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How do they fix this? They need to do more talking — and even more listening — with their users. Engage with the influencers. Sit down and find out what their d
by panic 10y ago
How do they fix this? They need to do more talking — and even more listening — with their users. Engage with the influencers. Sit down and find out what their developers need that the current products don’t offer. Find out what is making their users unhappy.
Asking people what they want will give you predictable results: complaints about any kind of change and positive feedback about shiny-looking features that demo well. You'll end up pulled in a million directions as you try to account for everyone's feedback.
The traditional Apple solution was to give a single idealized user — Steve Jobs — the power to improve his own experience. Nobody can replace Steve, but I think someone (or some group) inside Apple needs to fill this role before their products can become really great again.
- ams6110 10y agoHenry Ford: "If I asked people what they want, they'd say 'faster horses'"
- mrmondo 10y agoExactly, I find myself needing to use this quote all too often but it is a wonderfully well considered statement on product engineering.
- jay_kyburz 10y agoReally? I have a lot of hay, and it grows in my field for free. Horse manure goes well on my roses. I don't have petrol. I really did want a faster horse.
- redler 10y agoYou're in luck: Maximum-speed horses are indeed still available.
- mrmondo 10y agoIndeed, if you have the money - you can buy racing speed horses and in many countries it's still legal to ride them on the road while abiding standard road rules and avoiding highways. (The term 'Enterprise Horse' came to mind and I had a giggle)
- Lio 10y agoEnterprise Horse you say? You want a Suffolk Punch boiy[sic][1]! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk_Punch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk_Punch [1] boiy, or some spelling there of, is how old fellas round these parts (Suffolk, England) like to refer to each other. :)
- lostboys67 10y agoThere is of course the concept of a "Young" old Boy
- Lio 10y agoA very good point. For anyone wondering what a proper young old boy sounds like I would suggest the following factual and totally legit documentary on the storm of 1987 ...as described by one "Brian from Melton":- https://vimeo.com/130537730 https://vimeo.com/130537730
- ekianjo 10y agoSo what? The key take out here is "faster", so asking questions is not necessarily irrelevant, instead of focusing on making one's horses shinier or more economical. You need to find out what problem to fix.
- lurkinggrue 10y agoThese days all apple will give you is a thinner horse with less features.
- paublyrne 10y agoA thinner, slightly faster, slightly blacker horse that will needs to stop for water a little sooner. I like the 2016 MacBook Pro. The disappointment I felt was that after such a long wait for the update, I was expecting/hoping for a best of breed laptop, with no real flaws. In day to day use I don't actually think about its various (and widely discussed) flaws so much, and I just get on with using it as a tool to do my work. The Touchbar is useless, though.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago> The key take out here is "faster" Even that part is mostly wrong. A fast horse can run more than 40MPH which about all you can expect from a car in a city. The main reason most people don't own a horse isn't that a car is faster. Users ask for things that are obvious. No kidding faster is better. Can we have it cheaper and more reliable too? If you ask most people in 1870 how to improve those aspects of a horse they'll tell you all about horse breeding but that doesn't get you a car.
- lostboys67 10y agoYour ignoring the massive additional logistic costs that horse drawn transport has vs mechanised.
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- jeswin 10y agoActually, churning out better horses is what Apple does best. We are at a point where every other company has figured out how to make a good/great horse, and hence the Apple advantage is diminished.
- bubinubn 10y agoIt is unlikely, although possible, that this quote is correctly attributed. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse/
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- amadvance 10y agoAnd Ford could have asked: "Do you prefer it faster or that it's a horse?" - "I already have a horse." - "OK, I'll make something that goes faster."
- jmspring 10y agoI'd like an early 2015 MBP with 32 gig, faster processor and SSD and no fancy light bar.... Oh wait, that's a fancier horse...
- jmspring 10y agoI'd like an early 2015 MBP with 32 gig, faster processor and SSD and no fancy light bar.... Oh wait, that's a fancier horse...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jmspring 10y agoI'd like an early 2015 MBP with 32 gig, faster processor and SSD and no fancy light bar.... Oh wait, that's a fancier horse...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago> Henry Ford: "If I asked people what they want, they'd say 'faster horses'" From the OP: >>> Once they do that, they then need to go off and be Apple, but from a base of knowledge instead of a set of assumptions — assumptions that seem to be flawed and incorrect. But what Apple doesn’t want to do is start building products the way other companies do, because we don’t need “faster horses”, we need Apple to look beyond what users are asking for and figure out what they really need. That’s been Apple’s innovation strength in the past, and right now, it increasingly seems missing from the products they give us.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- yabatopia 10y agoI'd rather have a faster horse than a skinny, old horse with a touch bar.
