Leaders of complex initiatives and programs can benefit from the power of being simple but not simplistic. Two recent major product introductions reinforce this and provide insights into the power of design thinking. Our own IPS Learning FastPLAN Workshop also emphasizes the importance of clarifying what is being produced (e.g., new product, new service, new design) using an Is-Is Not Table, the Is Not portion being as important as the Is.
FACEBOOK's New Skype App Fast Compnay interviewed the young designer, Rob Mason. A critical design approach was minimalist with a focus on what was not included: no controls, place call window at the top of the screen, your picture is tiny, keep the video window in the foreground.
Design at Facebook is a leadership role, he says. The company looks for people with strong vision, strong soup-to-nuts technical and design skills, and strong abilities to drive consensus. “When we looked at Rob’s portfolio and the projects he had created on his own, we saw they were highly focused, dirt simple, and very clean,” Cuervo says. “That high level of focus was something we thought was appropriate for this product.” Whereas design teams at other companies are inundated with marketing and product requirement documents, the only guidance Mason was given was the fact that the company would be implementing Skype’s video capabilities and that it was up to him to figure out what the new feature should do. Mason then buckled down to the project, putting existing video chat products through the paces, sketching out new ideas, and building rough prototypes. A month later, Mason sat down with Zuckerberg and vice president of product Chris Cox for his first design review. (Unlike at other companies where designers are separated by oodles of bureaucracy from the top dogs, at Facebook, designers work directly with Zuckerberg and Cox to hammer out new features.) Mason pitched his idea: “A really minimal experience,” he says, “with none of the clutter or legacy of any other product on the market.”
Barnes & Noble's All-New Nook
BusinessWeek provides insights from Robert Brunner, the designer of the All-New Nook, which is receiving rave reviews.
The company knew “nothing” about digital media, Brunner says, “and wanted to know about how you would create a product and bring it to market.” Brunner and his new client settled on the goal of simplicity, removing as many buttons as possible and trying to put the actual reading experience front and center. “Books don’t have buttons,” he says, “so we felt that was not only an authentic place to be but also great competitively against the Kindle”—which has a keyboard, at the insistence of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Users still needed to control their device, though. Brunner believed that overlaying a touchscreen on top of a black-and-white eInk display would have made the device too difficult to read. His solution, used in the first Nook introduced during the 2009 holidays, was to include a large eInk screen for reading and a smaller color touchscreen to allow users to select books and turn pages. He now acknowledges that there were drawbacks to that approach. “Two displays doing different, related things created challenges for the user,” he says.
The All-New Nook is free of such design compromises: There’s only a 6-inch screen, surrounded by a black bezel, with just one obvious button. There’s no traditional touchscreen; instead, optical infrared sensors from a Swedish company, Neonode, surround the display and locate the position of a user’s finger. The device weighs all of 7.48 ounces. The soft contours of its back, covered in a synthetic rubber coating, allow it to fit snugly in a reader’s hands. Shrinking down e-readers “has now become an ergonomic issue, not a hardware issue.”
“I don’t know what more possibly could be done to black-and-white e-readers,” says Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner (IT), who calls the All-New Nook “truly as good as it gets.” Brunner also wants to add more social features, allowing people to meet others who are reading the same book—and even the same passages—at the same time. He also can’t quite accept that every tablet and e-reader has to be so boringly … rectangular. “I have a hard time believing this is the only solution,” he says, waving to all the similarly shaped devices arranged in front of him, including the original Newton and the two black-and-white Nooks. “Human beings don’t have any 90-degree corners on them.”
