iPhone: The issues with evolution
The iPhone, Apple’s pearl of the mobile device. Perhaps one could even say its the evolution of Apple’s early “Newton” hand-held from decades ago.
Well, this story is likely short, but important to me. It’s about the evolution of one man’s experience with a product. A product loved by many, particularly me. As a designer, and one most critically involved and interested in the design for experiences, the iPhone presented a revolution in the mobile phone or mobile device experience. A very true and valiant translation of experience from Mac OSX on the desktop to a mobile device.
I was a relative late comer to the iPhone, allowing the market to pick out all the bugs or issues that typically follow an early product. I learned my lesson after buying the first round of Intel touting Mac’s, placing my order at midnight the evening of their release. The following months weren’t too bad, but certainly contained a mix of “bugs” related to a new product. It comes with the territory.
But enough with that. Let’s fast forward to the issue at hand. My iPhone, and it’s presumed “evolution”.
Since the release of the devices 2.0 OS my experience has progressively gone down hill. Missed calls, late messages, required restarting the entire OS in order to web browse, download or send email, or even making phone calls. It’s really been a fairly disasterous experience, and one that makes me wish the old days of just having a phone that works (namely my old Samsung….).
Don’t get me wrong for one minute. I still love this phone. Sorry, this device. It’s far more than a phone, and no competitor on the market can come close to the experience this little puppy provides. It’s mind blowing, amazing, refreshing, a new outlook on how communication, productivity and fun can all play in the same sandbox. But Apple must recognize that the experience they provide is extremely fragile, and by releasing updates to software in the name of progress only to diminish the presumed and proven value of the device is extremely detrimental.
With that said, I’ll end this post and go play with my iPhone!
(1) 
08/26/2008 Bonding with the Customer
After reading a recent post on the blog her Nature his Nature titled “Take Your Customer To Work Day”, I couldn’t help but think about it’s similarity to the concepts of Participatory Design & Field Research all leading to an informed Design for User Experience.
In the article, author “shazell” highlights the importance of providing a level of clarity & transparency to the customer about how your business works and cares for their use of your companies products and/or services. As the article also points out, this could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the business and, of course, how the company treats their customer.
In the world of Participatory Design, much of the same is true. Its effectiveness is highly dependent on the clarity and perspective a business has towards their community of customers. If they truly care about how they serve and provide products or services for their customer, then this mode of research is incredibly effective. The basic principle is to allow the customer to have an active voice in the design of products that your company is ultimately designing for their user or consumption. The idea behind this is, from a marketing perspective, that you have the potential to limit your risk of poor market penetration.
On this same note, Field Research has many of the same effects, but almost in reverse. Field Research provides a design team the opportunity to experience how a customer uses the product or service they are designing for. Never conducted in a lab, the intent is to allow the designer (or researcher) into the daily life of the customer, essentially giving the designer the opportunity to “live the brand of the customer”.
What I find most interesting about this idea of “Take Your Customer To Work Day” is that in a few cases, this is actually happening. Take Etsy as an example. The online marketplace for all things handmade, has been building incredibly tight bonds with their buyers and sellers by inviting them into the Brooklyn headquarters to produce their goods. Pretty friendly, huh? And bringing a whole new meaning to the term “User Experience”.
And in some way, entrepreneurial gem Threadless is opening their doors to the customer party, though in a fairly different manner. The online community retailer of t-shirt designers and buyers has redefined what it means to be a company. The company has completely blurred the line between customer & consumer in a marketplace, and one might say they see themselves hardly as an intermediary, but instead, truly a participant in the community.
So in closing, as we see more and more creative uses for Social Media tools, our perspectives on the topic of User Experience evolve, finding new ways to connect to each other, and find new ways to share experiences between business & consumer.
Barking up the wrong tree
In a recent post
Personally, I couldn’t agree more with this quick snippet of daily insight. All too often designers are asked to “Make it bigger” & “Make it louder”, and as much as these tactics work to some degree, a level of tact, poise, and quite simply, respect for the end user (customer or consumer) is the most effective long-term approach
My own experience with “Barkers” happens a bit closer to home. North Beach in San Francisco. Walk along Columbus Avenue and you’ll be accosted by any number of Barkers on your stroll. Have I been to a single restaurant fronted by a Backer in my many trips into the city by the bay? Nope. Where do I go? A little, quiet, quality spot around a quiet corner. Dark, warm, and comfortable. The noise is on the inside, coming from the crowd of diners conversing, not Barkers trying to drag me in with “Bigger” & “Louder” messages.
