What if products were harder to use?
Dieter Rams, the legendary industrial designer has a sort of ten commandments for design. The fourth rule is “Good Design Makes a Product Understandable”.
Designers and laypeople alike often interpret this as “good products are easy to use and intuitive” (proof here). But that’s not what he says, and this isn’t the case. Those who design and build products, whether they’re digital or physical, hold this assumption especially close. Design at the highest levels is a bit more nuanced.
What's harder to use?
Surely, great products can't be hard to use, can they? I'll draw your attention to one of the best designed products of all time: the piano. There's somewhere between 5-50 million pianos in the world. It turns out it's actually a Fermi problem to estimate how many pianos we have, but there's likely somewhere around ~20 million pianos. This isn't including every Apple computer that has GarageBand built in with a digital piano. Most smart devices can be turned into complex musical synthesizers or basic pianos.
Imagine you walked up to a piano, without ever seeing one. What would you do?
I’ll tell you what you wouldn’t do. You wouldn’t crank out Beethoven's 5th the first time you sat down. It would take training and years of practice to play a complicated song on the piano. The piano is hard to use. Other musical instruments like a guitar, maybe even harder. You may know what to do with it (touch it, push it, pull it), but you'd have no idea how to recreate a piece of music you heard.
A piano is a system: a series of 12 repeated notes, each pitched 100 cents a part. But why do you use it? You can compose music, you can entertain friends, or just play it for hours as a sort of meditative practice. It turns out, the joy of a piano comes from what you can produce.
The reason a piano is a well designed product is because of the ratio of value to effort.
Value / Effort = Value / Effort Ratio
It would be tough to call this the Value / Effort Ratio, so we’re going to name this Euclid’s ratio. In part to pay homage to one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, as he doesn’t get as much attention as Pythagoras. But also because designers will sometimes gravitate to this “golden ratio”. A silver-bullet for setting up layouts and hierarchies. Spoiler though: it’s more of a model than a rule.
We’ll use the idea of Euclid’s ratio as a shortcut to talking about these products that may be difficult to learn, but highly valuable. It turns out there are many products like this. Have you ever spun up a complicated financial spreadsheet? Spreadsheets are one of my favorite tools. The freedom to create your own format, combined with the power of formulas creates this perfect storm of usefulness.
The first time you saw a spreadsheet, did you know what to do? This thing is complicated! I learn something every day when I sit down to use one. But, when I get the little cells set up, change one value, and all of the relevant formulas and sums and references magically update, it's like playing Beethoven's fifth.
Euclid’s Ratio
Euclid’s ratio is an interesting concept to think about when designing, using, or observing products. Aryton Senna has been voted the best and the most influential F1 driver of all time. He won the world championship in 1988, 1990, and 1991. He famously said:
"By being a racing driver you are under risk all the time. By being a racing driver means you are racing with other people. And if you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver because we are competing, we are competing to win."
Senna died tragically at the Gran Marino Grand Prix in 1994. He was famous for taking risks and simply driving faster than everyone around him. Years later, Lewis Hamilton—a six-time world champion—got the opportunity to drive Senna's race car. Before he drove it, he said "I couldn't sleep, I only slept an hour on the flight" (watch the video here). He was wondering what it was going to be like to enter the machine Senna had raced a decade before.
Formula 1 cars are meticulously crafted. Even the slightest change in weight, balance, or power could throw a driver off. Drivers are risking their lives to win.
These cars are not easy to drive. The shifting is difficult, then add 1000+ horsepower in a tin foil rocket. It would be much easier to drive a Prius to the grocery store. Does this mean F1 cars are poorly designed?
Which is a better designed product: contacts or glasses? A chainsaw or a handsaw? Blender or a whisk? Some of the best, most rigorously designed objects are difficult to use. Depending on the context, sometimes this is what you need.
What would we create?
Imagine a world where we didn't qualify great products as easy to use. What could we make? What could we accomplish? Good design makes a product understandable (thanks Dieter). I wonder if we could make products understandable and valuable, without making it feel like a toy.
Going back to Euclid’s ratio, if a product was harder to use, could we accomplish more? I think we could. If we omitted the assumption of products being easy to use—both when creating and consuming—maybe we could achieve greatness more often.
That's all for this one. Cheers and godspeed.