Increasingly, successful products all have a new must-have feature, and that is “beauty”. I don’t know if you’ve recognized it yet, but everyone seems to be extolling the virtues of their “beautiful” design lately, and I know that personally, when I’m choosing software, for example, I always want to see what it looks like before I’ll be bothered to download.

It may be that beauty is the new feature, but it is hardly the pinnacle of achievement in the design stakes. That is an honor that goes to Apple, who have transitioned from mere Usability to Beautiful to Magical. Magical trumps all the competition, of course. Magical implies a level of sophistication that mere beauty can’t even attempt. Magical is an unexplainable enigma, something that amazes just through its existence. Now, even for Apple, that is a mammoth jump. For everyone else, still doing Usability, aspirations of beauty are as much as can be hoped for, and most won’t have a chance even at that. Obviously, not everyone can be the prettiest person in the room.

The point of all this is this: in large IT organizations, we always find whatever feature the consumer has now, they will expect and demand in the workplace within two years. Consequently, I’m predicting that we’ll start to have a non-functional requirement around making beautiful experiences when we build systems, and that we’ll be rubbish at it when it happens. Every time technology makes the leap from consumer to enterprise, we never learn.

So, in two years time, we’re going to have a dilemma. Shall we design “beautiful experiences” for staff, when that is going to layer additional cost into a system? I mean, its not like large organizations have service designers just sitting around idle, nor do they generally have a design mentality when they build technology. So this stuff is going to cost more, at least at the start.

I think it will be easy for us all to say “not essential, cut it”.

This leads somewhere difficult though: the comparison between what people have at home and what they have at work is only going to get more odious the more the “beauty-feature” becomes a main differentiator. It won’t matter if our systems are “magical’ in terms of functionality when everyone looks at the interfaces and scrunches up their faces.

My prediction is that there will be further deterioration in the perception of users of their IT suppliers, namely that they can’t deliver to save themselves.

The Beauty-Feature is something that has occupied those working in Innovation Management for some time now. For a detailed examination of this, and other things that concern organizational innovators, read the free, online innovation book by the author of this article.