“The Flip’s success stunned the industry, but it shouldn’t have. It’s just the latest triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.”
— The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine in Wired
“I have learned more about web design from YouPorn.com than from all industry blogs, forums and books combined. Pay a visit once a day for a month and you will learn: what is niche market and why they are important. How to target customer. Why headlines are crucial. You will see how much attention they pay on optimising advertising and changing it every single day. And the most important thing, you’ll see how much other people preferences are different from yours. I call it interactive learning.”
— Marko Bijelic, who claims to be ‘the best web designer alive’
Click for a larger version — created by Design for Interaction Master’s student Robert Paauwe
“Here is where I make a Big Point. What we want from our technology, in its most elemental form, is to make our thoughts happen. Sure, it’s still very much sci-fi in 2010, but what every calculating machine and telephone and computer and phonograph and light bulb and hammer and every tool ever invented is about at its core is our desire, our evolutionary imperative to control our environment at our will. And we’re getting closer and closer to that happening.”
— Adam Lisagor, in Adaption
Often the hardest part while designing a product is to decide which features you will support and which you will not. It is easy to just put in that one extra feature, especially with digital systems. And most of the time we, designers, do. We succumb to pressure from the marketing department or a client, so that they can put that one extra bullet point on the functionality list. Nobody cares if customers are able to use it, and the worst thing is: it helps sell more products.
Selling more products is what we all want, but doing so by getting your functionality list expanded is wrong. This will ultimately backfire on you, as your customers will not buy their next product from you.
Case in point is Nokia. I own a Nokia 6300 and because of that, I know that my next phone will not be a Nokia. It is a wonderful device, with lovely stainless-steel covers and a solid look. The lack of attention to details is horrifying though.
This list is just the beginning of Things That Are Just Not Good Enough™, which start to annoy you after endured use. On the other hand, the phone has lots of functions I do not want to use, and even some I cannot use (push to talk? forget about it!).
All of these issue do not seem important, and mainly because you cannot put them in a sales flyer. They do however define how a user views your product. Details do not influence the initial buying decisions, but foster a longterm customer relationship.
Update. Jeremy Clarkson, of BBC’s Top Gear, tested the new Range Rover and said about the buttons: “There is another thing. The buttons and switches in de BMW and Audi are just taken out of normal saloon cars. In the Range Rover they are big and chunky. So that you can use them while wearing gloves. Little things.” View it on YouTube.
Last week, it was election day for local government in the Netherlands. With voting stations closing at 21:00 hour (GMT+1), the national public broadcaster (NOS) started its live show to present the results per municipality as soon as they were known. Like all election result shows nowadays, it had a mix of presenters, reporters on location, political analysts, and even a Twitter-reporter this year. The buzz with a minority of the population was, however, not about the results (Labour and Christian-Democrats considerably lost, Greens and Social-Liberals won). It was about the touchscreen used to present the voting results. For the first time in Dutch television history, a real touchscreen was used by the presenter. The man even got a nickname: “Touch Herman”, like his CNN counterpart “John ‘wall magician’ King”.
The NOS should not have used a touchscreen in their show. Touchscreens are hot again, mainly since Apple made them usable by putting them in the iPhone. They are so effective, because you are able to vary the control mechanisms based on what is needed. “On this screen you need 4 buttons, on this one you need 16.” Presenting the election results does not require different control mechanisms, the whole cycle is fixed.
While the presenter might wanted to alternate between the first and second results-slides (step 3 and 4), a previous/next button would have solved that. He did not have to manipulate the screen otherwise. There were a few other actions presenter Herman van der Zandt performed, like showing the poll results, but all of them were sequential and thus predictable. I actually suspect they were initiated by someone in the ‘control room’, since the same actions performed by Herman show different results each time.
So the only benefits of using a touchscreen were:
The downside of presenting with a touchscreen was that the presentation was:
All we have to consider now, is how we got here in the first place. This touchscreen was probably used since “CNN has it, so we need it too”. I hope the day will come when Minority Report-like touchscreens will be used properly by the NOS, till then, watch CNN for the serious stuff. (Oh, and if you are in the market: buy a Perceptive Pixel touchscreen instead of an U-Touch)
