Whenever one of these new Twitter celebs crosses your path, I don’t think you should necessarily accept it at face value. Ask yourself: What is really going on here? What kind of twitterer is this?
An Imposter: A fan (or maybe an enemy) Twitter-squatter who has claimed the celebrity’s identity and has not yet been shut down or replaced by the real celeb.
An Agent: A public relations agency has been hired by the celebrity to use Twitter to publicize their activities. The celeb has little to no knowledge whatsoever about what the hell is going on in their name on Twitter, or for that matter even have a foggy idea of what Twitter is. I suspect a large number of celebrity twitterers are of this type, and of course their fans either fall for the ruse or don’t care (in the age of professional wrestling “sports entertainment”, is there any difference?)
An Assistant: The celebrity has an aide, perhaps their secretary or personal assistant, who writes the tweets for the celeb. When I first started using Twitter I imagined a corporate CEO fatcat barking orders to their beleaguered secretary — in the same voice they would have used in the 1950’s to say “Judy! Take a memo!” to get their secretary to grab a pen and paper and ready themselves for dictation — shouting “Take a tweet!”
The Real Deal: The celebrity who writes themselves, with their own bare hands, using a real computer or mobile phone to tell their fans and followers what they are really doing.
I also wonder about the emergence of another, parallel phenomenon: the dual-identity Twitter celeb. This is where a celebrity holds two Twitter accounts. One serves as a public-relations communication channel for the celebrity’s “brand”, letting the celebrity reach out to thousands of followers just as a business would. The other account, though, is a personal account and is kept secret. It may even have an false name, a nom-de-tweet. This account is used for the same thing Twitter is used for by most other people — as a way to keep informally in touch with their real friends and loved ones.
Last night was the second U.S. Presidential Debate. One of my favorite new election-based interactive user experiences (in addition to CNN’s approval graphs and CNN’s magic wall) is Twitter’s election.twitter.com. Here’s a sample of what you would have seen during last night’s debate:
TechCrunch reviewed this site last week. Here’s their review in its entirety:
It sounds like a decent idea on paper: take every tweet about the candidates and stream them on a single, constantly updated site. Unfortunately, while it may be fun to look at for a few minutes, election.twitter.com is far too noisy to be worthwhile. There are no cohesive threads of arguments, and every quote that raises an eyebrow gets repeated ad nauseum. Verdict: Vetoed.
I completely disagree with TC’s analysis. It seems focused on extracting actionable, accurate, or even just coherent information. They’re disappointed in the quality of individual posts and the lack of consistent dialogue. It’s just “noise” to them.
Interestingly, the critique is identical to the initial criticism many people have of Twitter, before they actually try it and, hopefully, “get it”. They say it’s “just noise.” They say “who cares about everyone’s mundane, idle thoughts?”
Similarly, the nature and mechanism of election.twitter.com’s social function is, like Twitter itself, ‘ambient‘: It’s about getting an informal, general sense of what’s happening, not about following specific threads and individual thoughts. Just like with ambient music, you’re not supposed to actually listen to it in an attempt to extract something specific (for example a catchy melody, or a telling quote).
The “hot topics” keywords at the top of the page, extracted from the totality of the current twitterstream, are also extremely revealing. If you only look at that part of the page you’re already getting a real feel for the memes currently in circulation. Bite-sized but potent.
Bottom line: the site is not about finding content with immediate, actionable value. It’s about visiting repeatedly, or watching it flow by in your peripheral vision, without paying close attention. The goal is to synchronize with a certain public pulse.
(This is, coincidentally, what the New York Times home page does for me, albeit at a slower pace. I want to see what everyone is seeing and talking about today, and I trust that the Times home page will show that in a single page view, even if I don’t actually click through to any articles. It’s not about diving deep — it’s just about the broad overview of the zeitgeist.)
This new Twitter feature — this “topic-focused channel”, or whatever they call it — is a great new idea that I’d love to see extended to other areas and topics. It’s ideal for live events like debates, election night, live TV, sporting events, etc. Also for conferences, or even for private groups (a much-requested feature Twitter hasn’t yet delivered on). The idea is that you are really paying attention to something else — Twitter is just the back channel, the pulse of the topic. I can’t wait to see future implementations of this simple but powerful view.
