Endeavour Partners - Blog

“This may sound a little weird, but can I take a picture of that?”

A point of sale terminal at a Jiffy Lube with an apparently disappointing user interface

I was in a Jiffy Lube, of all places, paying for an oil change, and I saw a powerful example of something that we’ve been discussing with clients over the past few months:  Great user experiences in one product area can drive user expectations across a wide variety of other products, services and use cases.

In this case, the touch screens on iPhones and other leading mobile devices are changing people’s expectations about how things should work on everything from televisions to digital cameras to point of sale terminals like this one.  Apparently, Jiffy Lube customers and employees keep trying to use this as a touch screen even though it isn’t one!

A similar example comes from the TiVo and DVR experiences many of us have become used to.  Haven’t you often wished you could pause or rewind your car stereo?  Or listen to the usual 8:00AM broadcast team even if you were on your way in to the office earlier or later than usual?

People are now coming to expect an incredibly rich, interactive, and easy to use experience from all the technology in their lives.  The benchmarks are products like the iPhone, the iPod, TiVo, and Blackberry, and you will be judged against these standards regardless of what price point you are trying to hit or product category you think you are in.

Does your product have a touch screen?  Tens or hundreds of Gigabytes of storage capacity?  The ability to stop, pause, rewind, time and place shift content?  The ability to move instantly and seamlessly between applications or functions?  WiFi or wide-area cellular connectivity – or, better yet, both?  Perhaps it should.

There’s an interesting post on Lukas Mathis’ blog, ignorethecode.net on virtual keyboards, which drives home how important are small differences in size to usability.

This is a comparison of the virtual keyboards on the iPhone, and it brings out how small differences (<10%) in size make a big difference in usability:

However, the HTC Magic’s screen is only 90% as tall and wide as the iPhone’s. This doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but it actually has noticeable effects on usability. This is a comparison of the screens of the two devices, scaled to match the proportions of the real devices:

Virtual keyboards on iPhone and Android

This small difference is one of the ways in which the iPhone’s virtual keyboard outperforms the Android version.

Moreover, in a fascinating recent comparison, one of the surprising advantages of a virtual keyboard was driven home; in a recent discussion amongst some of my colleagues and contemporaries, and with my daughters, the perennial question of physical keyboard versus virtual keyboard came up. The BlackBerry guys insisted that (not least because of their years of experience) the BlackBerry’s physical keyboard could outperform the supposedly ‘error-prone’ virtual keyboard of the iPhone. In a head-to-head test, the young iPhone users won, however. Interestingly, they emphasized one particular aspect: a touch/virtual keyboard is faster because you don’t have to physically press the key down…

Computerworld is publishing the results of its mobile deathmatch between the iPhone and the Pre (Mobile deathmatch: Can the Pre knock out the iPhone) on Monday (6 July) and is asking for feedback on what to evaluate the devices on. FWIW, The Register has a good comparison as well.

I’ve been using both intensely since the Pre was launched (along with an N97, and less intensely a Storm, a G1, a Bold and an X1), and the Pre does come closest to the iPhone.

There are two key criteria which differentiate all of these devices:

• user experience (UX)
• ecosystem (apps and content)

And when you dig deeper, ease of use is not so much about any individual app, it’s about the ‘edge cases’. They’re all pretty much the same for an individual stand-alone task, except where the hardware lets them down (like the resistive touch screen on the N97 and WinMo devices, and the Storm’s horrible hybrid).

The big difference is if the job that you want to get done is an ‘edge case’:

• forward something from an SMS as an e-mail
• take a video and post it
• get information from a search and use it to navigate
• pick up a e-book for casual reading for a few minutes
• watch the second half of a movie on a smartphone that you started on the big screen TV last night
• search for and get directions to the nearest Starbucks (certified caffeine addict)

This is where the iPhone (particularly now it’s got cut-and-paste) excels. Easy to switch apps; lots of them.

They play nice together; take the integration of Where with Google Maps:

1. Swipe to the screen with Where on
2. Tap on Where
3. Tap on Starbucks
4. Tap on the nearest icon
5. Tap on Get Directions

Five taps, because there’s a nice little app, and good interworking; 17 seconds.

I just checked, on my big desktop it takes three times longer – ~50 seconds:

1. Mouse to the search field in Safari
2. Type ’starbucks’ into the field, hit return
3. Mouse over to and click on ‘Store Locator‘
4. Mouse over to the ‘Postal Code’ field and click in it
5. Type my ZIP code ‘01742′ into the field
6. Mouse over to and click on the ’submit’ button
7. Mouse over to and click on the nearest store
8. Mouse over to and click on ‘Driving Directions’
9. Type in my street address: about thirty characters and four tabs between fields
10. Mouse to and click on the ’submit’ button

Seven (7) mouse movements, about forty characters of typing.

Worth noting as well, with the app, Google sees much less; how will this affect its economics over the long-term?

Or the amazing Kindle app, which syncs to the last page read in the book that I’m reading.

For messaging and communication tasks, the BlackBerry (except the Storm) is better at mixing and matching modes than anything else.

The Pre’s pretty good as well. Where it falls short is in the complementary ‘cloud services’ and in the apps. The user interface is very elegant, and has some nice touches (pun intended), but it falls so far short on the apps side. The sync with iTunes does, at least for the moment, work surprisingly well.

There’re now a slew of apps on the Phone, like Where and At Bat (Red Sox fan, no zeal like that of the convert) and SugarSync and WordPress on which I depend. The Pre and WebOS has Where, but none of the others.

Without the strong support of either or both a major global network operator (Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile or Telefonica) or licensing to and working with one or more of the top tier ‘independent’ device vendors (Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, HTC or Motorola) Palm won’t get the market momentum it needs to build an installed base to enroll developers. Shipping the SDK so late and expanding the developer program so slowly doesn’t exactly help, either.

So, evaluate smartphones on ease of use for edge cases, and their supporting ecosystem.

With the dawn of the superphone, where is Microsoft? – FierceWireless

In a post on FierceWireless about smartphones (which he tags superphones), Stephen Drake poses the question that many of us are wondering about – what is Microsoft going to do?

It seems to me, however, that although it’s the right question, he’s missing the point, focusing on aesthetics and hardware, rather than on ease of use and software.

He characterizes these smartphones (or ’superphones’) as a:

“…high-end device class characterized by its ‘wow factor,’ a real or perceived buying frenzy, or an otherwise stylish, functional and pretty-to-look-at device…”.

While aesthetics matter, as hardware features, functions and form factor continue to be difficult but do not any longer differentiate, he completely misses the single most important factor: the user experience.

Talking about the Pre, he focuses on its: “…multi-touch capabilities and beautiful interface…”, hardware and aesthetics, when what matters about the Pre is WebOS. And the apps. Or lack of them.

When he comes to Microsoft, he asks where is “… the iconic, shiny device that users have coveted….” There are iconic, shiny devices: Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X1 for example, but WinMo just isn’t there.

Yes, aesthetics matter, but much less so than first ease of use, then the ecosystem (apps and content), both of which outweigh elegance.

Unless and until Microsoft can deliver the usability that customers are coming to expect from Apple, Android and Palm, it will remain uncompetitive.

Tragically, although this should have been apparent since before the launch of the iPhone, as Andy Lees put it at the announcement in Barcelona in February of the forthcoming 6.5 release:

“…[the user interface] seemed less important…”