The Droid arrives: So, so, so ugly!

I love it when Motorola partners with a carrier to put out a cell phone. You’re always guaranted a complete cluster-f*ck of a branding experience.  Thankfully, Google has its way with software, but try your hand at the 360 degree gallery to see the shell.  On the front, they manage to shove the Verizon logo into the lower right of the hardware.  Can you see those branding/sales executives arguing about how large it should be?  It looks as though the sales executives won – that logo looks so shoved into place that it looks….awkward and unfriendly.  In other words, it looks like an afterthought that came AFTER manufacturing.  Now flip to the back.  This just makes one giggle.  Motorola and Verizon are so frightened that you might forget who made this phone that they slapped the same logo’s on the hardware AGAIN.  The phone just feels insecure!  Way to go!  Great example of a potentially great piece of hardware being compromised by a splintered design/manufacturing process.

iPhone Killer? Better get out of commodity mode.

By now, some of you may have heard of the news that cell phone carriers recently rejected the design of Dell’s new iPhone killer. What’s so beautifully ironic about this is that many carriers are the primary culprits for creating the design mess we’re in today.

At any rate, I digress. Come with me on a little journey full of tidbits I’ve learned over the years that may help you in the path to create the holy of holies – the iPhone killer.

+ Carriers and Cell Phone Manufacturers need to get a divorce.

Let’s face it, Apple succeeded where you may have failed because ATT handed over the parameters and then got out of the way. The more design decisions that are sacrificed based on ‘engineering challenges’, the more chances your cell phone is going to look and feel like a behemoth with a signal. Establish the priorities early on, and if you understand the user experience, then make your user experience team the king of the hill. Send your engineers back to the lab to ‘figure out how to make the experience work’.

+ Your baggage is your worst enemy. Drop it and start fresh.

You walk into that room with your team of veterans, and you beam with pride. They’ve carried you through 9 different phone designs. Your strength is your weakness. Start from scratch, or send your team off to a creative lab (IDEO, Frog Design) to watch how they generate new ideas based on experience, not assumptions. Yes, there is a difference. Let’s face it. Every veteran gets ‘assumption crust’ along the way.

+ Just because you slap your logo in 9 different places doesn’t mean you understand branding

My Motorola ROKR was small. But in that small area, Southwestern Bell managed to slap their logo onto the hardware and software more then 8 different ways. Why did this happen? Read above. The manufacturing designers and Carrier Designers worked separately. And I firmly believe that this ultra-corporate graffiti could have been avoided with a small, cross-disciplinary visual QA team with full rights to ‘can’ decisions on the final draft of the product.

+ Apple has a niche market that permanently avoids commodity status

The ROKR’s advertising campaign was solid. The iTunes commercials for it were a hit. The actual product was a different story. And let’s face it, if you’re in the business of selling phones internationally as a commodity low-price-point product, no one is going to pick up a new device with your name on it and see it as anything other than ‘more future junk’. I still own an iMac Bondi Blue. It still holds value to me. Why? At the end to the product’s lifecycle, Apple didn’t hawk it off to the lowest distribution bidders with a ‘get it now, it’s cheap’ campaign. It retains it’s luster because Apple, as a cohesive brand, never chunked it out to the commodity world. Sure, you may have a pc with the same old specs, but once the manufacturer started selling your unit at 100 Dollars, chances are you saw the writing on the wall. “No matter how slick the advertising/Story about this product is at the beginning, It’s all still a lie. This will be deemed junk by it’s parents.” Apple sold me the vision of what an iMac stood for. They never changed it. I bought that story. And as long as Apple continues to hold true to that story, I’ll continue believing it. This means what for you if you’re not in marketing? It means that if you’re in operations, you can’t look at the product in a different way than how marketing pitched it. If marketing pitches an experience, you can’t expect your target marketing to go easily when you decide to put your glut in inventory on the cheap at Best Buy to re-coup costs. Operations, sales, finance, everyone MUST buy into the story if you expect to build loyal followers.

+ If you offload a part of the experience design to an external group that remains external, expect Frankenstein, not Farrah

If your operations and finance teams have overcome you as priority points, and are pushing you to farm expensive pieces out, throw in the towel. Nothing kills a special experience faster than giving the development of your dowry to a cheap mail-order-bride. And that’s exactly what operations and finance is doing. They’re working off of a different guiding principle.

