From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

I’ll admit to being a hopeless gadget freak, the kind who has to have the latest shiny object, if not the day comes out, then within a few months.  One of my addictions is MP3 players, of which I’ve owned at least six dating back to the mid-1990s.

The most feature-laden MP3 player I’ve ever known is the iRiver, a product that was ahead of its time in price/performance. Not only did it boast a spacious 20 GB hard disk two years ago, but it has very good digital recording capabilities. At $200 in 2006, it was a steal.  And yet I barely use it.

Instead, I have consistently opted for the more expensive and less feature-rich Apple iPod.  Why? Because for all its technical sophistication, the iRiver is too damned hard to use. Even after two years, I still struggle with its unintuitive menu system. The iPod, in contrast, is almost joyfully simple. It’s twice the cost and less than half the capacity, yet it’s my MP3 player of choice.

This experience occurred to me recently when I was listening to this keynote presentation from the O’Reilly Media Rails Conference by software development expert Joel Spolsky. Download it and listen.  It’s 45 minutes of sheer fun.

Spolsky’s point is anything but a joke, however. He tells his techie audience is not to let complexity obscure the appeal of simplicity. he cites the example of Apple’s iPhone and compares it to the Samsung Blackjack. In nearly every technical respect, the blackjack is a superior product.  It has more features, better bandwidth and expandable storage.  It supports Bluetooth and many Windows applications.  It weighs less than the iPhone and has a full built-in keyboard.  Yet the iPhone is killing the Blackjack – and everybody else – in the mobile device market.

The Futility of Features Wars

We’ve see this phenomenon repeatedly in the consumer electronics market. Technically superior products lose out to rivals that excel at capturing the user’s imagination. Microsoft Windows defeated the technically superior OS/2 on the desktop.  TiVo continues it to rule the roost in the DVR market, despite the presence of rivals with better price/performance.  The Macintosh is now putting pressure on cheaper Windows machines, largely because Apple has tuned it to work well with a small number of really popular applications.

Spolsky makes the point that developers often fixate on features and trivialize user experience.  This isn’t surprising.  Many developers I’ve known dismiss design and user navigation as detail work. They want bells and whistles, which is what appeals to them.

But ordinary consumers could care less about these things.  In many cases, they will make huge trade-offs in functionality and cost in order to get something that just works.

In their best-selling book, Tuned In, authors Craig Stull, Phil Myers and David Meerman Scott cite many examples of this effect. Among them is Nalgene, a plastic water bottle that is marketed to college students and outdoor enthusiasts in a variety of vibrant colors and branded labels.

Few products are more commoditized than plastic bottles, yet a clever marketing campaign built around environmental awareness and students’ need to express themselves through their accessories has made this vessel a hit at twice the price of its competitors. Thermo Fisher Scientific succeeded in marketing a product originally aimed at scientists to a consumer market because it was able to get inside the minds of those target customers.

The authors of Tuned In advocate rigorous market research over gut level decision-making. Their mantra: “Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant.”  In other words, companies that produce products for themselves often succeed in selling to precisely that market.

User experience does count. Just ask any iPod owner.