How about extreme design?!
This is a “shot” from Dribbbler, showing off a (PS3) game’s icon extreme design. One of the comments to this shot reads:
Allison House
“This is beautiful. I want to play that game so badly…”
I would say this is the secret answer to the secret question “How is it possible for such expensive devices Apple’s building to gain such a traction?”. The Old School tends to answer: “Huge marketing and communication push” and they are only half right; the best advertising plan is only a small fragment of what “extreme design” could mean to humans…
I’m not sure the iPhones are so much better than any other phones; on the long run, each company’s R&D would place their product closer and closer to a technical paramount. But extreme design is a quality that can beat whatever technical quality that product might have. More than design, we’re talking about functional design; “Mona Lisa” may be beautiful, but there’s no possible functionality one can associate it with. You’ll never be able to want a painting for anything else but its beauty.
Apple designs beautiful products, that’s trivial, but they also add “high functionality” to the same bearer of “beauty”.
Digital Trends discovered Apple builds more beautiful products than its competition, so they said “Apple’s from Venus, Google is from Mars”:
“People have a tendency to hold them up and show off the beauty of the design, and the elegance of the interface. While men in general tend to gravitate to technology products, Apple appeals to women better with this approach.”
But:
“The disadvantages to [Apple’s] approach are technical limitations and ugly engineering”
Indeed, they might have some “ugly engineering” issues, but all the twists in their wires and architecture outputs extreme design AND extreme functionality.
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I couldn’t disagree more on the idea that “beauty” is mainly perceived and bought by women (I’d say it may be the other way around, thank you).
In reality, beautiful design brakes the ice for functionality. It’s second to design women get trapped by Apple: because all the others keep scaring them away with their rocket science knowledge needed for reaching the damn “write new SMS” menu…!
I don’t think women are “lured” by the design only, but by its functionality and ergonomics that Apple is able to offer on top of that extreme design.
Take Nokia: they (once) had beautiful hardware, from any perspective. The OS’ user experience though scared the shit out of everybody, so there were no women left in the community. Nokia was left mainly with male clients (I’m talking about heavy users) who although not insensitive, they were used to technological stress for centuries.
What Apple discovered is most women cannot cope with this technological stress men that can sometimes may find refreshing, so they’ve reduced the friction.
