January 10, 2011

Gimme Pleasure

John Gruber made an interesting remark the other day:

“In hindsight, I think the use cases for the original iPad are simplicity and delight.”

This suggests that delight itself (the beautiful execution) is the feature, rather than merely a characteristic of a feature.  That is, I buy and use the iPad not to do things I couldn’t otherwise do, but for the pleasure involved in doing those things.

I find this point of view intriguing.  It gets at some of what I’ve had in mind for new Adobe mobile apps: that they should be about JOY, about pleasure–more like games, maybe, than very sober, precise desktop tools one associates with Adobe.

In a similar vein, Prerna Gupta, CEO of music startup Khush, writes that Not all Products Need To Be Painkillers:

It’s easy to say today that Twitter solves the problem of dispersed information, or Facebook the problem of dispersed friends. But who thought of these as “pain points” back in 2004? I don’t believe Twitter and Facebook are painkillers. Just ask yourself, Is “acetaminophen” really the drug you feel like you’re on when you’re using Twitter? Or does “methamphetamine” sound more appropriate? [...]

If you focus only on painkillers, you’ll likely miss out on a completely different, and potentially much larger, set of opportunities: those that target pleasure. Pornography, sports and coffee are, for example, three insanely lucrative industries, and each of them sells the promise of pleasure.

Your desktop/laptop already offers pain & pain killers. So, in building new mobile apps, can we focus more on aphrodisiacs? What would you like to see?

Video: The effects in Boardwalk Empire

I’m always a sucker for behind-the-scenes peeks like this one from Brainstorm Digital:

[Via]