It is what sep­a­rates the excep­tional from the good. Many are con­tent with being good and stop there. Only a few actu­ally go beyond good. And fewer actu­ally believe and get it.

I am a user inter­face designer and I have worked with iPhones and Android phones when design­ing mobile appli­ca­tions for both plat­forms. I had a Sam­sung Galaxy S, the best Android phone of its time and an iPhone 4. The Sam­sung is a really good phone, oth­er­wise it wouldn’t be so pop­u­lar. But it is only an eighty-percent phone. Sam­sung stopped at eighty per­cent because that is all that it needs to be to gen­er­ate a hand­some profit. Any more invest­ments into the prod­uct would only bring dimin­ish­ing returns. The iPhone 4 on the other hand is closer to one hun­dred per­cent. Apple had invested more than Sam­sung to bridge that last twenty per­cent to cre­ate the best pos­si­ble user expe­ri­ence and sat­is­fac­tion.

With the Super AMOLED dis­play on the Galaxy S, Sam­sung is pur­su­ing power-efficiency and bet­ter response times. Whereas with the Retina Dis­play, Apple is try­ing to elim­i­nate pix­els and cre­ate dis­play res­o­lu­tions akin to print. The Galaxy S uses a molded plas­tic shell whereas the iPhone 4 has a cleverly-designed stain­less steel frame which dou­bles as anten­nas sand­wiched between air­craft grade glass. The Android soft­ware that runs on the Galaxy S also has an eighty-percent user inter­face. Its multi-touch physics many com­plain to be unnat­ural. The visual pro­por­tions of inter­face ele­ments on Android hardly fol­lows any kind of design prin­ci­ples. It is on the other hand quite evi­dent that typog­ra­phy and visual pro­por­tions are impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tions in the iOS inter­face and iPhone 4 hard­ware. I can list more but it’s not nec­es­sary as few would argue the iPhone is better-considered.

As a user inter­face designer, I strive to go beyond eighty per­cent. There are both Sam­sungs and Apples among my clients. I try hard to artic­u­late the ben­e­fits of the last twenty per­cent to all my clients. I tell them how most com­pa­nies are eighty-percent com­pa­nies mak­ing eighty-percent prod­ucts. Then I tell them how invest­ing in the last twenty-percent is about invest­ing in emo­tional engage­ment with their cus­tomers while the rest are com­pet­ing with fea­tures and miss­ing the point, is going to make their prod­ucts stand out. This com­mu­ni­ca­tion has to take place with peo­ple in the com­pany who care. They are usally founders and the CEO but I’ve seen pas­sion­ate prod­uct man­agers and even engineers.

Pie graphs as sub­ti­tle progress indi­ca­tors on the ViKi iPhone app

I recently had the plea­sure of work­ing with ViKi – a video fan-subbing com­mu­nity and plat­form where I catch my favorite weekly episodes of Birdie Buddy. In the iPhone app I helped design, one of the improve­ments I made was to sub­ti­tle progress indi­ca­tors which showed how much of a video had been sub­ti­tled in a par­tic­u­lar lan­guage. The orig­i­nal design used color-coded discs. I added the pie graph for added infor­ma­tion den­sity. Although it was more engi­neer­ing work, Razmig (CEO) and Mela (prod­uct man­ager) totally under­stood how much more use­ful this can be for the user and sup­ported the idea. The app is cur­rently under development.

All these are merely nice prin­ci­ples to be for­got­ten unless you the prod­uct owner get it and mean it. Do you care about your cus­tomers? Do you want peo­ple to be happy? Are you in the busi­ness of mak­ing money or are you also in the busi­ness of cre­at­ing value?