Mike Arrington says that “making users happy is a suckers game” and that product innovation is best accomplished by small teams of people pushing the edge of the envelope driven by intellect and intuition rather than user needs and interests.
Making users happy is not a suckers game
While I agree that it’s easiest to innovate with small, creative, and tight-knit teams of professionals — I also believe that the best innovations come from “walking a mile in the user’s shoes” in an effort to create simple and elegant experiences that solve real problems for real people.
Take Apple as an example. They are definitely not suckers. I would argue the reason they win is because they build great products that deliver great experiences, and they do it with the user/customer firmly in mind.
Now consider Groove Networks. I worked there for nearly 4 years and had the privilege of watching Ray Ozzie and his team of super talented developers push the edge of the innovation envelope like most people only dream of. Ray and his team were confident that they knew what was best for users — and given their prior success with Notes, who wouldn’t be? In the end, Groove was a massively innovative product that unfortunately solved a problem that most people did not know they even had. The rest is history, and now it’s part of Microsoft.
The lesson learned, at least for me, is that “truly great” products must:
- push the envelop in terms of innovation
- deliver simple and enjoyable user experiences
- solve worthwhile problems that lots of “users/customers” care about
In that sense, making users happy is not a suckers game at all.
You’re both right (less confrontational than saying you’re both wrong, I guess.) If you’re trying to come up with a novel solution using breakthrough technology, you can’t sit in your lab and invent it, based on intuition and technical brilliance. But you also can’t ask the customer what they want, because they can’t articulate an answer if they can’t grasp the possibilities the technology brings.
The best chance of success comes from spending time with the customer (yes, walk a mile their shoes) and then working in your lab to come up with the solution they didn’t know could exist. You need to build a knowledge of the problem, infer how your technology can solve that problem, and then focus your efforts on addressing the issues at the heart of the problem.
As for delighting the customer, I prefer giving them a solution that is better than the alternatives and then charging them so much they almost refuse to pay for it. Almost.