If the line was busy, you got an unpleasant beeping sound. If you dialed the wrong number, the system charged you, which was very expensive for long-distance, and then you had to start from scratch. How easy was a phone to use back then? You had to memorize seven- or 10-digit numbers. “Later, at the launch of the Mac, I was struck by something Steve Jobs said about making computers as easy to use as a telephone. I remember leaving the Apple headquarters and driving to the closest restaurant just so I could sit down and take notes about what I’d observed that was so powerful in the design. I asked an employee there to show me a Lisa, and I saw that its desktop interface looked very much like the physical artifacts office people worked with-files and so forth. What made you bet so heavily on consumer routines? No one else seems to have thought of doing that. We actually invented and patented an alignment technique to make printers do it correctly. That sounds straightforward now, but at the time, people were using the old continuous Epson inkjet printers, which made aligning check stock to print on the lines of the checks hugely difficult. So we made sure that Quicken could print checks on a printer very easily. We followed people’s routines as we built out the product’s functionality. Nobody else offered such a familiar interface. You put the next transaction at the bottom, for example, just as you do with a check register. And it wasn’t just about appearance-the interface operated like a check register. Quicken was designed to look like a checkbook. HBR: What role have consumer habits played in your company’s success?Ĭook: We paid really close attention to how people actually went about managing their personal finances before we created our first product-and we got the user interface to mimic those routines.
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