SRC ID

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!

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.

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.

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!