I had the experience: 20 minutes with an iphone. Thanks to Gary Marsden for the opportunity.

People have said “oh yeah the iphone is really good.” Some have said “It’s really REALLY good.” But I thought they were just Apple groupies.

They didn’t convey just how good it is. It’s astonishing. My jaw dropped. And when my wife tried it, her jaw dropped too.

Now I’m an Apple sceptic. I find Apple devices rarely live up to the hype. So this is not an Apple-worship post.

This post is about how the iPhone is ushering in a dramatic shift in the world of user experience.

Adding more feel

There’s a term that bobs around in the world of technology: “look and feel”. Look gets most of the attention, and often, feel is something we struggle to define.

That’s because most applications feel the same. We click buttons, we slide scrollbars, we press keys. Nothing has really changed in years. And we reached the point where we all forgot to look for alternatives.

What’s special about the iPhone is the feel. You use it by making gestures, and touching it with several fingers at once. You flick at long lists to make them scroll fast. You pinch photos to make them smaller and stretch maps to zoom in. You don’t just interact with an iPhone. You conduct it. You play it. You treat the things on the screen like real-world objects (slightly magical ones). Using it is a great experience and I really urge you to seek one out and have a go.

(Yes I know it’s not perfect. It’s no good if you need to operate it by touch alone, it requires two hands, and it requires us to use our thick and clunky fingers. But that doesn’t stop it being amazing).

With this new kind of user experience, we’re inching up through the spectrum - towards fuller, more engaging, experiences. We’re still miles from the rich, real-life experience of a fast drive in a luxury car. But we’re closer than we were.

That’s cute, you say. It takes feel to a new level. But so what?

Well, this new kind of user experience will have a very real impact on our lives and the digital technology business.

A step-change

Think of it this way. In 1984 there was a small grey box with a mouse and some basic GUI capabilities: the Apple Mac. Humble, yes. But it was the first commercially successful GUI computer. 23 years later hundreds of millions of GUI operating systems are installed across the planet. And that has enabled us to build at least a couple of new industries, and transform the global economy. That’s right - we couldn’t have done it with just the DOS prompt.

The history of the internet is another great example. Only when the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, brought images and clickable hypertext to our screens, did the internet was finally go mainstream.

A change in the way we use computers - allowing us to do the same things better, and tackle new things we haven’t yet imagined. Explosive growth. Life- and economy-transforming results. The iPhone is the beginning of another round of that.

What kind of company that can make things like that?

As Harry Brignull and Bill Buxton have both pointed out, Apple stood on the shoulders of giants to make the iPhone. Multitouch research has been going on since the early eighties. The games industry has been making use of gesture and natural physics for years now. And smart phones have been around for a long while.

What Apple did, though, was to throw out one heavily-entrenched assumption: that phones had a keypad, a yes, a no, and two softkeys. Once they did that, they gave themselves a new opportunity to pull together a range of ideas and technologies into an amazing device.

For that they deserve enormous respect. Very few organisations in the world can throw out that much inherited wisdom, and demonstrate that much innovativeness, foresight and guts. Many wish they could. But for most, the risk seems too great, the politics and processes are too stodgy, the desire to just get something “good enough” out there is too strong. (The trick: follow a user-centred design process to de-risk your innovation projects.)

Who dares wins…

Well, it looks like Apple will sell 6% of the coming year’s smartphones. And Microsoft, will sell 5%, even though they have been in the market for years with Windows Mobile and Pocket PC. That tells us something.
But whatever happens to the iPhone, we can be sure that multi-touch and gestural interfaces are going to change the experience of using computers forever.

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Recently, Joel Spolsky pointed out the brilliantly obvious: The boxes for Microsoft's new generation of user-experience focussed products don't actually offer a great user experience. They are really hard to open. As Joel puts it:

A box that many people can't figure out how to open without a Google search is an unusually pathetic failure of design.

For those of you who want the full details, my colleague Karl Sabino has dug out the official Microsoft help page for opening the box. Yes that's right. A help page for the packaging. I'd love to know the traffic stats for this page. By assuming that each page impression corresponds to about 10 minutes of user frustration, we could calculate the total amount of customer time wasted by this nonsense. Still, I guess we should be thankful that the same designers aren't working on the escape slides for Boeing.

Balancing easy, useful and delightful

Microsoft have recently been talking about the importance of the aesthetic quality of a good user experience. Good for them. It's very important. Beautiful products make us more likely to try them out and, by putting us in the right frame of mind, make us more effective at actually using them. But this box seems to illustrate the problems of going too far towards the aesthetic, and forgetting the easy/useful part of the equation. It's cute, groovy, cool - but it's a pain to use. And that's not a balanced user experience. That's where the web was back in 1998, and we all thought things had moved on since then.

"It's a business requirement"

Maybe the box is hard to open for business reasons. Perhaps its some anti piracy measure or linked to the licensing agreement. That's no excuse. If a business "need" inconveniences customers, it needs to be re-thought. Why? Because if you treat your customers badly, they'll treat you badly - asking for additional expensive support, requiring heavy marketing expenditure to avoid churn, damaging your brand with negative blog posts. Which all cost you money in the end. In the words of Colin Shaw, "You get the customers you deserve."

Patching the hole

One thing that Microsoft have done right: issued a "service patch". They know there's a problem with the customer experience and they've done what they can in the short term to take the edge off the problem. They've published a web page. The next step is to stick the instructions to the box, so that you don't have to search the web to find them. No comments

A great quote that sums up the art of User-Centered Writing: “Bad writers worry about whether the reader will understand them. Good ones are more concerned about how well they understand the reader.” - Paraphrased from Lindsay Camp (2007) 1 comment

http://oakland.crimespotting.org

Crime database websites are nothing new, and I wonder how helpful they really are to people. Does access to this information empower you, or does it create an atmosphere of terror which within which the state is free to curtail civil liberties?

Whatever, the interaction here is simply grand.

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Finally we’ve managed to get our new site out the door. Please do drop by and take a look. In case you’re wondering, Flow interactive is a London-based User Experience consultancy. I’m a consultant there. We’re hiring.

By the way, my posts from this site (90percentofeverything.com) will also be appearing over on the flow blog.

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We're proud to announce the launch of our new website at www.flowinteractive.com.

The old one had been around since about 2001, and it was definitely time for a change. We think the new one does a much better job at presenting what we've gown up to be over the last ten years.

It's been a long time coming - partly because we've been so busy helping all our clients build their websites. But the stuff we're learning every day about user experience is valuable and we're hoping to use this website and the blog to share some of it. We plan to add more case studies and, in time, publish downloadable articles about some of our principles, techniques and insights.

Thanks to everyone who helped with the project, from both inside and outside of Flow. It was an honour to work with such a great range of talented people.

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This should be the mantra for user experience designers everywhere.

Image stolen unashamedly from Jonny Baker’s Photostream. The concept came up in a chat with Simon Johnson today over lunch.

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