts, a handful of certificates of deposit, maybe 10 different mutual funds. And that’s it. Credit cards? No way. Online brokerage (now that it has five million Internet-based customers)? Perish the thought.
ING Direct even simplifies the kinds of customers with whom it does business. The bank has no deposit minimums. (You can literally open an account with one dollar.) But it has unofficial deposit maximums. You want to open an account with a million dollars? Please find another bank. “Rich Americans are used to platinum cards, special services,” Kuhlmann told me. “The last thing we want in this bank is to have rich people making special demands. We treat everybody the same, which is how we keep things simple.”
That kind of attitude doesn’t always make you popular—but it’s the edgy attitude required to make you successful.
Benjy
on 22 Oct 07Another example of this that comes to mind is the restaurant Schwa here in Chicago (although recently closed/on haitus).
While super pricey - the 9 course menu cost $110 I believe - they bucked the trend of upscale restaurant. they were located on a stretch of Ashland that’s mostly home to taquerias and body shops. There was no maitre d, no somelier (it was BYOB in fact!), no waiters, etc. The guys in the kitchen took the reservations and waited the tables while also cooking. Oh, and because they wanted quality time with their familes, they weren’t open on the weekend. How many restaurants would close on the busiest/most profitable night of the week? I’m sure that many were put off by these quirks, but it also seperated those who wanted an incredibly unique meal from those who wanted to be part of a scene.
Dan
on 22 Oct 07It’s important to note that individuals who bought the first imac weren’t completely out of luck if they needed a disk drive. Imation had the superdrive which made use of the imac’s then brand new usb port to provide legacy access along with support for their superdisks which held over 100 MB.
The majority of customers didn’t need a disk drive, and so it made sense for apple to leave it out. But, they provided a mechanism for other vendors to deal with those edge cases.
I think a basic point is that there is only so much that anyone team or company can do at a high level of quality. And that it ’s possible to allow your customers to have some of their needs met by somebody else.
J Lane
on 22 Oct 07I had my last mortgage through ING. I remember shopping around to local banks saying here’s ING’s interest rate, can you beat it? They’d say no way, but you can’t got talk to a bank employee with ING, and there’s no bank to visit.
At one bank, I actually started laughing (poor employee) because they made this argument, and I said “you mean I don’t have to make an appointment a week in advance to miss work, drive down here, find parking, and then still wait 20 minutes because appointments are running behind?”. Thanks, I’m okay with a telephone and e-mail….
J
on 22 Oct 07While I see your point, I’ve been a customer of ING for over 3 years now and throughout that time I’ve seen them continually add services as new competitors have appeared over time. They now offer mortgages and checking accounts.
Because I find all of their services simple, I expect any new services from ING to meet my current expectations. I think this is different that if they were to drop existing services for the sake of simplicity.
Iain
on 22 Oct 07I too see your point, but your arguments are a little weak. Besides the obvious use of USB for floppy – for those who need it – the applematters quote is kind of misleading. I don’t recall anyone saying “How could anyone be so stupid as to forget something like that?” The “quote” is of someone reflecting back on the situation and, from the sounds of it, embellishing criticism to prove their point. That same column then goes on to claim that the intel imacs will have no removable media at all because “those technologies will be obsolete.” Oops.
Dr. Pete
on 22 Oct 07I think you’ve touched on a big challenge for the usability field. If we only really on what people are used to or what tests well, we’ll never innovate. At some point, we have to be willing to take an educated guess and take a gamble on better ways of doing things.
Bushman
on 22 Oct 07I have a custom desktop PC assembled by me, and i’v remove the floppy drive long time ago. I like innovations and that’s why simple USB pen drive is a perfect replacement for old school floppy disk drive – smaller, faster and higher capacity. If people need their floppies, so be it. But don’t come with this floppy to my home, YOU WON’T READ IT ANYWAY :D
Josh Walsh
on 22 Oct 07Deciding not to ever implement a feature is one of the most important decisions us designers make. Deciding to take an existing feature away is much more controversial.
Removing features from simple apps always bring outrage, and not rightfully so. By carefully planning features ahead of time, you remove the fear of outrage should you later decide to remove it.
Nick
on 22 Oct 07The newsfeed in Facebook is another good example. Everyone complained when this feature was added, and now this is what most users check several times a day.
ML
on 22 Oct 07The majority of customers didn’t need a disk drive, and so it made sense for apple to leave it out.
Hmm…In retrospect, this may seem like the case. But at the time, it was a pretty ballsy move. After all, no one else was doing it.
Jason G
on 22 Oct 07Apple in recent years has also stopped putting modems in their computers. If you want a modem you have to get a USB modem (Apple’s or another manufactures)
Also, how many PCs still come with serial and parallel ports. I find this especially weird on laptops.
Jason G
on 22 Oct 07A lot of PCs still come with floppy drives, I believe Apple dropped it in 1998 with the first iMac, almost 10 years ago!
