What does a napkin tell you about a restaurant? Quite a lot. A restauranteur friend told me about a survey that showed a massive correlation between category of napkin and customer satisfaction. That’s not to say you can hand out deliciously thick napkins in a shitty burger joint and immediately win customers over. It’s a cause and effect thing. The napkin represents a degree of care, preparation and devotion that goes above and beyond asking if they want fries with that.
Nathan Bowers recently wrote that quality is fractal. That is to say quality offerings display self similarity. Any small part of it, is indicative of its whole. This lets you make a good judgement about an entire product by looking at a very small portion of it. This is as true in software as it is in restaurants.
Gordon Ramsey, in his auto-biography, defended his obsessive perfectionist nature, arguing he has to obsess. You don’t win Michelin stars without it.
“It doesn’t matter how amazing the steak is, if it’s served on a cold plate it’s crap. If it’s served with a dull knife it’s crap. If the gravy isn’t piping hot, it’s crap. If you’re eating it on an uncomfortable chair, it’s crap. If it’s served by an ugly waiter who just came in from a smoke break, it’s crap. Because I care about the steak, I have to care about everything around it. “
The parallels in software are obvious. If you see a few lines of atrocious code, you can make a judgement about the programmer. By judging the programmer, you can judge his boss, and by judging his boss you can judge the company. That’s the nature of fractals. The desire for quality trickles down to everything from making sure that the homepage photo isn’t blurry all the way through to making sure that font in Christmas card is correct. As Aristotle said, excellence is not an act but a habit.
We judge humans this way so it shouldn’t be surprising that we judge software the same. That’s what is so clear about Apple. They are what they repeatedly do. They design everything, even the bits that allegedly “don’t matter”.
52 Comments
i.e. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Yes, certainly something one must not ignore for all sorts of reasons. Thanks for the reminder!
Posted by Andy Rutledge at 5:14 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Couldn’t agree more. It’s the little touches, the polish, the fit and finish, that really tell you how software folks approach their work as a whole. That extends from cleanly written and documented code, through to clean UI layouts and behaviours. Doesn’t mean there has to be great design - not everybody has the talent or resources for that, but it’s often pretty obvious how much sincere effort was made to polish it. Some hacker type who doesn’t take that kind of thing seriously is never going to be taken all that seriously by me.
Posted by Dave Cahill at 5:39 pm on 5 February, 2010.
But, Gordon has on repeated occasions shown he doesn’t follow his own words. It’s an “ideal” which isn’t practical. For example, http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Ramsay39s-new-Fword-frozen-ready.5182757.jp
Thus, reality: there are degrees of “crap”.
I very much like the message, though. Something in the abstract sense which we hope to strive for, but day-by-day, we need to repeatedly be reminded to act upon.
(This blog has a wonderful, bee-like color scheme!)
Posted by Torley at 6:19 pm on 5 February, 2010.
They design things so that every single part must be sent to an authorised service centre for consistently expensive repair?
Posted by Leon at 6:20 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Nice post and good job at avoiding the cause/correlation fallacy of napkins and perception - you are absolutely right that this is only an indicator of the mindset of those providing the service. I think having this perfectionist attitude will get you far, providing you do it within reason/budget. I also think your Apple comparison is golden - I wouldn’t swap my macbook pro for any alternative!
Posted by Alex O'Byrne at 6:27 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Bullshit. They don’t design their processors. Even their “A4 processor” is an ARM SoC.
Posted by redditor at 6:48 pm on 5 February, 2010.
You had me until the segue about Apple.
Posted by David at 6:52 pm on 5 February, 2010.
You had me until the last couple of pictures. Are you implying that a scooter:
http://www.honda-motorcycle.net/images/2008_Silver_Silverwing_Honda_Scooter.jpg
is better quality than a cruiser:
http://mylovetechnology.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/1901-harley-davidson-wallpapers.jpg
because it doesn’t have all the ugly mechanics exposed?
Posted by nes at 7:03 pm on 5 February, 2010.
