Apple Envy, Likeability, and Breakfast Cereal

With a nod to Sigmund Freud, over my years in UX, there’s been a growing sense of what I’ll call “Apple Envy.”

There’s a belief that the key to a successful, profitable product is being beautiful, and being “likable”.

It’s just like being back in middle school, when you wanted to be the popular kid, and along the way, you sacrificed your health, dignity, and integrity to become something you thought everyone wanted. Chances are, if you wound up looking like everyone else—or even if you did manage to stand out, you don’t count yourself as succeeding in becoming the popular kid. Why? Because your real job then—and now--is not to be a popular version of you. It’s to be the best--and real you.

In the product domain, the big metric the marketing folks drive after is “Like-ability,” so that if we’re able to score a 6 or 7 on a 7 point Likert scale, everyone on the marketing team high-fives each other and feels confident to launch.

This causes big problems with human factors people like myself. Yes, it would seem that we should be able to quantify likeability on a 7 point scale and make some decisions based on some confidence interval…but is likeability really telling us what we need to know regarding how we shape the product experience?

Spoiler alert: No.

I recently had an interview with a CEO that touched on this very topic. I figured I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by putting it out there before my relationship with the company went any further. Appropriately, I was putting my likeability out on the line; I wanted to be clear about how I'd approach things at his company. It may start off a bit off the wall, but I thought this example worked:

If it was about likeability, we’d all still be eating sugary breakfast cereal from our Saturday morning childhood.

I don’t know about you, but if I were to line up my breakfast cereal boxes, my boring adult breakfast-chow would not rate #1 for likeability. During that golden 2 year period when my mom relented on the “no junk food” ban, I ate a lot of Super Golden Crisp (“It’s got the crunch with punch!”), and I have a soft spot for Captain Crunch with Crunchberries, Fruity Marshmallow Crispies, and the old-fashioned version of Frosted Lucky Charms, before the leprechaun went all raver-crazy with the marshmallows.

I have a wonderful, fond, emotional bond to the characters, songs, stories, and experiences associated with those products, well above and beyond my corn flakes, bran, and various adult kibble brands that I now pour in my bowl each day.

If my product purchase and consumption was about likeability, I’d still be buying the products I like better.

But I’m not buying those products. Therefore, something else is going on, and chances are, the criteria of product selection is--and always has been more sophisticated than “likeability”, and the criteria of selection and usage will likely vary per product, and as the user and market change.

Likeability can enter the conversation, but it is not the go-no go metric of choice. Here are just a few ideas that can and should be tested--and designed for, in the product and the marketing materials:

• Price point

• Ease of adoption

• Ease of use

• Ease of service

• Feature set likely to use/price point = Value

And so, to circle back to the Apple reference at the start of this blog -- around the time of the Second Coming of Steve Jobs, TBWA/Chiat/Day ran one of the most beautiful campaigns for that company, "Think Different."

I encourage you to do the same. Let's not strive for likeability, unto itself. Let's strive for the aspects that resonate with our users, friends, and relationships. Let's aim to deliver the best of ourselves, and to never surrender substance, authenticity, and quality.

Think different. Then be different.

#UX #Usability #LevelofEffort #Value #Apple #EaseofUse