- intoverflow2 10y agoThis pseudo-intellectual quote makes no sense when what was actually delivered was a slower horse with 3 legs.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThe typical way of addressing the 'users don't know what they want' sort of issue is to build some really high quality ideas or concepts and then talk with some of your users about them. See what they like see what they don't. This can be done poorly too, I attended a Lenovo tablet investigation which was sad from the perspective that the people who were putting it on for Lenovo were trying to insure that everyone said only good things about their design decisions and the designers were trying very hard to get actual opinions from people. The user experience agency was clearly a wasted expense for Lenovo, and their lead tablet designer reached out directly to some of us with counter opinions to solicit more feedback.
- nardi 10y agoI feel like it's less about coming up with good ideas/questions and more about having the "idealized user." A user with extremely good taste that can guide development. And put that user in charge of everything.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoHow does the current Apple identify the correct idealised user when they don't seem to share the required taste? They need to relearn and engage in user discovery and questioning until they realise what niches they occupy and their use cases and needs. I doubt Apple's former lead would ever have put out a Mac that needs a dongle to connect to iPhone but not Android. I doubt he'd have killed Apple monitors as an iMac sat next to a black LG is just so damn ugly. iOS, MacOS and current hardware shows, oh so clearly, that once notorious sense of detail and overall direction is long gone. As is, their idealised user is envisioning all the wrong gimmicky things and missing most of the details. They're trying to play "what would Steve do?" but not being him they can't play that game well.
- roryisok 10y ago>> I doubt Apple's former lead would ever have put out a Mac that needs a dongle to connect to iPhone but not Android That just says it all really, doesn't it? Macs simply don't "just work" anymore. I feel like they're making almost random hardware changes
- skewart 10y ago>> Find out what is making their users unhappy. > Asking people what they want will give you predictable results... Asking someone about what's making them unhappy is very different from asking them what they want. In my experience, the value in talking to users is in understanding common pain points, not finding solutions.
- Reedx 10y agoAlso the case in game development. Players make great patients, but bad doctors.
- fnordsensei 10y agoNotice that the author doesn't say "do what your users tell you to do", but "find out what they need and what they experience as problematic". Any user research will involve interacting with users, but it's not to gather their opinions, which is almost always irrelevant, but to document their behavior, needs and drives. Users will offer solutions, because that comes naturally, but these need to be turned back into problems before being used. For example, User: "I want a big button in the middle of the screen that says 'print' and then prints my stuff immediately!" Researcher:"So you print a lot during your day?" User: "Yeah, and each time I have to go down a long list of menus, and then I have to reselect the printer each time." Apple has apparently been able to get by with user studies done on a target group of one (Jobs). However, he's not there any more, and the more time that passes, the more it seems that they haven't been able to fill his shoes.
- loosescrews 10y agoSteve was a notoriously hard person to work with. Realistically, anyone who Steve was likely to name as his successor would be a follower, someone who went along with whatever Steve said and told him what he wanted to hear. What Apple needed was another person like Steve, but unfortunately, by letting Steve select that person, they ended up with someone completely unlike Steve.
- Uhhrrr 10y agoTrue, but of course the choice was up to Steve Jobs, not Apple. Also, how the hell would you hire "person like Steve" anyway?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- visakanv 10y agoAs Paul Graham said, "So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup." – http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
- wineisfine 10y agoThis is a very clever analysis. Thanks for that, it makes a lot of sense. It also explains why it's shifted from being a computer company that makes gadgets (Jobs) is now becoming a gadget company that happens to make some computers as well (Cook). In all this, the gates are wide open for Microsoft to score some good points here towards devs.
- triangleman 10y agoHow do you figure there has been a "shift" like you said? In 2007 Jobs was using the phrase "post-PC", and by the time he died in 2011, more than half of Apple's revenue was iPhone/iPad/etc. To me it seems that Cook is just continuing the trend.