It doesn’t matter how great the iPad is. If it’s served with DRM, it’s crap. If it’s served with a crippled browser, it is crap. If it uses AT&T it is crap. Etc. etc.
Posted by Jan at 7:13 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Yes, yes, yes.
Posted by Aaron Deckler at 7:16 pm on 5 February, 2010.
I’m afraid I’m not convinced. It might be self-serving, and I acknowledge that. One of my flaws is inconsistency in my work.
If you were to examine the whole of the dining experience and judge whether it’s “good” or “crap” based on the quality of steak itself, you might judge that it’s great based on the steak. However, the napkins are paper, the gravy is cold and congealed, and the water had things floating in it. I don’t think you can pass a judgment of “high quality” on the whole experience from examining one facet.
I could write a great function but implement it poorly. Examine the function itself and it’s gold, but examine the item as a whole and it’s dross.
I completely agree that the little things make the difference, but I disagree with the fractal / self-similarity.
Posted by Russ at 7:23 pm on 5 February, 2010.
…
Self-similarity is not fractal. I’m not sure what caused the recent fad of using the word fractal to mean whatever the author wants it to mean, but quality being self-similar doesn’t make it fractal. The white background of this blog is also self-similar, and not fractal.
Posted by WA at 7:29 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Your Apple analogy would be more apt if, say, Gordon TOOK AWAY all the silverware because it makes the table look messy.
Posted by Scott at 7:39 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Love the article…right up to the comparison with Apple, which falls flat.
Granted, at the USER level, it works. But as soon as you get into their internal API, there are problems…and how they handle, say, bug reports, is atrocious. We submitted a bug to them that they verified, and then marked the bug as “private” so we couldn’t see updates–and then proceeded to delete all comments about the bug from their forums.
So unless “attention to detail” includes eliminating all evidence of anything wrong with their code, I must disagree that Apple really fits the fractal model of quality down to the finest scale. Though they certainly do their best to ensure the appearance of said quality…
Posted by Some call me Tim at 7:54 pm on 5 February, 2010.
This habit of quality is a question of focus. The decision to do a single thing, and to do that thing well. The fractal emanates from a single function.
Requirements on the other hand are rarely reduced to a single purpose. An entity that cannot achieve a single vision in each action it takes is not likely to approach uniform quality, customer experience, or be significantly effective in that action. Trouble is that that vision needs to be spot on. The hedge taken by many companies seems to be a shotgun blast at an array of targets. We can see that in the Thinkpad/Macbook example provided. The more utilitarian, but lower quality device tends to achieve higher sales.
Posted by Kevin at 8:06 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Yeah, good article up until the seemingly random apple mention.
Posted by Jay at 8:08 pm on 5 February, 2010.
apple fanboy
Posted by Name at 8:09 pm on 5 February, 2010.
I agree with Gordon Ramsey’s thinking. I disagree that Apple exemplifies good design. OS 9 was superbly made, but OS X is a catastrophe from a usability perspective. From the dock, which ignores Fitt’s law, and presents moving targets, to the window decorations, which are all the same size and shape, and are distinguished only by color (and are circles, to boot, which are much harder to hit than squares), OS X represents the triumph of style over substance. It’s all nice napkins, without the steak.
Posted by Jonathan Feinberg at 8:19 pm on 5 February, 2010.
I’d been an apple-only person for years, up until recently. A few of my favorite apple items had battery problems, hard drive problems and difficult-to-fix software problems. Trying to get these fixed and dealt with was a bigger hassle than anything I’ve experienced with any non-Apple-computer I’ve ever owned, all at 2x or 3x the cost.
It’s obvious now that Apple is pretty much all pretty-on-the-outside, and they’re doing well because that’s what is trendy right now.
Posted by Xerus at 8:23 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Jeez people, he’s not making any overarching statements about Apple, just that they clearly spend a lot of time making sure everything looks and feels good. It’s also one of the reasons they don’t allow customization: they design their products to look and function in a certain way, and interfering with that would change the experience. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing is up to you, but you can’t argue that they don’t put a lot of effort into design.