Saturday’s New York Times (in the Business section, of course) had an interesting article about “design thinking”. For starters, it included by far the clearest summary of what design thinking is that I’ve ever read, including from all the design thinking leaders:
While definitions vary, design thinking usually involves a period of field research — usually close observation of people — to generate inspiration and a better understanding of what is needed, followed by open, nonjudgmental generation of ideas. After a brief analysis, a number of the more promising ideas are combined and expanded to go into “rapid prototyping,” which can vary from a simple drawing or text description to a three-dimensional mock-up. Feedback on the prototypes helps hone the ideas so that a select few can be used.
The Times article also quotes IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown:
“Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about divergence… Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough.”
They hype around design thinking has been a little troublesome to many practicing designers, myself included. As I’ve said before, to me design thinking is intended to steer “business thinkers” in a new direction, opening their minds to new idea generation processes — a way of thinking and working that most designers are already intimately familiar with (so much so that most practicing designers find it almost impossible to understand what the heck “design thinking” means, kind of like explaining “wetness” to a fish).
But the Times article focuses on one aspect of design thinking that I am glad to hear: that the idea of design as merely a marketing tool needs to be retired.
The headline makes this clear: “Design Is More Than Packaging”. It’s conceptually in synch with my recent blog post, “Don’t Design the Box“, in which I argue that a design process that begins with trying to seduce the customer with the product’s superficial packaging — rather than seducing the customer with the actual product and the actual user experience — is increasingly going to be doomed to fail in a Web 2.0, customer-driven, design-centric marketplace.
In fact, this concept was also a key point of my recent “Seduction of the Interface” talks. In the talk I discuss how the traditional business structure (in which product design, development, marketing, and sales are all separate disciplines) needs to break down. For new digitally-distributed products, there is often no difference between the product’s user experience design, the product’s underlying engineering, the product’s marketing and advertising, and the “store” the product is sold from. All of these can, and increasingly should, be wrapped up into a single, holistic user experience.
In this new business model, design plays a key role in every aspect of the process — there are no walls between design, development, marketing, and sales. And even within design itself, there is no wall between product design and packaging design.
(I’m presenting it again this Friday at the Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam, hopefully with a few enhancements.)
The topic itself went through an interesting evolution. I started out thinking that my talk would simply be about the idea of merchandising as a user experience design challenge.
But over time, the word “seduction” in the title started to seduce me. I began to see opportunities to tie the two concepts together, to link persuasive user experiences to the timeless arts of seduction. Once this idea took hold of me, so much of the talk kind of magically fell right into place.
Anyway, if you saw me speak last week I’d love to hear your thoughts on how the talk went and how you think I might improve it. In general, the feedback I’ve gotten so far has been pretty good, but I’ve also gotten some really helpful advice on what to change. If you liked it, I’d love for you to toss some stars my way over at my Web 2.0 Expo crowdvine session page (where so far I have 14 votes, averaging 3.64 out of 5 stars).
Welcome to New York City
I was also on the Advisory Board for the New York Expo. An explicit part of our mission was to bring a distinctive New York flavor to the topics, speakers, sessions, and attendees. I hadn’t realized before how rare it is to actually have a web or design conference in New York City. So many conferences in my field are held elsewhere, presumably due to the high cost of holding events in New York.
Attending a conference in your home city has its advantages (no airfare or hotel), but the unfortunate part is that everyone you work with knows you’re still in town and easily accessible. Because of this, I ended up working during much of the conference. I didn’t get to attend very many of the other sessions, including quite a few that I really wanted to see. Also, I wasn’t able to connect with dozens of out-of-town friends and colleagues visiting for the Expo.
One session, however, that I knew I could not miss was Jeff Jarvis’s interview with John Byrne and Stephen Adler from BusinessWeek, discussing BW’s various forays into social media. The biggest of these is BusinessWeek’s recently launched Business Exchange, a new social media product developed by BW — which, I am proud to say, had a little user experience design help from our team at Behavior.
The BX, as it’s called, is a whole new way to look at business news and information. Structured as a collection of topics (covering just about everything important to business professionals), it gives users access to information not just from BusinessWeek’s deep editorial expertise, but also from their peers’ suggestions and contributions from across the web.
Anyway, it was a thrill to see our pixels unveiled in such a grand and public way.
What happens when Microsoft’s marketers design the iPod’s box. How, if given a chance, might this thinking have shaped the product itself?
