In the midst of a global downturn, Apple beat Wallstreet’s expectations today with their most profitable quarter ever. Sales for iPhones have risen dramatically. BrandKeys just published their 2009 ratings for the brands with the highest loyalty: iPhone takes first place, up from 2nd place last year.
This all with a phone that is not per se usable.
Make this little test: Try to call your friend with your iPhone while she is calling you from a regular cell phone at the same time. Until today, I always had to answer my iPhone before I was able to dial. The reason: The iPhone address book is not geared for efficiency, a key usability dimensions for frequent tasks.
Back in the 1950s, US company General Mills launched a cake mix. It was geared towards efficiency for the busy housewife. No separate ingredients needed – just add water. It didn’t take off. So business psychologists came in, researched the customers and found: Make the product LESS usable. Make customers add eggs themselves. Provide for a great experience by satisfying the social needs and basic motivations of the customer group. The cake-mix became a great success.
I like this story because it nicely sums up the progression in thinking from ‘just designing for ease and speed’ (old-school usability) to ‘designing an entire experience’ (new-school experience design).
Maybe Steve Jobs also likes the story.
Providing good usability for today’s products and services is a must-have. Understanding users’ motivations and needs and therefore evoking good experiences is where the money is.
Looking forward to comments from all the loyal iPhone users and usability fanatics.
I just had a really excellent customer service experience with our blog and CMS provider Squarespace.
About 40 minutes ago I accidentally deleted the content this page. And I couldn’t undo the changes. Of course I was frustrated and went on a mantra about the importance of undo and versioning in any application and about the damage done by unforgiving systems that expect users not to make errors.
About 20 minutes ago I gave up looking through my browser cache and wrote a desperate “save me” mail to the Squarespace customer support.
10 minutes ago I got a reply back from Christa explaining that she cannot retrieve lost portions of a page but that she had found a cached version on Google. She has also copied and pasted the page in a new page on our site.
5 minutes ago the page was recovered and I fell in love with Christa and Squarespace and Google and the Internet and the world in general.
Now I’m telling everyone about it.
The take aways
Great customer service creates great experiences in moments where customers are normally emotional
A very nice example of an implementation model that isn’t quite in line with the mental model of users.
Users want to catch-up with friends or buy a book online, not use a browser. That’s what makes Opera Unite intriguing. Opera Unite allows you to access your file system through the browser, share photos without uploading, leaving post-its on someone elses computer etc. However, it’s still a browser. Maybe more woven into your desktop but it’s still an application.
I believe that the browser of the future will have to be totally transparent. This will allow users to focus on the tasks at hand and not on the tool. No more cognitive friction. Adaptive Path’s Aurora concept they did for Mozilla is going into this direction. Thinking one step further, we might eventually even come up with a new concept that will replace the now more than 30 year old desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces on operating systems.
