I want to preface this by saying this is a rather highly opinionated article. I’m sure a lot of people won’t agree, but hey, whatever.
Choice is a funny thing. We all want it. We want to know that whatever happens it was our choice that it happened. We like knowing that we controlled the outcome. We like knowing that it was up to us that something happened. We like choice. We believe choice gives us power.
The problem is, every choice we are given paralyzes us. Every time we are faced with a decision we must sit and think. We have to evaluate our options based on the choices at hand. And every choice given adds more time to our decision process – it decreases our conversion rate if you will.
I propose that in product design, despite when a user says that they WANT choice and they WANT features, what they really want is you to tell them what they want. And I think there’s a very good reason for this.
When a user arrives at your application they are not a new user. They have habits that they’ve picked up along the way. Maybe they used similar software to yours before, maybe they only learnt how to use a mouse last week. Either way, they come with baggage. Every choice you offer your users forces them to go through this baggage and figure out what the best option for them is. And every choice you give a user forces that user to evaluate whether or not it is even worth it for them to go through this baggage and decide what to do next.
This is not a good way to run a business and the underlying problem of asking users what they want simply exacerbates it. When you ask a user what they would like to do, they shuffle through their baggage and pull out a few problem points that they have. Then they rank them and tell you the biggest problem they face with their current tool-set. And then you research their current tool-set and accordingly make decisions about your product.
I urge you to look at companies that truly revolutionized an industry – how many of them conducted ‘focus groups’? How many of them did ‘market research’? I think that companies that do ‘focus groups’ to help them drive product innovation are really driving product evolution. They are taking a product and moving it to its next, logical stage. But evolution is a lumbering beast. Evolution of a product takes years of development and the end result is only marginally different. Look at the difference between v2 and v3 of a product. Was it really that different? Did anything REALLY change?
Conversely, look at v1 of a truly revolutionizing product – the lightbulb, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and radio. There was nothing like them before. They weren’t born out of ‘market research’. No one interviewed a bunch of people to find out what they wanted next. If you HAD interviewed someone before the lightbulb, isn’t it conceivable to say that they would have asked for a longer burning lamp?
I think what I’m trying to say is that no one remembers the middle-grounds of evolution – they remain lost in the annals of history. Instead we remember the beginning.
Don’t strive to evolve a product to its next stage – revolutionize an industry.
Breeding homing pigeons that could cover a given space with ever
increasing rapidity did not give us the laws of telegraphy, nor did
breeding faster horses bring us the steam locomotive.
– Edward J. v. K. Menge, “The Quarterly Review of Biology”