Karaoke Creativity: the trap all good product designers should avoid
Summary: Blindly copying designs from one context to another is equivalent to singing bad karaoke. E-mail. Tweet.
How many times have you been in a meeting to hear “Company X has feature Y, so we should too”? Or it may come in some other variation thereof, copying enviable companies like Apple and Google, or pricing models like 37Signals, or “cutting edge” concepts like game mechanics and LBS, or whatever your industry’s leader du jour is doing.
While it’s wise to explore many other products, and to employ best practices and good ideas, the blatant copy & paste of designs from one context to another is a really bad idea. It will undoubtedly result in a poor imitation of the real thing…just like the average person signing karaoke: you can sing the right words to the tune, but you’re not going to perform like Bon Jovi. Moreover, as with karaoke, the performer (or in this case the designer / architect / developer) may think he’s doing a bang up job, but to the audience is often subjected to an awful experience.
Here we’ll look at Karaoke Creativity and some examples, as well as some steps you can take to ensure you don’t fall prey to it.
