你的产品具有怎样的灵慧？

The Soul of Your Product - Know What It Is?

"Soul" is a powerful four-letter word - as powerful as any in the English language! Whenever you hear that word, it evokes strong emotional feelings - but what exactly does it mean?

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as:

Soul noun

1. the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life

2. the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe

The great ancient Greek philosopher Plato, influenced by his teacher Socrates, wrote of soul as the essence of a person, being that which decides how we behave.

Okay, we're getting somewhere with our question. "Soul" seems to be the essence or the actuating cause that decides how someone or something behaves.

Does Your Product Have a Soul?
This brings us to the single most important question in this article:

Does your product, whether it is software or hardware, have a soul? If so, what is it? (Okay, two important questions!)

To answer these questions, let us turn to a great 21st century philosopher. A man named Steve Jobs! As many of you know, Steve is the founder & CEO of Apple, and the guy who gave us humans such great products as Apple computer, Mac OS, iMac, iPod, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and of course, the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows.

I can hear some of you asking "Wait a minute, didn't Bill Gates give us Microsoft Windows?". Well, if you're one of those folks with that unfortunate misconception, you must not have listened to any of Steve's speeches. As he incessantly reminds us, Apple created Microsoft Windows - or most of what is in it anyway. Gates & co just copied it shamelessly (shamefully?) and distributed it widely to the masses!

Kidding aside, Steve is one of my favorite "builders". He just knows how to create great products. Wonderful products. Beautiful. Functional products. Elegant. Simple. Products that break the mold...

In his interview with Fortune magazine in 2000, Steve said:

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product.

There you have the answers to those two questions we posed earlier:

Yes, your product does have a soul. That soul is, DESIGN.

Alrighty then, we have resolved this, haven't we? Well, if only it were that simple! Now we're left pondering the question "What exactly is Design?"

What is DESIGN?
Ponder no more! In the same interview, Steve says:

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product.

Okay, so Design is that thing that expresses itself in the successive outer layers of your product. But it is not the veneer.

What does "successive outer layers" mean when applied to your product? I'd say it is not just the look and feel - the colors and images, although they're a part of it. It is the user interface - the whole of it. The way the outer layers of your product interact with the user - the only things your user sees. That is Design. Right?

Steve continues:

The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

On our latest iMac, I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it is much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn't drone all the time. That was not just "Steve's decision" to pull out the fan; it required an enormous engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and do a better job of thermal conduction through the machine. That is the furthest thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started.

This is what customers pay us for--to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasant for them to use our computers.

There you have it. Great design is about sweating all the details - so that when your users interact with the outer layers of your product, the experience is as easy and pleasant as possible.

By this measure - I think most high-tech products suck! They either don't have a soul, or the devil has stolen them!!

Wondering what are some of the ways to get your product a soul, or to even steal it back from the devil? I'll cover that in my next article. Until then, here is to products with great soul.