Nest Labs did many amazing things when they produced the first Nest thermostat, but one in particular stands out for me as particularly brilliant.
For the uninitiated: the Nest Learning Thermostat is a very clever gadget. Suffice to say that it was very cleverly engineered, with the ability to learn your behaviour and preferences and respond dynamically like no other thermostat. It was very pretty and intuitive. It was arguably the first truly smart home device. Of course, for a company founded by Tony Fadell, former Apple VP and ‘father of the iPod’, and his team of brilliant engineers and designers, all of this was par for the course.
For me, the stand-out example of Nest’s truly experience-led approach is this humble screwdriver.
Photo credit: notcot.com
Faddell and his team understood that the product’s success doesn’t depend on just about the product, but on the whole experience. Nest was selling thermostats for $249, and the whole experience and brand association had to be just right. In his book ‘Build’, he outlines the journey, for Nest, as a rough set of percentages:
10% of the customer experience is on the website, advertising, packaging and in-store display.
10% is when you install the thing in your home.
10% is looking at and touching the device.
70% is the interaction with the system through the connected app.
To make the experience as positive and seamless as possible, they needed to really think carefully about every step of the journey. The marketing told the story well. The packaging was beautiful. The device itself has a gorgeous, futuristic and slightly otherworldly feeling, like I remember from the first iPhone. And the app was, of course, well designed.
Nest thought carefully about how users would install it, too. They designed an easy process with simple instructions anyone could follow. They prototyped it. It worked. Then they sent an early product to real users, to install by themselves, and - oh no - it took them an hour to install: way too long, for a supposedly quick and easy upgrade. But then they saw that users actually spent over half of that hour simply looking for the right tools. Once they had those, the job took 20 minutes.
With that insight, framed in that way, including a screwdriver in the box with the Nest seems like a no-brainer. In Fadell’s own words, it turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight.
I also love Fadell’s account of the unexpected consequences of including this tool, up and down the customer journey. After installation, the screwdriver would find its way into a top drawer somewhere, and customers would use it for odd jobs around the house. They’d see the logo. They’d smile. The screwdriver became a symbol of a high-quality, thoughtful brand experience. It was expensive to produce and include: it ate into margins, and lots of employees wanted to get rid of it. But it made its cost back, many times over, both through its impact on customer loyalty, and by saving money on phone support.
To me, this example illustrates the value of good user research, and of taking a degree of responsibility for curating the end-to-end experience. In other contexts, like, say, a government service, this kind of thinking might not produce a physical object like a screwdriver - depending on the user need, you might end up with a better-worded guidance page, or an email notification arriving at the right time. The point is that the product is only part of the experience, and it’s the experience that actually matters to the user.
Or, to put it another way: a product is only as valuable as the experience it’s a part of.