Charlton
on 22 Oct 07One of the things that I recall reading at the time was that Apple looked at the cost/benefit analysis of putting the floppy drive into an iMac, and concluded that the end cost to the consumer of putting in a floppy drive would be about $100 - about the same as the cost of an external floppy drive. It wasn’t that Apple decided that most customers didn’t need floppy drives, but that enough didn’t need them that the feature was best provided by an accessory. And in one of the markets the iMac was targeting - education—this was actually true, and saving $100 per computer was a very good thing.
The modem thing is similar: building a modem into my next MacBookPro would probably add $50-$60 to the price, which is just about the same cost as buying a USB modem. This means that people who need modems can have them for about the same cost, while people who don’t need them can save $60.
Any ballsiness here is in designing the thing so that a feature that is considered by the layman to be part of the core function is actually provided by a plugin, and using good PR to cope with the attendant howling of pundits.
Tony Hillerson
on 22 Oct 07I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about this comment when I should have been working and innovating.
Jay Levitt
on 22 Oct 07Great brands, by definition, aren’t designed to appeal to everyone. Not all customers are created equal…Customers who are passionate about Southwest don’t just value the low fares that open seating supports, but have come to expect and enjoy the organized chaos that the experience involves. One test of how committed a company is to keeping its offering distinctive and simple is how fearless it is about ignoring (even offending) vocal customers whose needs don’t conform to the core mission.
So you’re saying my AOL stock is going to go up now?
pwb
on 22 Oct 07What many do not understand about the Southwest boarding model is that by it’s nature, it creates an urgency for flyers to get to the airport early, then rush to the gate and then line up and get rady to board. All the other airlines try to optimize their boarding schemes assuming all the passengers are at the gate ready to board. Southwest’s advantage is diminishing, however, first with at-home check-in and now with the new boarding groups.
carlivar
on 22 Oct 07Reminds me of the west coast burger chain In n’ Out. Simple menu: hamburger, cheeseburger, fries, a few drinks, and milkshakes. That’s pretty much it and it never changes.
They focus on making delicious food, period. Whereas the major fast food chains always seem to be tweaking their menu and confusing the customer.
(best burger in the world, by the way).
Tom G.
on 22 Oct 07The real point is to provide products that give customers what they need. This is not always what they ask for or what they want. This is generally accomplished by visionaries who listen carefully to their customers and understand their challenges.
This creates a big job for a sales effort which sometimes must win the feature-checklist battle. This can be accomplished by education and trust, but it is nevertheless a challenge.
Mathew Patterson
on 23 Oct 07I love ING here in Australia for the same reason – not having a branch to go to is excellent, because it means everything I need to do with them must be supported online or by phone.
I also fully appreciate turning down potential customers who might hold (or expect to hold) too much influence over future direction, or require too much attention.
For Campaign Monitor and MailBuild we have similar unofficial policies where we suggest to people they would be best served by a different provider who works in the way they will need.
It lets us concentrate on the needs of the majority of our customers, instead of being distracted.
Nick Coster
on 23 Oct 07I would like echo Tom G’s comment about fulfilling an actual customer need. This will often be expressed as an ‘I want’ statement but the actual need may be a few layers down.
This is where different types of market research techniques really need to be applied. It may begin by statistically asking how many people use a floppy drive. When that number starts to decline we should dig deeper and as what the remaining people are using it for? If the answer is “to get data from one person to the next then” or to “back up key files” then as long as that need can still be met with the next generation of product features then removal of old features should not be detrimental.
In this respect I see apple as being very good at seeking out the source of the need that an out-dated feature may be supporting and then leapfrogging the current solution to lead the next generation of products.
Design awards
on 23 Oct 07It is always painful to be the first.
Bob Aman
on 23 Oct 07I really have to disagree about ING Direct being simple. They may be “simple” in their offerings, but that does not lead to simplicity in the lives of their customers. I use EverBank, and while EverBank’s offerings aren’t simple, the effect on my life is. Instead of having to deal with account numbers and routing numbers and all the usual administrivia to pay my credit card, because I have both my bank account and credit card with them, I just click the Pay Credit Card button, and I’m done, no complicated set up required. Plus, because all of my financial stuff is in one place, I get an accurate view of all assets and liabilities. When other banks do this, they’re usually making an API call to an external bank and there’s lag time, so you might be looking at your current assets and last month’s liabilities.
So yeah, I think I’ll stick with the bank that handles all the complexities so that I don’t have to.
Michael Geary
on 23 Oct 07They made a diskless iMac?
I thought they all have disk drives hidden inside. They even show you a picture of it in the Finder. (And I don’t mean the CD – that’s a disc drive.)
You can get an iPod with flash memory instead of a disk drive, although the disk-based models still have more capacity.
The iPhone doesn’t have a disk drive, but that’s nothing new. None of my phones have ever had disk drives.
(OK, yes, yes, I figured out what you really meant from the context, but it was funny when I first read it.)
This discussion is closed.