Posted by Adam at 8:25 pm on 5 February, 2010.
I like the one on the right more
Posted by John Doe at 8:29 pm on 5 February, 2010.
O f u c k ! H o w h o r r i b l y l e t t e r s p a c e d t e x t . I c a n ‘ t r e a d t h i s p a g e w i t h o u t d i s a b l i n g C S S !
Posted by kl at 8:45 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Quality trickles up as well as down. In my programming experience, that is more frequently the case.
Posted by fx at 8:46 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Funny how fanboy-calling people don’t get it.
Ask Ramsey for ketchup and he’ll punch you in the face.
Posted by asd at 8:51 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Aesthetically apple wins. Time it takes to pull a hd or change ram, pc wins. Please don’t associate the ultimate in “Good Design” with good aesthetics.
Good design is dependent on perspective, your 22 year old graphics art designer won’t care that he can’t swap out ram by removing one screw, the tech at the company he works for will. Ask each what they think of the design and you will get different and both valid answers.
Posted by Nathan at 8:55 pm on 5 February, 2010.
I get that, Adam, and I don’t think we who balk at the Apple example are intensely criticizing you (at least, I’m not). I still think that it’s a very good article, and I like the expansion on the phenomenon that “quality is a fractal”. It’s just that the Apple example nicely illustrates at least three other dovetailing phenomena, which are that quality is subjective, that style can triumph over substance, and that inferences are probabilistic. My idea of quality in computer hardware includes hackability, and my idea of quality in dining experience includes really good food. I admire the attention Apple paid to the iBook’s undercarriage but am more invested in its internals, just as while I may admire a fine napkin, the quality of the actual steak and its preparation are most important. Finally, while quality at one level MAY derive from an overall emphasis on quality that in turn affects all levels, that doesn’t HAVE to be the fact. Perhaps the fine napkins and comely waitstaff are COMPENSATING for neglect in the kitchen rather than acting as signposts of a commitment to quality.
Nevertheless…
Experience tells me that you’re right: quality in its parts bespeaks quality of the whole, often enough to be a useful guiding principle in selecting computers, restaurants, and software companies.
Posted by David at 8:59 pm on 5 February, 2010.
I like my components user replaceable, thanks - and I prefer to own and control my hardware.
Posted by Barry Kelly at 9:01 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Despite the fact that I had 6 repairs on my previous MacBook Pro before it finally broke for good, I still enjoy their products for things like weight, appearance, performance, graceful crashes…
In any case, very nice post. Thank you.
Posted by Anna at 9:26 pm on 5 February, 2010.
I believe Apple vs. Dell is form vs. function. I like being able to easily upgrade the RAM or hard drive in my laptop. The bottom of the Dell is very well designed for that. The bottom of the Apple? For aesthetics. They both have their place.
Posted by Pete at 9:49 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Is quality fractal or is that an optical illusion reinforced by our own tendency to assume? Our own tendency to want to eliminate complexity? As Adam already commented, there’s a great benefit to having a well thought out and consistent experience, but Steve Jobs’ perspective on what that should be is not always mine.
Posted by Scott at 10:56 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Respectfully, Scott, It might be more apt to say that the Apple analogy works because they don’t offer a ball-pit and play-pin with a cheap burger—only a prix fixe menu.
Posted by Michael Critz at 10:58 pm on 5 February, 2010.
Pete - “I like being able to easily upgrade the RAM or hard drive in my laptop. The bottom of the Dell is very well designed for that.”
Sorry, mate - my MacbookPro is as easy, if not easier to upgrade, in those respects than any Dell…and (unlike the Dell - at least the Dell I have as a work laptop) it isn’t flimsy, sloppy and, to be blunt, crap.
