Innovation Science

He Put the i in Design, and iPod, and iMac, and iPhone...

For those who can’t get enough information about the new iPhone or those who, like me, are eager to find more information about the Apple design innovation process, here’s a BusinessWeek article from a few months ago on the designer of the iPhone. And the iMac. And the iPod. Given his name, I guess we know what the “i” stands for.

Jonathan Ive heads Apple’s design group, a team that primarily works in San Francisco. The relationship between Ive and Jobs is interesting to read about given Ive’s quiet public demeanor and Steve’s attention-grabbing one. More interesting are the details of Ive’s design process.

I won’t regurgitate details from the article, but there are two aspects of Ive’s process that are worth noting.

Ive works closely with engineers to understand what’s possible, marketers to understand usability and consumer needs, and manufacturers to understand, well, manufacturability. As BW puts it,

Ive’s team at Apple isn’t the usual design ghetto of creativity that exists inside most corporations.

People and companies look at the success of the iPod and Apple’s dominance of design and conclude that they can emulate that design genius by focusing on cool new looks or on the latest business mantra Simplicity. Focusing on design as a creative-only process, as if the iPod dominates its market because someone designer rubbed the right genie bottle one day, misses the point and the value that Ive brings to Apple. His design process is one of intensive hard work and the ability to reduce expertise from multiple disciplines into the form factor of a single product. Great design exists in the harmonious combination of function and aesthetics, and processes to achieve this do exist and are perfected at Apple.

Edison’s maxim, Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, applies to design as well as it does to engineering or science. All three require innovation processes that include trial and error, intuition, investigation, and hard work. The lone genius creating innovations through flashes of creativity rarely exists in these fields. A description of Ive’s career makes clear that his and Apple’s success in design is the product of an incredibly disciplined process and a daunting amount of work. And, of course, terribly brilliant people for whom their job is their passion.

Which leads to the second point worth noting from the story, which is Ive’s process of creating hundreds of prototypes in the process of investigating ideas and refining designs. Ive has invested heavily into advanced tooling capabilities that allows his team to rapidly prototype ideas and quickly determine what’s good and bad about design ideas. While most companies examine designs by looking at 3–D CAD drawings projected onto a meeting room wall, Ive creates the designs as physical objects that he can hold and physically assess, sometimes using materials as simple as sculpted styrofoam, and figures out what aspects work and what ones don’t. This is also part of the IDEO way: to rapidly create prototypes so that designs can be assessed in terms of usability in a way that can never be done just by looking at a CAD design, and to iterate quickly on alternate designs, integrating the best concepts of each prototype to create a superior product.

Reduce to practice, investigate, try again, dare to create faulty designs so that they can inform the path to better ones. Apple’s success (and IDEO’s, and a few others’) has clearly proven this process as a valuable approach to successful design innovation. Not only can other companies learn by examining this approach closely, but other disciplines could probably improve their approaches to innovation as well by emulating aspects of this process. I’m sure that there are several business school dissertations developing those ideas already…

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!

Decision Making, Groupthink and Scientific Debate

The January issue of the Harvard Business Review is on decision making, and they cover an array of issues on this topic.  One aspect that got me thinking was the area of group decision making. They point out the dangers of decisions by consensus where decisions are easily made without conflict or debate. HBR points out the relevancy of "groupthink," a term coined by a psychologist in 1972 and which Wikipedia describes as follows:

In a groupthink situation, each member of the group attempts to conform his or her opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group. In a general sense this seems to be a very rational way to approach the situation. However this results in a situation in which the group ultimately agrees upon an action which each member might individually consider to be unwise.

When I think back on strategic decision-making meetings that I've been involved in, the least satisfying ones were those where no competing concepts were debated or given serious discussion. By "debated" I am not referring to a simple identification of alternatives followed by agreement (or silence) by everyone that the alternatives should be dismissed ("Okay, Plan A is consistent with our corporate approach. Well, let's consider Plan B--no one likes that one, do they?" <play cricket_sounds.wav>). The legal system is (simplistically speaking) designed to place opposing viewpoints against each other and let the best one win--respect for this conflict-resolution approach in business could benefit corporate decision making processes. Unfortunately, concepts and viewpoints that conflict with a company's norm are often immediately shot down as absurd or obviously not worth consideration (see my post on the No Instinct and Bill Kinnon's on the Idea-Killing Manager).

When I consider healthy discussions that take place in the scientific world, vigorous debate (or at least consideration) of opposing alternatives is critical for the successful development of ideas and identification of promising new areas of research. The ideas that withstand critical challenges from colleagues end up being the most robust and strongest theories. The best scientific labs that I've experienced have regular meetings where no assumptions go unchallenged, and alternatives to the consensus thinking are given serious consideration, with everyone in the lab actively participating in this process. If there is a debate over a point or competing hypotheses are uncovered in the lab meeting, people follow up with research/analysis that allows the different hypotheses to be proved or disproved--or at least enough evidence is gathered to indicate clear support of one hypothesis over the others. This approach often leads to whole new lines of funded research, the equivalent of creating a new product line or market.

Now, think about decision-making business meetings in which you have attended. First, how many of them consisted of a couple people doing all of the talking, with the other people contributing nothing to the discussion--their silence an implicit agreement with whatever the primary speaker concludes? Ever wonder why those silent people were in the meeting in the first place? Some may be there as legitimate observers, simply absorbing information to relay to their group or to incorporate into their own group's process. Most of the silent ones, however, probably have something to say but learned a long time ago that comments contrary to the company's normal viewpoint are quickly dismissed or given lipservice. Those people who sit silently keeping their ideas to themselves have become "obsolete".

Second, when was the last time that someone followed up on a competing idea by analyzing it and reporting their results back to those who were in the meeting? Rather than summary dismissals meted out to novel concepts or challenges to status quo thinking, one or more people should be tasked to develop the idea further until the evidence supports or disproves the value of the novelty. Spend a little time and ignore the No Instinct. I'm going to guess that people might complain that this requires time and resources that people don't have, but that excuse has become a routine defense for all inaction these days. Doing the extra work necessary to come to conclusions is what put IDEO on the map. They don't make critical design decisions by spending 30 minutes sitting around a conference table looking at options on  PowerPoint slides (remember the last time that you sat in a meeting where everyone looked at 5 different designs on a projector or hand out, then everyone agreed on the preferred design--the final decision based on a single inactive graphical representation), IDEO creates several different prototypes and spends time observing and documenting user interactions. A process that requires time and resources, but allows IDEO to optimize their design-decision process.