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

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.

I was going to write something about user agent strings but have no time this week for the inevitably polarized discussion that will ensue.

So i’ll instead leave you with this fairly apt quote by Noam Chomsky.

“Technology is basically neutral. It’s kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn’t care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody’s skull.”

And because nothing is ever black and white, i’ll also include the first tenet in Melvin Kranzberg’s six laws of technology.

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

The new iPad is so far less than thrilling.

I’m not saying that as a geek (or fanboy), but as a customer.

The new iPad certainly isn’t cheap. The screen is of course gorgeous, but good designers know that perfection isn’t always what a customer is after. (Or as Peter Drucker famously put it… “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it sells him.”).

Apple has just released a device that makes them look good (or at the very least clever), but at the expense of everyone else (including the customer). Sure, the fonts are so crisp they could cut glass, but absolutely everything else on screen is fuzzy.

(Everything except Apple’s own site where for possibly the first time ever, they’ve acknowledged that the web is now multi-context, and have taken the time to swap some images. Pigs may however fly before Apple honours us with a small-screen and bandwidth optimised experience).

The past week has been full of frantic tweets, articles and GitHub commits aiming to “solve the retina image problem” that the new iPad has thrust upon us. (And matters are not much rosier on the native app side of the world.)

The optimist in me thinks this episode may finally compel the standards bodies to properly discuss a multi-context image tag. The pessimist in me sees the second coming of the Y2K bug, as we all scurry around to solve a problem that could have been avoided through pragmatism and good design.

In this case, the pragmatism would have been needed on Apple’s part.

Everyone already loves the iPad. They’ve already sold more tablets than anyone else, and competitors are still struggling to catch up.

Releasing a retina-display version hasn’t really improved the device (which is now also noticeably heavier and feels awkwardly out of balance). What it’s merely done is create hype that no one (including Apple) actually needed.

What I would have loved to see from them is an admission that releasing a retina display iPad was not in anyone’s best interest at the moment. They could have even (as they do so well…) spun a story around that fact; explaining that in matters of user experience the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This quote by Maya Angelou sums it up very well for me (the customer…not the web designer):

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The iPad used to make me feel happy. The new iPad no longer does. 

—————————————-

Update: This post is certainly generating some vibrant conversations on Twitter

What i’m first finding interesting is that it’s really quite hard to be a user, designer and developer at the same time. There is a clear value in innovating, but no technology operates in a vacuum, and once the technology is there, it’s often the social change we struggle with the most.

Many people have responded that Apple is simply innovating, and that in the end, we will all be better for it. And on the one hand, I don’t disagree. I just find it sad that with fast release cycles and the need to compete, this innovation often occurs at the expense of users (and of course other times it doesn’t…hopefully it all balances out).

Bryan also mentioned something interesting after chatting with a few folks on Twitter. If Apple really wanted to use this as an opportunity to innovate, they would have also included their version (or vision?) of how to gracefully solve the multi-context image problem (and maybe even the bandwidth detection problem) in the latest version of Safari and iOS. There’s nothing like a new bit of implemented ‘spec’ to jumpstart progress.