SeatGeek Launches iPhone App

Couple of lessons I learned:

- Customers won't necessarily comment on the design - but they care about it very much. - Having sub-par design leaves a door wide open for a competitor.

Of course, there are so many things that make a product successful and just having a great design by itself may not be enough, but it's one important piece of the puzzle.

Putting it another way, which Minimum Viable Date would you choose?

  1. Cute and sociable. Smells nice, good conversationalist.
     Date involves picking up two packages of cup-a-soup from
     7-11 and sitting on the curb outside.

  2. Heroin addicted, hasn't showered in a week. Withdrawn
     from conversation. Date involves dinner and wine at a Michelin-
     starred restaurant followed by a limo picking you up and taking
     you to a sold-out concert where you're in the front row and you
     have backstage passes after.

This is what Apple got wrong with their maps app. Its appearance is what you'd expect from Apple. It's really polished and likely went through their rigorous pixel-perfect prototyping [0]. But the underlying feature that people expect is accurate mapping. Having a map which is never wrong but looks like an Etch-a-Sketch would be preferable to a highly polished map which gets you stranded in the Australian Outback.

That said, you want to find the right balance. If you're providing the app to existing customers, they're probably looking for the functionality and can deal with a lack of polish. If you're using the app as a marketing tool to attract customers, be sure to make it look good but they may not sign up if the functionality isn't there.

[0] http://intenseminimalism.com/2011/apple-design-myths-a-summa...