And that’s my rant for the evening, everyone. I hope this proves insightful In the end, my dedication comes not from the price-point I got, but from the experience Apple gives me. This isn’t unique, or impossible, but you have to start the story from within your organization. You have to build the iPhone killer, and your team, all of them, have to believe you’ve done something special. And for the love of god, hire experts who can guide you down that road of interpreting how your potential target market defines ‘experience’.

A Neat Little Graphic from Circa 2003

Here’s a graphical poem I cobbled together in early 2003. Republishing it for posterity’s sake, I think.

Apple, where are your haptics?

Keyboard interfaces are appearing on new surfaces, including iPhone screens,
televisions and a plethora of other information devices. It makes sense. As
devices get smarter, we need better ways of communicating with them. Remember VCR interfaces? Remember the blinking, red 12:00 your father never figured out how to fix? Need I say more.

These new surfaces, however are most often inadequately equipped to provide the user with the kind of feedback we expect to receive to assure us that we’re comfortably progressing in typing out our messages, passwords, game-key combinations, etc. correctly.

Some traditional keyboards have grooves and the ‘F’ and ‘J’ for orientation purposes. As well, most of us become accustomed to the feeling the pinky finger gets when it presses on a particular key at a particular angle. The impression our senses get reinforce comfort levels. To me, the perfect keyboard was the keyboard where each key had a slightly different ‘input personality’. Pressing the “L” made a slightly different sound and had a slightly different feel, than the “;” or “P” key. Keyboard makers didn’t intentionally build this kind of subtle feedback into the keyboard – it just so happened that keyboards, by nature of their physical manufacturing, had certain feedback traits.

These feedback traits, or nuances were especially helpful when I performed tasks that required a QWERTY interface, but I wasn’t using the keyboard to type ‘words’. Gaming key combinations, accounting, etc….other tasks seemed to call on another part of the brain that relied more heavily on the ‘feel’ and ’sound’ of the keys, and less on the traditional QWERTY word method.

Enter stage the new Apple keyboards. Flat, supposedly more ergonomic, still prone to subtly different sounds from the right to the left side of the keyboard, but much less dependable when it comes to tactile feedback. I have to look down at the keyboard to find my “F” and “J”. Once found, I’m in good shape for communication in full sentences. But it’s been a much harder road to travel when I call upon my keyboard to be the interface to a key-combination-centric game, Mac specific key-shortcuts or even programming.

So you can imagine the frustration I felt when I realized the iPhone keyboard had NO tactile feedback function. Some smartphones do provide users with the ability to turn ‘Haptics’ on. It’s an on-off toggle that essentially provides touch-vibration on the stroke of a key. The same level of vibration on all keys. Boo.

But I need more. So, bear with me as I propose an idea. I call it “Flexible Haptics”. What if, depending on your need for tactile feedback, you could visually set the level of vibration for your keys? So you’re an ardent mobile gamer? Choose only specific keys to provide strong vibrational feedback, while others don’t provide any. So, you find that your very fat thumbs often miss the exact location of the middle range letters? Set the middle zone to strong haptic feedback and create a range that ends with no haptic feedback at the edges. Programmer who spends most of the time on the special character range? Set the most oft-used special characters with strong haptics, and range haptics down on frequency of usage. So you’re a Key-Shortcut power user in Photoshop? You get the point.

Of course, there is another step that’s probably less realistic in the short term. But types of vibration may give us more felxibility in creating ideal forms in which to customize the QWERTY experience. I’m multitasking – One vibration set is for photoshop shortcuts, a different vibration is for general OS commands whereas yet another is for gaming.

In conclusion, I think Ms Wilcox would be deeply proud. She’d never admit to it, but this post would most certainly provide her with enough impetus to share another wondeful surfing story. She loved the Peruvian coast.

She made my typing experience unique because she personalized the mundane – and in doing so, she made it special. Via her delivery, she gave me the chance to personalize the typing class. The Haptic experience is different, but the same. Tactile feedback is important to the way I learn and communicate. I’ll need tactile feedback to be integrated into new technologies so that I can stop having to reach for how the technology needs for me behave….and I can continue to be….just me.

New Wave Ware

One strategy that major record companies have been employing lately to deter downloading is adding bonus computer content to new CD releases. I recently discovered that this technique is not unique to CD’s, but had in fact been practiced in the vinyl era as well. That’s right: there were a handful of records released in the late 70’s and early 80’s that contained computer programs as part of the audio.This is totally insane, and totally great.