trevoro.ca | blogElegant Solutions to Complex Problems

Progress can be measured by how little we do the same thing over and over again. Once you have a process, you can wrap up each piece in a little section, hand that to someone and then press the button that says “go faster”. Things generally work this way. The first car took awhile to put together, but once some guy figured out what pieces you need to build, he realized you could automate and streamline most of the work. Doing it the same way every single time made the price way lower, the ease of maintenance much higher, and resulted in many more sales of the Model-T. As for customizing things, Henry Fords famous line was that it came in any colour, so long as it was black

On the flip side of things we have a culture of consumerism that is very motivated to satisfy their need for self expression. This desire to  be ‘different’ and express ones individuality is often the motivation behind many purchasing decisions. It influences your decision about what car to drive, or what computer to buy, what software to purchase, or what sweater to wear. Every so often a counter-culture will erupt whose whole purpose is to be hyper-individualistic, hyper-free, or to challenge the status-quo which, ironically enough, is actually a method of self expression in itself.  It’s important to note that Companies are like people in this respect as well. Corporate culture and habit dictates a lot of their purchasing and ‘innovation’ decisions.

What if the need to make things just ‘a little different’ is over. What if we have too many choices? What if we just bundle up all the bits and pieces into something reasonable and say “You can have it in two colours: black and black”

We have two very different systems on our hands. One hand suggests that in order to make a product economically viable you need to have a process which makes millions of them. On the other we have a value system that suggests we customize and change things – in order to satisfy our desire of self expression and individuality. Where one decides to offer the ‘customizable’ part is what will make or break your business (unless of course, you’re in the business of customizing).

The placement and degree of customization have a lot of big implications.

1. The more different you make something, the more combinations of shit going wrong you have to predict and support.
2. More permutations = decrease in instantaneous knowledge transfer. For example, if you could make your iPod work 1000 different ways, when you hand it to your friend they’ll just stare at you and blink – nobody cares if it’s just covered in sequins.
3. Hyper customization results in a situation where you also can’t produce enough of something reliably or cheaply, which results in all sorts of messes. This is particularly interesting in software. What gets included as a feature? What ends up just being a plugin?
4. Usability and interaction / retention can be severely impacted. Where do you draw the line between custom color schemes and layouts, and being able to personalize & express yourself through your purchases instead.

(There are a lot of things these points can be tied into as well. For example, it seems as though people are much more willing to accept less customizable control over something if they’re subscribing to a service or purchasing an object that is indistinguishable from magic)

While many industries are designed with the understanding that we need things “just a little different” it also wastes a lot of resources and in some extreme cases delays progress. While I’m a firm believer that monopolies and globally homogenous environments are a bad thing, it’s interesting that the most successfull companies I know of today are the ones that have convinced people that they dont want things different; they want things the same.

It’s the Model-T all over again. Only now you can get your iPod in a few more colours.