Some weeks ago, I spoke at the most excellent Mobile 2.0 Europe conference in Barcelona (I had posted a slideshow of the slides to the talk). Now the good folks of Dotopen, who organised the event, now made a video of my talk available. After watching it, I will say that one never stops learning 
. However, perhaps you will enjoy it anyway. Here it is:
Volker Hirsch from dotopen on Vimeo.
As now is good tradition, here are the slides to the talk I delivered at Games Convention Online last week in Leipzig. Have fun and remember that sharing is caring…
Sluggishly reacting applications, latency in almost everything you do, crashes, blank screens, long lag to pick up networks, buggy settings. Do you remember any of this? Sounds like some old-fashioned feature phone that was somewhat overloaded by its ambitious maker, doesn’t it? But, alas, no, it is not. This is the user experience with a one-year-old iPhone 3G, 16GB since 24 June 2010. Do you recognise the date? Then luck will have it that you have experienced the same: the grandly titled “iOS4″ update that was being pushed down your throat (or rather iTunes) to your iPhone 3G.
Apple has been hailed for poking everyone else making handsets in the eye when it came out with the iPhone: here is a newbie that got it all right and venerable industry leaders found themselves with cartons full of ostrich egg on their faces: here was someone who got it all right: combining great build quality, maybe only OK-ish specs and unsurpassed UI with a vertically integrated publishing and distribution system that made for a leap in usage of mobile devices. It was a bad slap for the Nokias etc of this world and a revelation for millions of users (even if they were not Apple fanboys).
Software and hardware need to blend well
And then it came back to bite them! I am not a techie but iOS4 on the iPhone 3G feels like someone put a little too much luggage onto too frail a porter: the things creaks and aches at every corner. Gone are the days where one could switch from one app to another in seconds, where the iPhone – in good Apple style – did what you wanted it to do without much ado but breathtaking efficiency and speed. Now, it is clunky and, well, very old-fashioned. It could of course all have been avoided: just don’t push iOS4 to the iPhone 3G (or older models). No one would have cried, you should think: if the hardware cannot handle it, it cannot handle it. Users understand such things one should think. Keep iOS4 to the iPhone 4 (even the numbers match, doh!).
Allowing iOS4 to be pushed to the iPhone 3G was one horrendous mistake!
So is this the latest marketing trick of Apple? Go and spend another £600 to buy a new one, you say? This would be utter and incredible cynicism on a scale that would put Apple right on top of the current bad-boy scale! After all, I am not talking about an old, well-worn something-or-other device; I am talking about something that was only a year ago (which is short in terms of device replacement even in the mobile space) for a considerable amount of money!
However, I think that is not it. My suspicion is rather more frightening. It very much feels like Apple starting to overextend itself and learn how complex and fragile it is to deal in the mobile space. Pushing iOS4 to devices that obviously (not only under some special and hard to find circumstances) cannot cope with it is just shoddy. Every game or app developer in the market for more than 2 years would have caught this in QA. Does Apple not have QA? Or not anymore? Or at least not enough? It might happen to you when you try too much too quickly. Apple’s passion (or paranoia?) that drives it to try and do everything itself appears to haunt it now: I mean, QA is really simple. You don’t need cohorts of phDs in elementary physics to do this. It doesn’t take you 3 years to build it up. And – last but not least – Apple appeared to being very much on top of this in the past. So what happened?
A great showcase on the importance of User Experience
I have been throwing this into the faces of Nokia lovers who never fail to point out how technically superior Nokia’s hardware is: users do not give a toss about hardware specs. They care for the overall user experience. The unhappy marriage of the 3G with iOS4 shows what this does when it goes wrong: all the fun of using an iPhone is gone. What good is it when my phone lets me down every 10 minutes? What fun if my e-mail doesn’t open for 20 seconds? How exciting if applications appear to be frozen only to open just seconds after I pressed the home button (that will kill them just in time after I saw that it did, at the end, react)? Utter frustration. Rotten user experience. Complete fail.
Apple shows us, hence, accidentally how important the overall user experience is, and this may well be my final example on this: a simple (well, maybe not so simple) piece of software turns the most coveted consumer device of the day into a somewhat lame brick! However, it also shows how incredibly important it is to match the hardware (and network environment) to what the overall product (here: iOS4) promises to deliver (non-Apple case in hand would be video-calling on the Nokia N70 back in 2005: there was just no way this would work in practice; the experience was just too horrendous).
