Author Archives: steph

Product design 101: Part 2 – The automobile

Would you like a tablet with those fries?

My local ASDA (Walmart UK) grocery store just put up a fairly substantial Nexus 7 POP display…at the front door, next to the place where people who didn’t travel by car tie up their pets and wait for taxis. For all I know there’s a second one at the door that leads to the parking lot.

Just to be clear, this is a grocery store. Sure, they have an aisle or two that sells toasters, light bulbs, cheap paperbacks and school supplies, but a good 80% of the store is food (…well ok, 50% food, 30% liquor).

There’s always been a small counter selling cheap-ish mobile phones and SIM cards, but it’s not exactly a feature of the store. I’ve seen far more people hovering in front of the fruit or shampoo aisle than i’ve ever see at the phone counter.

So maybe this is just a trial. Or a back-to-school promo. I’m not sure, but it reminds me of that cheeky Volkswagon Golf commercial that’s currently playing in the UK…

…a woman browsing a farmer’s market stops at a fruit stall and asks for four lovely apples.

“Anything else?” asks the salesman.

She pauses just a moment, peers down at her list, then asks if he still has any of those lovely Golfs.

The salesman looks around briefly (as if trying to recall just exactly where he might have put them) then he points at a Golf precariously balanced on the table next to a crate of oranges.

“£1500 off the deposit” he says “would you like just the one?”

Suggesting you might buy a car on impulse is certainly cheeky.

Suggesting you might do the same with a cute, well built, eco-system-rich sub-£200 tablet is however starting to feel plausible.

As prices continue to drop (and we’re pretty sure they will) it may well make sense to routinely (!) sell tablets next to fruit, toys and jeans…or simply give them away as accessories to something of higher value.

Stranger things have happened

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@tef pointed me to this lovely little bit of history…a cache of design notes and “statements of architectural principle” compiled by Tim Berners-Lee between 1996 and 2003.

A particular article, entitled Myths about links caught my eye. The article seeks to dispel common myths (from 1997!) in regards to linking.

Looking at them today, they seem quite absurd.

Myth: A normal link is an incitement to copy the linked document in a way which infringes copyright.
Myth: Making a link to a document makes your document more valuable and therefore is a right you should pay [for].
Myth: Making a link to someone’s publicly readable document is an infringement of privacy.

Tim also outlines some notorious cases where companies tried to prevent others from linking (or deep linking) to their site. (Note the presence of one an Olympic sites on the list…a brand that to this day has difficulty adapting to social change).

It’s sobering to think how many businesses (let alone global resources like Wikipedia) wouldn’t exist today if we’d continued to believe that linking should require permission, or payment, and should otherwise be prevented from occurring. The overhead involved would have been stifling and the administrative hassle not worth the burden for all but the largest or richest of companies.

But then again…stranger things have happened.

This glimpse into the web’s past reminds us how the social, political, and organizational changes brought on by a technology are often far more disruptive than the technology itself. In fact, creating the technology is somewhat (!) the easy bit. What’s much harder is to find a place for it in our lives.

And if that technology happens to be disruptive, this can take a very long time indeed. Fifteen years after Tim wrote these notes, we may think we know the Internet (and the web), yet their place in society is constantly being challenged.

How many bizarre, costly, and disruptive processes do we persist with today simply because it’s so hard to move past “how things have always been…”?

How different might the world be if we’d gone another way?

Product design 101: 2012 edition

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Bryan couldn’t sleep last night so he decided to play a game on the PlayStation.

He turned it on and was told it needed to update before he could proceed with his game. Fair enough I suppose. He hadn’t used it in months. So he clicked “Update”.

Several hours (and three updates later), he was finally able to play.

Let’s think about this for a moment.

Sony is a big company with lots of engineers. Surely they can devise a cleaner, less lengthy update process? Yet clearly someone decided this extra effort wasn’t worth their time.

Instead, we (the people who buy the products) get to lose a few hours negotiating their lengthy and convoluted process. Some of us may worry that maybe one of the updates has failed (…why do we need so many of them?). Some of us may even decide to restart the process, only to discover that we now have to wait even longer.

All this for a software update that we may not even need (…explain to me why I even need to update software to play a two year old game that doesn’t access an external server or API?)

And don’t try telling me it’s an “important security update” (by far the laziest and most disingenuous piece of copyrighting in the history of software).

Nothing about that message inspires trust or love for your brand:

either your product is actually insecure,
or you’ve decided it’s too complicated to explain the reason for the update in plain English,
or you’re scared to tell me the update is entirely due to some new partner service you’ve added that I probably won’t use,
or you simply don’t trust me to update unless you make it sound ominous.

