TITLE: What Does the iPod have in Common with Prego Spaghetti Sauce? AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: November 22, 2004 9:45 AM DESC: A good design can fulfill a need you didn't know you had. But how can you create such a design? ----- BODY: While waiting for the UNI's first men's basketball game of the year to begin yesterday, I read a couple of articles I'd found while surfing the blogosphere. I was surprised to run across the same Big Idea in both papers, albeit it in different forms:

Design, well done, satisfies needs users didn't know they had.

I found it first in Paul Graham's new essay, Made in USA. Graham relates how he felt after buying an iPod:

I just got an iPod, and it's not just nice. It's surprisingly nice. For it to surprise me, it must be satisfying expectations I didn't know I had. No focus group is going to discover those. Only a great designer can.

The essay itself is about why the US is good at designing some things, like software, and bad at others, like cars. Graham's diagnosis: Americans don't care much for taste or quality. Instead of relying on a sense of good design, American auto manufacturers rely on focus groups to tell them "what people want". So why is the US good at designing other products, such as software? Americans are driven by speed, and some products are done better when done quickly without undue emphasis on getting it "right". Indeed, when I read the essay, the quote that most struck me wasn't the one about the iPod, but this one:

In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working fast. If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea. Working slowly and meticulously is premature optimization. Better to get a prototype done fast, and see what new ideas it gives you.

What a nice crystallization of the spirit of agile development: If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea. Working slowly and meticulously is premature optimization. Graham points to Steve Jobs as an exception to this general rule about technological fields and offers hope that American designers who care about quality and craftsmanship can succeed. Of course, Apple, has never been more than a niche player in the market for computer software and hardware (a niche in which I proudly reside). Next, I found myself reading Malcolm Gladwell's recent The Ketchup Conundrum. Yes, an article about ketchup. Actually, it's about mustard, too, and Prego spaghetti sauce. When Campbell's Soup was trying to reinvigorate its Prego-brand sauce in the late 1980s, they brought in an unconventional market researcher named Howard Moskowitz to inject some new ideas in their approach. This quote caught my eye (emphasis added):

Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghetti eaters what they wanted. But Moskowitz does not believe that consumers -- even spaghetti lovers -- know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. "The mind," as Moskowitz is fond of saying, "knows not what the tongue wants."

Moskowitz uses focus groups -- Graham's bane -- but with a twist. Rather than have the Prego folks create what they think people want and then taste-test it against standard sauces, Moskowitz had the Prego folks create forty-five varieties of Prego, in all the different combinations they could think of. Then ran these varieties against a panel of trained food tasters before taking the options to the people. In many ways, this is exactly the opposite of the Jobs approach, which relies on a genius designer to assess the state of the world and create a product that scratches an itch no one quite knew they had. The Moskowitz approach is more in the Art and Fear philosophy, to produce a lot of artifacts. Many will have no shelf life, but in the volume you are more likely to create something of value. Not stated in the Gladwell article is another potential benefit of Moskowitz's approach: in producing lots of stuff, designers overcome the fear of creating, especially things that are different from what already exists. Even better, such designers can begin to develop a sense of what works and what doesn't through voluminous experience. Design, well done, satisfies needs users didn't know they had. And you can do it well in different ways. -----