With all the news about the new nest thermostat I thought it a good time to clarify what I meant by well designed product.
A well designed product is one that is intelligently designed for people to use the damn thing. It doesn’t have to be first to market, have a ton of features, or even really compete with the existing offerings in that space. It needs to raise that status quo and make people step back and say “Wow”.
That “wow” factor is why Apple has been so successful. The iPod was a skip-free high capacity long running music player. It wasn’t the first music player, and it certainly wasn’t the last. It defined the category and raised the bar for everything else. The smooth metal back, intuitive interface, and raw simplicity of it made people say “wow”.
The devil is in the details, and those details matter. Those are the details that make you say wow.