The technological sophistication of the present age is a
double-edged sword. On a basic level,
our attraction to products is based on a desire to get more benefit with less
effort. Sometimes technology makes our
lives better by enabling us to accomplish more with less effort; sometimes it
makes our lives worse by requiring us to put in much more effort to accomplish less;
and often it’s both at once.
Another fundamental concept is that a “benefit” is the
fulfillment of a need, and that human needs have changed very little for tens
of thousands of years. We need to eat,
and buying a meal from a vending machine fifty feet from our desks is far more
convenient than going hunting with a sharpened stick. We need to communicate, and calling someone is
far more convenient than tracking someone down and going to speak to them face
to face. We need to travel to a remote
location, and hailing a taxi and taking a plane is much more convenient than
travelling a thousand miles on foot.
In the early stages of product evolution, solutions are
simple: the need to communicate to someone is addressed by a telephone, which
simply has a microphone and speaker, a bell to ring when there’s an inbound
call, and a way of entering the correct number to place a call to a specific
telephone.
In the middle stages of product evolution, the efficiency
and effectiveness is improved. The
telephone still has the basic features but now it can be carried anywhere, the device
can store numbers so they don’t have to be remembered, and it can record calls
when we can’t answer. It’s even possible
to send a message in text when we are not able to speak.
But beyond that, technology begins to evolve in unfortunate
ways: we can speak a name rather than typing it, but have to invest time in
programming the device to understand the idiosyncrasies of human voice or learn
to speak in an affected way so the device can understand. The device itself is so cluttered with other
features that we have to hunt among dozens (or hundreds) of things to find the
phone application.
There are many reasons that this happens, between
technophilia (wanting to add everything that can be thought of), panic (feeling
the need to match what the competition offers), or greed (wanting to sell the
device to as many people as possible).
When these or any other motivation causes a producer to lose site of the
core value proposition (what benefit is delivered for how much effort), then
technology has gotten out of hand. It is
no longer a servant to the needs of the user, but an antagonist or at least an
obstruction to the user who seeks to serve a need.
And the result is the tragic world of the modern product –
so laden with unneeded features and functions that it is expensive to obtain
and difficult to use. Periodically, and
quite rarely, some firm recognizes that things have gotten out of hand and
offers a pared-down version of the product that restores the value-to-benefit
proposition – they create a product that does just one thing and does it
exceptionally well, delivering benefit with minimal effort. But then, the cycle reboots: the Apple
iPhone and Google’s search engine took the market by storm when they simplified
their solutions, but have both become cluttered with add-ons and gimmicks that
distract from and diminish the value they originally provided.
It is, perhaps, an inevitable cycle that has only become
accelerated by the present age, and the strength of will to control greed and
fear seems ever less common in the present culture.
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