A Reframe: Products as Windows
“Why did the window go to the doctor?”
“Because it was feeling a bit framed.”
My heart rate slowed down and stabilized as I took the corner leading home. It had been pumping hard for the past 25 minutes and doing heavy duty work while I attempted a new personal best for a 5k run.
I remember that run vividly because of the mental connections I made next. I had been listening to an audiobook where a mention of perspective shift and reframing came up just as a security truck passed by. This truck had its windows completely welded shut. From a construction and functional point of view, I wondered why would the car makers add the windows to the truck, and introduce weakness in the structure, if they were going to weld it shut anyway? The obvious answer was that the cars were built first to be generic and adapted for this particular use. That thought raised the question, how do we design products, physical or digital, with a view towards how they evolve, and as their intended use changes? Something to ponder.
Back to the real world. We had not long ago stopped working on Playmat, our mobile first games platform for emerging markets. The zero interest rate era was over. Raising funds for startups was getting harder, and we had made an already hard space look harder with how we had strategized building up the platform. As of that moment, as a mental exercise, my thoughts got narrowly focused on reframing the product. As a window.
A window is designed with a few things in mind. Who is going to use the window? What do they expect out of it, where is it placed, does it serve more than one function? How does its utility change over time? You could draw a parallel in the physical form and functionality or on a conceptual level. Let’s focus on the latter.
Consider the window of a car. You’d want to roll down the windows and feel the breeze. But what if that window was an amphibious vehicle that was supposed to work on the submerged roads of Mumbai after their annual rains or Florida after a hurricane hits it every 3 or so years? I imagine you’d definitely want to be able to seal the window shut tight.
What was a perfectly nice window would be useless under water, so we need the window to perform multiple functions in different situations either from the get go or as we realize the new need. What do they say about jumping off a cliff and assembling the plane on the way down? While it’s fairly romantic and makes entrepreneurs feel like heroes, after removing the rose tined glasses, there are things I would pack for before I make the jump again. In other words, I would think through and make affordances in the product understanding that it’s dynamic and will change with time.
This mental exercise of framing software products as windows works because it acts as a forcing function to think about the product in a different light and circumstance. What we would consider as implied knowledge and solution by the creators suddenly becomes a question of is x really needed, or is y really what we or the user are trying to do?
For Playmat, it clarified that what we considered our window was trying to act as the portal to Narnia; while magical and filled with unlimited possibilities, not what someone would expect when they are looking for a closet to get in or out of.
What other things could this reframe be used for?
What about dating?
A user is using the dating app / window to look at who else is out there. Their eyes are executing a search query for identifying prospects that check their boxes. You’d want to share some of your information with the outside, let someone else peek in, perhaps let one or two in, oh wait, that got too crowded, the window should let the user push someone back out too. Hopefully, with the right person in, close the window for good.
If you really get down to it, this essay is itself a window, think about it.