Most-advanced-yet-acceptable principle meets digital product innovation
As a product designer, you’ve probably have learned Raymond Loewy from the textbook and his influence on physical product design. Also, you might not be a stranger to his MAYA principle — Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. In his word, it would be:
“To sell something surprising, make it familiar; to sell something familiar, make it surprising.”
— Raymond Loewy
The principle originates from product design but I have seen many of my friends who works in the sales and marketing industry have adopted it as one of their tenets.
Actually, in my personal experience, I didn’t fully realize the magical power before, it was not until several years ago that I dived into the augmented reality domain, I started to feel the essence of the principle from being involved in some activities. I developed a mobile AR app to see how far mobile AR can reach. I dived into a startup that leverages AR to accelerate the physical product development process. I experimented with AR headset to see the potential. I saw different mobile/wearable AR companies raised, fell, and pivoted. I heard fellows shared the business development stories and people’s reactions. I gradually got the sense of how people innovate on products and sell to the market, and how people say yes to accept some of the new things and say no the others.
Overall, MAYA told me the majority of consumers are definitely into new things but fear of things too new.
Let’s take a look at these examples: Several years ago, wearable and mobile AR were new to most people, not to mention the way to set up AR properly and interact with AR content. If you ever experienced AR headset, don’t blame the product development team just migrated the UX from desktop to AR/VR and make the application unusable, it is just a way to make a brand new/advanced thing to be less new/strange. (And of course, lacking sophisticated AR/VR dedicated UX principle is also another reason.) Pokemon Go leveraged a famous IP to push mobile AR concept one step further, but imagine if they used a brand new IP with brand new rules instead of the one that people are already familiar with, it probably wouldn’t have gone that far. When we introduce our startup solution to potential customers, we always use analogies in their domain to make them feel comfortable, like the modeling tools and collaboration tools they’ve used.
I started to think about a more systematic way to apply MAYA principle in digital products innovation — What does it mean to be too new, and what does it mean to be new but yet acceptable. So first of all, we need to understand what cornerstones make up a digital product.
When we innovate on digital products, there are three cornerstones that we need to consider, the first one is structure, the second one is content, the third one is mechanics.
Structure
In any industry that has been sophisticatedly digitalized, we see the digital products have evolved into a common pattern and structure. Take a look at some examples shown below:
Even without seeing any branding and actual content, it is still easy for anyone who is veteran in using digital products to tell what category each example belongs to. The group on the left is e-commerce, the middle one is social media, the right one is content streaming.
Content
Content is the information and features that the product provides to users, it is the core value proposition, it is the campfire that brings users together. In e-commerce, it would be the products. In Social media, it would be the information feed.
Mechanics
Mechanics is the rule to put all the content and features together to build up a system, and the way that users interact with the system. Facebook has different mechanics from Twitter. Walmart+ is coming to the market and it would also have different mechanics from Amazon Prime.
With these cornerstones, applying MAYA principle on product innovations would be clear and systematic — For any innovative product that seeks for mass-market acceptance, it just can’t be innovative on all three cornerstones, otherwise, it means the product is way too new, too strange.
For example, if a product is new on the content and the mechanics, let the structure stays in the comfort zone. Think about a new FPS game, it gets a new storyline and new items/armors/enemies (Content), new game rules and new system (Mechanics), you’d better stay within the classic structure of FPS game, which is seeing two hands holding weapons in front of the camera you can move around the world map to knock out enemies. Another example, Tinder gamified and innovated on the structure (Profile cards and mutual match conversations) and the mechanics (The game-changing swipe gesture and variable rewards), while keeping the content like everyone else in the industry — The people who want to date.
Innovation is not the most difficult part, we can be innovative on every single perspective of a product. But if we want the majority to say yes to it when it goes to market, we still want customers to see something they are familiar with, and I hope this can help you think what cornerstones you want to innovate.
