Conceptual Clarity

OK so the pun was bad, but I couldn't help myself.  All puns and jokes aside though, the Nintendo Wii is doing serious business.  This Christmas one of the hottest selling products is the Nintendo Wii.  I bought myself one, as did many many others.  I've never before bought a games console on its release date and in fact, with the little time I have to play games, I really prefer using my laptop.  So why my change of heart?  It's down to the Wii's outstanding product design and therein I believe there are a few lessons to be learned by product managers and development teams everywhere.

The Wii is not the most powerful next-generation games console – its graphics don't stack up against the competition, it can't play Blu-Ray discs (or DVDs for that matter) and it doesn't even have a hard-drive.  So why buy one?  Because of the innovative style of control and gameplay.  The controllers of the Wii respond to the player's movements in three dimensions instead of just the wiggle of the thumb or the press of a button.  It's a concept so simple I'm surprised that no-one thought of it before.  As a consumer it's this that I've valued over all the other features of the consoles and having now played the Wii I can tell you it's value well placed.

So as a product manager for software used by businesses what can all this possibly mean to me?  Well there are several product design concepts that the Wii exemplifies that many business can learn from:

• Vision is key.  If in doubt, have a look at the interviews with the Wii development team.  It's also key at Ephox.  We develop using an Extreme Programming (XP) methodology and for this vision is so important.  Check out James Shore's article on Vision in Agile Development if you want to know more.
• Sometimes your customers can't tell you what they want.  I imagine if Nintendo asked any gamer what they wanted in a console their answer would have been better graphics or more games.  I doubt that anyone would have said "a controller that responds to your movements in three dimensional space".  We experienced something similar with Track Changes.  Clients didn't ask for it as it wasn't something they expected of their online WYSIWYG editor, but our vision told us how valuable it is.
• Changing the balance of differentiation.  Nintendo changed the value curve.  They focused on the control mechanism and the gameplay and reduced the investment on other factors, like state-of-the-art graphics, media and hard drive technology.  This enabled them to introduce a clearly differentiated, valued product for less than the cost of the competition.  For Ephox we've had great success with integrating EditLive! into other online systems because the differentiation shifts from management and control to creating a system that people can actually use and obtain value from.
• Simple is often best.  While I am sure the Wii controllers are technically fairly complex, their beauty is in how simple they are to use.  As a very casual game-player I've never quite managed to get the hang of the XBox controller, but with the Wii I could pick it up and start playing straight away.  As any software developer would know, making simple, easy to use interfaces is very difficult, and it's definitely something I'm focused on as a product manager.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 9:14 am
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