Look In Unlikely Places

"They had a pretty good run," Yurchenco says. "There were probably billions of those suckers made."

In this wonderful WIRED profile, Jim Yurchenco is referring to products build on the basic insights of the original Apple mouse, which he invented as an early employee at pre-IDEO. Not bad for an early design project. We could attribute much of the success of the product to its affordability, which was due to Jim’s efforts to simplify the design of the innards - it dramatically de-featured the mouse that Xerox PARC had debuted earlier.

What I loved was where he got the idea to radically simplify the part count:
“The Xerox mouse relied on a small ball, forced down against the tabletop, whose motion was tracked by an elaborate system of mechanical switches. Yurchenco started looking at other input devices to see how it could all be done more elegantly. He found his answer in an Atari arcade machine. Its trackball seemed perfect for the job.

The Atari machine differed from the Xerox mouse in a few key ways. For one, its trackball wasn't forced up or down. Instead, it just floated. Yurchenco tried doing the same and found the mouse functioned just fine if you let gravity do the work. Moreover, it resulted in less friction and fewer parts. That was one key insight. The Atari machine also used optics to track the trackball's movement, relying on interrupted beams of light instead of mechanical switches. By borrowing this concept, Yurchenco further streamlined the internal components. That was insight number two.”

Folks might scoff at the discovery of a game-changing insight in an arcade. Just like they do at napping as a tactic for creative insight. But the point is, when someone is obsessed with solving a problem, solutions have a way of revealing themselves at the most unlikely times and places.

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