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 think yur right.
you can feel when you use apple’s products that someone over there is obsessed about simplicity, elegance, ui, and design.
i think committee’s tend to give you a lowest common denominator which can work in some scenarios, but is probably not the right way to go if you are doing innovative stuff in fast moving waters.