Soul and Spreadsheets
"The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it" ~ Carl Jung
There's a management saying that goes "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." This is a dangerous saying because it implies that everything needs to be measured. The problem is, a huge part of reality simply can't be measured, it can only be felt, and everything needs to mix with reality eventually.
I've been thinking a lot about this lately because I've noticed people are increasingly reluctant to make decisions with their intuition and I’m not sure why. Is it because we're swimming in so much data that it feels like everything is quantifiable? Is it because our intuition has atrophied? Is there more pressure to not make mistakes and data makes a perfect scapegoat? Whatever it is, we are not doing ourselves any favours.
Numbers and data are comforting. They're certain, they can be analyzed, insights can be gathered, conclusions made. Life within the edges of a spreadsheet is predictable and that feels reassuring, but at some point your product must leave the nest and deal with the market.
When it comes to designing products for people, you can't ignore the fact that people aren't simple data-driven, logical creatures. We don't have metrics on how happy our partners make us, the fun-factor a friend contributes when we invite them to a party, or the ROI of kids. We don't need to explain it, we just like having these people around. Similarly, some products feel good and make us smile, and others don't. Some products feel good in our hands, and others don't.
For the first several years of touchscreen smartphones, the iPhone felt much smoother to scroll than Android. There was no spreadsheet anywhere at Apple HQ that showed the positive ROI of the investment in this technology. Some things can't be measured but that doesn't make them not real, not important, or not financially valuable. In so many companies though, if something can't be tracked in a line on a spreadsheet, it doesn't get built. I've seen so many features die because there wasn't enough data to support a business case, even though I knew intuitively they would matter to users. This is part of the reason I’m building my own app – I get to test, tune, and prove my intuition.
The all-time great consumer product companies consider the spreadsheet and the soul. The justifiable and the unexplainable. Everything needs to make financial sense but it also needs to connect with something deeper.
The soul and the spreadsheet – you need both.
Examples in the wild
These are a few of my favourite examples of places where soul and spreadsheet are in harmony.
The breathing light introduced in 2002 on Macintosh laptops made them more endearing and approachable to early computer users.
Sleep light on Macs ("the breathing light")
On early Macs, when the computer was asleep, the light on the outside "breathed" like a sleeping person. This is one of my all-time favourite Apple design details and impossible to quantify the benefit. However, it had sound logic behind it. At a time when computers were intimidating, it made them friendlier and more endearing which made them approachable to more people.
PS… this wasn’t a matter of a simple pulsing light. There was a mountain of effort and attention to detail required to make it actually feel human. This article goes into all the crazy details – https://avital.ca/notes/a-closer-look-at-apples-breathing-light
There was certainly no focus groups that came up with the design of the Tesla Cybertruck – this was an Elon Musk gut call.
Tesla Cybertruck
The jury is out on whether the styling of the Cybertruck will be successful in the market but there's no question the decision came directly from the gut of Elon Musk. For the record, I believe it will be successful and, more importantly, further build the trailblazing association to the Tesla brand, which definitely has value.
9-time world champion Valentino Rossi talking to his bike before a race. He believed these machines had a soul.
Valentino Rossi and his bike
To build and tune a race motorcycle is an incredible feat of engineering – i.e. lots of science, data, calculation, analysis, etc. Yet the connection with the rider is an equally (if not more!) critical part of the picture. Here, Valentino Rossi (9-time world champion), talks to his bike as part of his pre-race ritual. He has said that to him his bike is more than just machine, it has a soul.
The RememBear lock screen took weeks and weeks to make and perfect.
RememBear lock screen
This is the lock screen we created for the RememBear password manager. It took many, many weeks to come up with and build this design and there was definitely no ROI calculated for that time. We won't ever know if the financial investment was worth it, but the emotional payoff for our users and the team certainly was.
This Apple video for more slow motion examples of how incredibly responsive this interaction is – https://youtu.be/gttSJA-kDmQ?t=554
Apple’s “Fluid UI” design
Another Apple example, this time the design of the interaction when you swipe up to go home on newer iPhones. The amount of effort put into making this feel right was staggering and it's why the iPhone has always just “felt better” than other phones. Again, the investment is rooted in the belief that an interface that feels real will sell more phones, even though it's impossible to quantify how much.
This Apple video shows slow motion examples of how incredibly responsive this interaction is – https://youtu.be/gttSJA-kDmQ?t=554
Your phone frosts up like a window on a cold day in the Yahoo Weather app
Yahoo Weather app
This is a screenshot from the Yahoo Weather app. Notice the little frost crystals on the corners of the screen on a cold day – it’s as if your phone is a window to the outside. This always stuck with me as an example of a “little big detail” – something small and arguably unnecessary, but simultaneously important. That Yahoo app lived on my home screen for years because of the attention to detail of the designers.