Form vs Function in Tech: Your Users Understand the Debate Better Than You Do
I overheard an IT professional tell the following story the other day:
My girlfriend was picking out a new laptop, and she said she really wanted a Mac. She said she likes how Macs look and feel, and that she thinks Apple products are cool. But I told her Macs are a waste of money— she can get a PC that does all the same stuff for half the price. Obviously she just didn’t *get* how tech works, so I had her buy the PC.
What’s going on here? Boyfriend puts performance first. Girlfriend thinks aesthetics are more important. Looks like a classic “Form vs Function” battle, right? In which case, it seems like Boyfriend was right to go with the cheaper option.
Except, of course, that’s not quite what was going on.
Girlfriend wasn’t deciding between a fully-operational PC and a hollow MacAir casing that didn’t have any guts in it. She was deciding between a fully-operational PC and a fully-operational Mac. And, given their equal performance, she wanted the option that also had the form factor— and she was willing to pay twice as much to get it.
Like many well-meaning IT professionals, Boyfriend didn’t see this. He got stuck thinking exclusively about functionality. But Girlfriend moved on from functionality almost immediately. She assumed anything she got was going to work. It was a given, and that freed her to take look, feel, and, yes, cool-factor, into consideration.
“Right” or not, Girlfriend was actually thinking about tech in a more layered way than Boyfriend the IT pro.
The takeaways for IT?
- 1. There’s a reason your users often weigh form over function. And, no, it’s not because they don’t get tech. They just assume the tech’s going to work…the tech part of most things has become a given, so they don’t want to think about functionality for more than one quick second. (Starting to see why they get so upset when the system breaks?)
- 2. When tech has both Form and Function, magical things happen. Like—people are suddenly lining up to pay twice as much for seemingly equivalent tech. Remember this the next time you want to create a something your users will love.