When designing a ad, website, brochure, or application we need consider the holistic experience we’re trying to provide our customer, as well as the context or baggage they carry with them. Tourists. They’re likely tired, hungry, and want a nice relaxing environment to reflect on the days sights, sounds, and purchases. Give them a memory equal to their experience of the day.
Where does barking ultimately leave a business. Likely attracting the wrong kind of customer. Or at least one that doesn’t interest me as a business owner. Perhaps someone like this guy or this guy. Yeah, they’re funny to look at, but you wouldn’t want to hang out with them too long!
I suppose the same goes for dogs. In particular, mine. A barking dog does not attract people, it scares them away. I wish my own dog would learn that simple rule! :)
Dusties PT 1
Over this past weekend I found myself sifting through the dark dirty corners of my external hard drive, which amongst other things, seems to contain an archive of random dj mixes from my years previous running Subsystence web broadcasts out of my apartment (perhaps defined as a precursor to podcasts) and the Subsystence radio program (broadcast from Northwestern Universities WNUR studios).
Below is a complete broadcast from the later. This is part test of a new Wordpress Plugin (found here). The mix is fairly distorted and well, sloppy, but that’s how I like it.
track length: 1:02:48
Side note
For those with a quizical look on your face (for the one, maybe two people who read this blog currently), I used to DJ, and for a while tried my hand at web broadcasting from my Chicago apartment. That site was called Subsystence, for which you can find some information here.
The Twitter addiction
Twitter, the Ruby on Rails bastard child, and focus of much debate about Ruby’s potential scale issues, is a site I’ve used in for the better part of a year that has been on my mind of late. The site is loved by many and misunderstood by the masses. For those of you who love it, you’re likely addicted, and it’s this addiction that I’m mildly interested in talking about here.
I recently took a family vacation to South Korea, where my iPhone doesn’t work (blessing in disguise). As such, I was essentially cut off from updating my Twitter profile. Sure I could have done my updates through the website, but come on, after a full day of running around bowing, eating, bowing, and faking my way through Korean with extended family, the very last thing I wanted to do was boot up the laptop and log onto twitter to summarize my day in TXT sized bites. No thank you. So I essentially went without Twitter for two weeks.
And now, as I’ve been sitting here for the better part of two weeks, I’ve totaled two or three Twitter updates, and am finding it rather hard to think of a reason to update my profile. Let alone allocate the time or attention to follow along with other peoples banter, and engage in conversation. Did I loose my interest, or perhaps I’m just not fully back into the swing of my old daily routine. In either case, it seems, at least for the immediate moment, my addiction is broken, and hopefully, for the sake of my family and my business, it’s a good thing.
Ultimately, what I’m curious about in the longer term, is how much Twitter hype & activity is sustainable. Is Twitter ultimately a fad that will eventually morph into the next coolest gadget in online web crack? I suppose only time will tell. Until then, you can follow me on Twitter and see if I eventually come out of hibernation.
The experience of free
I recently signed on to a relatively new site called Beatport, an online retailer of electronic dance music. To be honest, one of the best designed dance music sites out there in terms of providing a smooth music shopping experience. And their catalog is definitely impressive to someone like me who is used to scouring the globe looking for hard to find techno records.
But with all of this, I was recently disappointed and seemingly suckered by a small amount of extremely powerful copy. The e-mail subject line (see below via Gmail)
Wow! Amazing. I was up ’till the wee hours of the evening the night before sifting through droves of tracks, adding artists to my favorite artists bin, record labels to my favorite labels bin, and even adding tracks to my shopping cart to consider for purchase (oddly enough I couldn’t seem to add tracks or releases to a favorites bin).
I open the email and the story gets richer. I’m asked to confirm my email by “clicking the link below”, which I promptly do. No problem there. Back to the e-mail, scroll down looking for the notice about my awaiting free downloads. Ten of them apparently. Woohoo. I’m psyched. And the story continues as I find the following information:
VIP! Wow I’m in.
Now obviously we know this is not leading to a positive review of this particular experience that I’m depicting. But I do need to say a few things in their benefit. First a good number of my friends support Beatport by buying records there and influencing my habits by word of mouth. My use of Beatport to download digital is likely not going to change, meaning I will likely buy those records in my cart, but that said, pay attention. The story will continue. There is room for improvement.
