Building a new product at NewHaptics is different from other companies for a number of reasons. One significant reason is that we are a startup that’s never built a braille display. Being a startup has its pros and cons, but one significant benefit is that we get to start from scratch. There is no dogma. There is no “this is how it has always been done” attitudes that come from being risk averse. We get to question everything.
The problem with questioning everything means you have to answer significantly more questions than normal. For example, braille cells often came in packs of 8 from the manufacturer so many braille displays were in multiples of 8. Does that make sense for a multiline display? Will people care if we have a display with a weird number of cells? Finding the right answer to questions like these takes a nontrivial amount of time and effort. It can quickly become death by a thousand cuts.
“What value does your product provide” is another often asked question of startups and companies building new products. It’s the classic product value proposition that people like to ask then ignore because companies usually don’t have a good answer. Usually companies take a prior version of a product, add some features, make some modifications, package it up and sell it for more. It’s safe, boring, but effective.
But we don’t get to do that. We don’t have a prior version to build from. We don’t really care about braille cells in multiples of 8 because we build our own. So instead of trying to answer a million little questions we decided to tackle the big one first and let it be our guide.
When someone asks what value our product will provide it is a bit tricky to answer since we are still building prototypes and answering questions on how to do things, but it’s based on only one insight and one philosophy.
Insight: We believe a multiline display can enable people to use their computers in an easier and more natural way.
Philosophy: Focus design on user friendly and simple to use interactions.
That’s it. The way we think about building a product stems from that one insight and one philosophy. With those in mind, we can reframe questions from “How many lines and characters to include'' to “How should a dropdown menu look and act”. We believe this is a significant difference in thinking which will ultimately lead to something that people will truly love using.
We still have a thousand questions to answer, but our philosophy gives us a framework to offer up answers that provide real value.
