Innovation and the Highlander Principle

It sounds like the opening to some kind of Dadaist joke — what does Highlander, a 1986 film about immortal warriors, have to do with innovation? The answer is: The movie’s most famous line about immortals, “There can be only one,” also applies to the number of true innovations a new product can have.

I learned this last week, at UX Week 2009, a four-day event dedicated to user experience design, hosted by my company, Adaptive Path. On the last day, we focused on the future of user experience, looking at new ways that people will interact with technology. Two presenters separately mentioned that your product have only one innovation per release.

Matt Webb, a product designer with the consultancy BERG, shared the work he did on Olinda, a prototype digital radio created for the BBC. The radio leverages what Matt and his colleague Jack learned from years working on the Web, and included APIs, social networking capability, and modular construction that enable extensibility. While clear that Matt is very fond of Olinda, he recognizes why it didn’t capture the broader imagination — there was simply too much to explain. “It’s a radio, that allows you to see when six other friends are listening to the radio, and you can buy hardware modules that plug into it, and you can reprog — hey, why are you walking away?” Had it just done one of these things, you could explain it much more simply, “it’s a radio that shows you what your friends are listening to.”

In his talk, Matt in turn pointed to a sage post from Justin Hall, a video game designer who recently wrote about how he shut down one Firefox-based game, and launched a Facebook game. In his post, Justin advises:

Be selective with your innovation. Keep as much of your product predictable, so people can find their way to the gem of awesome that you have pioneered. Too much innovation means you’ll have to individually teach each user how to love your product and you don’t have time for that.

It was another speaker, Robin Hunicke, a Game Designer and Producer at thatgamecompany, who actually introduced me to the phrase “The Highlander Principle,” which I find to be a memorable way to keep this in mind.

From 1999 to 2000 I worked at Epinions.com, which offered user-generated product reviews. Epinions was massively hyped, and seemed destined for big things. Not only was it an early user-generated content (UGC) site, it also had social networking capabilities. And the ability to rate not just products, but other people’s reviews. And you would receive personalized recommendations based on your behavior. And reviewers received a cut of the advertising revenue their posts generated. And all of this at a time before Friendster (much less MySpace or Facebook), Amazon allowing you to rate other customer reviews, or Google AdSense.

Epinions never reached its potential, and I think it’s because we were trying to do too much. We weren’t aware of The Highlander Principle, and our innovations were too numerous for most users to appreciate. I also think it demonstrated our own internal lack of focus, and inability to prioritize, to do one one new thing really well. We tried to spread our bets, and that diluted the experience.

There can be only one.