So, dear Apple, back to the drawing board. And if I may make a humble suggestion: just push the last pre-iOS4 version back to the older devices tomorrow! First thing! Promise! Please!
To all the others: this is a great opportunity! Catch up! Double your efforts! But don’t forget that the coolest frigging hardware (12 MP cameras anyone) is useless if the UX is not matching it either!
Apple’s iPhone is only a marketing fad for vain urbanites. True purists go for Android. Those who see the light in volume go for Nokia or Samsung.
All this are points often heard when one dives into the deeper echolons of most mobile tech blog or forum. Engineers throw up their hands because those “American-centric media types” “don’t get it” and only wave their flag for whatever Steve Jobs, turtle neck and all may put up onto the big screens of his church.
I am not American and I am not a media type. And I don’t wear turtle necks (well, not since c. 1989 at least). And yet, I do prefer my iPhone (3G) over my Nexus One. And this despite obvious advantages of the Nexus: better screen, quicker, haptic feedback (yes, Mr Jobs, I do like that), the concept of open source, etc, etc. So why do I stick to the iPhone? Fanboy? Marketing fad? Vain urbanite?
Here’s why: I have been trying to set up my Nexus so it will do what my iPhone does, and I am not talking of playing a fancy game or running some other app that is not (yet) available on Android. I am talking about the two key things I need a phone for (41-year-old non-techie I am), and that is phone calls and e-mail; calendar (with sync) is important, too. For the former I need my address book, and I need it to sync properly. For the latter, I need my (admittedly too many) e-mail accounts set up on my device and syncing properly. As to calendar, wait for it below. Alas, two very different experiences:
- On the iPhone, you do the following: 1) plug the phone into your computer, 2) answer “yes, please” when iTunes asks you if it should sync contacts and e-mail addresses, 3) get yourself a cup of coffee, 4) walk off.
On the Nexus, you’re OK (-ish) if your life evolves around Google. With a Gmail account and associated contacts (and/or calendars), you’re sort of OK. It does all that. Now – shock, horror – I do not actually send all my mail from Gmail and my contacts are mainly dealt with in my address book (take Outlook or whatever you want if you’re a Windows user). And I use iCal and not Google Calendar. And so it starts: there is no desktop application that would help me do this. On a Mac, the phone is not even recognised when you plug it in (and that is a rare thing on a Mac; is this another piece of Apple vs. Google? I don’t know but I doubt it). So you are finding yourself setting everything up by hand! Entering the POP3 and SMTP (or IMAP) server addresses, user names, passwords, etc, etc for seven e-mail accounts is no fun. And (remember I am not a techie) invariably leads to some box checked wrongly here or a typo in a password there and, kawoom, nothing works. I can set up a Google Calendar/iCal sync BUT that will only sync the specific Google Calendar bit between the two, and not any of my other (work, home) calendars. I can sync my address book with Google, so that works. The whole procedure took me the better part of 45 minutes, including lots of corrections and swearing and led to me abandoning a half-configured beauty of an Android phone. Great result.
So why is that?
My answer is: because they design it with engineer-centric design. And that is wrong! Why? Well, because most people are not engineers! An engineer thinks something along the following: I am Google and we love the cloud. Therefore, I will design everything so that it will adhere to that principle and will – in a purist kind of way – design everything in a way that you can beautifully and seamlessly set everything up – if and as long as you use all the wonderful Google services we have. And if you don’t get that, you’re not worthy.
The same works with Nokia: we’re Nokia and we have the best hardware, the best distribution and an incredibly good and powerful plethora of services around it (we did spend time, resource and money after all to become mighty competitors in maps [Navteq], music [Comes with Music], apps [Ovi - and the many iterations before it], etc). I will therefore design everything in a way that I can let this hardware shine as best I can; I mean: we had video calls since 2005, for elk’s sake! And if you are too dumb to configure everything in a proper way and cannot find the destination to where your downloads were stored, you’re not worthy.
Apple looks at things a little differently (and it is not only for the better although, for most people, it is): they provide a tool that brings everything I need over to my phone just like that. Job done. Easy! They will look at whatever tools they need for this. And if it means extending iTunes (which, yes, I know, they had already) to accommodate syncing data other than music and video to something other than a computer, than so be it. In that, they follow their own philosophy as slavishly as the other guys do but they do design it from a people-centric rather than an engineer-centric point of view. And that is why it works so well for people that are not (also) engineers.
