Design for User “Delight”

Don’t focus on technology and features. Focus on the experience you want to create, and build a system that gets you there. A concept reinforced by the success of iPod and iPhone where the major differentiators are in the user experience area, as opposed to a unique feature set or technology.

As Bruce Tognazzini puts it, The iPhone really is a study in “delight.”

Here’s a great presentation about 7 UX lessons learnt from iPhone

That said, it’s not as easy as “if you build it, they will come”, as Saeed points out, things don’t just take care of themselves. It’s easy to look at successful companies or successful products and draw that conclusion, but unfortunately it’s not true…It ignores a lot of realities of the marketplace such as product awareness, branding, complexities of competition, fluctuating buyer needs, discrepencies between needs of buyers and users, and potential complexities of the buying process.

Both iPhone and iPod were backed up the highly impressive Apple marketing machine and Jobs’ tie-ups with the industry. Creating awareness about the product is just as important. If people don’t know about you, you don’t exist.