There’s a classic [1] product design exercise called “Design the Box” in which a product’s packaging is conceptualized first, before the product itself is designed. The idea is to view the product from the consumer’s point of view as they are thinking about buying it, to think about who the customer is, what is important to them, what will make them desire the product, and what makes the product different from the others on the shelf.
This thinking is nothing new. It’s called merchandising. Merchandising is the strategy and implementation of how a product is displayed in stores, how it shows up in photography, how it is described on a web site. It’s a consciousness of — and responsibility for — the final step in the product supply chain.
(It also happens to be the very subject of my talk this week at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC and at Euro IA in two weeks — consider this post a bit of a preview.)
Merchandising is critical to traditional product design and marketing. But in the world of interactive product design, the word merchandising is rarely even uttered. How did we get here?
Henry Dreyfuss, the great mid-20th century industrial designer (and, in many design historians’ minds, the father of ergonomics and user-centered design) was a great champion of product merchandising. To Dreyfuss, merchandising is one of a designer’s fundamental responsibilities and core skills, right up there with things like usability, style, and business and technology constraints. Merchandising, traditionally, is the aspect of a product’s design that makes it desirable before the consumer owns the product — even before they’ve seen any advertising or heard any facts about the product.
It’s important to note that merchandising has two very different aspects. The first is showroom-centered, where a store displays the products it is selling in compelling ways. Think of a retail store’s window displays, the tables with featured products, the blouse-wearing mannequins. This form of merchandising is generally managed by the retailer themselves. In the interactive world, the analogy would be the design of an e-commerce experience: The products that are featured on a home page, the personalized recommendations for users, the ability to zoom in on an item, or to view other users’ ratings.
The second form of merchandising is centered around the product itself, and is controlled by the product’s manufacturer, developer, and designer. This ranges from the design and appearance of the product itself to the product’s packaging and display.
In consumer product design, merchandising is alive and well. Physical objects are designed to allow shoppers to imagine carrying them in their pockets and installing them in their kitchens.
In interactive design, I’m not so sure this is the case. That’s actually the subject of my upcoming talks. For now, I want to focus on the difference between merchandising via packaging versus merchandising via the product itself.
Obviously I agree that merchandising is a critical part of design. I question, however, the idea of worrying about it too early in a design process, because when you do so you are engaging more in a marketing exercise than a product design exercise.
The real power of merchandising is its ability to make a given product look better and more desirable than it actually is. Great merchandising, however, can exaggerate features, hide flaws, promise miracles. It’s certainly a great idea to show your product in the best possible light, and I’d argue that there’s always a measure of deception inherent in product marketing (will the latest web To-Do list really make your life easier?), but I think that the deceptive component of marketing and merchandising cannot be the first step in a design process because it prevents us from focusing on the user experience. Which is critical because, in today’s market, the actual user experience itself (not the promised UX given in the showroom, in the ads, and on the box) is likely to be the most important factor in ongoing user satisfaction.
So how useful can the traditional attitude towards merchandising work, then, in a marketplace where the customer and corporation have so many more touchpoints than just the showroom floor? Today’s consumer is more focused on the user experience than ever, and has more ways of evaluating that experience than ever before. Word of mouth, online reviews, test-drive videos and unboxing photos, and free beta products allow consumers to get past the bullet points and sunbursts.
The “design the box” exercise can be a powerful tool for generating ideas and for getting into the mind of the consumer. It is also, I fear, a trap insofar as it refocuses the designer from user experience to salesmanship.
The classic video seen here, “What if Microsoft designed the iPod box” is a great illustration of this. The video imagines Microsoft’s marketing department slapping bullet points, stickers, and exaggerations onto the iPod’s classic minimalist box. Imagine a product designed with this methodology and you can. (I’ve not used a Zune, but I suspect its simple design would have been a very hard sell at Microsoft if it were designed before the iPod redefined the market for everyone else).
Designing the box was once a great product strategy idea in an economy where a clear line could be drawn between the pre-sale consumer and the post-sale consumer. If a product’s cool features couldn’t be explained to consumers in a box on a shelf, they might as well not exist.
But now, with Web 2.0 products and services, that that line between pre- and post-sale is blurred or even completely lost. Now I think we should focus on designing the product as if the box — illustrations, bullet points, specs, everything — was an inherent amd permanent part of the product, not an entirely separate entity.
Using some clever detective work (about which I will say little except that Google was really all I needed), I think I’ve uncovered the master plan behind the Mad Men Alternate Twitterverse that I’ve been enjoying lately.