Posted by Stuart at 11:55 pm on 5 February, 2010.
hmm, i dont know. When i go out to eat steak, i want good steak. I don’t give a crap if they give me paper or cloth napkins. I just want a good steak. So far the best steak house i’ve been to serves drinks in cheapo plastic cups that you’re likely to find in any cheap takeout joint, there’s saw dust on the floor and the table ‘cloth’ is a plastic sheet. But the steak tastes damned good. And they give you a damned good size portion of it.
you can go and worry if your waiter is ugly or your plate is cold (or you find a few lines of bad code) but I’m going to go enjoy my thick, juicy steak
Posted by Ian at 12:23 am on 6 February, 2010.
Great post, Des. It even extends to the more budget restaurants who can’t afford proper napkins, but the paper napkins they give are big and decent and don’t feel like sandpaper. It makes it clear they’re coat-conscious but they still give a shit about the details.
Posted by Brian at 12:45 am on 6 February, 2010.
“God is in the details” - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Posted by Michael Disabato at 12:52 am on 6 February, 2010.
I see the bottom of that apple, and I see hate. How dare you want to increase your RAM? How dare you replace your hard drive or battery? This is apple’s computer, you’re just using it.
Posted by non at 1:38 am on 6 February, 2010.
Excuse me for my english it’s not my first language.
No offense guys but I don’t think you PC guys get the point… He’s making a point about having quality of service or product. Sure PC is customizable and can be upgraded with so many options(even tho you really got to know how your PC works wich only a minority of person knows). Remember that probably 60 % (maybe more) of people owning a PC don’t know how to it really works and never will.
When you buy a Apple product you buy it for it’s reliability, it’s style and it’s stability. Of course, PC may offer same advantages and more but if you don’t take care of you firewall and antivirus you might have a problem. When you want to buy a computer you want it to work when you want to wich will leave you with a good experience.
Just take the same logic of PC on cars. You possibly can take any car to change each and every part in it to make it as you wich it to be but if you just want a car that has fiability you just don’t care about custom modifications.
Hope you get my point
Posted by Vince Desjardins at 2:55 am on 6 February, 2010.
I ate dinner in a restaurant in London England
the most amazing dinner from beginning to end
from the unending pitcher of beautiful fruited still water
to the fire in the corner
the flower on the table
the shrimp danced with delight
the soup trickled into every nook and cranny of my soul
the duck swam through my with wonder
and desert wrapped me in a velvet touch
I shouted to the streets below
3 weeks later we came back
and took our spot again
turned out this fine chef and owner had worked with Gordon for years
every aspect of that meal
touched every aspect of the experience
Posted by LunaJune at 6:12 am on 6 February, 2010.
I find Apple very arrogant, some of their products are good looking and innovative, I use them, but there hasn’t been a single time using my Ipod which I haven’t been pi**ed off by something (error messages in Itunes EVERY TIME, stupid menus, forced bloated shite…) and I use it daily so, no this was a bad example.
Turn it around: You want to buy a perfectly restored classic automobile which you’re viewing. You know this car type very well, and after inspection/testing find that it is perfect. Will you not buy it because the company selling it had a messy shop floor, or because the mechanic showing you the car was filthy, smoking or nude? Never trust a skinny cook anyone?
Posted by BK at 10:56 am on 6 February, 2010.
Very much like. But there is too much of a good thing with the contrast of your quote style. The ghosting after effect is alarming and intense.
I really enjoy the layout of the site, as well as the blog posts though. Thank you!
Posted by Maxwell at 11:38 am on 6 February, 2010.
At work we have both Lenovos and Mac Pros (the latest and most speced ones of both).
The Mac Pro sure it’s beautiful, but when doing anything at all on it it’s fan start spinning until it makes like a jet engine. The Lenovos on the other hand, NEVER spin up, even at 100% CPU usage.
So the Mac may be beautiful, but it’s lack of vent holes on the underside and on it’s side make it run hot all the time (to the point of being almost too hot to touch).
But then again, you don’t buy Macs for ergonomic or performance reasons, you buy it for looks, so I guess they made the right trade ofs.
