Where’s the Magic?

Jul 8, 10:44 PM

There was a time when people knew how the products around them worked. But as our technological capability has increased, the workings of many everyday items has become more and more of a mystery. As far as most people are concerned they might as well work by magic! I suggest in this article that there is a boundary inside the product, behind which the workings of the product are simply a way to deliver an experience, and in themselves do not command the attention of the user. Should the user care how things work? How do we define something as a product? Is it a contraption, or the service and an experience that is provided?

Depending on how ‘technically-minded’ people are, some prefer different ways to reach the same outcome. For example some people like automatic gearboxes, because it takes away a bit of effort. Other people don’t feel comfortable with this loss of control, and prefer a more hands on approach to motoring in the form of a manual transmission. Why is this?

It might have something to do with the experience that the product offers. After all, people are choosing which products to buy based on the experience of using them, rather than a list of features. Remember the computer ads of the late nineties: ‘300Mhz 10GB 256MB’?That was back when people were impressed by goods where their technological credentials were displayed on them (2000 GTi etc.) Since then things have changed. Today, most people probably don’t know such intimate details about their gadgets. Technology has moved on sufficiently that technical issues are less of a hurdle than they were, leaving product developers time to think about how people use things. Or more importantly, consider how people would like to use the things they find challenging at the moment.

Sometimes when a product is bought onto the market, it is met with complete indifference, even when it can do something that has never been done before. Successful products are developed around a clearly defined problem, and a solution is conceived to deal with the problem or need. Things that are created purely because they can be, tend to struggle to justify their existence to potential customers. This is the difference between Technology-led and Demand-led Design.

In 1985 Clive Sinclair famously launched a revolutionary new product called the C5. It was a battery powered vehicle designed for cheap efficient urban transportation. Technologically it was quite a clever and unique response to the problems of urban congestion and road pollution. However using it was considered to be a terrifying and unpleasant experience, especially when taking into account the ‘Great British Climate’. Soon after launching, and selling only 17,000 units, the C5 became a popular object of ridicule (Rodney 1985).

This failure can be attributed to the fact that the technology, while innovative, was not used to deliver a pleasant user experience.

Sinclair would have done well to learn from another inventor, George Eastman, who nearly 100 years earlier in 1888 invented something that ‘would change consumer technology for ever’ (Merholz 2007). His invention was photographic film on a roll. This invention in itself was just an incremental development on the existing system of photographic plates. Whether he realised it or not, the real innovation lay in the decision to change the way that people interact with photographic systems. Before Eastman, taking a photograph was a seriously complicated affair that was generally only ever performed by professionals with lots of expertise and complex equipment. According to Merholz, He changed all this by making something that previously required 17 steps to operate, take only 3. Eastman achieved this partly by using a more efficient system of managing the photo-sensitive material, and partly, but more radically, by out-sourcing the tricky bits. “You press the button we do the rest” was the slogan used in advertising material, recognising that the user only wants to take the pictures, and that was all they would have to do. When the film was all used, the camera was returned to the factory where the film was processed, replaced and the prints were produced by professionals.

By locating the necessary but less consumer engaging functionality elsewhere, Eastman had changed cameras from simply being stand-alone devices, into a part of a bigger system, ‘The Kodak Service’ (Merholz 2007). This was one of the first instances of the consumer technology industry operating as we know it today.

As the design industry has matured the more astute designers have focused on the user experience and have chosen to shroud the complexity under a simplified user interface. If the complexity is ‘out of sight’, it can be proverbially ‘out of mind’, without loosing functionality. Maeda (2006) summed this up in one of his ‘Ten Laws of Simplicity’:
“The complicated can appear simple when moved far away”

Probably the most clear example of this principle is seen in mobile telephony. Mobile phones are probably the most high tech equipment owned on a massive scale, with 87.7% of adults in the UK owning a one (Mintel). But are these phones really owned? The cost of developing such clever devices is huge, but this still makes financial sense. While people rarely pay anything close to the production cost of a mobile phone when they get one, money is made by being part of a bigger system: the network. Here the benefits of the latest mobile are rented to you for a year, together with benefits associated with the service, all in one package. The phone is useless without the network. Here we see the integration of products and services to deliver a personal facility that has become so integrated into society, we can hardly envisage a future without it.

