The expected value of imperfection
The price of shipping is imperfection. If you wait for your product to be perfect, you’ll never finish it. Fortunately you can decide which features should be closer to perfect and which can slack off a little. The Kindle DX is a good case in point. Reading and flipping pages on the Kindle is a wonderful experience. On the other hand, using the keyboard is painful. The keys are hard to press. The modifier keys are confusing. Mistakes are easy to make, slow to spot and hard to correct. Yet despite all these problems, I still love the device.
A good way to square the great overall experience with a bad feature is the “suckage to usage” ratio. You can take any feature and say “it sucks,” but that doesn’t tell you anything about the whole product until you factor in how often you use the feature.
37signal's Ryan Singer makes an sharp observation about features on the Kindle by calculating their expected value based on how frequently you use certain functionality. He calls it a "suckage to usage" ratio. I wonder if the engeineers actually took this kind of analysis into consideration.
You can read the full blog post, but the formula he's created is this:
Expected Suckage
Ε(S) = ∑ (Feature Suckage • Feature Usage)
I actually think that this is a good way for accessing a lot of things. If you design something which focuses on doing a single task better than anything else (Kindle as the best book reader, iPod as the best music player, etc.) the goal for all the other features is simply to minimize their expected suckage.