Posted by Gigi at 1:38 pm on 6 February, 2010.
Apple sucks. I hate how ugly their plain white machinery is. The beautiful black machine on the right with all the nice features beats it 100-0!
But I love how the quote from Gordon Ramsay says ugly people can’t be waiters. I’m glad someone says it out loud!
Posted by No at 6:05 pm on 6 February, 2010.
I once ate at a trendy taco joint -one of those art-deco furnished restauraunts with neon lighting in all the right places. Good tacos. I had brisket with a bit of gravy on the side that I could spoon into them along with a very good spanish rice on the side that had some finely diced bits of fruit that gave it a sweet flavor. They had thick napkins. Four tacos and iced tea ran me $10.00.
I also eat at a dive that makes the most wonderful tacos with barbacoa, lime, and cilantro. Four of these with iced tea? $3.95. I don’t think I ever got a napkin from them. Their tacos are fantastic! Quality is in the food. Dollar for dollar, the little taco stand beats the trendy spot hands down.
The iPad and other Apple products have that clean, art-deco look. But I’d rather have my quality on the cheap. I’ll do the napkin myself (sudo apt-get install napkin).
Posted by cfeagans at 8:20 pm on 6 February, 2010.
I’ve a different perspective. I trust things that I can use after dropping more than I like things that turn my head for their design. And I’m glad the marketplace is diverse enough to serve all of us a wide choice of products. All long as mine just keep on ticking I’m a happy camper.
Posted by Bernie Goldbach at 11:27 pm on 6 February, 2010.
Hi Des
Certainly an interesting post, however I think by your statement “If you see a few lines of atrocious code, you can make a judgement about the programmer. By judging the programmer, you can judge his boss, and by judging his boss you can judge the company.” falls afoul of the law of small numbers.
Just because you can extrapolate correlated quality systems in general I don’t believe you can reverse this to an individual level without unacceptably high error rate. Basically your false positives are just going to end up being too high.
In others words your best judge on if a company is a good company is to judge the company as a whole not extrapolate from a developers code.
Posted by Caelen at 3:39 pm on 7 February, 2010.
Always the same while putting comments on the net…right asd…anyway
my message didn’t get really understood…Expert in informatic are NOT the aimed customers neither for MAC or PC but maybe Linux. They try to sell their product to the biggest class of customers wich is people who don’t get how their computer works but like to do some MSN Messenger so Facebook and other social nertworking activities. PC is totally customazible but has a counter effect which is that it has to much option for a person who doesn’t understand computer but is great for an expert. Apple has a more friendly interface with less customaziblity wich is way more simple for regular person but expert in computer will be less likely to appreciate.
I don’t praise for Apple or PC. It’s just that for the moment fits more my needs as a student and that is why I consider MAC is a better product for me.
Posted by Vince Desjardins at 7:14 pm on 7 February, 2010.
I suggest disabling comments on this blog for the same reasons. Even skimming them has detracted from the experience of reading the original post.
Posted by N at 1:59 am on 8 February, 2010.
True Quality *is* fractal. Most things which are called quality are not. Ramsay’s steak example, with amazing steak on a cold plate, would be something called quality by most people, but would not be True Quality. Same with Apple. Their designs are fantastic, from the shapes, to the colors, to the lack of screw holes on the iPod - Sleek industrial design perfected. Unfortunately they sacrifice other quality metrics in order to achieve it. No screw holes on the iPod means no way to get at the battery compartment, which means the battery isn’t replaceable and I would (if I were crazy enough to buy one) have to send the thing in and go without my music player for who-knows-how-long until they got around to shipping it back to me. Or, as with most people, I’d have to buy another despite the fact that the device is perfectly good, and simply needs power.
So looking at the only the steak, which is excellent, might lead you astray in that you might predict the entire experience will be quality even though the napkin and the gravy are crap. But then such a cursory quality inspection would not itself be True Quality, and without that you cannot hope to reliably detect True Quality.
