I agree that it's lazy business practise. It's the same thing we see all the time in our industry, in all industries. It's the "good enough for now" phenomenon, and it piggy-backs on the "don't know what I'm missing" mentality. Since most people are passive consumers, if what they have is working well enough, they don't tend to spend any time envisioning how it *might* be better. For businesses, the highest ROI comes from innovating in new areas, rather than improving existing ones that have been working well enough.
How often do we see this in our own work? How much time do you spend improving established areas of your software or web sites that are working for users, versus implementing new functionality? Most of us have a backlog full of things we would love to improve, and plan to get around to... eventually... during that magical release cycle when we don't have anything new to design or implement. I look around my home and see so many things that I would have expected to be so much better by now, so much more elegant or automated; the technology to make all of these improvements has been around for many years, and in most cases the changes would be cheap to design and implement. This is a topic that has always riled me up - which is probably why I'm a designer. ;) But in all honesty, would *I* buy that new smart refrigerator or (finally!) usable remote control? Probably... eventually... but what I have is working well enough for now. It took me several years to hop on the Roomba bandwagon, and next to my iPhone, that's one of my favourite gadgets I've ever owned. I'd love to get some of your thoughts on how - and if - we, as designers, can combat this mentality. Cheers, Sylvania User Experience Designer TechSmith Corp. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
