Tag: productdesign

Fast Company is taking notice:

One of the things that excites people most about technology is that it is seen as a gateway to the future. So how does that explain the recent glut of lo-fi adverts, software, and user interfaces that seem to be being spewed out by so-called hi-tech companies?

Perhaps you’re knowingly nodding your head, too, with the recognition that no matter how high-tech a design solution may be, the best ones often start quite at the other side of the spectrum, with pencil and paper or simple boxes and arrows.

Why is Apple so controlling? Why do they have phones that are all nearly identical? Why do they have particular restrictions on background apps? It all comes down to battery life. Battery life is not just another feature on some specifications checklist. It is the driving philosophy behind every design decision made on the iPhone.

He suspects that Android will only develop more battery life issues, and things are already getting pretty bad.

Again, it’s all about balancing constraints. If you want to run seventeen apps at once, or play flash games, you have to expect you’ll get a couple hours out of your phone, max. Apple isn’t willing to create a device where consumers need to be charging their phones five times a day.

Huge blow to the Gowalla and Foursquare camps.

Yelp has boatloads of venues already, they obviously have an even larger number of legit and useful reviews, and they most importantly have existing relationships with these businesses (at least on the order of Yelp window stickers). Soon to come, deals for having a Regular badge at a given bar, or special happy-hour specials if you check in with multiple friends.

I’m a huge Gowalla fan, but these updates leave only one feature necessary for the Yelp app to really put the future of both Gowalla and Foursquare in jeopardy: contact import from facebook/twitter/etc. At that point, Gowalla will look like a “not as powerful, more game-like” version of Yelp’s offering.

I’ve always wondered why there wasn’t a better design for that awfully large plug. Now I’m wondering why no one else thought of something like this years ago.

One day, the Nook may be a much more usable, more capable bit of gear. Of course, Amazon and Sony won’t be standing still; 2010 sure will be an interesting year.

Looks like David Pogue wasn’t too impressed, and B&N didn’t spend enough time refining and polishing their product.

The case also highlights the distinction between understanding and listening to customers. “Adrià’s idea is that if you listen to customers, what they tell you they want will be based on something they already know,” Norton observes. “If I like a good steak, you can serve that to me, and I’ll enjoy it. But it will never be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To create those experiences, you almost can’t listen to the customer.”

Don’t take this the wrong way — Adrià most certainly pays a lot of attention to his customers. It’s at the core of what he does. But what he doesn’t do is listen to their input, he instead works to understand their needs and desires, and creates his own experience to satiate them.

You can listen to customer feedback all you want, and it might give you an okay product. It’s when you understand your customers and forge your own pathway based on that understanding that can lead to something really special.

So they’re going the freemium route in 2010, it seems.

I think the described featureset makes sense — if you’re a large company that requires a lot of technical feedback and support like Comcast, Twitter as a support mechanism can become unwieldy quite quickly, so a UI that helps manage this inbound traffic would be of great value. Additionally, for these companies and a lot of smaller ones, having good statistics around your use of Twitter, your reach, etc. will probably be worth whatever fee is charged.

Who is this bad for? Social media monitoring tools.

Matt Thompson on an Omaha paper’s acquisition of WikiCity:

WikiCity in its current state strikes me as a textbook example of a site built by robots. Such sites tend, in my experience, to appeal mostly to other robots. Contrast it to Wikipedia, whose every page was built, word by work, link by link, on the actions of individual people. Or to Everyblock, whose pages run on powerful algorithms, lovingly engineered and hand-polished by a brilliant and careful team of makers. These are large sites built on millions of niches, but neither were built that way to start.

It’s certainly hard to scale up, but it’s true that it’s even harder to scale down. I don’t think it’s impossible, but the idea really has to be killer to work if it’s been designed for a large-scale from the start.

