The simple reason products fail: Consumers don’t understand what they do

The Holy Grail for innovators often is not simply to win in an existing market, but also to create an entirely new product category. But doing so raises a critical question for the entrepreneur: How do you get potential customers and investors to understand what it is you are doing?

It’s harder than it sounds. Consumers make sense of unfamiliar products by mapping them onto categories of things they already understand. So when Apple comes out with its iPhone 6, for example, it’s pretty easy for customers to understand that it’s a lot like the previous iterations. But genuinely novel products don’t fit neatly into one category or another. Indeed, their novelty stems from the very fact that the ideas and technologies that came together to create the new concept existed previously in domains or categories that were thought to be entirely distinct.

As a result, innovations that are totally new to the market are often extremely difficult to describe. Things that are difficult to describe are hard to understand.And things that are hard for consumers and investors to understand typically face two outcomes: They are either ignored or devalued...

Jesper Sørensen is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Read his full article here

Form Follows Function (FFF) – An unclear design principle?

Frank Lloyd Wright introduced the word ‘organic’ into his philosophy of architecture as early as 1908. It was an extension of the teachings of his mentor Louis Sullivan whose slogan “form follows function” became the mantra of modern architecture. Wright changed this phrase to “form and function are one,” using nature as the best example of this integration. If Frank Lloyd Wright was alive today, he might agree with Andreas Burghart that FFF is an unclear design principle.

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Guggenheim Musuem NYC.

In a blog post for Centigrade UI Architectures, Andreas Burghart explains why FFF is an unclear design principle. The conclusion is that form and function must be balanced. It also means that form must always communicate main function correctly. 

For the field of interface design, this means that aesthetics and usability are equivalent and mutually influence each other: a beautiful interface improves its perceived and actual usability. Visual poorly communicated functions have a significant negative impact on usability. Good usability increases tolerance for suboptimal aesthetics.

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Frank Lloyd Wright

Ideally, however, for the development process usability and aesthetics has been treated with the same importance, so that the best result can be achieved for the user. This is also the basis and philosophy for our daily work as professional user interface designers and usability engineers.

Reasons for misunderstandings

The origin of FFF is very old and oftentimes leads to some misunderstandings. In addition, FFF originally referred to architecture, which is why mistakes are made when you transfer it to the field of digital media.

The simplicity of FFF is Blessing and Curse at the same time. On the one hand, it is a catchy alliteration. On the other hand, it is a complex issue that cannot be communicated entirely through the simplified statement...

Read Andreas Burgharts article