How the Amazing Becomes Merely Adequate
Why is it that things that blew us away a short time ago (last year, last week…) suddenly fade into the background for us today? Why does the thrill leave so suddenly?
The tech industry is particularly terrible in this space. How fast the shiny new (gadget, software, web site) becomes yesterday’s news. Did it suddenly do whatever it does less well? Well, no, then it must have been our perceptions that shifted somehow.
The folks at the Chasm Group define features that merely meet the expectations of users as “hygiene”. Basically the story goes: you don’t get points for good hygiene. You do, however, get points taken away for bad hygiene. Good hygiene is just expected.
The kicker is that what was fabulous and new last year is just hygiene now.
How do features cross this line? Clayton Christensen, author of the Innovator’s Dilemna, suggests that features are more compelling when isn’t yet sufficiently developed to solve the business problem for which its designed. Every feature upgrade is a huge deal, because it takes the product closer to crossing the line where it can actually address the business problem.
Once it crosses that line, however, the new features become much less interesting. Think Microsoft Word. There are those who feel it was perfect about 10 years ago.
I was thinking about this when I stumbled across the Japanese idea of two kinds of quality (it comes from Total Quality Management):
- atarimae hinshitsu: The idea that things will work as they are supposed to (e.g. a pen will write.).
- miryokuteki hinshitsu: The idea that things should have an aesthetic quality which is different from “atarimae hinshitsu” (e.g. a pen will write in a way that is pleasing to the writer, and leave behind ink that is pleasing to the reader).
(Above bullets quoted from this wikipedia page).
So maybe there’s something here – is it possible that features transition from miryokuteki to atarimae as our perceptions change? Perhaps what had an aesthetic quality yesterday (wow! A graphical user interface!) simply becomes part of the expected behavior today.
My question is really if we can control the speed of the transition. How can we think about how we make stuff to prolong its powers of differentiation? It may not be possible to prolong the “excitement lifespan” of individual features, but an organization that pushes well into the “wow” space will create lasting value in the way they are perceived.