Besides, the point was not that “if one element of a given system is True Quality, they will all be True Quality.” It was more that “If the tiniest and most insignificant aspect (hint: The underside of a laptop is not the tiniest and most insignificant aspect. The screws you use to secure the motherboard to the case are, since they’re invisible) is True Quality, the rest is likely to be as well.” And that’s not even necessarily true, as sometimes those tiny details are a lot of fun to work on, so the designer spends lots of time on those, and shoves the boring under-the-hood stuff off to the back burner and then halfasses it when he finally has to do it.
Posted by Charles at 12:58 am on 12 February, 2010.
Thats amazing, just about 10 months ago I wrote an article on a blog of mine (now on pause due to college commitments) I suggested that I would love to have gordon ramsey as a design tutor. He would tell the good from the bad. I am a firm believer that design is like good cooking, taste is subjective but quality is not.
Article: http://www.whiteinkblog.com/2009/05/13/edenspiekermann-students/
Posted by Youssef Sarhan at 5:28 am on 18 February, 2010.
>It was more that “If the tiniest and most insignificant aspect[...] is True Quality, the rest is likely to be as well.<
That wasn’t the point either. The point isn’t about what indicates quality, but what indicates a lack of quality. Anything in the chain that interferes with the experience, including the insignificant details, indicate a lack of quality. The reverse is not true.
Posted by Tim S at 8:09 pm on 23 February, 2010.
Just a short note to say, that this is a great analogy and insight. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I do wonder how thickness, or thinness for that matter, will impact products like the iPhone or iPad.
Posted by DT at 11:05 am on 1 March, 2010.
very good article.
thank you for this post admin
Posted by estetik at 11:57 pm on 23 April, 2010.
9 Trackbacks
[...] De http://www.contrast.ie/blog/the-thickness-of-napkins/ [...]
Posted by La opción simple » Sobre la importancia de cada detalle at 8:58 pm on 5 February, 2010
[...] from “The Thickness of Napkins“ article at the Contrast blog. This was written by admin. Posted on Saturday, February 6, [...]
Posted by blog.siddharthnair.com › Gordon Ramsey, Apple & Analogies at 10:36 pm on 5 February, 2010
[...] on February 5, 2010 by switch11 The Contrast Blog has a very interesting post claiming that the thickness of a napkin reflects the quality of the restaurant. A friend in the restaurant business told me about a [...]
Posted by Is the quality of an eReader reflected in every part of it? « Kindle Review – Kindle 2 Review, Books at 7:55 am on 6 February, 2010
[...] The thickness of napkinsMore on this “quality is fractal” business. [...]
Posted by Things I Found Interesting Around February 5th | Chris Coyier at 4:37 pm on 6 February, 2010
[...] http://www.contrast.ie/blog/the-thickness-of-napkins/) « Flight to UK [...]
Posted by The Principle To Make My Life A Tad More Complicated at nevJournal2 at 4:57 pm on 6 February, 2010
[...] stellar dev shop, Contrast, illustrates the elegant idea that “quality is fractal” in The Thickness of Napkins. And have a look at another excellent post of their’s on entrepreneurship: Good or [...]
Posted by Weekend Links, Will Keep Longer if Refrigerated | Recess Mobile Blog at 9:52 am on 7 February, 2010
[...] …Nine easy Valentine’s Day projects on Brides.com. …The thickness of napkins–a blog post from Contrast.ie about the importance of maintaining quality in all the little [...]
Posted by weekend work. ›› Princess Lasertron at 11:58 am on 8 February, 2010
[...] Shared Quality is Fractal, from restaurants to software.. [...]
Posted by Flow » Blog Archive » Daily Digest for February 9th - The zeitgeist daily at 10:32 am on 9 February, 2010
[...] recent interesting blog posts have talked about the fractal nature of quality: quality items (software, restaurants, whatever) will exhibit the self-same high-quality at every [...]
Posted by On Fractal Quality and Startups at 6:48 pm on 22 May, 2010