Lets look at what is happening here: There appears to be a trend for innovation relating to how people conduct everyday activities. To begin with, an activity had an outcome, and this outcome was the reason for completing the activity. For example, an outcome might be a nice drink of coffee. To begin with, this meant that a series of activities need to be conducted to achieve the goal. Beans are grown, harvested, imported, roasted and ground, then they are infused with hot water, which itself needs to be sourced and heated. Then the grounds are filtered out, leaving the resulting hot beverage.

Someone then invented a device that could contribute towards achieving this same outcome: The Coffee Maker. Ground coffee and cold water go in, and fresh coffee comes out. Here the user of the machine has opted out of some of the control over what happens, but the process is much more convenient. The machine is providing a service. Now, even operating the machine can be outsourced, and the level of service takes a step closer. You walk into Starbucks for example, and once your beverage has been specified, the complex process of assembling it is started. People move around behind the counter, buttons are pressed and levers are pulled. In moments, the finished drink is ready and available for collection. Here the product is not the coffee itself, but the service of having it made for you, on demand and to bespoke specifications.

This is the evolution of the process, from an Activity, to a Thing to a Service. As an activity, you are the provider of the service; the outcome is reached exclusively by your own endeavour. When you buy a ‘thing’ to do these jobs, you aren’t buying a heating element, percolator, filter, and jug. You are buying a device that delivers a service. Knowing how it does this is something the consumer generally doesn’t want to know, nor should they be expected to. As Eastman said, “You press the button, we do the rest”, it is as if the product is a box, and the system inside that delivers the service is magic! When you go to a coffee shop, the service is more apparent, and the consumer gets the reassurance of seeing it happen. The outcome remains the same, (this is what you went in to Starbucks for). But this time, the magic is not in a box in your house, it is in the coffee shop.

There are benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing ‘The Magic’. On the benefit side, when someone else handles maintenance, capital expenditure, knowledge and innovation, the customer is free to walk in and use the service depending on whether they fancy it or not. Also, there is nothing gathering dust in the kitchen, and no need to worry if it goes wrong. However the externality of this service lacks the convenience and immediacy of owning something to provide the service on site.

Moving activities off site is not always what people want. There is an inherent satisfaction in owning a device that sits on your table, and seemingly performs miracles on a daily basis. Sometimes the movement from having a thing, to using a service happens in reverse. People want the quality of coffee that they are now used to from specialists with high quality equipment, but with the autonomy of preparing it at home. This service is far more complex than simply heating water and dribbling it through some beans. As any coffee fanatic will tell you, this is an exact science, and requires skill and care. This magic, formerly the specialisation of wizards, to a greater or lesser degree, can now be replicated inside a device. The expertise of measuring the right ingredients can be captured by providing them in specially manufactured capsules. These are specific to the drink required so that the exact process happens perfectly every time.

This need for autonomy may seem inefficient when looked at on a large scale, but it can be understood when viewed in the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943). He argued that beyond the basic needs of physiology, safety, and a sense of belonging, humans had to have self esteem and the opportunity to self-actualise. The availability of certain products provides a clear opportunity to fulfil these requirements. For example Black and Decker have a range of products that are marketed towards these self esteem needs and self-actualisation. These consumer (em!) power tools take the function away from an external service provider, give control back to the individual and help the user towards a state of self actualisation. Ownership of a powerful tool, has an attraction and esteem generation similar to that of fast cars. The satisfaction lies not only in being in charge of such a machine, but also being able to do things that would otherwise require the job to be done by someone else on behalf of the consumer.

Meeting these emotional needs is a high level of achievement for a product in terms of consumer needs.

A product must be functional to be successful, but once people get used to products that are functional, they start to look for products that achieve the functionality easily. Usability is now the selling point, where it used to be just the ability to do the job (Jordan 2002). Simply put, products that are not easy to use cannot compete with those that are. The new differentiator is emotion, if a product can make you feel something, on top of being usable and functional, then it can be a very successful design.

As products have evolved to provide us with more and more fantastic services, they have had to become more complicated. The goal of the designers is to keep the complexity on the inside and away from the user. This is the magic inside the box, but between the magic and the user, there must be a layer of interface. The more intuitive this layer, the better, and as long as the product does everything that is expected of it then it is successful. Ideally the interface should be progressive and allow more of the functionality to be revealed as the user becomes more experienced.

