When I was in university, my major was Physics, and for whatever crazy reason I took a number of Computer Science and Applied Math courses as electives. OK, I admit it, I was bit of a “mathochist”.
Needless to say, I spent a lot of time with classmates solving math/physics problems. Often we’d make our way into the one of the graduate student lounges, which had nice sofas and floor to ceiling chalkboards — yes, I’m that old — and we’d work away.
One of the most satisfying aspects of these exercises would be when one of us would find an “elegant” solution to a problem. Usually it wasn’t me who found these solutions :-), but I recall once, in my final year of university as we were studying for exams, my friend Richard and I standing quietly, looking at what we’d written on the chalkboard, admiring the elegance of the solution we had found.
And while that sounds incredibly geeky, I’m sure all of us have had similar moments in our lives after a particularly proud accomplishment — whether it was something we wrote or created or built.
Now if you look up “elegant” in the dictionary, one of the definitions is:
gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct
What a wonderful picture that evokes. Notice it doesn’t just say “concise” or “simple” or “succinct”, but “gracefully concise” and “admirably succinct”.
To call something elegant is a wonderful compliment. It conveys something deep about that object. It implies that people gave a lot of thought about that object, what it should look like and how it should function.
Elegance doesn’t happen by chance, and it’s hard to describe what makes something elegant, but once you see it, you recognize it immediately.
Take a look at this video. Many of these products are quite elegant. I showed this video to my children and I could tell from their reaction, they saw the beauty I saw.
Listen carefully around the 5:00 mark when the narrator talks about the design process.
Could you see yourself buying some of these products? I could, and that’s just after seeing them for a few minutes on a YouTube video!
So the question to ask yourself is, can your own design and development process create anything that could be called elegant by customers or prospects? Could a short video of your product have a similar impact on them?
If not, why not and what needs to change to enable it?
If yes, is the elegance the result of an intentional aspect of your process? How could you improve it?
Being elegant is NOT a hard requirement to have a successful product. But think of the products you admire, whether physical or electronic, that rise well above the crowd. I’m sure most of them can be described as elegant.
Saeed
Tweet this: New Post – The Need for Elegance in Product Design – http://wp.me/pXBON-2cY #prodmgmt #design #ux