4 December 2019
I work with a number of tech clients and often get asked to act as a sounding board for various ideas. Some of these are truly bonkers and will never work, and some are just genius. My clients ask me what makes a good new piece of tech. This is virtually impossible to answer.
A ‘good’ product can fail badly if it launches in the wrong place at the wrong time or just doesn’t quite get it right compared to the competition (think Sony Mini disc or Betamax, and who can forget the palm digital assistant!). There is one thing that is always true though, the products that make it will always have a KISS principle involved.
KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid
Whatever you’re developing, it has to have been blessed with a KISS.
So my first statement is a little untrue; it’s not impossible to answer what makes a good new piece of tech. They have a few attributes. One of the main attributes the best new tech has is that it is easy to use and doesn’t make life complicated.
When I was young we had a Ferguson top loading video recorder. Peter Kay fans amongst you may be familiar with his take on these; they are the ones with the remote control attached by a wire(!) and they woke the entire house up at night when you rewound or fast forwarded a tape (and fast didn’t really mean fast, in fact, it should have been called ‘slightly quicker forward’). These came with a digital clock and boasted the ability to be programmed to record your favourite programs with ease. That was clearly a lie. The only person in my house who could set the clock and successfully record something other than the signal test card was my mum. And that was only because she spent several days in a row trying to decipher the instructions. The really successful tech would never allow that to be the case in today’s world.
Tech needs to work for the user, be intuitive and easy to understand and use. Many consumers expect to be able to use tech without reading a manual. Ironically, my nephew could unlock an iPhone before he could speak yet my mum still cannot take a photo on a smart phone without in being blurry.
Tech also needs to solve a problem. That can be a real problem, like keeping in touch with friends and family and sharing photos of day to day life, building a Virtual Reality model of a remote factory lay out that can be used to train technicians as safely and as fully as possible or it can be a made up one such as the need to see how many hours of REM sleep you get each night (anyone with a smart watch will know that once you start getting this data, it becomes the first thing you look at each morning!). If tech doesn’t solve a problem (real or otherwise), then it probably isn’t going to make it.
My final piece of advice on what makes a good piece of tech is it has to be accessible and easy to set up. The world we live in today means everyone wants everything yesterday, and even that isn’t quick enough. If your product is difficult to find, has a poor user experience in set up or doesn’t communicate with other tech, chances are it’s not going to have a high take up rate. Your new idea needs to be the simplest thing to set up and get started on out there.
To conclude, that new idea you have that I am going to listen to you explain to me and get hugely excited to help you on your journey with has to have been given a KISS.
- It needs to be intuitive
- It needs a smooth set up
- It needs to be easily accessible
- It needs to communicate with other tech
- Finally, it needs to make life easier in some way.
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