I've been fortunate enough to work in quite a few environments where practical jokes were, well, encouraged. Here's a video of the best one ever played on me. I understand it took 5 people several hours to completely cover my office.
Here's what they did to me:
Note: This post was originally published November 20th, 2011.
Call me a geek, but I dig economics. Always have. In particular, microeconomics and its intersection with buyer behavior, incentives, and choice.
To get (more than a little) wonky, I always thought 'dead weight loss' -- the notional loss of value based on inefficient delivery of goods or services -- was pretty interesting. OK, maybe that's a lot wonky. Maybe it's better to think of it as waste caused by bad choices. And those bad choices are everywhere.
My favorite is in software product design. In most products, we add a lot of features, options, and bells and whistles that are simply not necessary. At best, all that bit-bloat goes unused. More probably, users get confused. Perhaps even pissed off. Why do we do this? Typically because some executive, some product manager, or (usually) some committee of executives or product managers gets so enamored with the idea of solving everyone's problems, that they end up solving no one's problems elegantly.
Let's take a simple example. Let's say we're designing a new product (or a new release of a current one). We figure out that there are three valid target use cases for our release and we start planning what we're going to build. We wind up with three different delivery options (A, B, and C below). The obvious choice is either B or C, right? Of course. But what really happens? People argue and eventually we compromise on A.
Going back to wonky-land, if we plot functionality versus the potential target market, the graph would look something like this:
This is fine, provided we don't overbuild. But in most cases (think Microsoft Excel -- how much functionality do you really use?). Depending on how much you overbuild, the graph looks more like this:
In other words, we're wasting time building stuff that only a small segment of our target markets care about. That shaded area under the curve is more than just theoretical. It's a ton of money. And maybe more importantly, it's opportunity cost. We could have put those resources to work elsewhere.
As products mature, it becomes very tempting to add features that move you slightly down the demand curve and add a few more potential users. I'd argue that these resources might be better placed on improving user experience.
Bringing it back from jagged edge of economics to practical marketing reality -- the point is quite simple (in theory). Let's focus our time and attention on a few things that make a difference for a large swath of our target market. Let's aim for elegance and strive to solve our users' hard problems in simple ways.