I could be wrong, but here’s my theory of how this all works:
First, there are a large number of participants in this operation — not a single, lone writer playing many different roles as many suspect. These people are writers, advertising professionals, bloggers, performers, and marketers. Basically clever people.
And few, if any, of them work for AMC. I suspect some mastermind (Deep Focus, it seems) was hired by AMC to manage this campaign. They subcontracted the work to a dozen or more Twitter “actors”, each playing a character from the show or from history. Some actors may be playing more than one role, but I suspect that most actors are assigned to play a single character.
These actors use Twitter in basically the same way normal Twitter users do — updating “what they are doing” every so often, responding to direct messages, having many side conversations. But always in character. The actors tweet each other and they tweet the “real world” people they’ve been following. Each actor has their own writing and Tweeting style — some stick firmly to the 1962 universe, others slip into occasional 2008 anachronisms.
They also socialize differently, with behavior that mirrors the broad range of real Twitter user behaviors. For example, @peggyolson follows nearly 1,800 people — basically following anybody who follows her. She even trolls through other characters’ follow-ees and starts following new people, just like many Twitter users do.
@David_Ogilvy, on the other hand, has over 200 followers but only follows 23 people — just as some Twitter celebrities often do, carefully controlling who they wish to interrupt them.
Lawyers and Money
So what happened last week when the project was briefly cancelled? Well, it seems that AMC’s right hand sometimes doesn’t know what it’s left hand is doing: the lawyers who hunt down copyright violators apparently didn’t know that AMC’s marketing department was behind these fake Twitter accounts. Once this was cleared up, however, Twitter was able to reactivate the accounts — pointing the way, perhaps, to Twitter founder Evan Williams’s projection that Twitter is going to try to monetize through corporate contracts.
Perhaps facilitating alternate universes will somday become Twitter’s bread and butter? Selling official account names for fictional characters across hundreds of fandoms? We shall see.
Why This Matters
In any case, I am completely impressed with this work, if only for the fact that it radically refocuses where and how digital marketing dollars can be spent while still exploiting Web 2.0 social media in a profoundly savvy way.
Think of it this way: How much would you charge to spend a few minutes every few hours (even while working at your normal job) to write snarky, chatty Tweets in the voice of a character from a really good TV show? Even if they pay you as much as $2 per tweet, then the person playing, say, Don Draper would have earned around $500 in the first few weeks of this project (he’s posted about 250 tweets overall).
So let’s do this for all 20-30 characters for a few months, and let’s throw in a supervising editor and a project manager to keep the project humming along. It seems to me that the whole project’s budget couldn’t cost more than $75-100k — a fairly typical, even low, budget for many TV-show promotional mini-sites.
That’s $100k for a PR-generating, sophisticated, far-reaching digital marketing effort that requires no HTML skill, no information architecture work, no programming or server configurations, almost none of the normal digital marketing skills we normally think of as part of this kind of work. All they need is some good writers, a good idea, and an open-minded client.
I just found out that @benjamin_spock is following me on Twitter. I’m getting the feeling that I’m being sucked in to an Alternate Twitterverse generated by Mad Men.
About two dozen new Twitterers have followed me over the last couple of weeks, and the majority of them have been characters from Mad Men. At first it was just @don_draper, who I first started following based on only a real-world conversational recommendation from a friend. Then @peggyolson befriended me (and for a moment I thought she was a human). Soon I had a dozen Mad Men following me, both from the Sterling Cooper agency and, soon, from their clients and their families.
But that was just the beginning. Soon I had several early-60s Madison Avenue giants following me, too, including @David_Ogilvy and @billbernbach. Clearly the Alternate Twitterverse surrounding don_draper was bigger than I’d imagined.
But now I know what’s happening. The Alternate Twitterverse of 1962 is taking over the real Twittersphere of 2008. With the appearance of Benjamin Spock, it is only a matter of time before Buckminster Fuller appears. And James Baldwin. And Glenn Gould. And Doris Day. And Lenny Bruce, Jacques Tati, Sylvia Plath, Alan Shepard, Jackie Kennedy, Bill Paley, Vladimir Nabokov.
As promised, I’m going to begin featuring some of my favorite Mad Men scenes in which Don Draper practices exquisite creative communication. Today’s episode: Lucky Strike.
