The design intention

I often come across discussions on tech topics spanning finance, strategy, and more lately, Design. Yes, that D-word. My first understanding of design, surprisingly, came from a Microsoft example. Before you wince, consider how Outlook started off as being so different from the rest of Microsoft products. All the data simply resided in the program, having created its own ecosystem of files/folders without the user having to save to the underlying operating system.

I was reminded of this intentional design choice today while thinking about the philosophy of the WhatsApp founders. Jan Kaum blogged about his intention to not sell ads on the platform, asking a simple question: "Have you considered the alternative?"

A staggering 70% of WhatsApps 450M users (100M in the last 4 months) use the application daily. Imagine the impact of a single design decision that sets your firm apart from a plethora of others offering similar services, in a sea of apps that drown any new comer to the 1M+ app market on any major platform. I love writing code in Matlab, R, Python - but I cannot imagine a block of code having this level of impact in the success of any of our creations.

The cardiology department of a hospital in India uses the service to share EKGs of at-risk patients with a group of doctors for immediate response. While Facebook, with close to 1B users, may have less than 25% active users in a month, the impact of WhatsApp is staggering. I'm inclined to think it's more than the code - it's the design intention.