Besides making my mouth water and making me wonder if I would every buy a $150 burger, the article also annoyed me with its annoying experience via the annoying slideshow mechanism. There are times when an automatic slideshow are nice - for example, looking through a new photoset of my brother’s kid - especially if there’s a group of people watching at the same time. But how is an automatic slideshow of entries with text that needs to be read a good idea?
Few people read at the same rate, and even a single person will read the entries at different speeds depending on what else is happening on the computer, how interesting the text or picture is, etc. If I finish reading and it doesn’t advance to the next slide, I’m annoyed. If I haven’t finished and it advances to the next slide, I’m annoyed. Except for the miniscule percentage of instances when the slideshow advances exactly when I’m ready for it to advance, this is a lose-lose experience.
For me to read an entry, I need to click “stop” to disable autoadvancement. Then I click “next” to continue to the next slide. Here’s the most annoying behavior - once I click “next”, it returns to autoadvance mode, forcing me to click “stop” on every slide! Grrrrr.
If you want to put something like this in a slideshow format, fine. Just don’t make autoadvance the default setting, because that’s really annoying.
Some of the things that I found particularly interesting:
1. How quickly (I’d say within the first 5 years) the general form factor evolved to being very similar to the common designs that are still in use today.
2. Once designer aesthetics came into play in the late 90’s, it really became a prominent part of mobile phone design.
3. There sure have been some funky looking phone. Both good and bad.
As you can probably tell from my past posts, I’m a big fan of Apple product, especially the iPhone. This video does a great job of highlighting the marketing and design savvy that comes from Apple. It’s terrifically funny, too.
This is a picture of a late night broadcast of SportsCenter during playback through my DVR. What’s interesting to me is the column of topics along the right edge of the screen. The current story is the highlighted topic at the top of the column. As the story finishes, the list scrolls up and the next topic moves into the highlight and sits at the top.
When watching in real time, this is useful by letting me know what’s coming up in the broadcast. But the real value is when I’m watching from a recording. For me, SportsCenter is the perfect candidate for recorded viewing. In an hour broadcast, there’s probably only about 15 minutes worth of content that I’m truly interested in. And that’s why this list of topics of so useful. I’m able to fast forward to exactly what interests me in a very easy way. I don’t need to guess what the story is about by watching the picture on the screen - I can simply look at the topics as they scroll up.
This is a case where the UI is embedded in the content with a usefulness that is maximized through DVR usage. Brilliant. I don’t know if this was the intentional design (if anybody knows, please let me know) or if it’s a wonderful side-effect of putting a topic list along the side, but the value it adds to the way in which I watch SportsCenter is significant.
This last week, we had two types of tangerines in our fruit bowl. One was wonderfully juicy and sweet. The other kind was enjoyable, but not nearly as succulent as the first kind. I ended up finishing off our stock of the second kind first. Why? Because they were really easy to peel.
Yes, I know. This is a fairly trite example and really, how important is it that I can peel one kind of tangerine 20 seconds faster than the other kind? Well, important enough that I ate them all first and I go to the store looking to buy the easy to peel kind and not the other. That’s 10 seconds vs. 30 seconds of peeling!
So imagine that the taste of the fruit is the feature. It’s what the customer eventually consumes. It needs to be promising enough that the fruit is an attractive purchase, but it doesn’t need to be the best. What it does need is easy access. By making the innards significantly easier to access, the growers can sell me a fruit that is whole lot more enjoyable, even if it’s a little less tasty.
“Addressing Usability in the Wake of the iPhone”. This was the title of a session I attended at CTIA a couple weeks ago. Based on the title, it sounded promising and I was excited to hear what the panelists had to say. Unfortunately, it was a major letdown and showed me that too many people still don’t understand what user experience and usability are really about.
The panelists included senior management of some intriguing newcomers as well as long-established companies. But the entire 90 minutes was spent talking about the features that they would provide in their products. There was lots of talk along the lines of, “We have this new, great technology that users definitely want and it’s important to provide a great user experience.” Then they would describe in detail the feature set without further discussion about how to bring the great user experience to life.
This showed me that focus in the industry is still very much on feature lists with minimal understanding of how to create great experiences that involve those features. Yes, it would be great if I could perform x feature on my phone, but only if the threshold of usage were low enough that I would actually use it. Unfortunately, this message was completely lacking during the panel. This wouldn’t have been so thoroughly disappointing except for the fact that the title of the session was “Addressing Usability”!
