Innovation Science

TedTalks Scoops Steve Jobs

I was going to write about something else, but I feel compelled to write a post on Apple’s iPhone that was just introduced. I have no doubt that it is being assessed, critically or not, in almost every tech blog today. So, I’m not going to go over the features or exclaim my enthusiasms for their latest innovation…make that innovations.

I will say that the iPhone appears to be a beautiful example of innovating to meet the needs of the consumer. Also, the audacity of spec’ing a cellphone to have just a single button is pretty amazing. Okay, that was a couple enthusiastic exclamations.

FYI, the unique multi-touch user interface was previewed by a researcher from NYU in this amazing video from TedTalks:

Simplicity Creates User Satisfaction

An article in the latest Harvard Business Review titled Defeating Feature Fatigue reminds me of a post at Creating Passionate Users on breakthrough ideas. The Harvard article goes into analytical detail on how companies continue to add features to their products but in the process severely hurt the usability of their products. Customers may be more motivated to buy the product that offers the most features, but will be less happy with the product once they realize how unusable the product is. Post-sale satisfaction is maximized with the simplest features that provides the best usability (sound familiar, IDEO?) So, there must be a happy medium that optimally trades off sellability with post-sale user satisfaction. The figure to the right demonstrates the HBR authors' theoretical analysis of this trade-off, indicating that the happy medium is--surprise, surprise--not too many features, not too few. Sounds like the Goldilocks Strategy: the number of features is just right.

Last year, the Creating Passionate Users blog posted a very similar looking curve, which is shown here on the left. Look familiar? The point that CPU made was the same as the HBR authors. Usability has a big impact on user satisfaction, and often simplicity provides the best solution for product design. Having the most features might get customers to buy the product when they are considering different items at a store, but users prefer simplicity and ease-of-use after they actually own a product and therefore simplicity provides the most long-term user value. Users don't want complexity and don't want to have to read the manual whenever they want to use one of the product's features. Great scoop on HBR, CPU!

iPods Converge with Hearing Aids

The hearing aid world converges with the iPod world, and consumer electronics in general, as described in this article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The figure shows hearing aid earmolds attached to iPod earpieces, providing a comfortable and secure fit, reducing interfering sound from outside, and reducing leakage of low-frequency sound with the tighter fit. Small, low-power audio earpieces definitely have a market, and the possibilities here are interesting.

(Disclosure: I work for the company discussed in the article but am not working on the consumer technology described. I did that gig at Sound ID).