Need Invents, Usability Re-Invents – What Separates Timeless Products From the Rest

I still remember what my professor told us on our first day at college — ‘Design is everything’. Society is made up of multiple design elements — people, castes, religions, genders, roads, buildings, cars, trees-the living and the inanimate; the real and the virtual. Each day of our lives, we encounter multiple designs, both physically and virtually. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of these elements have become part of our day to day life. Though some are natural, more than 80% of our daily designs are manmade.

The story of Usability started with the Wheel — the world’s first and finest invention of Usability design. I’m fascinated as I try to imagine how they thought up a design that has stood the test of time — millions of years! Of course, there are infinite variations of the wheel in use today, but none have changed the base design. The wheel stands as a testimony to the success of a ‘usable’ design.

Usability is a buzzword today. Every talk and every design boasts of user experience. To understand usability better, I thought I should go back 25 years in my life. Back to a time when life was human-based, not technology-based. Or in simpler words, to an era before the invasion of the smartphone.

Back then, I had never heard of a mobile phone or mobile anything. Radios were common in everyone’s houses, whereas televisions were not. Fridges and washing machines which have now become basic household elements, were nowhere in the scope of most household budgets.

If you observe, you’ll see that, over the years, the products that we use in everyday life have seen a phenomenal change in terms of appearance, size, features and performance. For example, if you check out the image below, you can see the transformation of a telephone in past couple of decades.

The build went from Massive -> smaller-> sleeker-> bigger . We cannot argue that the each design of the telephone was failure in its time. So what was the need for a new design? People wanted to have a ‘better experience’ and more-simplified version of the product. This is where ‘usability’ played a major role in the evolution of the phone.

The addition of features turned the phone a multipurpose gadget, the enhancement of its usability propelled its adoption and made it an omnipresent device.

The better usability we had, the more we got attached to these gadgets. Like how we started seeking the comfort of messaging over the convenience of calls and the substance of personal meetings.(I know this is all to-gather a different debate!). And as most comforts do, we got too used to it(read ‘addicted’) somewhere along the way. Perhaps that explains why we believe that not having a mobile number means we ‘don’t exist’. Even as I type this out using my iPad, it occurs to me that I could have used a pen and a notepad instead.

In the evolution of any product, change, in terms of user experience is essential for its survival. But every change needs to be consistent in terms of both functionality and usability of the product, as taught to us by the evolution of the bicycle.