This quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is a great illustration of the role that efficiency plays in the modern product design. Any part of the product that does not deliver at 100% creates unnecessary friction, which falls both on the user’s shoulders, as less seamless experience that there could be, and on the maker’s as extra manufacturing or maintenance costs. In a global and highly competitive market either one can present a strategic disadvantage, and eventually become the cause for the product to be overtaken by the competition.

Every component of the product, both on the inside, outside, and everywhere in between, must have a clear role that it carries out in the most efficient way possible. Every penny that the maker overpays for a part easily becomes £100 when scaled to 10,000 copies. Every minute that a user unnecessarily spends with the product, similarly, expands to 166 hours of cumulative wasted time. Every extra roundtrip between the architect and the engineers due to ambiguities in blueprints generates extra manufacturing costs through increased work hours and extended delivery times.

In the modern world, only the efficient survive.