The Most Advanced Yet Acceptable Products Win

Principles of balance are as old as time.

For Aristotle, it was the balance between excess and asceticism. For Taoists, it’s the balance between exerting effort and letting go. And for Raymond Loewy, famous for designing products like the Coca-Cola bottle and the S1 locomotive, and often considered the father of industrial design, the balance was between the advanced and the acceptable.

In the early 20th century, to guide the creation of his groundbreaking works, Loewy developed a rule he called MAYA: the most advanced yet acceptable design. 

MAYA dictates that the ideal design sits between solutions that are completely novel and entirely familiar. Be too novel and customers will tune you out. Be too familiar and customers will look right past you. Or, in Loewy’s words, “The adult public’s taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm.” 

MAYA is the sweet spot: novel but familiar, advanced yet acceptable. And it can make or break the success of innovations.

To better illustrate MAYA, I’ll highlight hits and misses from three high-profile tech categories: smartphones, wearables, and generative AI. I’ll use these examples to demonstrate how you can apply these principles to your designs, create products that resonate with your target audience, and bridge the gap between innovation and acceptance.

Why the iPhone was a hit and folding phones aren’t (yet)

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Hit: the iPhone

When it was introduced in 2007, the iPhone represented a big leap forward in mobile technology and a dramatic departure from traditional telecommunications. Although the product was novel and full of tech advancements, Apple made it feel familiar and acceptable in a number of ways.

First, the device leveraged design continuity from Apple’s existing products. While the iPhone was new, its industrial design was reminiscent of the contemporary iPod, which was already familiar to many consumers.

Second, the touchscreen technology was highly intuitive and understandable. The experience of manipulating the interface directly with your fingers made it familiar notwithstanding its novelty. It helped digital interactions better mirror those of the real world.

And third, the device leaned into the familiarity of the phone. Despite its innovative features, the iPhone retained longstanding phone functions that users understood, like calling and SMS. Framing the device as a phone gave people a familiar mental model to understand the new technology and imagine how it might fit into their daily lives. 

Since the iPhone broke through, Apple has been careful not to upset its MAYA balance. After that initial spark, the design has been stable from generation to generation, helping the iPhone become a powerhouse that’s still baked into our daily operations 17 years later.

When Apple does inject changes to the iPhone, it’s cautious and intentional about doing so. Two of the more dramatic shocks to the iPhone’s MAYA balance were the removal of the home button (on the hardware side) and the move away from skeuomorphism in iOS 7 (on the software side). From the iPhone's deliberate evolution, one might assume that Apple recognizes when it has reached sufficient familiarity to make bigger changes that advance the form.

Miss: folding phones

Over the last five years, the folding phone market has continued to grow but has yet to break into the mainstream. While blending smartphone and tablet-like functionality into a single device opens new avenues for mobile technology, companies haven’t remedied the fact that most people still don’t see folding phones as an acceptable and familiar option for daily use.

A few tactics might help move the needle:

1. Continue to improve the ergonomics of the hardware
2. Refine the software to make better use of the device’s multiple form factors
3. Decrease costs substantially to bring the devices more in line with people’s expectations for non-folding alternatives
4. Let time and consistent exposure work their wonders for building familiarity in the public eye