Selling something surprising (make it familiar). On selling something familiar

But by using a familiar form, TiVo made people more comfortable adopting a radical innovation. By hiding the technology in something that looked visually familiar, TiVo used similarity to make difference feel more palatable.

Many digital actions today visually evoke their analog ancestors. We click on the icon of a floppy disk to save documents and drag digital files to be thrown away in what looks like a waste bin. Visual similarity also shows up offline. High-end cars often use fake wood grain on the dashboard and veggie burgers often have grill marks. All make the difference seem more similar.

The opposite also holds. Design can be used to make incremental innovations feel more novel. When Apple introduced the iMac in 1998, it featured only minor technological improvements. But from a visual standpoint it was radically different. Rather than the same old black or grey box, the iMac was shaped like a gum drop and came in colors like tangerine or strawberry. The device was hugely successful, and design, rather than technology, created the needed sense of difference that encouraged people to purchase.

Design sometimes has to lie about the size of a change—truthfully.

A radical behaviour may need familiar controls. Digital files went into folders and bins because “hierarchical data objects” would have made ordinary people throw the computer into a real bin. Vegetarian burgers acquired grill marks. TiVo borrowed the shape and buttons of the box already living under the television. The resemblance said: you know roughly how to approach this.

With a modest improvement, the problem reverses. A familiar casing makes it vanish. The early iMac looked like a boiled sweet dropped onto a grey accountancy desk; the visible novelty carried technological changes that might otherwise have passed unnoticed.

Neither move is inherently deceitful. Every product must translate what changed into something a shopper can recognise at speed. The fraud begins when surface signals promise capabilities that never arrive: rugged ridges on a useless appliance, eco-green packaging around gratuitous waste, an “AI” sparkle pasted onto ordinary autocomplete.

Form also determines which questions get asked. Give a new machine one enormous button and people assume the complexity has been handled for them. Cover it in switches and they assume control, even if half the switches do nothing useful. Before experience, appearance writes the customer’s theory of the product. That theory can welcome them or quietly tell them to leave.

Choose where the strangeness belongs. If the behaviour asks a lot, let the form reassure. If the improvement risks looking trivial, give it a silhouette. Do not launch a new interface, vocabulary, ritual, price model and mascot simultaneously unless your commercial plan includes frightening people for sport.

Before anyone uses the product, its surface has already suggested which old habit still applies and which new behaviour might be safe. That first theory will be corrected by experience, assuming the design persuades anyone to begin.