Authors: Peter Sander
• Platform, not product
• Elegant simplicity
• The cool factor
You could sum this up in a three-word guide to product design and leadership: complete, simple, and cool.
Think about your last experience buying a technology product (other than an Apple). A laptop PC, for example.
You may have searched a manufacturer’s website to learn about it. There was the same old Web-page format, the same “speeds and feeds” statistics, nothing special; now you need to find a place to buy it. Suppose that is a conventional electronics retailer. You walk in. You hear the noise of a thousand unrelated electronics products blaring away in the background. You walk into the PC area. You stand around for a while. Finally a 20-year-old in a blue smock with a ring in his nose asks you if you need any help. You ask a few questions, get a few standard answers, and buy the machine after standing in line behind someone who was buying a new vacuum cleaner.
You go home to set up your new laptop. You turn it on, and it works. But now Microsoft takes over the experience. You set up Windows and register. You’re good for now, but for all intents and purposes, you’re a Microsoft customer. The pattern continues. You want music? You load iTunes or Rhapsody or some such. You want other programs to run on your new machine? Back to shopping mode. Then there are time-consuming software installations and dealing with those vendors.
Then something happens to the machine, and the screen goes dark. You call the 800 number, and an agent 12 times zones away reads through a long list of prefabricated questions. Your machine doesn’t work. Now you’re at the mercy of your electronics store or returning
your product to the manufacturer. Are you dealing directly with the company that made the software? No. Are you dealing with the company that made the product? Maybe or maybe not—depending on how much of its service the company has outsourced.
You get the idea. You don’t have an integrated product that was designed as a whole product. And you don’t have an integrated experience that was designed as a whole customer experience.
In today’s tech space, most products are really a collection of other products bundled together to (hopefully) achieve a design objective. They tend not to work as well as a product that was designed wholly in house; Google Android customers are finding that out today, because Google doesn’t make the hardware. You need to own the whole ecosystem to make really good products.
And the same holds true for the rest of the customer experience beyond the intrinsic product. In most of the tech space, manufacturers can’t control distribution, can’t control the retailer, can’t control setup, and can’t control service.
Such experiences scream for the need for whole products. Products are better if they are whole on both the inside (the stuff that makes the product work) and the
outside (the rest of the customer experience during the ownership and use of the product). Today it seems that most manufacturers work to perfect the “core” product and are satisfied if the tangential elements of the product are nonnegatives; few take the steps to turn these elements into real customer experience positives.
Steve Jobs and Apple didn’t see things this way at all. They led the free world—the technology world in particular—in terms of holistic, or whole-product, thinking. They worked to deliver a complete customer experience to fit the visions and customer needs that we’ve been examining.
Sure, complete products are nice from a design and experience viewpoint. But done right, they can also make money. Since the demise of cameras and film, and disregarding razors and blades as a far simpler product platform, we haven’t seen anyone find a way to monetize a customer relationship after the sale the way Apple does.
The holistic product and holistic customer experience become a win-win both for the customer and for Apple. The customer gets a better, more complete, and, at the risk of using an overused word, seamless experience. Apple gets residual revenue after each sale, keeps control of the customer experience, and, especially lately, gets and retains access to huge amounts of customer information (some say too much).
Steve Jobs had a whole-product, total customer experience orientation from the beginning. He first saw it in the creation of an entire product in a simple, user-friendly cabinet, the Apple II (designed to resemble a consumer-friendly Cuisinart cabinet that he had seen in a department store, as the story goes). The idea grew with the availability and use of VisiCalc (although not developed by Apple) as a solid application for the Apple II.
The whole-product idea really marched into town with the early Macintosh. The Mac was really “turnkey”—ready to use, with no need for configuration or add-ons. Everything was on-board in a cabinet that was simple even by today’s standards. The OS was integrated with the product. At the time of the introduction, Steve saw a new laser-printing engine under development at Canon, and immediately hooked up with Canon to develop and market a version—the LaserWriter—especially for the Mac. When Apple doesn’t actually develop an accessory or software itself, it works very closely with the vendor to make sure the development is done right, and it tries to sell the product under its own name where it makes sense and where possible.
Holistic design leads to better products. Apple gets to manage the experience. Quality improves; there are fewer “blue-screen” failures. The channel gets more
to sell. The customer gets a solution. What more could you want?
Under Steve Jobs, Apple continued down the path of integrating the whole experience through the life of the Macintosh. Steve had visualized direct delivery of Macs to consumers from a FedEx hub, assuming control of that part of the process and gaining more customer touch. At the time, Apple had exclusive authorized resellers (dealers) and some presence at large retailers, but no direct channel. The direct-channel idea, however, was nixed by a skeptical John Sculley, who instead looked at distribution as a multitier model and a battle for shelf space—à la the soft-drink industry.
That conflict, among others, led to Steve’s departure. But the vision of selling direct to consumers as part of a whole-product platform never went away.
