Experience Is the Product

Not only that—it's the only thing users care about

by Peter Merholz

In 1888, an inventor named George Eastman designed, manufactured, and marketed a camera that changed not only photography, but consumer products—forever. Four years earlier, Eastman invented a new kind of film, roll film, that was much easier to handle than fragile photographic plates. Now, had Eastman taken a typical engineering approach to designing a camera that used roll film, he would have copied the typical camera of the time, just on a smaller scale, providing an incremental improvement on his predecessors. Instead, he focused on the experience he wanted to deliver, captured in his advertising slogan, "You press the button, we do the rest."

Thanks to this new film, the new camera's functioning was extremely simple. Unlike earlier cameras, the user never needed to open this camera, and there were only three steps to take a picture: Pull the Cord (to prepare the shutter), Turn the Key (to advance the film), and Press the Button (to release the shutter). After 100 exposures were used, you sent the camera (or just the film roll) into Eastman, waited a while, and had your film professionally developed and printed for you.

This level of accessibility began the consumer revolution in photography, and this camera, the Kodak, became one of the first consumer technology brands. By approaching design with the customer in mind, and not simply as a collection of functional requirements, Eastman arrived at a radically different result.

Take another look at that phrase—"You press the button, we do the rest." Eastman marketed the camera based on this promise of experience. But in order to achieve that result, Eastman couldn't just design a simpler product. That would only address the first half of the phrase.

On its own, a simple camera is meaningless, because the entire photographic process (loading a camera, exposing the light-sensitive material, removing that material, processing the material, printing images from that material) could not get any simpler. Eastman's genius was in designing his system so customers could do what mattered most to them—capturing the image ("You press the button"). Eastman located other functions elsewhere in the system ("We do the rest"), allowing the Kodak camera to be remarkably straightforward to use.

In order to meet his goals for delivering the desired experience, Eastman developed relationships with his customers that ensured they remained satisfied. He couldn't think of Kodak as a product, but as a service. This necessitated a factory unlike any seen before, one that could handle complex processing and printing capabilities. Investing in such an operation was an immense risk, but necessary if Eastman were to deliver on his promise to "Do the rest."

For the customer to continue to use the product, she needed to send it in to get the photos processed and printed, and for the new roll to be loaded. Cameras, which were once standalone products, now became points of entry into a service.

Why can't we learn?

Why is it that what Eastman figured out over 100 years ago seems forgotten today? Why do so few products seem concerned with how they fit into the lives of their customers? (Been to a consumer electronics event recently?) Why is it that people still approach products as isolated entities, unconnected with the world around them?

A comment that sheds light on this comes from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple:

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop....

That's what we wanted to do with Mac.

—from Insanely Great, written by Steven Levy

Until the last sentence, you might have thought he was taking about the iPod or even the iPhone. But the quote came from 1984, and demonstrates that transcendent product design is a matter of philosophy and approach. The reason product development has gone wrong is that people stop at the worst time—when the solutions are most convoluted.