They key point is this: Apple does not try (or at least not in your face) to change what people do. If I want to run my e-mail off 5 different domains, then so be it. If I prefer my contacts to sit on my disk rather than in the cloud, that’s fine. They’ll give me tools to facilitate doing what I do already and don’t lecture me on what I have to do to make it work. That this brings about subtle changes in user behaviour is fine: if you convince me gradually that things work better one way rather than another, I might be converted. But to tell me “my way or the highway” does not work! Ever!
The downside is Apple’s control mania, which blocks things (sometimes fairly questionably) because they are (or only might) be out of their control. And this is where Google, Nokia and all the others could score: try to combine things! If you would look at how Apple does things, and then – at the very end – you provide a door (doesn’t have to be a trap door, can be a flashy entry portal) to the innards and machine room of your device, so you can show off whatever you want and open the marvels of technology to those who can and want to handle it – so they can turn their super-smartphone into an uber-super-smartphone. But do leave normal people alone.
In the post-iPhone era, things have changed already (a little): you now get hidden installers (that do not ask you 100 questions on where you want to do what and where and under what penalties and with which risks), you get better interfaces, etc. BUT the default is still engineer-centric and not people-centric. Improve this, and the iPhone killer can be yours!
Image credit: http://www.ntamco.com/main/images/stories/design-is-a-behaviour.jpg
Gartner published the latest smartphone numbers for Q1/2010 (or so I read), and it is testament to the continuing rise of this segment: sales increased by nearly 50% year-on-year (and do remember that there was this recession-thing last year). Total sales were 54.3m units in the first quarter of this year. Not too shabby!
On the OS side, the rising stars are Android (9.6% global market share from 1.6% a year ago), which is now bigger then Windows Mobile (and it took it only a year!) and iPhone (15.4% vs 10.5% in Q1/2009). The silverback gorilla still is Symbian which dropped to 44.3% from 48.8%. Blackberry is also down (albeit only slightly: 19.4% from 20.6%).
Here’s a table:
Here it is, the May Bank Holiday edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists. For those not in the know: it is a weekly write-up of the best and brightest in the world of mobile-(related) blogging and is being hosted each week on another blog; this week it’s me… The easiest way to follow the Carnival every week is to subscribe to the Twitter stream of the formidable Peggy Anne Salz.
So here’s what this week has in stock for you:
James Coops from Mobyaffiliates provides us with an excellent overview of mobile affiliate networks, a fairly fresh approach to carry the multi-billion dollar online equivalent to mobile.
Jay Ehret asks the question that normally costs a round, namely “Is it the Year of Mobile yet?“. And he has a refreshingly clear look at it: a) it is impossible to throw all of the various mobile marketing things (SMS, mobile web, LBS, mobile wallets, m-commerce, etc) into one bucket, and right he is!, b) he reckons that it is certainly time for mobile now since low entry barriers and cost basically make it a ride you cannot lose.
Dr Jim Taylor delights us by adding a few more acronyms to the mix: NEI is the new TMI. The “I” stands for information and Jim looks how the wealth of available information and the way people handle it may reflect upon larger sociological developments. Very thoughtful stuff!
Ajit Jaokar from the OpenGardensBlog looks at the decline of fixed line and wonders if we’re all erring, namely because the wires are needed to take the data load off (hyper-)broadband mobile networks. He then wonders if one shouldn’t think mobile and fixed-line as one and design accordingly.
Peggy Anne Salz points us to a podcast on app store marketing. With nigh on 70 app stores and gazillions of apps, discovery, marketing and sustained usage are issues central to the distribution (and revenue!) strategy of every app developer (I for one certainly bookmarked it).
Tego Interactive’s Alfred de Rose queries whether Apple needs an iPhone in the enterprise (he thinks it doesn’t, and his arguments are very noteworthy!).
And, finally, Rudy de Waele announced the next edition of the wonderful event that is Mobile 2.0 Europe, which will take place in beautiful Barcelona – and not in rainy February either but on 17 June. Book your tickets here. Next to it, there will be the AppCircus, a unique traveling showcase of the most creative and innovative apps presented by their creators at top events around the world.
And that’ll conclude this week’s carnival. Make sure to clue yourself up, read, listen, ponder, share and discuss!
Next week’s edition will be hosted by James Coops at his MJelly Blog.
