The answer to my question is no. We don’t want to stay away, unless you really don’t like the mainstream. Mainstream has been tested by the crowd preference or at least what designers believe what’s going to be popular. So deliberately staying away from the mainstream is a suicide mission in general, or at least could be very costly if you have that mindset.
However, there’s some subtleties in terms of understanding the mainstream, especially if you are in the business of implementing the mainstream features.
Pitfalls
People don’t have patience these days. Absolutely zero. So if you are customers of consuming mainstream products, you should be.
As a designer or implementor of the mainstream functionalities, the story isn’t like what’s shown on TV. You don’t gain fame or reputation in a day, or a month, or a year.
Instead, you most likely bet on luck to bring you the success. From the statistic perspective, you wait, and if you happen to be able to do something a million times, you have a 0.00001% chance of hitting the home run, so in a way your success is guaranteed. From that perspective, you can afford the patience.
If you start to get what I’m saying, I mean implementing mainstream features, or any features, is not a small task. It’s a task that takes polish of lots of years of efforts and time. So you really shouldn’t think you’ll gain some superman power to get a feature implemented instantly.
Penalty
My point starts to emerge as, even though you might want to implement the mainstream feature, you will not be looking for a mainstream toolset that provides the mainstream feature out of the box. Even you have it, you probably shouldn’t be seduced into using it. Unless you are an impatient consumer. Get the point?
You might wonder what’s the consequences of using mainstream toolset that produces the mainstream feature? Wouldn’t we want the feature and get the benefits today?
Yes, you do get the benefits, however, the benefits has been on paper since day one. So there’s no surprise what you are getting. We are in a society of customizations, believe it or not. This generation is about having everything in their own way. So lack of surprise means small subset of failure on the front.
Similarly, the biggest penalty of using mainstream toolset to build mainstream feature is that you can’t really customize the feature in a way you want. Because mainstream is a fixture of features and behaviors hard coded in a tight specification. Deviation from it would create lot of friction not only in the user bases, but also among the designers.
Last but not least, you don’t gain any experience in using the mainstream toolset. You want to learn basic things to get better over years of practice. Since there’s no shortcut in any business, if you really want to run faster, you need to understand what is walking today or at least what is a leg.
Be fair to yourself, and be fair to your common sense. Don’t live the hype.
Foundation
So, what is the cure? The cure is a rollback. There’re people that never likes the mainstream on day one, so it’s not too difficult for them to arrive the following.
Don’t use mainstream toolset to produce your product, irregardless whether the feature is mainstream or not.
What it means is that, go find a small toolset, or even smaller toolset that might have nothing to do with the product itself to be your foundation of your toolset. You polish up the skillset of using that tool that contributes to the implementation process of the final product. These toolset is what I refer as the foundation.
To understand this better, maybe I throw you a question. By looking at your iPhone, do you know how Apple designs it?
Not a clue, I don’t either. But that’s my point. If you can figure right away what tool people uses to build a product. Most likely your answer is wrong, because if you could have figured that out that easily, the company would probably go bankrupt yesterday.
This is an over-simplification in this philosophy.
Conclusion
In short, the mainstream feature is nice for your eye and easy to use, but if you are the one who designs it, you should look elsewhere to build it. You need to go small instead of big, if you really want to be good at it.
