Analogue innovation (doing one thing well)
At an audiology appointment in the summer, I was given a test that involved the use of a very analogue-looking hearing test machine. It was a beige unit with a handful of buttons. Something close to the feel of the Atari and Commodore computers I first used in the 1990s.
Making conversation, I asked the consultant if they were due an upgrade. They answered: “We’re not short of new and more modern kit, but this is still by far the best at what it does.”
The best at what it does is useful framing. This type of device was of an era where it was designed to do a specific thing, consistently producing accurate results.
To take another example, I love my Gaggia Classic coffee machine. It’s an analogue design – the latest model has the same basic features and buttons, which have only been slightly adapted from what you could buy 20 years ago.
The Classic is simple to use and gives you the tools you need to consistently make a good coffee. No additional features, it just does one thing well.
The art of making a product that does one thing well has arguably been lost. With so many modern devices, digital overwhelm is everywhere. It’s design without trade-offs. The constraints used to be that products had to focus on a single function or task, or were limited by computing power or what was possible with engineering.
Instead, the default of modern devices, apps and products has become features and personalisation – tied to marketing to sell more to consumers or commercial buyers, which extends to the latest audiology tech.
The ability to do one thing well is the sort of care in product design that’s starting to look increasingly radical.
Around the same time as my appointment, Amy Hoy shared some thoughts on Bluesky related to this subject. Amy was talking about how reading on eink then shifting to a smartphone is a poor user experience. And that if Apple had any innovation left, they’d be making the world’s best eink-type device …The point here was that younger people are now “all over digital overwhelm and concerned about their eyes.” The extension of this is that there are groups becoming increasingly interested in dumb phones, minimal phones, eink, etc.
Amy’s point was that most of these products aren’t very good at the moment (“they suck”), and that Apple could probably design them better than anyone else (at least a previous version of Apple might be capable of that).
The point is we’re seeing new trends. Where people want limits, and devices that do one thing well. We’re all overwhelmed, and we long for focus. We want machines to give us quality and consistency, working within more considered constraints. It’s the type of simplicity many of us grew up with, instead of the everything-all-at-once promises of modern feature-heavy tech.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.