What certain companies don’t seem to grasp is that today’s technology environment provides them with a unique opportunity.

Products used to be defined by their physical form. Buttons, cogs, wires and gears that you couldn’t magically replace once you discovered a better, faster or more efficient way to do things.

Today however, many products are simply defined by their software. They are also connected to the Internet. This means, almost any product can now change after it ships.

Not only can a company add new features, they can also simplify, shorten steps, clarify messages, streamline processes and update data structures.

In short, we may forgive you for releasing a product that includes the odd hoop we must jump through, but we won’t forgive you for not leveraging time, data, and technology to fix it (especially when your competition is systematically iterating to annihilate those very same hoops).

Consider yourself warned.

7 inch tablets and other oddities

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As rumours spread of a possible 7″ iPad and Google announces it’s Nexus 7, smaller tablets are already proving quite popular in Asia.

I first ran into widespread 7″ tablet use in Hong Kong back in 2010. Back then, it was the first generation Galaxy Tab. While not as common as the iPad, 7″ Tabs were easy to spot while wandering cafes and student hangouts of MongKok and Kowloon.

Two years later, a whole range of tablets (5″, 10″ and many sizes in between) are readily visible in central Bangkok. These include the 5.3″ Galaxy Note, the second generation 7″ Galaxy Tab (thinner and lighter), the 8.9″ Galaxy Tab, and my personal favourite—the perfectly sized (not too big…not too small) 7.7″ Galaxy tab.

Back in Europe however, it’s still pretty rare to see a tablet in the wild other than the iPad. There’s obviously no way to know why smaller tablets haven’t caught on here, but I suspect it’s due to a (somewhat random) confluence of events:

The iPad came out first and was heralded by Apple as “the perfect size”.
Mental models developed around the larger size and were exacerbated by flaky 7″ tablet releases by the likes of RIM and Motorola.
Both the original 7″ Tab and Amazon’s Kindle Fire didn’t quite sort out an optimal viewport width (vis-a-vis their respective number of device pixels and physical device size). The poor 7″ Tab ended up feeling like a Fisher Price inspired oversized phone, while the Fire suffered an opposite fate with reduced usability due to a bit-too-wide viewport.

Why smaller tablets took off in Asia may also be down to culture and historical accident. The Samsung brand is incredibly strong in Asia, so it’s not surprising the Tab family had immediate appeal. The use of smaller tablets in Asia is also paired with widespread use and availability of accessories. Some accessories are of course pure fashion, but others go a long way in enhancing and extending a device.

The most interesting I think are foldable cases (not unlike a classic iPad case but widely available in Asia for almost any make or model of device). Fitting one of these (inadvertently?) results in more comfortable and balanced use of many mid-sized devices. Compare the image below of a girl holding a 7″ tablet upright (in the way Amazon often portrays their much lighter 1st generation Kindle) with the far more comfortable use of a Galaxy Note when cradled in a foldable case.

This may not seem life-changing but makes a world of difference if your hand is smaller. A smaller tablet paired with a more ergonomic case is also quite conducive to stylus use (yet another accessory that caught on much faster in Asia and has remained popular due to the obvious benefits of handwriting recognition for certain character-sets).

The ability to easily accessorize, is similar in value to the ability to install an app. The device changes from a finite that thing you must adapt to, to a thing that you can mould to fit your lifestyle.

For some reason, 10″ tablets feel just that little bit less versatile. Like it or not, they require a certain planning and intent to carry. By comparison, smaller tablets weigh less, the display is often “big enough” (especially if you can do stuff like this), and the device fits into almost any bag, purse, or even pocket.

Smaller tablets are also infinitely more comfortable (and less dorky-looking) to use when taking photos!

I think we stand to see much higher use of smaller tablets/larger phones/connected purse-sized glowing rectangles of indeterminate viewport size in the future.

It’s about the content stupid

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Here’s a revolutionary idea. What if all sites were lightweight?

Seriously. Wouldn’t the world be a much better place?

Oh but sorry, I forgot. Users want interactivity. (We know this because…well, just because).

I’m in Bangkok, in a nice hotel, on a Mac, trying to browse the Camper web site using somewhat lethargic wi-fi.

The site is—I have no doubt—award winning. I’m sure it will show up on the pages of .NET mag any moment because the gorgeous “Take Camper shoes for a walk” concept was developed using HTML5 instead of Flash.

Never mind that it still has that all too familiar “Please wait” loading animation (by my estimate a 20-second wait just to load the swooshy, minimalist Jackson Pollocky home screen…but of course Camper’s personas didn’t include slow wi-fi).

