Letting Go .. For A Great Experience, Part 1

Paradox: 'par-&-"däks; n., 2 a : a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true - Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

One of the major objectives of any company is to build its brand awareness and loyalty among the customers of the markets it serves. This is crucial to maintaining market share and to the very survival of the company. The most common way of pursuing this objective is to ensure that the company’s products are familiar to the customer. This is typically accomplished by taking every opportunity to make and keep the user aware of the products and make them visually interesting and inviting to hold and manipulate. While this approach has been successful in the past and is held to be common sense, I submit that in the future it will be problematical.
We are beginning face a paradox. We want to focus on the ‘User Experience’. However, at the same time we are making our devices more complex by continuing to add features into an already crowded package.

There is a problem with this approach. Consider one of the most popular and successful (they are not always the same) devices to appear in the last five years: the Apple iPod. This mp3 player has not just succeeded as a product; it has inserted itself as a major element into the digital music subculture. The iPod currently has over 70% of the digital music player market and enjoys an intensely loyal fan base despite repeated attempts by all the major digital music player manufacturers to displace it.

The iPod does not compete on price (there are cheaper players); it does not compete on storage capacity (there are players with larger hard drives), and it does not compete on the number of features (there are players that provide more features). Instead, it competes on the user experience.

However, Apple is successful because they have let go. The have recognized the paradox and have understood the solution.

The hallmark of the iPod is its simplicity, both in appearance and operation. It contains very few controls. It possesses a very plain form factor. And it provides a few functions. Now this is not the solution to the paradox. This is the implementation of the solution. Our implementation of the paradox solution may be different. But the effect would be the same.

The simplicity of operation comes from Apple’s recognition of one key aspect of the paradox: the iPod is, in the final analysis, a tool. It is simply a means to enable people to listen to music of their choice when they want to wherever they want to. Nothing more. The key insight is that to achieve this, they had to let go of trying to keep the user’s attention focused on the device. They had to let go of the desire to keep the iPod in the user’s mind. Making the user focus on the device simply interposes the device between the user and what the user really wants to do. Apple had to realize that people really did not want to use an iPod. They wanted to listen to their own music whenever and wherever they wished.

Apple took this to heart. They devised the iPod such that it required very little attention of the user to access and listen to the music. They allowed the iPod to sink into and remain in the background of the user’s attention. The result: a wonderful user experience, a wildly successful product - and enormous publicity.
And here we see the paradox clearly. By allowing the product to sink into the user’s background of attention, the device achieves publicity and user awareness far beyond anything that could be obtained had Apple tried to keep the iPod in the user’s focus. Thus, the more you try to call the user’s attention to your product during its use (in the mistaken attempt to create a great ‘User Experience’), the less successful the product will be.

Next time: How Apple implemented this solution to the paradox

My Life As A Conflicted Technologist

I have been developing technology for over 25 years, 13 of those years prototyping cutting edge technology. And yet, I am a conflicted technologist. I love developing technology. I am very good at it. However, I am often frustrated using it, and many times confused by it.

For 10 years I have been doing applied research on wearable system design with a focus on high usability. Starting with a project called Person Integrated Communications in 1997 and later on a project called Conformables I and my team investigated ways to design wearable and portable devices that could be used with very little effort and focus.

The fundamental idea of both projects was that people do not want to use technology for its own sake. They don’t want to focus on it. They don’t want to figure it out. They just want to use it to perform a task. And that task is rarely intrinsically connected to the device itself. The device is simply a tool.

The frustration, the doubting of our intelligence we have all felt at one time or another when using technology says more about its failings than our own. Too many devices and applications are very good at making smart people feel stupid.

The result of the wearables work over the last eight years is a unique focus on usability backed by the definition of 18 design principles and several dozen heuristics and examples. It has also resulted in several awarded U.S. and international patents as well as the book ‘Moving Wearables into the Mainstream’ published in November of 2007 by Springer.

The focus is not on just being able to use a device or service. The focus is on adopting a mindset that promotes design of devices and applications that can be used almost transparently, allowing the user to focus on their real task instead of on using (however easily) the device or application.

As technology continues to permeate more and more of our everyday experiences we must insist on placing ourselves first. We must become masters of our technology and no longer let it dictate how we perform our tasks. We must insist that our technology fade into the background of our attention, even as we use it. Companies that take this attitude and have the knowledge and resources to embody this in their products will be the success stories of the next decades.

This blog will discuss ways to reduce this conflict of technology with people and how to design applications and services that are almost transparent to use as they help us with our daily tasks. I look forward to your comments, suggestions, and questions.