Beat on it Until the Suck is Gone
I love Bear Naked granola. It’s a delicious snack that’s full of flavor and decently healthy. It makes an appearance at least once a day, either as a component of breakfast or as a mid-afternoon snack. Their Banana Nut and Peak Protein varieties are among the most satisfying consumer goods in human history.
There’s not an easy way to explain why I love Bear Naked. It’s good, obviously, but that doesn’t really tell you much. The texture is perfect for me: a good crunch without feeling like I’m chewing into a handful of gravel. The taste is friendly without being sugary or otherwise cloying. The packaging is zipper-topped with a big window that lets you inspect the contents of the bag, evaluate the topography of the granola and decide if you’re feeling like nuts or dried fruit that week.
Last Sunday I bought a bag of Bear Naked and found something unexpectedly dismaying the next day at the office. My bag was missing its zipper top. An email to their customer care folks assures me that this was anomalous — the zipper hasn’t been cut as a cost saving measure or anything. I was surprised by my relief for retaining something so seemingly unrelated to the product itself.
Surely, package design has a big role in the stuff we buy. I’m not walking through the cereal aisle in the supermarket making my granola decisions based on whether or not the package includes a zipper, but packaging helps me establish the product’s credibility. Yet, I found the more I bought Bear Naked, the more the zipper became associated with the overall experience of the granola. The zipper meant portability: I could toss my Bear Naked into my laptop bag and take it with me. The zipper allowed impulsiveness: instead of letting my hunger gnaw away at me, I could easily remove the bag from my cabinet, open it, and shake out a snack without worrying about container management or doing some sort of origami to keep the bag sealed. Best of all, the zipper provided quality assurance: with virtually no effort on my part, my granola would remain fresh and safe from staling and other food-killing yuckiness.
So while the zipper isn’t central to eating Bear Naked, it becomes central to how Bear Naked slots into the puzzle that is my every day life. Intangibles like flavor and texture bear heavily on the moment-to-moment satisfaction of having this stuff in my mouth. Without them, there’s no point and a zipper won’t make a lick of difference there.
What the zipper does is add the barest touch of lubrication to the whole process. It makes it brainlessly easy to integrate Bear Naked into the rest of what you do. It spares you the trouble of having to think, taking care of your storage chores for you.
Inevitable Annoyance
The use of every product inevitably includes the opportunity for something annoying to sneak in, either in maintenance, integration into the rest of your life’s flow, or simple consequences to overall use. There’s a huge benefit to considering those annoyances and including a little packet of grease to ease the burden on your users.
The now-standard auxiliary input jack in most cars is a great example of this: early on, five bucks worth of wiring and hardware turned into a solid, satisfying differentiator for the carmakers who were paying attention to the rise of iPod. Just a little touch, but it meant no lame car clutter, like tape adaptors or FM transmitters. Would anyone now in the market for a new car even tolerate the absence of that simple accessory?
It’s surely more expensive to develop, but MagSafe makes using a portable computer just incrementally less obnoxious every time the battery drains. Unlike the moronically-sized electric schlongs that jut out the back of almost every Dell I ever had to use, MagSafe is unobtrustive, plugs into the side of the machine, and doesn’t even really plug in at all. Bring it somewhat close to home and the magnets sort out the rest of the orientation issues for you. Best of all, it’s impossible to break off the plug.
Modern usability becomes more and more about eroding the minor annoyances that build into major resentment. No one buys a car to plug their iPod into it, granola for the included zipper, or even a computer just because they enjoy plugging it in. But by taking the time to beat back the mediocrity that creeps into those simple elements of using the product, there’s one less rough edge to gradually wear away at the love the user feels for the experience of having it in their world.
Put another way: beat on it until the suck is gone.