Overall, what I saw at CTIA was disappointing from a UX perspective. There is some great industrial design happening and definitely some wonderful technological features being developed, but in my mind there’s still only one major player who has demonstrated a commitment to excellence in mobile UX. (That would be Apple, in case you’re still wondering).
I’m heading off to 3GSM in Barcelona next week. It will be exciting, overwhelming, tiring, and hopefully educational. Here are my main topics of interest:
1. Industry reaction to the year of the iPhone
Massive hype and media coverage put the iPhone smack in the middle of mobile industry consciousness. How will other companies react, if at all?
Android. Linux mobile (lots of efforts, just google “linux mobile”). The gates are just now opening.
4. Mobile social networking
Lots of varied and interesting efforts going on. Also lots of copycat, boring efforts. None wildly successful yet. I’m curious to see what kind of evolution is coming in 2008.
5. Mobile advertising
Who is going to be the first to truly succeed here and make a run toward dominating the space? Will there be any hints next week?
6. Mobile content
Again, a space that’s starting to feel ripe. Who is going to provide a truly compelling product?
7. UI / UX innovation
2007 was really exciting for UI advancement. But in most cases, mobile devices are still unreasonably difficult to use. What does 2008 have in store?
Comcast owns every channel of communication that enter and leaves my house (except my mobile phone service and U.S. mail). They’ve got my internet, VOIP, and TV all to themselves. What a great opportunity to provide convergence and integration of all of this content and across all of these services!
Instead, they offer nothing of the sort. That makes me mad. Not only do they not provide anything impressive, they don’t even offer anything better than adequate. And some of their services are downright horrible. I stay with them because I don’t really have other viable options and I will admit that the convenience of a single billing package is nice.
Although I’m satisfied, but not thrilled, with my internet, VOIP and cable TV, the Comcast DVR experience is so terrible that it makes me think poorly about the entire company. The Motorola DVR that I rent from Comcast is an inexcusable piece of junk. I can forgive poor UI design (to a certain extent, anyway). I’ve been in this industry long enough to see that a good UI can be an advantageous differentiator, but also that a product with a poor UI can succeed if the core technology and performance is good enough to make up for the UI deficiencies.
The Comcast DVR has neither of these. The UI is awful in many ways (that would be a long article in itself). But even worse, the stupid thing is constantly failing in core functionality. A couple days ago, I noticed that the clock on the faceplate wasn’t showing the correct time. For some reason, the DVR’s clock had stopped or it wasn’t registering the correct time. The primary purpose of this device is to help me manage my TV schedule. Um, that is completely dependent on knowing the time. The outcome of this is that several of my schedule programs failed to be recorded. I had to reboot the DVR to get it right again. This is a complete failure of the device, not some UI difficulty. It completely failed to do exactly what it is meant to do.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t all that important. It’s only TV shows that I’m missing. But there is no excuse for this type of bug. There’s nothing difficult about this. It’s simply shodding quality control. It’s not like they need the latest and greatest processing chips or any other kind of technological advancement. It’s pretty basic stuff with really sloppy implementation, telling me that Comcast and Motorola just don’t care. I want you to care. Please care.
Yikes, it’s been a while since I wrote one of these things.
This one is about the Novint Falcon. I’ve been pretty excited waiting for this to launch and ship. As a reminder, the Falcon is a consumer-level haptic device with 3-degrees of freedom. It’s incredibly inexpensive (something like $250) for what it claims to offer and the hope is that this is the breakthrough that brings haptics to the masses.
I received mine a couple weeks ago and finally got around to trying it out this weekend. Installation was easy and it looks nice enough (though a lot larger than I imagined - didn’t think it would be as big as my head). Unfortunately, I regretfully must declare that I’m very disappointed in what it offers. The actual performance is acceptable, but not stunning. Pretty much in line with what I hoped for at this price point, but it didn’t exceed my expectations.
The real disappointment was in the bundled applications that came with it. The tutorial presented the basic “feel spheres of different textures” and “feel the inertia of a ball on a rubber band” demos that have long made rounds within the haptics communities. The problem is that these are gimmicks. They don’t provide any utility in the consumer market space and do nothing to lift haptics out of its gimmicky niche.
The bundled games weren’t any better. The ones I tried used haptics in ways where force-feedback was not essential to the gameplay (again, making the effect gimmicky) and in most cases, didn’t seem to be helpful in making the game more compelling. Note - I have not tried out all of the games yet, so if anybody has a recommendation for one that will blow my mind, please speak up.
