The next frontier of devices and interaction.

One way to look at the Post-PC future is that it's really all about input modality and interface - rather than device or content.

In this view of the world, Apple’s particular achievement in the last five years is that it *nailed* multi-touch input and the corresponding touch interface – the iPhone, the iPad, the App Store all flowed on from this breakthrough. Others were trying to make their existing phone UI more usable, better looking form factors, phones that incorporated music players, and Swiss-Army-knife arrays of peripheral features. Smartphones, PDAs and tablet PCs were all coming out with styluses. Jobs and Apple changed the game with a revolutionary step up in input and interface.  (How many Post-PC computing devices do you see coming out with a stylus or hard keyboard today?)

This not just my idiosyncratic point of view, by the way. The iPhone Wikipedia entry contends “Development of the iPhone began in 2005 with Apple CEO Steve Jobs' direction that Apple engineers investigate touchscreens” providing multiple citations.

The next frontiers are gesture and voice.

Kinect and Siri are streets ahead in these respective areas. No matter what you think of their current state of either, the bucket loads of real-world data they are collecting is invaluable for improving the underlying algorithms; and hence the navigation/interaction experience. These datasets are something a would-be competitor can’t get by any other means.

Both Kinect and Siri are out there in a big way. Kinect holds the 2011 Guinness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronic device in history, while the quarter following the release of Siri on the iPhone 4S saw unprecedented iPhone sales of over 37 million units.

The question, then, is - What lucrative new devices, markets and business models will gesture and voice unlock for their successful pioneers?

In my opinion, if you *nail* voice (not just word recognition but the syntactic problems), you win mobile search. Siri is Apple seriously cutting Google's grass, at least as much as Android does vice versa.

 And if you want to win internet TV (and who wouldn’t want to own an App Store on the baby boomers’ favourite device), you need to *nail* gesture. Actually, it will be probably a combination of gesture AND facial recognition AND voice that proves the killer breakthrough for TVs and public screens as computing devices.

Apple rumours hint at some combination of inputs for the mooted Apple TV. And besides, 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy has already hilariously illustrated why voice alone mightn’t quite cut it.

Customer Experience vs. User Experience

This is a post from the Hyro blog, from August 14 2009 - another one with a useful comment wasn't forwarded to me at the time. I respond belatedly.

I’ve heard a lot of answers to the question “What is the difference between Customer Experience and User Experience?”, all of them long-winded.

Some of them have been very good answers – but needlessly complex, since there is, in fact, a very simple answer.

The difference between Customer Experience and User Experience is the difference between a Customer and a User, and the difference between a Customer and a User is that a Customer has a choice.

Your digital business is competing moment-by-moment for the customer’s attention with other digital businesses, other channels (TV, Radio, iPod, billboards), and now (on mobile internet) with the good-looking girl/boy sitting near them on the bus. Before the potential customer even thinks about doing anything an usability expert can measure, they are making a split second, emotional decision to give their attention to you.

I particularly like sharing this insight with senior marketers. It instantly transforms them from slightly-intimidated-by-Digital to smartest-guy-in-the-room. Because if there’s one thing marketers know about, it’s Customers, and the Customer Decision Journey. By contrast, we in Digital Services were calling them ‘users’ a year ago - and still routinely refer to them as ‘visitors’ or ‘browsers’. Quaint, really.

“Oh, we have some visitors!
Should we make them a cup of tea?
No don’t worry, they just want a look around, they’ll be off soon.”

Anyway, the point is that the Customer Experience point-of-view allows us to access and apply years of excellent learning from the offline world and marketing science. It allows us to ask how a customer feels about completing an online task, rather than just worrying about how many clicks they have to make. More importantly, it allows us to stop feeling guilty about using emotive words like ‘cool’ or ‘kick-arse’ when talking about the visual and tactile interface.
 