- Reedx 10y agoYep. I imagine this is (at least in part) why Blackberry and Palm didn't invent the iPhone. Prior to Apple's entry, how many people were saying what they wanted in a smartphone was to remove all those buttons?
- Oletros 10y agoA lot? At least looking at the evolution of the smartphones in those years.
- animex 10y agoAs crappy as they were, all the windows phones I owned before the iPhone came along were using soft keyboards. Wasn't like something "new". Albeit, iPhone keyboard was a definite advance in terms of usability which it's primary stylus being your finger. The crappy stylus driven keyboard is probably what made Blackberry so popular and the iPhone was a natural evolution of people wanting to just use their hands with such a device without compromising screen real estate.
- Fnoord 10y ago> Prior to Apple's entry, how many people were saying what they wanted in a smartphone was to remove all those buttons? Except 1) Apple weren't the first innovating in that regard. I don't know who was, I just do know Nokia was experimenting with Nokia 770 and Nokia N800 in 2005-2006. True, they weren't smartphones, but they were going in the right direction. Without many buttons. The Nokia N810 had a keyboard, and that was less well received than its N800 keyboardless counterpart. 2) Apple didn't remove all buttons from the iPhone (power, volume keys were still there). The two important changes were: A) Removal of the physical keyboard, replaced by a (by then) well working OSD. Working with a capacitive screen. B) They made 1 main button.
- gutnor 10y agoHe is correct. Blackberry was the leader of the smartphone and the keyboard was his best loved feature. Sure there were other smartphone, Apple wasn't the first, etc But thinking that people would just go 180 was just extraordinary. Apparently people were ready to sacrifice quite a lot for the huge screen of the iPhone.
- olalonde 10y agoThis sort of analysis just screams post hoc fallacy.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- WhitneyLand 10y ago>Asking people what they want will give you...complaints. ..You'll end up pulled in a million directions This sounds dismissive. I get what you're saying but user information is invaluable. I assume you mean, make sure you get information from your customers in a productive way. For example I've never known a dev who wasn't surprised watching a usability study.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gurkendoktor 10y ago> complaints about any kind of change and positive feedback about shiny-looking features that demo well "The internet" wanted a better cheese-grater Mac Pro, Apple delivered a shiny, un-upgradable computer. "The internet" wanted incremental Mac upgrades, Apple added the gimmicky TouchBar to the one Mac model that was still popular. 3D touch, Mavericks' Finder tags, Siri on the Mac, using the watch to unlock your laptop... I feel that Apple's updates are 90% gimmick and 10% substance at this point. I agree that Apple needs to find a new Steve Jobs, but in the meantime, asking customers for feedback doesn't look like it could make matters worse.
- ProAm 10y agoBottom line is Apple has forgotten they are a computer company first and a lifestyle company second. This year they tried to be a lifestyle company first and it was a huge mistake. They'll fix it, I give Tim Cook 3.5 years to right the ship or he'll be gone and they'll try to get someone who can.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoNo, bottom line is Apple have forgotten they're a company that sells awesome - or at least tries to - and have become a company that sells branded stuff, just like every other company selling branded stuff. That (IMO) was the Jobs difference. He wanted game-changing awesome in everything - the PR, the advertising, the packaging, the launches, the personal story, the ecosystem, the design, and the product internals. Sometimes he got that very wrong. Mostly he didn't. But I always felt that Jobs was absolutely consistent about the goal, even when his idea of awesome was as much of a miss than a hit. (As at NeXT.) Cook doesn't understand awesome in the same way. He understands useful, more or less, and he understands incrementally better. But he's not obsessively and addictively dedicated to making things that are unexpectedly cool and insanely great - or at least as insanely great as they can be, given what's possible. Mostly he seems to want to make money by cutting production costs to raise margins - which is fine for a company, but not very exciting for anyone else. The problem for Apple is that Jobs was one of a kind. Not only is there no one at Apple who can replace him, I'd be surprised if there's anyone in the entire industry. The only two people who are similarly obsessive, effective and obnoxious are Bezos and Musk, and they both have other plans. And I'm not saying that as a fanboi, because Jobs was clearly an obnoxious asshole for far too much of his life. But credit where it's due - he was uniquely smart and talented. Apple's best hope might be to keep a very close eye on the AI startup scene and see if they can talent-spot the next major player before he/she gets to billionaire status.