According to Alan Cooper, the “best to market, trumps first to market”. He gives the following examples.
- An ergonomic peeler versus a dinky metal peeler
- Some clunky MP3 player versus the iPod
- AltaVista versus Google
His advice to Interaction Designers, whom he was addressing at this conference:
We need to stop asking for permission and resources and show them how to achieve to seek success. We are an insurgent cadre of revolution.
On the higher cost of building:
The most expensive thing in business is opportunity cost, which is the cost of what you didn’t do while you were busy doing whatever you did do. Thus, it’s double or triple as expensive to rush a crap product to market. There’s no group of consumers waiting for you to ship your bad product to market.
On Prototypes and Code:
Prototypes are software. I believe that there’s a role for prototypes in interaction design, but I believe it’s a very small and limited role. It’s primarily done as a narrative, not as software. The risk of doing interaction design in a medium of code is much greater than the benefits yield for you. We as competent craftspeople should be able to communicate with great precision and clarity what we intend the software to do without resorting to code.
Code is a sledgehammer here. Prototypes are code that has not achieved released. Snippets of disposable code are great tools for design engineers, but they don’t play a large role for interaction designers.
Thanks to Ben Galbraith who is blogging about Interaction Design, including this keynote..