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I'd like to talk about the Nintendo Wii.
Earlier in the month I wrote about how approaching software design from the perspective of an anthropologist was a good idea in Project Management Software Development: A Fresh Look From a New Perspective. I'd like to continue that discussion by talking about how we, as software users, sometimes struggle with what we really need vs. what we think we need—and how software designers need to somehow figure out the best way for us to interact with the software. (I think this applies whether or not we are talking specifically about project management software. As an industry, PPM software just happens to be a really good example of a failed development process.) As I describe in the previous post, human behaviors are pretty complicated things to measure. There are so many variables associated with how we react to different situations that it's difficult to quantify our behaviors in a way that can be illustrated in a graph or spreadsheet.
Love it or hate it, the way my Nintendo Wii was designed is a good case in point. Genyo Takeda*, the general managers of Nintendo's integrated research division, said the following about the possible consequences of allowing convention thoughts about video game design to control the development of the Wii:
"This may sound paradoxical, but if we had followed the existing road-maps we would have aimed to make it 'faster and flashier.' In other words, we would have tried to improve the speed at which it displays stunning graphics. But we could not help but ask ourselves, 'How big an impact would that direction really have on our customers?'"
Takeda famously compared building a gaming console to the automobile industry. Not everyone looking to purchase a car is looking for a high-performance racecar—there is a very lucrative market for automakers making fuel-efficient cars. Takeda suggested that the Wii could parallel this model. The challenge, as he saw it, was that given the choice, users would continue to ask for more and more regardless of how it really effected their gaming experience.
"There is no end to the desire of those who just want more. Give them one, they ask for two. Give them two, and the next time they will ask for five instead of three. Then they will want ten, thirty, a hundred, their desire growing exponentially. Giving in to this will lead us nowhere in the end. I started feeling unsure about following this path about a year into development."
The Wii has been very successful because Takeda and his team focused more on how the user interacted with the game and less on following the conventional wisdom that "faster and flashier" was better. They looked at the process with fresh eyes, unclouded by conventional thought. Which is why my wife, not the typical game system user, made sure we purchased a Wii.
Could the project management industry learn from the Wii?
Most project management software development is driven by feature requests (what end users and developers think they need), without really observing how they interact with the work management process. It doesn't help that the people buying the software aren't always the people using the software either. Most of the PPM practices we use today have evolved from the assembly lines of the industrial age. They may have been great processes for building the Model-T, but they are not effective at helping today's knowledge worker deal with the creative problem solving that goes on within most project teams today.
Of course anthropologically driven contextual inquiry is expensive. It takes dozens of customer visits and hours sitting beside users, watching them interact with the process. Until the industry starts paying more attention to discovering what users really need, verses what they say they need, what the analysts say they need, or what the designers think they need, the industry will continue to produce unimaginative software that is tedious and cumbersome to use.
Could the project management industry learn from the Wii?
Most project management software development is driven by feature requests (what end users and developers think they need), without really observing how they interact with the work management process. It doesn't help that the people buying the software aren't always the people using the software either. Most of the PPM practices we use today have evolved from the assembly lines of the industrial age. They may have been great processes for building the Model-T, but they are not effective at helping today's knowledge worker deal with the creative problem solving that goes on within most project teams today.
Of course anthropologically driven contextual inquiry is expensive. It takes dozens of customer visits and hours sitting beside users, watching them interact with the process. Until the industry starts paying more attention to discovering what users really need, verses what they say they need, what the analysts say they need, or what the designers think they need, the industry will continue to produce unimaginative software that is tedious and cumbersome to use.
Posted on: August 12, 2010 02:20 PM |
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