Experience Driven Product Strategy

James

June 11, 2008

Yesterday, Peter over at the Tech Capital Partners Blog posted an article about Experience Driven Product Strategy. In a nutshell, using such a strategy means to approach your product design from the top down . That is, start with what the user will see and touch rather than the nuts and bolts of how it works. I posted a comment about how important this is but that there must be more a play than user interface since not every one uses a Mac. Peter replied to my comment with some thoughts on the other forces at play.

All this got me thinking more about what exactly makes a good user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). What are the commonalities in the UI/UX of some very successful products? The first two that come to mind are the iPod Touch and the Wii Remote.

iPod Touch

The iPod Touch let’s people use familiar gestures for flipping though CD covers and photos. To me, it is reminiscent of flipping through a real stack of CDs or collection of LPs in a milk crate.

Wii Remote

The Wii remote allows users to perform familiar movements to control objects on the screen. For example, in Wii Sports Baseball, you don’t press a strange combination of buttons to cause the player on the screen to swing the bat - you swing the remote exactly like you would swing a real baseball bat.

I think the common idea here is that each of these products allow the user to behave like… well… humans. Our hands didn’t evolve to hold an Xbox controller, use a mouse, or type on a keyboard. Our hands a really good at holding, throwing, touching, hitting, pointing, and squeezing. I think the UI/UX of the iPod and the Wii remote are so compelling because they are modeled on how naturally use our bodies to manipulate real world objects.

This probably isn’t that big of a revelation, but I think technology has finally reached a state where this kind of interaction can be effectively realized in electronic products. Apple tried years ago with the Newton where the interface was a metaphor for pen and paper. However, it failed because the handwriting recognition just wasn’t good enough. We are now seeing very cool advances in touch screens and similar technologies like Microsoft Surface.

I think (hope) more of these button-free approaches will be taken with more electronic devices. How about this… imagine a TV remote that uses Wii-like functionality: twisting the remote to the left or right controls volume and flicking the remote up and down controls the channel. That would be neat.

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