Beauty is the new must-have feature

 There is a new must-have feature in tech products, and that is "beauty". I don't know if you've noticed, but everyone seems to be advertising their "beautiful" design lately, and I know that when I'm choosing software at home, I always want to see what it looks like before I even bother to download.

Beauty may be the new feature, but it is hardly the technological high-ground in the design stakes. That honour goes to Apple, who have gone from Usability, to Beautiful, to Magical. Apparently, when you have something that is "magical", you've really just trumped all competition. Magical implies things that mere beauty doesn't even attempt. Magical is unexplainable, an enigma that amazes just by being.  Even for Apple, that's a pretty big jump. The rest of us, still doing Usability, can only aspire to Beauty, I suspect, and most of us won't have even a chance of that. Not everyone can be the prettiest person in the room.

Anyway, there is a point to all this, and it is this: we in large IT organizations always find that whatever feature the consumer has now, they will demand in the workplace in the next two years. Consequently, I'm predicting that we'll start to have a non-functional requirement around making beautiful experiences when we build systems, and that we'll be rubbish at it when it happens. We are always surprised when stuff makes the jump from consumer to enterprise, and we never learn each time it happens.

So, in two years time, we're going to have a dilemma. Shall we design "beautiful experiences" for staff, when that is going to layer additional cost into a system? I mean, its not like large organizations have service designers just sitting around idle, nor do they generally have a design mentality when they build technology. So this stuff is going to cost more, at least at the start.

I think it will be easy for us all to say "not essential, cut it".

This leads somewhere difficult though: the comparison between what people have at home and what they have at work is only going to get more odious the more the "beauty-feature" becomes a main differentiator. It won't matter if our systems are "magical' in terms of functionality when everyone looks at the interfaces and scrunches up their faces.

My prediction is further deterioration in the perception some users have of their IT partners and their capability to deliver.

Comments

[Fiona]

Another excellent and thought-provoking post, James.

I guess it all comes down to how you quantify the benefits of staff morale in your business case.

[AMP Mills]

Excellent post James.

Though I question your rationale behind saying "Shall we design beautiful experiences for staff, when that is going to layer additional cost into a system?".

From my experience, when designing a system usability is one of the first requirements (and you can't cut this cost) and if usability is done right then this will influence the feelings users have towards the system.

As you say, not everybody in the room can be the prettiest, but it doesn't mean those that aren't still can't turn heads. Look at Google - not "shiny" but it does what it does very well and people love it's simple design.

[Stephen]

Quite an interesting word – Beauty, e.g. ‘Beauty in the eye of the beholder’, ‘Beauty is only skin-deep’ etc.
Perhaps there is something more needed e.g. a sort of ‘Feng shui-ness’ combined with beauty? There does seem to be a number of design attributes that we should all aspire too, perhaps we should try to codify them and say what they are? Interesting how some things age and others remain timeless, or have an ability to adapt or change.