There is a new must-have feature in tech products, and that is “beauty”. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everyone seems to be advertising their “beautiful” design lately, and I know that when I’m choosing software at home, I always want to see what it looks like before I even bother to download.
It may be that beauty is the new feature, but it is hardly the pinnacle of achievement in the design stakes. That honour goes to Apple, who have gone from Usability, to Beautiful, to Magical. Magical trumps all the competition, of course. Magical implies things that mere beauty doesn’t even attempt. Magical implies a level of sophistication that mere beauty can’t even attempt. Magical is unexplainable, an enigma that amazes just by being.Now, even for Apple, that is a mammoth jump.The rest of us, still doing Usability, can only aspire to Beauty, I suspect, and most of us won’t have even a chance of that. Not everyone can be the prettiest person in the room.
The point of all this is this: in large IT organizations, we always find whatever feature the consumer has now, they will expect and demand in the workplace within two years. As a result, I predict that we’ll start to see additional requirements added to systems from now on: make the experience beautiful. It is unlikely we’ll be especially good at doing this, and will furthermore be surprised when it happens. Every time technology makes the leap from consumer to enterprise, we never learn.
Therefore, in just a few years, we’re going to be make a pretty big decision. Is it the right thing to design “beautiful experiences” for staff, when this will obviously add cost to systems? Let’s face it, it is not like large organizations have service designers who just sit around idle, and neither do they generally have a design mentality when technology is built. This is all stuff which will cost more, at least at the start.
I think it will be easy for us all to say “not essential, cut it”.
This leads us somewhere challenging, however, because the comparison between what people use at home and what they’re getting at work is only going to become more stark while-ever the “beauty-feature” is the main differentiator. It can hardly matter if the things we build are “magical” in terms of what they do, when everyone looks at the way they look and pokes out their tongues.
My prediction is further deterioration in the perception some users have of their IT partners and their capability to deliver.
The Beauty-Feature is something that has occupied those working in Innovation Management for some time now. For a detailed examination of this, and other things that concern organizational innovators, read the free, online innovation book by the author of this article.