What came next—after Steve’s 1996 return, of course—was iTunes in 2001. Based on a software platform purchased from a third party and modified, and a then-novel approach to getting paid for music downloads (which Steve had to work hard to negotiate with the recording industry), the iTunes Store was born. Now, for the first time, a store was really part of Apple’s product. The iTunes Store not only allowed for easy and
seamless purchase, but also managed a buyer’s music library from a distance. And of course, Apple then became a big player in the music industry, with an estimated more than $1 billion in annual iTunes revenue.
The App Store for the iPod and then the iPad followed soon after. The model was the same—to provide a seamless way for customers to shop, buy, and download apps for their devices. Customers can choose from an assortment of free and paid apps in 12 categories, from business and education to games and entertainment. The App Store builds the customer experience and loyalty while also generating substantial revenue. (Apple doesn’t break out revenue figures for iTunes or App Store sales.)
The App Store and iTunes added a lot to the postsale customer experience. But what about the presale experience? What about postsale product support?
The first Apple Retail Store hit the ground in 2001, and there are 357 of them as of July 2011. Carefully crafted and staffed, the stores were meant not just to sell products, but to “make deep emotional connections with customers.” They were designed in such a way as to carry the simple, elegant, sleek, plain tech design of the products forward into a beautiful and compelling physical space. Trained salespeople walk the floor, and the “Genius Bar” at the back of the store holds up the support end of the experience. By setting up these stores,
Steve Jobs went against the conventional wisdom, despite the failure of Gateway stores and the aborted launch of Dell stores. But the way the stores completed the customer experience was unique and delighted customers; shopping in an Apple Store is a pleasant experience even for those who don’t own an Apple product.
Apple Stores, like everything else in the Apple universe, are part of the Apple whole product. The Apple whole-product components are designed to the same standards as the products themselves.
The Apple platform doesn’t just
support
the customer experience—it
adds
to the customer experience.
Look at (or, these days, pick up) an Apple product. What are your first impressions? Smooth; substantial; solid; sleek; sexy; simple. I’m running out of “S” words, but no matter. Apple products have an elegant simplicity that is matched by none except a few design-centered Bang & Olufsen audio products dating back to the 1960s. But beyond appealing, attractive design, the elegant simplicity stretches much further.
Simply put, Steve (another “S”; how about that?) sought a level of refinement and sophistication that would run laps around most competitors. It wasn’t just
about how products looked, it was about how they
felt
. And it wasn’t just about how products felt, it was about how they
worked
.
If he had put his mind to the task, Steve would probably have been a pretty good designer himself. But he was better at creating a vision, letting his design specialists do their thing, and then working with the result. In 1992, one of the bright spots in a relatively dull Apple era was the hiring of the industrial designer Jonathan Ive, a Brit who had previously worked for Apple as a consultant. Ive favored a very clean, sleek, high-tech look, with lots of white plastic, aluminum, titanium, and stainless steel; flat surfaces; and minimalist designs for control interfaces, plugs, and so forth. Initially he worked on the original PowerBook laptops and reached his stride with the 1998 introduction of the colorful iMac, an Ive brainchild. He is credited with the design of the iPod and runs something of a monastic design lab at Apple. Today he is the senior VP of industrial design.
In 2008, the
Daily Telegraph
named him the most influential Brit in America.
Simplicity is not just an objective, it’s a passion. To Steve, a product was more sophisticated when it was simple. It takes a higher design standard to make something simple.
As Steve shared in a 1998
BusinessWeek
interview shortly after returning to Apple: “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Mark Twain once said, “If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute presentation, it will take me two weeks to prepare.” Many others have echoed the same sentiment.
For Steve and his team, the 40-button mobile phone was a nonstarter. Having one button was the design objective, and it took some extra work to get there. The beautiful graphics interface and simple touch controls, brought forward from the iTouch, were the result. Apple wants all of its products to be the “five-minute speech”: the one you understand, the one you remember.
Along these same lines, in a 2006
Newsweek
/MSNBC interview, Steve shared: “Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or
energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart and want objects that are well thought through.”
Less is more. So I should stop here. You get the point. Do the extra work to make it simple. Made simple; done right.
What Steve Jobs saw in products, he also wanted to see in product families, and in organizations. For Steve, “Simplicity and focus are one and the same.”
Consider what happened when Steve returned to Apple and reduced 350 products to 10 products on a simple four-quadrant grid. Do you think this helped the product teams focus? The sales team? The channel and retail stores? The customer? You bet.
Likewise, Apple’s organizational structures are simple. Most high-tech firms have people scattered in cities and beautiful mountain towns all over the place. An HP product, for example, might be designed by teams in California, Colorado, Houston, and Massachusetts, each doing a piece of the design. Time zones, voice communications, and even cultural differences add friction to the process. Steve kept his design teams small, simple, and together. The recently announced three-million-square-foot “spaceship” headquarters in Cupertino was designed in part to get all the design teams under one roof—they
had been scattered in locations within about a five-mile radius of the current Infinite Loop headquarters.