A lesson from Volkswagen

Something I’ve noticed recently in the non web-design world that I think web-designers (especially those obsessed with rules about usability) can learn a vaulable lesson from: Most VW New Beetle owners actually in fact use their flower holders.

Why this is important can be broken down into 2 seperate ideas that come together to make a sucessful whole: 1) The flower holders (I’ve heard) actually get in the way a little bit of using the windshield wiper toggle switch. Not so much as to hinder the use of it, but to make you think twice about it. (Again, that’s just a rumor. I haven’t tried it myself…) and 2) VW knows its market with that car so well that they could accurately predict that a flower holder is something they would want. Let’s face it. It’s not a standard accessory and probably never will be, except in this case.

The point I’m trying to make is that branding and market-research do in fact hold sway over usability when it comes to customer experience. Now, the flower-holder doesn’t get in the way of shifting the car’s gears or turning the steering wheel or make the car any less smooth a ride on the road. It would be ridiculous if it did hinder those things. But by accepting the minor loss of having their wiper switch not work like other cars, they make the tremedous gain of having people very happy with their purchase, happy enough to put flowers in it, on a regular basis I might add.

Now, I’ve drawn similar theories about website design from the automobile industry before and have had them dismissed because people have been around cars for the better part of 100 years and websites are still in their infancy, making people more adept at figuring out a car’s ‘interface’ and that making a car move can only be one way out of like 4 total ways (automatic, manual, truck-style automatic, and semi-auto), making it very easy to figure out which way the car needs to be manipulated. Websites, on the other hand, can be any number of navigation styles and even within those, people take liberties with how you get your job done there. And the argument I’ve made against this is that, yes, people have been dealing with automobiles longer than computers/the internet and, yes, the interfaces are much more varied and confusing.. but I also think that there’s somewhat of a sliding scale… sure, cars took 100 years to get where they are today, mostly because of advances in technology. The internet has skyrocketed technology-wise and people are ready for whatever comes next. It’s not that people weren’t ready for cars like we have today 50 years ago, the technology just didn’t exist to create and sustain them.

But I digress.

The most important sentence from above is: Branding and market-research do in fact hold sway over usability when it comes to customer experience, at least when the idea in question does not get in the way of the actual major function of the product. I guess I just wanted to point out the simple fact that people do use their New Beetle’s flower holders, for whatever reason and that the internet could be viewed with the same openness to new ideas as VW had been when someone said ‘Hey. What about a place to put a flower?’ Or when someone at Apple said ‘Hey. What about blue?’

• Category: Design