Create Magic
Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash
Everyone in enterprise software talks about ‘Consumerization’. The idea is that the products we use at work are getting easier to use — more like the products we use in our everyday lives. It’s not a new idea, 20 years ago Marc Benioff founded Salesforce on the dream of making CRM as easy as Amazon.
So why do consumer products, almost universally, have better user experiences than work tools? Are the product teams better? Do they invest more in design? Do they just care more? Well, maybe, but the truth is that consumer products have great experiences because they have to. They have no choice.
“Economy beat sentiment and benevolence.” Sir Edwin Chadwick
In the land of consumer products, the buyer is the user. Work tools, in contrast, are most often bought through a procurement process. Historically, this has meant an army of salespeople and consultants sanding off the rough edges and twisting and bending the ill-formed shapes into something useful.
Contrast this to the process we follow when buying products in own life. We read a brief description or review, sign-up, and the product has to do the heavy lifting all on its own. Being unusable on day zero is not optional.
But there is more to a consumer experience than a better-looking interface. If you only notice visual beauty, you’ll miss the depth of what makes consumer software tick. Unlike business tools, consumer products are rarely pure utility. They go beyond just ‘getting something done’. The emotional side of the software is a blind spot of most business software.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the utility of work tools. There is a purity of logic to it — if you can solve a problem people care about, with a clear return, you have a good shot at success. Consumers are fickle and the buying process admittedly less rational. To win there, you also need magic.
‘Increase user’s speed to awesome.” — Joel Spolsky
Take Instagram filters for example. In a single tap, with the same low-quality camera, you’re immediately transformed from an average photographer into an artist. Early Instagram was pure joy to use — and you wanted to share your newfound skills with anyone who would listen. That simple moment of delight changed everything.
Most teams never figure out their magic moment, but even if you do, you’re not finished. You can’t ‘set it and forget it’ — delight is perishable. Remember when you ruled the world with a 1,600 baud modem? Now if you can’t have 3 TVs and an iPad streaming 4K video simultaneously, you complain about your internet speed. Yesterday’s awe becomes tomorrow’s expectations.
Enterprise software teams rarely take this lesson to heart. We too often stop at the surface level — taking our existing product features and ‘cleaning them up’. Consumer startups understand that word of mouth matters and the fuel of word of mouth is making your user’s great. Make them so good they want to spontaneously share what they can now do!
“Add something unexpectedly good.” — Kim Goodwin
Done well, the product should take their breath away. A moment before the world was different — their expectations of what was possible have been transformed, in a good way. This is the stuff of great products and it’s the biggest lesson I hope business software learns from consumer products. Yes, improve your user experience — beautify, simplify. But remember it’s not enough to have an interface that works — you have to create magic.
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