Adaptive Path Blog

I’ve been giving a particular presentation a lot of late, on the importance of an experienced-based approach to the design of products and services. Part of the talk deals with the evolution of product categories, which go through the phases of Technology, Features, and Experience.

So, for example, in 1976 or so, the first VCRs for home use came on the scene, and that was simply a function of a new technology. The technology allowed you to do something you couldn’t do before, and that was enough. It didn’t matter that the first VCRs were bulky, unattractive, and clunky to use — they allowed you to record television shows to be played back at your leisure, and that new capability was enough to make it exciting.

Then, in the 80s and into the 90s, VCRs entered into this features craze. In this middle tier, it’s typical for companies to compete on features, angling to get more bullet points on their product boxes in some demonstration of superiority. Such an approach lead to almost universal frustration with VCRs, and the blinking “12:00″ the icon of unusable home technology.

In this decade, we’ve entered the world of digital video recorders. And, largely thanks to Tivo, we’ve had a shift towards an experiential design. The Tivo’s designers could have simply taken their technological offering and housed it in the old trappings, offering an incremental improvement to the VCR experience. Instead, they realized that they could fundamentally reshape people’s relationship with television, and this experiential approach has given them amazing traction in the marketplace (though not domination, thanks to market forces in the world of premium television).

Now, when I give this talk, I make it a pretty clear and linear progression: Technology, Features, Experience, with the point being that, in this modern world, we can no longer compete or differentiate through features, but must often take an experiential approach.

The nuance that is lost, though, and which I’m exploring here, is that, in the case of Tivo, the experiential opportunity is enabled *because* of a technological shift — in this case, the recording to a digital medium and the delivery of the service on what is essentially a computer.

A similar thing happened in the 1880s with photography. George Eastman invented a new type of film, roll film, which was easier to handle than glass plates. In order to develop a market for this roll film, he invented a camera that housed it. He could have created a camera as complex as the ones that used plates, just smaller, but instead he redefined the photographic experience into one of great ease for the picture-taker, and the camera he created, Kodak, launched an entire new market.

Not every experiential awakening is borne of such technological innovation. Microsoft Office 2007 seems like a direct response to Microsoft’s earlier featuritis, recasting its functionality in a way that makes sense for users. The underlying technology is fundamentally the same — the bulk of the changes came from a reimagining and redesign.

Anyway, I don’t quite know what to make of this. I just wanted to put it out there. I find I can be dismissive of technological advances, but have to acknowledge that such advances are the underpinning of these seismic experience shifts.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Experience Design, Experience Strategy, Product Design, Product Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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