Two words for Apple: Thank You!
I can’t believe what I saw. I just finished watching Steve Jobs’ keynote (1 GB download) where he introduced the iPhone along with Apple TV. I got two words for you and your team Mr. Steve: Thank You! Here’s why:
I really can’t remember the last time some new technology just ‘wowed’ me this much, not by a feature or two, but by the entire package as a whole. Apple took about two years in the development of iPhone, and boy were those two years worth the while!
Yes, they were!
You see, unlike other blogs, I’m not going to exhaust the list of all cool, amazing, incredible and sophisticated features of this new phone. All I want to talk about is one thing; one thing that kept striking me all throughout the keynote; one thing that I have always, always, wanted in a freakin’ smart phone: usability.
I believe this factor in mobile phones (and other electronic devices in general) has long been overlooked to the point that it comes last on the list of desired features. Piled-up features together with average or poor unit design all add up to increasing what Alan Cooper describes in his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, as: cognitive friction. Here’s a brief description of what this fancy term means:
It is the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem permutes.
In his weblog, John Wood rephrases this in an easier way:
.. when our tools manifest complex behaviour that does not fit our expectations
So what does this have to do with usability and the whole iPhone thing, you ask? Well, let me give you a neat little formula to make this clearer:
Less cognitive friction = more usability
In other words, the more you design your product to be intuitive, understandable, predictable and consistent, the less cognitive friction you inflict on your users which translates into a much improved usability. Usability is the key to simplicity, so in the end you have one awesome product that packs set of amazing features into a clean interface even a 5-year-old can operate. Oops, I just described the iPhone!
Steve repeated certain keywords fairly often in the keynote I couldn’t help but take note of them. For instance:
- "it’s simple"
- "it just works"
- "the way I want it"
- "how I want it"
- "when I want it"
- "it’s smart"
In my opinion, all those are just synonyms for usability. Without a single doubt, Apple has done an outstanding job in this area. It exceeded by far what the biggest mobile phone makers in the world have been doing for years. Hell, it set a new standard for user-mobile experience. No longer do you have to put up with a phone that gives you one fat button that is supposed to do different functions depending on the screen you’re in. Steve said it, for more than a decade, computers were designed to give us custom options (e.g., different buttons) for each context we’re in. Well, it took the genius of the innovative people at Apple to say: "hey let’s do that for the phone as well"! And so they designed a phone with no static hardware buttons but slew of context-driven soft buttons and finger gestures that are meaningful and easy to learn" (("There’s some debate going on why mechanical or hardware buttons are more useful than soft buttons"))".
I’m not trying to deny that iPhone has its own set of "alleged" flaws which are being debated. There’s no doubt that such new innovation will bring (in its first phase) its own set of problems. However, all I wanted to say in this post is that we all have something to learn from the amount of thought and hard work put into making this device as human-friendly and cognitively-frictionless as possible. Tech newbies and savvies alike will find it easy to learn and operate. Steve’s perfectionism shows all over the device!
So, thank you Steve, and thank you Apple, for raising the bar and setting a new standard for how mobile devices are ought to be in the 21st century. You’re the new leaders of the pack, so innovate on!
