No room to spare: creating a product definition statement

Apple released their iPhone Software Development Kit yesterday for developers looking to build bona fide, native iPhone apps. Along with it, they included a new version of the their iPhone Human Interface Guidelines.

Apple’s HIGs are fantastic in how readable they are — they’re written in such simple, inviting language. (Check out the icon design guidelines for Mac OS X.) No jargon that you’d usually see in this type of technical guideline documentation.

One thing in particular that struck me in the iPhone HIG is a section on creating a product definition statement (requires free registration). An excerpt:

Before you begin designing your application, it’s essential to define precisely what your application does. A good way to do this is to craft a product definition statement—a concise declaration of your application’s main purpose and its intended audience. Creating a product definition statement isn’t merely an exercise. On the contrary, it’s one of the best ways to turn a list of features into a coherent product.

How cool is it that Apple is providing guidelines not only for how an application should look and feel and behave, but even a process for how you should go about conceiving your application?

The HIG continues:

A good product definition statement is a tool you can use throughout the development process to determine the suitability of features, tools, and terminology. It’s especially important to eliminate those elements that don’t support the product definition statement, because iPhone applications have no room to spare for functionality that isn’t focused on the main task. [Emphasis added.]

This idea of creating a definition statement at the outset is so important; it could apply just as well to someone starting a company, or even just writing an email. In either case, it’s so easy to get distracted and to lose sight of your core goal. In today’s information-overloaded and attention span-underloaded world, we rarely have “room to spare”.