We learn by analogies and patterns. Comparability is key. Benchmarking is the tool we have to make sense of things. That’s why we rapidly grasp a new product if someone pitches it to us as “the Uber of…” or “the Brazilian XYZ” or, taking us a few years back, the iPHONE - not a phone per se at all, but it functions as a phone as well.
While consumers are driven by the new, they hold onto the known. Raimond Loewy, the father of industrial design, called his theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”— MAYA. In order to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.
Every product is designed for someone, with a latent need. The first step is to act as an anthropologist and only then as an engineer/designer.
I took 2 examples straight from the article:
On Product Design - Spotify
Consider the experience of Matt Ogle, who, for more than a decade, was obsessed with designing the perfect music-recommendation engine. His philosophy of music was that most people enjoy new songs, but they don’t enjoy the effort it takes to find them. When he joined Spotify, the music-streaming company, he helped build a product called Discover Weekly, a personalized list of 30 songs delivered every Monday to tens of million of users.
The original version of Discover Weekly was supposed to include only songs that users had never listened to before. But in its first internal test at Spotify, a bug in the algorithm let through songs that users had already heard. “Everyone reported it as a bug, and we fixed it so that every single song was totally new,” Ogle told me.
But after Ogle’s team fixed the bug, engagement with the playlist actually fell. “It turns out having a bit of familiarity bred trust, especially for first-time users,” he said. “If we make a new playlist for you and there’s not a single thing for you to hook onto or recognize—to go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good call!’—it’s completely intimidating and people don’t engage.” It turned out that the original bug was an essential feature: Discover Weekly was a more appealing product when it had even one familiar band or song.
In Music
Several music critics have used videos like “4 Chords” to argue that pop music is derivative. But I think Raymond Loewy would disagree with this critique, for two reasons. First, it’s simply wrong to say that all I–V–vi–IV songs sound the same. “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and “No Woman, No Cry” don’t sound anything alike. Second, if the purpose of music is to move people, and people are moved by that which is sneakily familiar, then musicians—like architects, product designers, scholars, and any other creative people who think their ideas deserve an audience—should aspire to a blend of originality and derivation. These songwriters aren’t retracing one another’s steps. They’re more like clever cartographers given an enormous map, each plotting new routes to the same location.
Here’s the story that inspired this post.