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Comment by russell | Hacker News Reader

He says the problem is design by focus groups. Consumers know exactly what they want, but when a company produces it, they go buy something else more interesting. I've tried using focus groups back in the last century. It doesnt produce anything useful, except when you are looking for flaws in your product.

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The problem is that so often users will express their desires not in the most distilled form, they will typically express them in the form of some unimplemented solution that they have arrived at via a process of mental satisficing. They don't know how to design software, or hardware, and they damned sure don't know how it works either. But they sure as hell know that if your product would "just" do this one little thing it would help them out.

The problem, of course, is that you then end up delegating design to people who lack the expertise. You can end up implementing ridiculous features if you just implement suggestions uncritically. For example, if you sell a sports car that people think should be more powerful they could express that by saying it should have a bigger engine, even though there are many ways to approach that problem (EFI programming, turbo chargers, lighter frame, different gear box, etc.) If you end up doing this a lot you end up with a big ball of mud design-wise as everyone's disparate needs and half-thought-out solutions collides with each other.

It takes a lot of effort to take the needs of customers and distill it down into a core set of functions and then tie those functions together in an elegant manner in a cohesive and highly useful design.

If you look at a lot of the "also ran" products from any given genre you will notice a trend towards a chaotic implementation of a laundry list of features whereas the market leaders tend to present a more elegant and cohesive design, even sometimes at the expensive of a handful of features.

Great point. Consumers are also heavily biased towards what they already know or see in similar devices - "oh, if it had a removable battery, I need that" or "I need it to vibrate when I type on it," and so on. They might all be valid desires by the consumer, but it doesn't mean it has to be there. Establishing the correct prioritization of features is the principle goal of these product development teams, and Apple seems to be winning there.

Surely because what a person claims they want often varies drastically from what they actually want.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spagh...

Nonsense - if it wasn't for focus groups we wouldn't have been able to launch our new car with improved whip holder!

Well, that's better than our focus group; they just want faster horses.

Ours insisted on backwards compatibility

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