Last week I wrote a post called The Need for Elegance in Product Design. In it I said that calling something elegant is high praise, and although elegance is not a requirement for product success, those that are elegant, that have a “Wow” factor to them easily stand up above their competitors.
A reader, Rohan, left a comment that makes a good point. He wrote (edited for brevity):
Saeed, as much as I love elegance myself, I’m not at all sure that most people care about it.
Given the commercial success of so much that is inelegant, I don’t think you can claim that there is a “need for elegance in product design” without backing it up with some hard data. Certainly it’s a desirable thing to some potential customers, but maybe not all that many. I conclude that elegance is a “feature”, complete with price tag.
First, let me restate the definition of elegance I used in the original post.
gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct
As I said in my original post:
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.
The focus here is on market leaders, becoming one and sustaining that lead, and not simply on creating a product that meets some market success.
Disruption is everywhere
The reason that elegance — smart, intuitive design — will grow in importance is because other barriers and differentiators are undergoing significant disruption. From funding to prototyping to manufacturing to distribution to marketing to retail, all of these areas are changing and making it easier for new, small and fast companies to enter markets.
Kickstarter.com is a relatively new site to help new projects and businesses get both exposure and funding using crowdsourcing. You no longer need to go to the bank or find angel investors or as friends/family for initial funds.
The advent of 3D printing and outsourced prototyping services means that anyone who can use (or learn to use) 3D modeling software can design a product and get a physical 3D instance of it for very low cost in a very short timeframe. And this technology can produce stunningly complex objects.
Sites like Shapeways make the manufacturing process dead easy for low volumes. And for anyone with higher volume needs, there are of course more traditional manufacturing means.
As for marketing and retail, the Internet has made the process much easier for smaller companies to get visibility. They have many options, particularly for retail, from sites like EBay, Amazon and Etsy to a myriad of smaller sites, and of course it takes less than 1 day to actually set up a full web presence to sell products online.
How can companies create sustainable differentiation?
This disruption makes it easier for companies to create, market and sell their goods to a wide audience. But it also means that it is that much easier for others to copy their ideas in record time. Look at how quickly companies have announced and built tablets to compete with the iPad. This would not have been possible 20 years ago.
Remember the $100 laptop project? How about the $10 tablet project? This is not to say that these are all elegant products, but the fact is that it has never been easier to quickly get inexpensive derivative products to market.
So how can companies differentiate and sustain product leadership?
There are still a few areas that are not yet disrupted or not yet commoditized. One of them is design: good, thoughtful, elegant design.
And design goes beyond just the look of the product. It involves how the product functions, how it is built, how it is delivered and yes, how much it costs. The design process can (and should!) identify ways to drive DOWN costs, and therefore prices of products.
Elegant design takes all of these into account, and delivers differentiation on MANY fronts. These are not things that can easily be duplicated. But when they are, and they will be as markets and competitors are not static, the challenge is there for all parties to move forward, become more efficient, improve the designs, and create new, elegant products to lead the market.
Given the pace of change we are seeing, driven primarily by technology, it’s the human aspect, thinking and creatively solving problems, that will drive innovation and product leadership.
Saeed
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