5 characteristics that make great products
Ruthlessly simple, Strong design, Instant value, Great value and Luxury packaging
1. Ruthlessly Simple
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” Albert Einstein
Designing something simple requires courage and discipline. You need to be ruthless.
“Focus is about saying NO.” Steve Jobs
Years ago, only Apple seemed to care about simplicity. Today every successful startup is obsessed with it. Simplicity does not mean there is no features, it means that you have the right balance between features and usability. To do so, you have to “edit” the product until you reach the amount of functionality which feels just right. Editing is a skill already mastered by the great masters centuries ago. When Michelangelo was asked how he created David from a block of stone, he just said: “I simply removed everything that was not David.
Today, this art is still difficult to master. It is so important that Jack Dorsey considers himself as the Chief Editor. If you want to dig deeper, I would recommend strongly reading Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. It is an excellent book about this principle. What’s great about this principle is that it can be applied to products as well as all areas of life.
2. Strong design
A product with a strong design is not necessarily beautiful. It can be alluring but beauty is not the point. Think the Volkswagen Beetle, the first iMac, An object with a strong design is immediately recognizable and polarizes people: you either love it or hate it. If you don’t have a strong feeling about it, the design is not strong enough.
True, a vacuum cleaner might not be the most exciting piece of hardware you can think of but a dyson is a different beast. I love mine but it scares my 3-year old son. Well, it somehow looks like an H.R Giger’s Alien and to me, this is what makes it cool and different.
A Strong Design has to induce a visceral reaction.
3. Instant value
A great product adds Instant Value to its user. It solves a problem from the the first time and the first second the user tries the product.
What does this mean for social services? Clearly, it means they are not great products at the beginning. When they launch, social products are useless for the first set of users as there are no relevant content for them. After a while when the network effect kicks in and a certain density is reached, then the service becomes useful. It takes a while.
Instant also means fast. People can’t wait for getting the value. Your app needs to start in less than 200ms, your website has to load instantaneously. Not only is speed critical for customer satisfaction, but it also impacts your search ranking on Google.
4. Real value
A great product provides real value to people. There should be something in the product that people are willing to pay for and that they cannot get for free on the market.
So again, what does this means for social networks? They are free, right? People don’t pay with money, they pay with their profile being tracked and advertisement being shown. The other side of the equation, the brands, are willing to pay to get something they cannot get for free: access to targeted customers in a way than TV could never provide.
Thinking about Facebook or twitter, it is quite possible that people would actually pay $1 per month to access them if this was the only option. Of course, people would pay now, not when those 2 services started, as seen in Point 3 — Instant Value.
5. Great packaging
“You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting” Steve Jobs
Poor packaging can kill a good product. For a consumer goods, it is the actual physical packaging and the ecosystem. For a service, it is the experience and the customer care service.
Packaging sets the tone for the whole relationship your customers will have with your product. I believe Steve Jobs said that packaging is the last thing you did before you gave the products to your customers but it is the first thing they will experience after they bought your product. You simply can’t mess with the first impression.
Great products come in great packaging, they deliver instant value, they have a strong design, are simple to use and they provide long-term real value to the user.
Those are 5 simple characteristics but it is much are much easier to list them than to execute each of them.
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