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The myth of the lone genius innovator
A quick quiz in "masters of experience design." When you hear the name Steve Jobs, what products come to mind? iPad, iPhone, iPod, iMac, some others, perhaps.
OK, now the same question of product associations - with the name... ready?... Shigeru Miyamoto. Go for it.
Plenty of people will know the answer right off. But lots of people have no idea who Miyamoto is - even though they know his products quite well.
If you've heard of an Italian plumber named Mario, his twin brother Luigi, and their many adventures in videogame worlds, you know Miyamoto's work. Zelda and Link, Star Fox, and others were also his creations. Even the Nintendo Wii owes its design, in part, to Miyamoto. The man knows how to create successful games.
So - Jobs and Miyamoto, masters in the field of good experience. In the past month or so, two major publications have run profiles on them: the New York Times on Steve Jobs, and the New Yorker on Miyamoto. They're worth reading.
Apart from both being accomplished creators of great digital experiences, there's one striking commonality between the two profiles. I'll run the quotes, and you (as quiz question #3!) try to spot the similarity.
From the Times:
Mr. Jobs, colleagues say, is uncompromising. Prototypes and early working products ... are shown not to focus groups or other outsiders, but to Mr. Jobs and a few members of his team.
And from the New Yorker:
In fixing games, [Miyamoto] relies on his taste and intuition. And then he asks family and friends to play them. Nintendo doesn't use focus groups.
Did you spot it? No focus groups. Maybe a few close insiders get a peek at a new product, but otherwise it springs forth from Jobs or Miyamoto (and the employees who build it for them). Customers, with their lack of design skills and market savvy, are kept safely away from the design process and only begin their role when the product hits the virtual store shelves.
Or maybe not.
Lots of attention these days gets paid to the question of innovation. Where do ideas come from, how to find good ideas, how to build an organization or a culture that constantly innovates and disrupts. One tempting archetype, often advanced by the media, is the "lone genius" - a Jobs or Miyamoto, so far advanced in their visionary powers that they can sit inside the corporate tower and generate insanely great ideas, emerging only to show a few colleagues the prototype before sending it off to mass production.
Now, I'll be the first to acknowledge the genius of Steve Jobs and Shigeru Miyamoto. And I don't fault them for avoiding focus groups - I don't do focus groups, either (though I do advocate a different research method called listening labs).
However, I just can't buy into the myth that great ideas like Jobs's and Miyamoto's emerge from a single person's vision. There's always another party involved in the process, and that's the end user. (The customer, the player, the reader, etc.) Great ideas, great products, great experiences come from creating something that is especially useful, meaningful, or fun for another person. Masters of experience design always have an orientation toward benefiting "the other."
Interestingly enough, both profiles above manage to include some data on this point. For quiz question #4, spot the similarity. (Emphasis mine.)
employees at Apple stores provide the company with a powerful window into user habits and needs, even if it is not conventional market research. "Steve visits the Apple store in Palo Alto frequently," said a former consultant to Apple. The design decisions made by Mr. Jobs, Mr. McKenna said, are informed by his grasp of users' desires, technology trends and popular culture.
In the New Yorker piece, noted game designer Will Wright (of the Sim City series) says this about Miyamoto:
he approaches things from the players' point of view, which is part of his magic.
Miyamoto himself describes an unusual tactic for getting his designers to think about users other than themselves:
sometimes I ask the younger game creators to try playing the games they are making by switching their left and right hands. In that way, they can understand how inexperienced the first-timer is.
Understand the customer's desires. Think about the player's point of view. Jobs and Miyamoto, not surprisingly, both have the habit - the discipline, the worldview - of creating things with someone else in mind.
Do you see? The "lone genius" is an attractive myth but not much more. And whether Apple or Nintendo runs focus groups is really beside the point. I can bend your ear about research methods (contact my company if we can help), but the real point is how these disruptive ideas, these great products really get created: they're born through a desire to benefit someone else. If you want to become the next Steve Jobs, get to know your customers.
One problem, I think, is that the vast majority of companies out there don't try to put the customers' needs first. They fall somewhere behind packaging convenience and ease of manufacturing. Very few organizations are willing to make the changes needed to produce what they see as the "right" product for their users.
Companies like Apple and Nintendo often get it wrong, but they're aiming for user satisfaction. Companies like Microsoft, for example, have other (possibly more commercially useful) aims in mind, like providing "value for money." They may or may not hit their goals, and their artifacts (in this case, hardware and software) look similar, but the goals designed to be solved by those artifacts are quite distinct.
A very inspiring post!
Great products from great teams takes tons of empathy. To know your customer is to be able to empathize with their desires, dreams, everyday life and view points.
Truly connecting with customers is how great design is made.
Great post. As a brand consultant, I see the best results coming from a small focused group of people that are both visionary and customer-focused, rather than relying on the fake environments of focus groups. I also advise my clients to gather customer feedback in terms of needs and usage, but not to take individual items like ads, tagline or product names into artificial research environments. People will always offer an opinion if they are asked, even if it's not how they would react when encountering those elements in their real, daily lives. So you have to balance that.
The point is to gather customer input and perspective overall, and then do the visionary job of translating that to a product, a brand, an advertisement, etc. Executives that try to make every decision by research or focus group are simply being lazy and outsourcing decision making - rather than synthesizing overall input from the customer, trusting a core group of experts, and offering the public a vision they may not even known could be possible. The hard work is CREATING and taking the risk based on all the info available.
Jobs and Miyamoto have the initial visions of the product and how the customer will interact with the products. They have teams build those vision and interactions. Both men are in the unique position to force the engineers and programmers to build to the vision. Parts don’t get valued engineered out and scope does not get reduced. You can either deliver to the original vision or work someplace else.
The issue of creativity and how it happens is well portrayed in this article from Strategy+Business: How Aha! Really Happens (http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10405)
Mark: Your post inspired or compliments WSJ column today "How Apple Foot-Dragged to Victory" where Holman Jenkins, Jr offers the hypothesis ... "Mr. Jobs's slowness is the key to Apple's success. His focus on the device, his emphasis on perfecting the user experience, meant holding back, not overreaching. The iPod would only be a music player. The iPhone and iPad would be Web-browsing devices that wouldn't play most of the video on the Web. Apple TV remains "a hobby" (his words) because there's no way yet to deliver an acceptable user experience. And notice that each of these device categories had been around for five or 10 years by the time Apple entered (clobbered) them."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704754304576096180952188772.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The real point I see in your excellent post, Mark, is the implied notion that necessity is the mother of invention and focus groups are not very good at identifying necessity. They are very good a capturing reactions, but no so good at proactively identifying potentials. Since I am not the visionary genius like Jobs or Miyamoto, I have to rely on observational research similar to what these guys do, but mine is much more overt and planned. Asking users what they want derives very different results than actually watching them. As Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Observing users has provided incredible insights into customers’/users’ REAL needs that has helped many of my clients achieve unparalleled results within their industries. In every case, observational research (such as your listening lab process) identified critical unmet needs, even in mature industries, that reshaped those industries. I think that’s the most powerful message in your post, that watching the users gave these guys the insights that launched market-dominating products. Not to suggest that reactive methods such as usability testing and interviews don’t have their place, but in 20 years I have never found anything more successful than observational research.
Peter Skillman told me, "Enlightened trial-and-error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius."
In your post the enlightened part is Jobs' and Miyamoto's intense customer focus.
But implicit too is the constant exploration and iteration in prototypes to get that product vision right. Both work with excellent teams of craftmen. Working and reworking is how they arrive at great, complex, focused products so often.
(They also fail a lot. For all the successes, each has wracked up their share of failures.)