All this wouldn’t be so bad if each shoe collection didn’t spawn yet another “Please wait” message, and yet another 20 second wait before i’ve even seen the shoes (…but that’s what the awesome copywriting is for…a collection called Flexibility, Together or Cushioning must surely be worth the wait!)

Eventually it becomes unbearable. Where is a good mobile site when you need one?

The problem is, I really like Camper. I saw some nice shoes today at the mall and want to know if they’re available back home (because i’ve learned from experience that region-blocking also applies to shoes).

So I take the only sane option available to me. I download their PDF brochure.

It takes about 10 seconds.

The content is static, but it’s perfectly lovely (…possibly due to the fact that I can actually see the bloody content). And as a bonus, it’s incredibly portable…I can view it on any number of devices!

So congratulations to all of us. It’s 2012, HTML5 is awesome, and i’m surfing a PDF.

The zombie apocalypse can’t come soon enough. Nothing like a good plague to sort things out.

How do you personalize a glowing rectangle?

Steve Jobs on man as a tool maker

The curious properties of software

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Been thinking a lot lately about the need to focus, simplify, and devise useful and future-friendly efficiencies for the web.

A certain level of simplification (and certainly focus) makes good sense in all areas of product development. I recall bumping into an Apple poster a while back advertising their new OS with “…over 300 new features”. As a user, being faced with a number of this size made me nervous rather than happy.

Focussing is however far easier said than done…especially when faced with business imperatives, stockholder pressures, and the want/need to innovate (and do so before the other guy).

On that topic, I ran into this lovely passage (from a long-lost Scientific American article) which goes a good long way in explaining what’s going on:

“The software industry frustrates long-term investments by producing ever larger, slower programs that require ever larger, faster machines. At the March conference, Nathan Myhrvold [Microsoft's then vice president of applications and content] modestly proposed Nathan’s First Law: “Software is a gas,” he said. “It expands to fill its container.” In fact, that is more of a policy than a necessity. “After all,” he observed later with a laugh, “if we hadn’t brought your processor to its knees, why else would you get a new one?”

Why else indeed.

Myhrvold also goes on to say that: “In demos, the new technologies are inarguably cool. Cool is a powerful reason to spend money.”

Fifteen years later (the article is dated July 1997), little of this appears to have changed. Make of that what you will

The blending of retail experiences

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I’ve been fascinated lately by the impact always-on-and-in-your-pocket connectivity is having on shopping. Mobile shopping is transforming itself from a (presumed) on-the-go activity to one that can occur almost anywhere.

A recent Comscore study of smartphone owners revealed 56% had made mobile purchases at home. Another 42% had purchased items on their devices while out, (at a variety of places including schools, and restaurants, or at work) while 36% had purchased items on their mobile while inside a physical store.

UK shopping brand Tesco is now partnering with Samsung to take this a step further by launching a virtual pop-up grocery store in a Korean subway station. (You may also recall last year’s smaller, subway platform prototype).

Shoppers wander the physical aisles and add products to their virtual basket by scanning a QR code. Products are then delivered to their home.

The value for supermarkets is pretty obvious. No retail staff to pay, and an opportunity to store, pick and pack in the most cost-effective way possible. For users, the value is only evident if basic hygiene factors are accounted for.

Scanning a product should ideally indicate whether it is actually in stock at the warehouse (a feature that still eludes many online grocery shops).
You should be able to leave a comment for the packer (assuming the packer is human), for example regarding the ideal weight, or sell by date of perishable goods.
Using the app, you should be able to browse all information that would normally be included on the package. This would include product (marketing) descriptions, ingredients and nutritional information.
Oh and of course, you need to be in a city where there is network access on the subway. (Smart retailers will likely provide back-up wi-fi…just in case).

If they’re smart, Tesco would also link this service to the pre-existing ability to scan at home, and review past orders to pre-populate a cart. This would transform it from a single “do it now or miss it” activity, to a cumulative “do it whenever you think of it” thing.

Of course, an obvious missing aspect is still anything sensory. No more squeezing, smelling and inspecting fruit. Impulse buying may also be reduced as photographs yellow under fluorescent lighting, or simply because you can’t manipulate and otherwise play with the real thing.

Then again, people may bulk-buy, or pick up stuff they normally wouldn’t (it’s far easier to ignore that 1000 calorie tub of Häagen-Dazs if you can’t physically see it in your basket). Putting the store in the Subway may also capitalize on the well-known effects of grocery shopping while hungry!

So on the whole…not that different than online grocery shopping but with the ability to browse and wander (alone or with friends) which is admittedly very different (on a human scale) than punching a product name into a search field.

Stephanie Rieger

Beyond the mobile web