The downside to these magic boxes, is, what happens when the magic stops working? Peering through the interface we are clueless to the ‘chaos’ that lies beneath. Generally speaking, particularly with electronic products, we do not attempt to fix them ourselves, if something goes wrong, we assume the whole thing has gone wrong. It is then time either to get a new one, or take the offending artefact to someone who is more knowledgeable about how it works: a wizard.

But, we can all be wizards, to a greater or lesser degree. The layer of simplicity protecting us from the complexity inside a product is not like the peel on an orange, more like the skins and layers of an onion. As we move forward in understanding, we de-layer the simplicity in order to reach the more advanced features underneath. Take a digital camera for example, these, like many gadgets, have a setting called ‘auto’. This is the outermost layer of the onion: the highest level of simplicity, point and shoot. For many people and many photographic situations this is just fine, but what if we learn a little more about how photography works?

Taking the camera out of ‘auto’ and into ‘P’ mode, we have removed a layer of onion and we can access a little more complexity with the reward of more control. Like any risky investment, there is now more to go wrong. However, there is a much greater reward, in both delivering the desired photographic effect and in the sense of well-being arising from having achieved it.

At this more advanced level, we are still not interacting directly with the magic; ‘P’ stands for Programmed Auto, and a further foray into the onion takes us to fully manual mode. Here, we manipulate the increasingly elaborate interface, to make adjustments to almost any variable of the photographic process.

This onion skin arrangement to the provision of simplicity is a good way to balance control and convenience, it is a sort of opt-in approach. It does not deny people who want it the extra functionality, but when optimum simplicity is needed, it is there and ready to help.

So what have we established about the user and the design? Essentially it goes back to the individual. Pirsig (1974) in his seminal book, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ points out that people perceive the reality of the objects around them in two ways: ‘What it is’ (components), and ‘What it does’ (functions). People who are interested in how things work have an understanding of the basic principles by which they work, and this is considered when these people interact with products, a kind of technical sympathy. The other type of people however have very little understanding of these principles, nor much desire to find out. It is simply not part of their view of the world. These people view the things they use as discrete entities that have idiosyncratic behaviours all of their own as opposed to a collection of components, utilising certain principles to achieve a function. These perceptions of the world represent a fundamental difference in personal values, and each can be difficult to comprehend from the point of view of the other.

With the modern elaborate products and systems we know today such as the mobile phone network, cameras and coffee makers, ‘What is does’ people are most comfortable when the magic is hidden at a safe distance. They like it to be under a manageable interface optimised for them as a user. These are the ‘Point and Shoot’, ‘Stab and Steer’, people. Moreover it has been recognised that good designs provide emotional fulfilment targeted at the user as well as the total functionality that is expected. Part of the emotional fulfilment is the self-actualisation Maslow famously recognised in the 40’s and there is a community of people that need to indulge greater level of understanding of the world around them. They get a great satisfaction from their practical involvement in the world. These people need products that allow them much more control over the function of the device, and these are the individuals that Pirsig identified as people who see items for what they are more than for what they do.

So products can be created for and marketed to the ‘What it does’ community (iPod, Automatic Transmissions, TiVo) or for the ‘What it is’ community (Hi-Fi Separates, DIY tools, Linux). Alternatively the designer can attempt to reach both communities by allowing users to opt-in to the complexity, when the extra functionality is desired.

The designer needs to know where to put the boundary between the magic and the user depending on the user’s desire to deal with what lies beneath.

References


Merholz. P. (2007) Experience IS the Product… and the only thing users care about
Core 77. Available at:
http://www.core77.com/reactor/06.07_merholz.asp
[Accessed 12/07]

Merholz. P. (2007) Experience IS the Product Proceedings: dConstruct conference held at Brighton Dome, Brighton, UK. September 2007. Slides Available at:
http://www.slideshare.net/peterme/experience-is-the-product
[Accessed 12/07]

Maeda. J. (2006) The laws of simplicity
London: The MIT Press

Rodney. D. (1985) The Sinclair Story. London: Duckworth. 184 pp

Maslow. A. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review 50,370-396

Jordan. P. (2002) Designing Pleasurable Products: An Introduction to the New Human Factors
London: CRC Press

GB TGI, BMRB Summer 2003 & Q3 2005 & 2007/Mintel. Adult Mobile Phone Ownership. Available at:
http://academic.mintel.com/sinatra/oxygen_academic/search_results/show&/display/id=220123/displaytables/id=220123
[Accessed 02/08]

Pirsig. R.M. (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. 
London: Corgi. 1974. pp 54, 92-93

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