subject: The New Must-have Feature For Successful Products [print this page] Increasingly, successful products all have a new must-have feature, and that is "beauty". I don't know if you've noticed, but everyone seems to be advertising their "beautiful" design lately, and I know that when I'm choosing software at home, I always want to see what it looks like before I even bother to download.
It may be that beauty is the new feature, but it is hardly the pinnacle of achievement in the design stakes. That honour goes to Apple, who have gone from Usability, to Beautiful, to Magical. Magical trumps all the competition, of course. Magical implies things that mere beauty doesn't even attempt. Magical implies a level of sophistication that mere beauty can't even attempt. Magical is unexplainable, an enigma that amazes just by being.Now, even for Apple, that is a mammoth jump.The rest of us, still doing Usability, can only aspire to Beauty, I suspect, and most of us won't have even a chance of that. Not everyone can be the prettiest person in the room.
The point of all this is this: in large IT organizations, we always find whatever feature the consumer has now, they will expect and demand in the workplace within two years. Consequently, I'm predicting that we'll start to have a non-functional requirement around making beautiful experiences when we build systems, and that we'll be rubbish at it when it happens. Every time technology makes the leap from consumer to enterprise, we never learn.
So, in two years time, we're going to have a dilemma. Shall we design "beautiful experiences" for staff, when that is going to layer additional cost into a system? I mean, its not like large organizations have service designers just sitting around idle, nor do they generally have a design mentality when they build technology. So this stuff is going to cost more, at least at the start.
It will be so simple and easy to cut such features as "not essential".
This leads us somewhere challenging, however, because the comparison between what people use at home and what they're getting at work is only going to become more stark while-ever the "beauty-feature" is the main differentiator. It can hardly matter if the things we build are "magical" in terms of what they do, when everyone looks at the way they look and pokes out their tongues.
My prediction is that there will be further deterioration in the perception of users of their IT suppliers, namely that they can't deliver to save themselves.