A quick post I wrote for the Viget UX blog on five major identity schemes, how they’re used effectively, and how to go about working out a scheme for your product:

The key to choosing a system is balancing the needs for the contributor’s privacy against the skepticism of the consumers. In Yelp’s case, a pseudonymous identity system might lead some to think that many reviews of local restaurants are being posted by the restaurant staff itself. That might still be the case, but at least it’s discouraged by the emphasis on abstracted real names. In Facebook’s case, privacy in terms of identity isn’t really necessary for people who are supposed to know each other anyway. For a forum dealing with sensitive topics like disgruntled workers, relationships, or medical issues, anonymity might be crucial to creating a safe haven for people to share their thoughts.

It’s easy to overlook, and can be tough to change later…

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that’s what you like to do.

I’m always reluctant to link to anything Scoble writes, but I almost completely agree with what he’s written in this case, and have been thinking the same thing lately.

In response to a quote from Google saying, “We don’t want to work on problems that only affect a small number of people:”

The thing is, innovations usually come about when it doesn’t seem like anyone is interested. Let’s go back to 2006 when Twitter was first released. I remember showing it to other people. They thought it was the lamest thing they’d ever seen. See, no one was sitting around and saying “I have a problem, I need a way to blog but I want to be limited to only 140 characters.”

For UX folk, it’s one of the big disconnects between user research and the product design process. If everyone could name exactly what they needed, someone would already have gone and made it. Great products solve problems that people never knew they had.

John Gruber, in his overall write-up on the new C&P functionality on the iPhone, summarizes Apple’s philosophy when it comes to releasing these types of features:

That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great. That’s not to say Apple never releases anything less than great, but they try not to. This is contrary to the philosophy of most other tech companies — and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of Microsoft. And it is very much what drives some people crazy about Apple — it’s simply incomprehensible to some people that it might be better to have no text selection/pasteboard implementation while waiting for a great one than to have a poor implementation in the interim.

I tend to agree with the Apple stance. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the great, but do let greatness be the enemy of the good/fair/poor.

A quick post on the Viget UX blog about a discussion Barn and I were having at the office today. It spawned from a nugget in Jeremy Keith’s notes from Jared Spool’s AEA talk today:

You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.

Right now there’s still a need for storefronts like Best Buy, but the rest of the post gets into speculating about how Amazon could make a play. Not that they would…

Jim Dalrymple:

The answer seems quite simple: AT&T is afraid of what will happen to its network once millions of iPhone users start sending MMS and connecting their computer to the network.

I remember back in like 2002 hearing a Verizon Wireless employee warn a potential customer that they’re likely to use more minutes than usual with Verizon, since the network was much better than CellularOne’s.

This is much the same thing. Once you’ve made a phone that makes features easy to use, people are likely to start using them.

Cringely on iTunes vs. Hulu:

Fox owns a big chunk of Hulu, yet American Idol performances are exclusively available on iTunes, not Hulu. Why is that? Because American Idol performances on iTunes make a lot of MONEY, that’s why. Adam Lambert downloads alone make more money every week — a LOT more money — than do ALL the shows on Hulu put together.

Bob suggests that Apple might spend their mammoth amount of cash on hand to commission programming only available on iTunes, a la HBO. That would be a very cool development.

In line with my recent post of the same nature about Twitter: A quick little list of instances of Google implementing “competitors’” product features shortly before or after the competitor’s announcement.

So what’s going on here? Greg’s reaction to this was that it was atypical of a market leader to be so reactive to “the competition” (if that’s what you call companies that have a minuscule share of the market). He’s right. Can you imagine Walmart making wholesale changes to its stores because mom and pop’s store on the corner implemented some neat features for its customers?

Compete on features with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other market leaders at your own peril. If it’s just features, your risks grow exponentially.

IDEO is working with BUG Labs on a fairly quick exploration of a redesign for their popular hardware prototyping tool. It’s always cool to get to see the work IDEO does.

The most interesting thing about this is that they’re blogging about their deliverables publicly as the process is underway. I’ve been hoping to land a project that would benefit from this kind of public exposure, getting feedback from real users throughout the course of the process.

I think that feedback could very successfully augment or replace many aspects of a big user research process, with a potential to do so with a much smaller budget and time commitment.