Experience Is the Product

I really enjoyed this article in Business Week:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2007/id20070622_697183.htm

I especially appreciate the section that talks about how the Kodak camera became one of the first consumer technology products. Here at eBay we often discuss the fact that the auction format can be inherently difficult for users to understand -- especially first time users -- which makes the design so much harder to get right. Kodak had the same problem, and marketed the camera with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest.” Here is a discussion about what happened next:

Take another look at that phrase—"You press the button, we do the rest." Eastman marketed the camera based on this promise of experience. But in order to achieve that result, Eastman couldn't just design a simpler product. That would only address the first half of the phrase.

On its own, a simple camera is meaningless, because the entire photographic process (loading a camera, exposing the light-sensitive material, removing that material, processing the material, printing images from that material) could not get any simpler. Eastman's genius was in designing his system so customers could do what mattered most to them—capturing the image ("You press the button"). Eastman located other functions elsewhere in the system ("We do the rest"), allowing the Kodak camera to be remarkably straightforward to use.

In order to meet his goals for delivering the desired experience, Eastman developed relationships with his customers that ensured they remained satisfied. He couldn't think of Kodak as a product, but as a service. This necessitated a factory unlike any seen before, one that could handle complex processing and printing capabilities. Investing in such an operation was an immense risk, but necessary if Eastman were to deliver on his promise to "Do the rest."

I think this points out an important design principle that is also true for web design -- enable the user to do what matters most to them, and hide everything they don't need to do in the back-end. Now, figuring out what should be shown and what shouldn't is a whole other story of course, and not easy. But it is a worthy goal. A couple of technology examples that get it right come to mind:

1. Putting a CD in your CD-ROM drive automatically pulls in meta-data about the album -- artist, album title, song titles, etc.
2. Intuit's TurboTax connects with your employer's payroll supplier to pull in your salary and other tax information -- reducing the possibility of user input error.
3. Amazon allows 1-click ordering -- automatically uses your default Credit Card and Address information to fulfill your order

Something to think about as you use the web every day -- what actions that sites ask you to do could be taken care of at the back-end without user input?