Invisible Features (2)

Back in April I indicated how quality (and performance) have been the most invisible features of a product while people have been taking for granted. Ease of use is probably the second most invisible feature. Although some do seem to appreciate that. But only if they have previous experience in the field, something they can compare against.

Otherwise it things are simple and just work, they do not get much attention. If things are simple and just work, the users just do not appreciate the underlying problem being solved is actually difficult.

Like flying. Commercial air travel is probably one of the most complex accomplishment: ultra mature and ultra complex technology (materials, propulsion, predictive maintenance, navigation, safety) combined with ultra wide scale operations (pilots, traffic control, airports, security, connections, booking) on a global scale. Millions of humans do this every day and very few really appreciate the complexity. Actually most of them complain on security lines, flight delays, malfunctioning entertainment systems and bad food).

The complaints are actually laughable, as they almost never touch the heart of airlines operations. I have never heard anyone complaining on aircraft engine manufacturers or air traffic controllers. At the same time the underlying excellent performance of the technology coupled with extreme ease of use (buy a ticket online, show up at the gate) makes commercial flying one of the most successful business category. Because of this excellent performance coupled with the excellent ease of use - both being the invisible features.

And this paradigm (excellent fundamental performance + excellent ease of use) is applicable to many other categories. Once both are met, they are considered obvious and set a reference level for anything else. And set the basic expectations from customers. Anything less reliable or more difficult raises our eyebrows, as the difficult (although invisible) problems seemed to have been solved long time ago (or have never existed in the first place).

The same - of course - applies to my own little business field. In 2012 (which now seems ages ago) we started our initial experiments with Bluetooth, as it seemed to have all the properties necessary to achieve performance and ease of use of commercial IoT systems, necessary to make the end products successful. Now - the customers have been appreciating that - and this is the greatest reward for this long bet. At the same time for many this has become just obvious - to take an app and commission a large lighting / sensing system in a streamlined fashion. Which is even greater. Only a few really know what it has taken to get here. And even fewer remember the early days, when lights were still popcorning (2014) and the "retry" button was showing up in the app quite frequently (2017-2018). The devil is in the details, but the technology must work in general. And it takes many passes of the grinding stone to make a rock shine.