One of the most thrilling parts of my job is pitching our creative ideas to clients, whether it’s when we’re trying to win new business or during the actual development of a project. In either case, several creative communication challenges arise:
1. Getting the client to understand our ideas
2. Inspiring the client to give us productive feedback on our ideas
3. Convincing the client that our ideas are good
The first two cases are simply a matter of good two-way communication: every one of our presentations is a conversation between the creative team and the client, and our ideas can and should be shaped by that conversation.
But the third challenge kind of flies in the face of the first two. It’s a sales process, where we need to stand tall and back our ideas with confidence, selling the ideas, convincing the client that our idea is correct — sometimes even if the client’s feedback pokes a few holes in our concept. Of course the best way to keep a client happy is to simply have great ideas and great follow-through on those ideas. But without confidence in your ideas, you’re risking preventing great ideas from succeeding.
All creative people question their ideas — If I thought about it more, would I come up with something better? Has this idea been thought of before? Am I totally off base? But if you can’t stand up for your own ideas, then those ideas wont be given a chance to develop and get better. Ideas are like living things, weak when born but growing stronger as they overcome challenges, learning from failures and mistakes. Without confidence to drive it along and protect it, a perfectly good idea might be nipped in the bud before it becomes truly great.
Lucky Strike
This clip exemplifies all of these challenges. A little background: Don Draper, in typical Mad Men fashion, has been, shall we say, distracted from work and has arrived at this pitch meeting completely unprepared (I don’t advocate this, but hey, that’s Don Draper). The client is the maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
The year is 1960, and America is just starting to learn that cigarettes are actually dangerous to your health. Many people forget that cigarettes used to be marketed as great for your health, helping you stay slim, fighting infection, and all other manner of ludicrous medical claims.
First, let me say that I love watching the dramatics of Sterling Cooper’s pitch meetings, which happen in almost every other episode of Mad Men. As it is with Behavior’s pitches, the Mad Men agency team has a functional dynamic — one person focuses on the company’s credentials, handing off the creative proposal to another. Unlike at Behavior, however, Sterling Cooper’s creative team is embroiled in a cutthroat competition as Don Draper and the young Pete Campbell. I suppose that’s life at a large agency.
In this pitch, the client is given a chance to explain their situation to the agency first. Don Draper listens intently, but when he steps up to bat he immediately strikes out. Okay, so far Draper’s lack of professionalism here is unforgivable. Pete Campbell has a backup idea. But his idea is even worse, and doesn’t take into account the client’s profound belief that cigarettes are wholesome.
Draper, however, has been mulling over his client’s concerns. His initial thinking, when he finally unleashes it, is inspired completely from what his clients told him about their product — that they are really no different from their competitors. But that’s just the start. He immediately engages the client in a conversation about his concept, looking for something meaningful to latch on to, to complete his idea.
After a rapid brainstorming exercise with the client, the idea crystallizes: It’s Toasted!
Then, critically, Draper stands behind this idea 100%. He’s even willing to argue with the client over the idea. “They’re all toasted,” says the client. Draper’s argument makes no logical sense. But he believes in it, and will argue passionately for it, because the idea is a quintessential Don Draper idea, one based on emotion instead of logic. He has transferred the conversation from one about medical health to one about happiness and assurance.
Hopefully I’ll be able to keep these copyrighted — but used here under journalistic fair-use — videos posted here. And please stay tuned for more!
Upon a friend’s recommendation, a couple of weeks ago I started following don_draper on Twitter. More precisely, I’m following whoever is Twittering and playing the role of Don Draper, the main character and fictional creative director of a 1960’s Madison Avenue advertising agency on AMC’s critically-acclaimed series Mad Men, now in its second season.
What’s more, over the last two weeks Twitter has notified me that I am now being followed by peggyolson, bertram_cooper, and several other personages from Mad Men’s fictional advertising agency, Sterling Cooper. I assume this is all part of an AMC-blessed ARG-style internet marketing campaign, and because of that I feel a little bit snookered.
You see, I at first assumed that don_draper was some kind of individual fan’s Twitter-based writing project. Also, don_draper the Tweeter is, unfortunately, not nearly as interesting as Don Draper the character. Sucks to learn that I was pwned by marketers.
