I’m reading Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge at the moment. (no, we are not made of the same awesome, we just happen to have the same strange surname) So even if you aren’t into product design it’s full of great references and insights into to a whole range of innovations over the years. As well as plugging the book to anyone in marketing one reference stood out in particular, and that was from Douglas Engelbart, the guy that invented the mouse – not the squeaky one of course, the one attached to your computer

Without going into too much detail and to cut a long story a bit shorter it has to do with creating stuff that people have to learn to use, versus creating stuff that people intuitively know how to use – the former example a Stenotype, the latter being the mouse.

From a communications and marketing point of view we generally rely on the safety net of the approach that led to the mouse. Yeah it works, but does it work as well as it could have? Let’s be honest, we have all had ideas fail to come to fruition because we have relied on asking and testing things with people. It goes without saying of course that you can only measure against what has gone before and not against something that doesn’t exist. But that’s the problem, evolution not revolution.

The Stenotype on the other hand found the best way to do something and people had to learn to use it. Where as the mouse, whilst genius, is really an extension of writing – something Engelbart got frustrated with. Think about the physical and gesture based interactions that our almost common place now – iPhone, Wii, Windows 7, Project Natal. This could have happened years ago but focus groups and user testing probably slowed it down as much as technological developments.

My long winded, round about point is that I would much rather focus on working towards the end result or solving a problem, rather than incremental compromises based on what people are empirically comfortable with.