Know your customer
So there’s no need for drumrolling at this point as I’ve likely blown the cover on what happens next, but to say the least I was sorely disappointed. I click the link, the page loads, I log in. What am I presented with next was a bit of a shock. Ten, pre-selected tracks that scatter the globe from techno to house, trance to breaks. None of which I’m entirely psyched about. As a matter of fact, after a second or two I’m pretty much pissed.
As I said, I spent an excited and kid-like evening clicking and listening, clicking and adding to my hearts content. Essentially telling Beatport the style of music that I live for. That I love. And instead I get a pre-sorted, full-spectrum, wide-girth bin of bullocks that honestly, I don’t want cluttering my already beefy iTunes library. I want more signal and less noise.
My overarching point here is they missed an amazing opportunity. I’m sure there are economical, and perhaps legal constraints they are working within, but ultimately, my experience was a flop. This will be a story I tell my friends and foe when talking about Beatport. Of course I’ll still recommend Beatport, but this story is rich in User Experience chatter.
Managing expectations
Set my expectation, or don’t. But if you don’t fully set my expectations up-front, beware the consequences. With this recent interaction with Beatport my expectations were only set as far as being promised ten free downloads. What this translated to in my mind was an opportunity to download the five or so tracks I had selected the previous night, plus a few more of my liking. So I filled in the gap myself, with what I wanted. What I was hoping for.
Simple Twists
Want me to buy more tracks from Beatport? Then, give me a sample that I’d like. As I pointed out, I already began to identify genres, styles, labels, and specific artists I am interested in. Use what’s known. Leverage the information that the consumer has provided to influence future engagement. It’s certainly simple enough to pull that insight and deliver the consumer a more customized, enjoyable experience. Ultimately, the ten songs wouldn’t have made me buy more, but it certainly might have impacted me in the long term, knowing that they’re investing their time & efforts into features that actually relate to me.
The bottom line is, expectations abound, and online, when the consumer is not led to water by person, but instead by their own twists and turns, extra care has to be taken in setting those expectations, or designing with our consumers potential expectations in mind.
Now, off to Beatport to pick me up some good music!
Pitchfork buries MTV online
On March 5th Pitchfork Media launched their newest web venture, Pitchfork.tv. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. They done a pretty extraordinary job with the detailed interaction on the site.
Right off the bat
At first load, the user is immediately immersed in video numero uno. Following the spirit of YouTubes successful auto-play feature, Pitchfork, I believe, is also providing the “Turn on the TV and watch moving pictures”. MTV? Hello? Are you watching? You should be. You’ve lost the beat ages ago.
Interaction gone wild
From an interaction design standpoint, the cats at Pitchfork have done some extremely simple, but extremely fluid and effective execution of the video experience. A simple display for the video itself, with little clutter. The only options the user is provided with is to navigation through the various site sections (again, kept to a simple number of six), and two components to the right of the video window. One provides details of the video being played, while just below they provide a YouTube style i-framed navigation mode to flip to another video.
Slide, don’t jump
My absolute favorite aspect to the interaction design and user experience provided in the site is the fact that as the user navigates through the various sections of the site (the six options at the top), they never loose a beat with the video playing. Essentially the user can navigate and search for content without losing their location. Did someone say RIA? I think this is bloody hot, and something to inspire and learn from for application.
Ultimately, they’ve done a great job keeping true to the natural video watching experience. Beyond MTV, YouTube & Flickr could learn something from these cats.
Nourish Organics goes live
One of our personal projects, Nourish Organics, recently went live as an early release, and we’re very proud to see this one run free in the wilds of the web. Nourish Organics is a small organic smoothie & juice retailer located on the east coast that specializes in cleansing drinks as well as personal holistic healthcare counseling.
A labor of love that involved photo shoots, brand development, identity design, copywriting, hand sculpted code, and multiple iterations of design. But as with many labors of love, it’s never quite perfect, never quite complete, but there comes a time when your children need to head out into the vast open prairie alone.
We expect to see and hear some great feedback from current clients, as well as new ones and passers by. Take a look, tell us what you think, and expect us to take it to heart and update as we learn.
And if your thristy and looking to clear your body of yucky toxins, drop the team of juicers a note and they’ll be sure to respond quickly and get you going.
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