I do feel better about the fact that this campaign is limited to Twitter, however, where the characters’ chatty tweets feel like time-warped, ghostly, telepathic musings from the past, voices from characters long gone. Thankfully, too, http://www.sterlingcooperadvertising.com simply redirects to AMC’s Mad Men site instead of presenting us with some kind of anachronistic web site from 1962 (although a non-anachronistic, modern 2008 ad agency site, complete with a contemporary client roster and profiles of Sterling Cooper executives past and present would be a fun promo).
Why did I follow don_draper in the first place? Because as a creative professional — even though I work in a (slightly) different industry and even though it’s 45 years later — I find his character absolutely inspiring and thought provoking. And a good deal of my fascination revolves around his professional skills and talents.
So what is it about Don Draper? In the first episode of season 2, Draper’s boss Roger Sterling tries to explain to a colleague, “Duck” Phillips, what Don Draper is all about. Sterling tells Duck, “Imagine he knows everything you do about this business but thinks like a child.”
Indeed, Don Draper the philandering husband is certainly childish in his tendency to always indulge his immediate desires. But Sterling was talking about Draper’s ability to see advertising as an emotional appeal, based on our most basic childlike emotions of love, safety, desire, and fear. Draper’s gift is his ability to understand these emotions while being a cunning businessman and a strong leader. He finds people’s emotional buttons and presses them, whether it’s understanding the hearts of his client’s customers, tapping into his own clients’ fears, coaching (or disciplining) his team, or drawing on his own pain and heartache — or all of these at the same time — he is able to devise, over and over again, advertising creative strategies that are simultaneously calculated and heartfelt.
I’ve got a few more blog posts lined up to talk about some of Don Draper’s specific speeches and how they resonate for me as an interactive user experience designer. Stay tuned.
(UPDATE 8/26: Turns out the whole Twitter thing was an unauthorized project after all. And what’s worse, AMC stupidly shut it down. Duh. I hope they don’t shut me down after my next posts!)
(UPDATE 8/29: Looks like all the Sterling Cooper Twitterers are back up again. Yay AMC!)
Running shoes must be usable, but it’s their seductive design that really sells the product.
I’ll be delivering a new presentation concept about “merchandising” at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in New York this September 18th (and again two weeks later in Amsterdam at Euro IA). Not about merchandising as in the design of retail environments (offline or online), but about merchandising as in how products themselves are designed to make people want to buy them.
Many UX designers see “merchandising” as another flavor of marketing, and therefore see it as something different from, or even opposed to, good UI design. It’s the evil part of the product design process that says we need to put 100 buttons on the remote control so that they can put 100 bullets on the box, which in turn will help the product sell from the shelves in the stores.
Software developers loathe marketing, so if they think that UI design is marketing, then they will loathe UI design.
The qualities of software that make for a good advertisement or computer-store demo are not the same qualities that make software usable and pleasant to work with long-term, day-in day-out. Often these qualities are opposites.
A shopper may choose the microwave with more buttons, because it seems “more powerful”. However, the shopper will soon find out that it does the same thing as any other microwave, you just have to spend longer figuring out which button to push.
It is easy to fool people into buying something that is against their own best interest.
Don’t do that.
I’m not sure I agree with this entirely. The user experience designer’s job is essentially no different than what the industrial/product designer’s job has been for a century: To design products that people want to use. A product that is empirically hard to use but that people perceive as easy or fun to use because of delightful UI characteristics can be successful. A product that makes a lot of noise, takes up a lot of space, is expensive to maintain, and has a complicated interface might be extremely desirable and satisfying to many people simply because it makes them feel powerful using it, despite the measurable waste associated with the design.
A designer who neglects marketing concerns and designs a product that the target audience sees as undesirable (because, for example, it lacks a sexy list of features or a glossy interface) is just as bad as a designer who neglects production concerns and creates something that is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build (to manufacture, program, whatever).
And unfortunately for us designers who favor elegance and simplicity, there is a large cohort of consumers and purchasers who feel a *lot* better about instead owning products that they are confident have the most buttons and bullet points, regardless of usability or even performance. You can probably throw many Windows Vista champions into this category.
If efficiency isn’t generally seen as important to a product’s users, then we designers who do think it’s important need to make our elegant and efficient products scream out to users “I am simple to use! And (in case you didn’t know) that’s a good thing! Don’t buy the competitor’s junk with all the bloated features — buy me instead and you’ll be happier!”
That’s a designer being a marketer, or even a salesman. But in a good way.
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