It has occurred to me recently that several start-up MVP’s releases have a high requirement of hacking (eg via API’s) to enable them to be truly useful eg Ninjablocks, LeapMotion, PebbleWatch, versus a simple ‘plug-and-play’ approach more suited to technical lay people.
The amount of included functionality varies across them and they all start with a basic set of interactive “samples” either as build kits or an app store style library.
I am curious if this is a deliberate choice as a certain kind of prototyping in the wild – to keep the offering lean while still determining the uses for it; is is a deliberate decision by developers to create a platform because they see the potential for a multidirectional business model; or is it a subconscious outcome due to the developers because they a tinkers by nature?
The marketing material appears to sell these items as having lots of potential for folks to build their own activities and with an ease of language that assumes a familiarity of the work to do that. So I’m assuming it’s a deliberate choice… but for then to evaluate the potential for further development resulting in an off-the-shelf product line, or as a specific goal that provides a self scaling platform based business (contributor and consumer) rather than a simple consumer fed one.
As a ux designer I really enjoy seeing how these offerings shake down over time into use by their creators. Do they make further development decisions to support the desire-paths described by their customers? Do they investigate the gaps for further development opportunities?
I’d love to hear thoughts on this, it’s likely to be any or all of the above.
I know the Ninja Blocks team and for them it was definitely a deliberate strategy of appealing to hobbyists and hackers initially, for both early sales traction and ease-of-delivery. That customer type is attracted to the opportunity to mess with something and adapt it from its original purpose.
I’d say it’s definitely deliberate. Building ‘platforms’ is all the rage at the moment, and for good reasons. It’s hard to make a standalone plug-and-play product really valuable as we all have ‘legacy’ systems/apps/products; new products either need to replace those to a large extent or find a space that isn’t being handled well. I think the latter is ‘easier’ for startups, but this means new products aren’t as standalone as they used to be; they need to be ‘cool’ enough to start using now and gain much more value when integrated with other things. It’s also difficult to scale activities required to build ‘standard’ functionality to make a complete product or provide integrations, there’s just too much work for a small team for too little return, so why not let someone else do it?
I guess it also does depend on the customer segment; the tinkerer’s market hasn’t been touched for quite some time and is probably growing for a number of reasons (the startup story of Apple has been popularised, ‘used-to-tinkerers’ coming back to tinker but with less time for soldering and building from scratch, parents trying to get kids tinkering like they used to, etc.).