Blogature

While staring at http://www.microsoftshitbrick.com (a site not for work or for the turd-phobic), Jon said (of the Zune): “why do people still think imitating Apple will make them successful too? It’s like a design cargo cult.”

Quite so.

Apple has been an incredibly strong force in popularizing design in consumer electronics and beyond, starting with the original iMac in 1998. Because good design practices (both in a technical, aesthetic, and business sense) became obvious to the general public coincidentally with Apple becoming successful again, outsiders who didn’t understand the deeper reasons for Apple’s success decided that ‘design’ was what was going to set them apart too. The problem is, a lot of them didn’t really get it.

So instead of real design, we got a bizarre imitation of design of which the Zune is just the most recent and spectacular example. Just like islanders famously cleared landing strips and built bamboo radio towers to attract American cargo planes, companies like Microsoft are now imitating the branding (”Hello from Seattle?” Cute.), building an online store, and adding “social” features, expecting that commercial success will follow. I’m sure someone inside Microsoft said at some point during the design process “What would Apple do?” with a straight face. Maybe it even got used as an argument - “This is the right thing to do because Apple does it.”

But, of course, this isn’t how Apple does it (although the prospect of an Apple designer asking “what would we do?” is pretty amusing). Apple’s design process is, as far as I’ve read, a pretty idiosyncratic thing, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve copying single parts of past designs and assuming that they can mish-mash them together to make another successful product. Products and services are holistic beasts that succeed or fail for lots of reasons, not because they look like past successful products. It’s easy to mistakenly assume that technical details have shallow roots and can be tweaked without major consequences. The Zune is evidence of precisely that phenomenon to the extent that it’s crashing while the iPod isn’t.

We’re trying to avoid this cargo cult design process in Thinkature. It can be surprisingly hard at times. A lot of interface design is rooted in copying best practices and taking advantage of interface metaphors that people are already familiar with. Still, it’s critically important to understand why existing interfaces are good, so you get the details right. Otherwise, you’re just another islander hoping that drinking afternoon tea and chatting politely about the weather is what made Western Civilization successful.