I thought Matt Burns’s article about Apple’s relatively simple product line struck a chord:
Garmin makes 82 GPS units that can be mounted in a car or carried in your hand. 82!?! That’s a lot and includes 27 designed specifically for the car. If Apple made a GPS, there would be two models available – maybe only one. Apple would shove everything they could into this one GPS and sell it at a profit instead of making similar different models that feature slightly different specs.
I can relate, because I recently bought a Garmin GPS, but first had to wade through model-feature-comparison-hell.
There’s a lesson here that many product managers miss: fewer choices is frequently the better design.
- Does Garmin really need two models, identical in all respects except Bluetooth support?
- Does every Windows install really need to ask what directory to use for installation?
- Does my PC wireless configuration really need to ask me a bunch of questions about what network to use? Why doesn’t it just find the strongest, test for openness, and use that one? (but let me change it later if I want)
If you’re a product manager: SIMPLIFY!
Good advice. Better if you used this advice back in 1996 🙂 Howza it going?
Strongest??
I guess you live in a single-family house. Do you really want your PC to start transmitting data over your neighbor’s pwned WiFi?
Maybe there’s a heuristic here that covers some common use cases. For example, “if there’s a single strong signal, use it”.
I’m sure there are more cases that could be captured that streamlines the experience for many/most users.
Yep, and in the broader sense, I agree. We spent years (decades) assuming that if two functions were at different levels of abstraction or hierarchy, we had to had to HAD TO present them as two distinct layers in the UI. If I click on my mailbox, and there’s only one message, it would be a Horrible Thing to immediately show me that message instead of showing me the “list” containing one message. Confusing! Arbitrary! Non-deterministic! Muscle memory!
Handy.
Oh.