Making software smarter sometimes pushes customers away

A colleague and I were talking about how MS Project tries to anticipate, intuit, and proactively rearrange your project plans for you--and how often this goes wrong and just ends up frustrating us to the point of doing what we were doing at the time: looking at a simple gantt chart I'd built and shared with her on a competitor's product (in this case smartsheet.)

We have to be careful about how we try to make software "smarter". Done wrong, we can make the user feel too dumb to use it and drive them away.

37signals is famous for (among many other things) their approach of deliberately trying to "underwhelm" the competition by doing less, saying no to most feature requests, and keeping things so simple, so clear, so easy-to-use, so mission-focused that it does its job REALLY well and that's it.

Think about your phone. I was talking with a gentleman the other day who'd just bought a smartphone and realized after a week it was way too much for him; he was complaining about how hard it was to find a phone that was literally just a phone.

It's okay to put all kinds of sophisticated intelligence in our software. Enterprise-class problems are complex and require a solution that fully addresses each need. But we need to keep in mind the old Naisbitt idea of High Tech/High Touch and ensure we spend at least as much brain power on making it usable and friction-free. "Smart" shouldn't just mean logic and rules and number crunching on the back-end; it should mean we've arrived at the simplicity on the far side of complexity in our interface. Sometimes it just means let me do it myself, thank you very much.

Moving away from PowerPoint?

After reading The Back of the Napkin I'm giving serious thought to moving away from slick PowerPoint (and my actual preference, Keynote) presentations and moving toward real-time diagramming of my ideas on a white board, flip chart, or piece of paper. I just did an experimental film using simple hand-drawn pictures on a series of index cards and laying them in a rough prototype of a proposed workflow for a client and it seemed to have worked just as well, if not better, than trying to do the same thing in a more polished, "professional" way. I'll keep experimenting with this notion. But I'm more inclined to move toward this intuition of mine based upon this great blog post. I love this representative quote:

[Speaking about others showing up with portfolios of their past work and him showing up with a paintbrush...]

It not about the past; it’s about the future. It’s not “build me something like you’ve already done” but “build me something from your imagination.” Calatrava came with a paintbrush and a vision, not a PowerPoint of his projects.

The challenge isn’t putting together the slickest presentation. The challenge is having the imagination and the ability to converse with clients about what their future will be. Those are the paintings that will win commissions.

Thinking with your hands

I was listening to a TED podcast this morning from a gentleman from IDEO. He described a design session where an IDEO team was meeting with surgeon's to discuss a new surgical instrument they would like developed. Someone from the design team left the room and in a few minutes returned with a dry erase marker taped to an empty film canister that was taped to a clothes pin in the rough shape of a gun. The designer gave it to the surgeon's who passed it around and begin offering very constructive feedback on how the device should sit in the hand, how it should be shaped, what it should do, etc. IDEO calls this behavior "thinking with your hands" (and this eventually turned into a real device).

It typically involves making many low-resolution prototypes very quickly. Often by bringing many found elements together in order to get to a solution...And so this behavior is all about quickly getting something into the real world and having your thinking advanced as a result.

This dovetails precisely with the Getting Real approach advocated by 37Signals. Tom Peters has been an advocate of this for years. And it explains why the Back of the Napkin approach of visual thinking works so well.

IDEO takes this idea seriously and has "protyping carts" around filled with Play-doh, tape, Legos, colored paper, markers, etc. ("the stuff we all had in pre-school") so desingers can begin prototyping objects whenever they want. They also apply this approach to designing a service experience through rapidly jumping into role-playing various scenarios.

Creativity

Creativity begins when a zero is cut from your project budget.

- Maverick designer and urban planner, Jaime Lerner in a 2007 TED speech.