Switch - Chip Heath [132]
The engineer is just trying to help—to add another gee-whiz feature that will improve the remote control. The other engineers on the team, meanwhile, don’t particularly care about the calendar-toggle. Even if they think it’s lame, they probably don’t care enough to stage a protest: “Either the calendar-toggle button goes or I quit!” In this way, slowly and quietly, remote controls—and, by extension, other types of technologies—are featured to death.
The Palm Pilot team, aware of this danger, took a hard line against feature creep. When the team began its work, in the early 1990s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) had an unblemished record of failure. Apple’s famous debacle with its Newton PDA had made other competitors gun-shy.
One of the competitors on the PDA market in 1994 looked like a malnourished computer. It was a bulky device with a keyboard and multiple ports for peripherals. Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot team leader, was determined that his product would avoid this fate. He wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists. The Palm Pilot would do only four things, but it would do them well.
Hawkins fought feature creep by carrying around a wooden block the size of the Palm. Trae Vassallo, a member of the Palm V design team, says, “The block was dumb, which resonated with the simple technological goals of the product, but it was also small, which made the product elegant and different.” Hawkins would pull out the wooden block to “take notes” during a meeting or “check his calendar” in the hallway. Whenever someone suggested another feature, Hawkins would pull out the wooden block and ask them where it would fit.
Vassallo said that the Palm Pilot became a successful product “almost because it was defined more in terms of what it was not than in terms of what it was.” Tom Kelley, from IDEO, a prominent Silicon Valley design firm, made a similar point: “The real barrier to the initial PDAs … was the idea that the machine had to do nearly everything.”
Hawkins knew that the core idea of his project needed to be elegance and simplicity (and a tenacious avoidance of feature creep). In sharing this core idea, Hawkins and his team used what was, in essence, a visual proverb. The block of wood became a visual reminder to do a few things and do them well.
There is a striking parallel between the development of the Palm Pilot and the Clinton campaign led by James Carville. In both cases, the teams were composed of people who were knowledgeable and passionate about their work. Both teams boasted plenty of people who had the capability and the desire to do a lot of different things—argue every issue and engineer every feature. Yet in both cases the team needed a simple reminder to fight the temptation to do too much. When you say three things, you say nothing. When your remote control has fifty buttons, you can’t change the channel anymore.
Using What’s There
Our messages have to be compact, because we can learn and remember only so much information at once. But suppose we’ve assessed the core of our message and we have too much information to aspire to the compactness of a proverb. How do we convey lots of information when we need to? The following exercise is designed to reinforce the need for compactness and to provide a hint about how to cram more information into a compact message.
Here are the rules of this exercise: Spend ten to fifteen seconds, no more, studying the letters below. Then close the book, pull out a sheet of paper, and write down as many letters as you can remember. Spoiler alert: Don’t turn the page until you’ve finished the exercise.
J FKFB INAT OUP SNA SAI RS
If you’re like most people, you probably remembered about seven to ten letters. That’s not much information. Compactness is essential, because there’s a limit to the amount of information we can juggle at once.
Now turn the page and try the exercise again.
There