Make things beautiful
Are you a professional who has strong analytical skills and who is at the beginning of their career? I have a very high ‘return on effort’ advice for you: Make things beautiful. This advice will help you in any job. The advice is especially helpful if you are an entrepreneur or a product designer. If the products you make are in the physical world, then it is no longer just advice. It is a commandment.
I mentor many early stage startups. I also come across early stage makers in programs such as Invent@IIT. In my interactions, I am struck by two things. The first is how much technology a motivated team can learn when they are solving a real problem. The second is how ugly their prototypes usually are.
I can understand that a maker may be limited by material availability for early stage prototyping, but even the computer rendering of the final vision of the product is ugly. Why is that?
Why do so many analytical folk make ugly stuff?
It is natural to value skills that you are good at. If you are a good programmer, you value programming skills. A corollary is that you value other skills less. The startup folk I mentor are technically very competent. They value knowledge, logic and analytical skills. They value function over form. So they will spend one hundred out of hundred hours improving the function of their solution. They don’t spend any time on making things look beautiful (or even easy to use. The bigger reason many technologists make ugly things is because they don’t think from a user’s perspective at all. But, that is a topic for a future post). It is almost as if they believe that a beautiful prototype is a sign that it does not work well. Interacting with these young men and women reminds me of my days as an IIT student.
In my student days, the standard footwear was the hawai chappal. The chappal was combined with torn T shirts and shabby shorts. If the entire ‘ensemble’ made any sartorial sense, it was only because of an amazing coincidence. Most of us were proud of this culture. I suspect that in our minds, shabbiness was an indicator that we were logically and analytically strong. We could be shabby precisely because of our ‘brilliance’.
Although engineering students are much better dressed now, I think many still believe that making beautiful things is a betrayal of rationality. At minimum it is a waste of time. The ethos seems to be, “We are logical geniuses and hence our work does not need to look good.”
To such young founders, I would point out the example of Apple and Steve Jobs. Jobs was fanatical about how his products looked (and about the user’s experience). From phones to tablets to laptops, one reason that Apple products sell so much is that they look beautiful.
Read any Apple story and you will read about its Industrial Design department. The department challenged its product and manufacturing design people with more and more innovative designs. There would be no compromise with how a product looked or felt. If the laws of physics allowed it, the engineers had to figure out a way to make it. This uncompromising attitude had a lot to do with the company’s success.
But perhaps you aren’t making a consumer product? Maybe yours is a business to business product and you don’t believe that hard nosed executives in your customer industry worry too much about how the product looks? Let me share my own experience with you.
In the early 2000s, I was a cofounder at a software product company. We made products in financial services and competed successfully with the likes of Bloomberg, Iflex and Infosys. Of course our success was because of multiple reasons including a better understanding of client requirements than the competition. But it was also because we made sure that our product looked good. This was especially true when we demoed product extensions that had not yet been built.
We used wireframes extensively to showcase upcoming features. The wireframe would allow the user to click through and get a feel for how the product would operate. The cofounder in charge of sales was obsessed with making sure that the wireframes looked fabulous. I believe that when potential users are looking at your demo, they imagine themselves using it. Nobody likes it when they visualise themselves interacting with ugly things.
But maybe you work in the area of deep tech. Maybe you are solving problems at the cutting edge of technology. Surely, you don’t need to make beautiful products? Well, let me introduce you to Peter Beck.
Peter Beck is the founder of Rocket Labs, the second largest private space company. Peter Beck learned engineering by building things. From rocket powered bicycle when he was teenager, to working with Hydrogen Peroxide in his home to making rocket bodies out of fibreglass, Peter Beck has done it all. Peter is a bona fide genius.
This is a quotation at the entrance of one of his offices,
“Make everything you do a work of art, if it looks like crap and does not work, then you have nothing, if it looks fantastic and does not work, at least it looks fantastic.”
This is for parts of a rocket that nobody would see.
Look around you. People will gladly pay extra not to buy or use ugly things. It is true for you and it is true for your friends and families. Why would the users of your products be different? Start making your prototypes beautiful and notice how people sit up with interest even before you have started talking about it.
But maybe you think it will be very difficult for you to make things beautiful? Let me help you out with some easy first steps.
Developing a basic aesthetic sense
There are many excellent resources in the world on design and aesthetics. However, I am not going to refer you any. I know that you don’t have the time to go through them. I have a simple bit of advice. For the next product or prototype that you are building, go to Amazon and search for your competition.
Let us say, you are making a chakli maker. Amazon may show you something like this
What do you notice? The first thing you notice is that none of the products on the market is ugly. You and your friends may disagree about which particular product appeals most but you would agree that none of them looks ugly. Do this exercise for all kinds of products that you interact with. From headphone cases to sling bags to shampoo bottles. You will see the same pattern
- Successful products are rarely ugly. This is because nobody wants to use ugly things.
- Not everyone will agree about what is beautiful but there will be near consensus about what is ugly.
Over a period of time you will start thinking more of the form of the products and colour combination and materials. You would start asking yourself why a particular material is being used. You may discover that it is because it lasts longer or because it is cheaper or that it feels better on hand in addition to looking good. You would have developed a basic aesthetic consciousness.
You will notice that your prototypes have started looking better and better. Until one day you notice that as soon as you begin your product demo, your audience members are sitting straighter. You can see that their eyes have widened in interest. And this is before they have understood the clever technology that you have used. This is just them responding to how your product looks.
Congratulations. You have made your first beautiful product.
AI is cracking the IIT Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) now. Of course it is. At the end of day, JEE questions are puzzles: well defined problems with unique solutions and AI will have an edge there. In the AI world, you need to Go beyond Puzzle solving
“How to spot a bad expert” in this series has received a lot of attention.
Follow me on medium. Choose the option to get the stories delivered to your Inbox.
You can follow AskHow India (@AskHowIndia) or me (@YogeshUpadh) on twitter or on LinkedIn
