Feature creatures
Bike with bells and whistles made in Adobe Firefly.
"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole."
Seth Godin, marketing expert, wrote this powerful statement in This is Marketing. It's powerful because he's explaining how people prioritize what they wish to accomplish the most.
Designers should focus on what their audience truly needs rather than the product itself. To focus on the outcome the product provides for them. These are the important experiences customers wish for.
Everyone buys a bike to get from point A to point B. Anything beyond that has to do with a specific bike's value catered to a niche audience. Mountain bikers look for different values in a bike compared to competitive cyclists. Mountain bikers want unique experiences which lead to unique features. Adding an excessive amount of different bells and whistles to your bike design won't make it more appealing to them.
3D TVs were a fad for about 15 minutes. Not only were they expensive and limited in content, but people don't want to put on cumbersome glasses to watch a movie. The innovative feature is there, but who cares? It's not the desirable outcome when watching tv.
Segways have yet to segue to the mainstream because they are expensive and unnecessary in most use cases. Self-balancing scooters and rentable e-scooters are much more affordable and make sense for the occasional user. So, Segways are constrained to commercial and industrial settings.
Google's new Pixel 8 looks promising, but their temperature reader is confusing to people. It makes sense if you use it to check people's temperature in lieu of Covid-19, but it isn't FDA approved for medical use yet. That won't stop people from using it that way at home, but it still seems out of place to critics unless they receive that approval. In the meantime, the use cases aren't clear or important.
This is why designers obsess over user experiences and needs, not features and capabilities. Design around what people desire the most so they can fall in love with what the product offers them.
