blog.payne.org

Great products rarely come about through committee design.  I’ve never seen it myself — behind every great product, there’s always been one or two obsessed people.

And it’s not enough just to be obsessed, you’ve got to be obsessed about details.  Most people can’t or won’t get into the details.

 From time to time, I send feedback to friends about their products and Web sites, some of it really really specific.  One recent one was about date selection from a calendar:  on a two-month-wide pop-up, they could have optimized the “end” date selection a bit better based on a chosen “start” date, when the start date was at or near a month boundary.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? 

This is how great products happen, one little bit of obsessed detail at a time. 

I currently lug around:  a phone, a MacBook laptop, an iPod, a small camera, and way too many cables and power supplies.  Amazon’s Kindle is interesting, but adding an eBook reader to my pile doesn’t help.  This is really about convergence:  why do I need to buy something new to read eBooks?

What I really want:  a Small Device that I always carry in a pocket, and a Big Device that I carry in my laptop case or backpack.

The Small Device is a telephone, video phone, content reader, audio player, video player, Web surfer, digital camera, etc.  It’s dominated by the screen (e.g. as large as possible), and it uses a high-quality touch and gesture interface.  It has great wireless connectivity.  The iPhone is the closest current offering.

The Big Device is nearly identical, but with a much larger screen.  It may also have a keyboard, or may clamshell like a laptop but with two screens, allowing you to touch type (or use other gestures) on the bottom screen.  It has an “always on” UI — it doesn’t boot like a laptop, it’s just there.

Big and Small are totally synced.   If I take a picture on Small, I can immediately view it on Big.  If I stop reading a book on Big, I can resume reading at the same spot on Small.  They both have great displays, tons of storage, and long battery life.

(And eventually, Big may go away, because I’ll have a big screen display in all of the places I live and work.)

Phones and MP3 players have already converged — how long until we get to this milestone?

I haven’t (yet) played with Kindle, Amazon’s new book reader. But it looks like they made a brilliant design decision: instead of connecting to the Internet through a host PC, the Kindle includes built-in wireless network access through Sprint’s EV-DO network.

This is a great example of “simple power” that I wrote about earlier. By eliminating the host PC, the designers removed an entire layer of complexity. There’s no Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop software to install and manage. Users don’t even need a PC, and there is no monthly account for wireless network access (charges are built into the cost of the device and content).

With the simplicity, users get more power: they can browse and purchase new content from anywhere, at any time. This is a dramatic upgrade from the typical iPod download-n-sync experience.

This suggests a design challenge: is there some element of your software or system that you can totally eliminate, making things both simpler and more powerful?