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1 Comment:

Bora Says:
December 11th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Hello Michael,
I am not sure I understand and agree (from what I understand) with your differentiation of user/visitor vs. customer.
For me a customer is simply a visitor that is either going to buy right now or at the minimum has the potential to buy in the future.
Sounds simple but it seems that many companies and digital agencies forget the word “buy” very often. Instead of creating a website that makes everybody happy, it is in my mind more important to concentrate on the buyer and give them the necessary information that is necessary (providing for their stages from information seeker to actual buying decision).
All this depends on who ever your buyers are, consumers, corporates, investors or even the press.
I do support that a customer makes a split second decision if they find you interesting and trusting enough. But real customers who actually look to spend money to solve a pain/problem are usually easier to convince to stay compared to the browsers who are jumping from site to site.
In my experience the conversion part is more important, because here it will make the difference if one can even collect the low hanging fruits - the customers with their wallet open ready to buy a solution to their problem.
That is also where usability plays a big role - how easy is it for the customer to buy or convert to a lead. One of the studies from Stompernet show that 70% of customers ready to buy from a site never finish their purchase. Imagine that in a supermarket - people leaving in droves because they found it to hard to buy.
I would be interested in your response Michael.
Cheers,
Bora

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Hi Bora

Thanks for waiting patiently for 18 months for a response.

In short, I think we are both right.

I'm arguing here against the past tendency of the usability discipline to be doctinaire and humourless - much like Bauhaus-inspired architects of the 1950's decrying bourgeious ornamentation, and shoe-horning American office workers into buildings designed for 1920's European public housing.

But you are right. The converse - the sole emphasis on 'cool' - is just as unsatisfactory.

There has to be a balance in user interface design - between desirable/emotional considerations, and usable/rational considerations. Ideally, this balance should be weighted according to what stage of the Customer Decision Journey we can infer a user has reached.

As for the store where people are leaving in droves because they find it hard to buy - that store exists in the real world, in high streets and malls across the world. It looks good from the outside, and you want what they sell, but the music's too loud, and the shop assistant is too busy texting her friends to even look at you.

I agree, you don't want your website to be that store.

Fast and Upside Down

First published on the Hyro blog 29 Jan 2009. Here's me purchasing a petard with a piece on concise and single-minded communication. Yes, one of my very next posts was a rambling epic braindump.

It strikes me that the ‘reverse pyramid’ principle of web copywriting is an excellent metaphor for the world we now live and work in. The ‘reverse pyramid’ turns the orthodox narrative structure upside down. The punchline comes first. Draw the conclusion, then build the case. 

The reason behind this principle: people are less able to read large amounts of text on a screen versus a book or magazine. You need to make your point immediately, and hope that it’s compelling enough to keep some of your audience reading.

But I think this principle goes beyond web copywriting – it’s an insight to something pervasive in the digital world, and into the way the digital generation behaves.
It’s often said that our attention span is shrinking, that young people can absorb less information, and are less capable of understanding complex concepts. The implication; people are dumber than they used to be, especially ‘young people’.
But is this what’s really happening? From where I stand, the generation which has grown up on the internet is getting smarter, and their ability to quickly grasp complex things is increasing.

‘Quickly’ is the key word here – the digital world is fast, and getting faster. Its inhabitants realize that, in the course of a day, they will be exposed to much more information than they can possibly absorb. Their minds have been trained to rapidly process snippets of information and decide what to ignore, and what to persist with.

So, our attention span may appear to be shrinking, but it’s not because we’re losing the ability to concentrate, it’s because we’re learning the ability to rapidly and consciously decide which information is useful, and which information is not – and we’re doing so almost every waking moment of our lives. The kids are alright – their brains haven’t been dulled by years of internet and video games, they’ve been sharpened.

Think about this the next time you stand up to address a room full of people with mobile phones and laptops. The first thing you say will have to both encapsulate your purpose, and convince your audience that it’s worthwhile to keep listening. Same goes for just about every interaction in your professional life – the interactions you conduct personally, and those you engineer via digital channels on behalf of your brand or business.

If you have any questions, please feel free to call me. But make it fast. And upside down.
Next week – I expose the dangers of Binge Thinking
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BTW, there was no post on 'Binge Thinking'. I was having a subtle dig at a pointless gabfest of a management conference. Binge Drinking was a tabloid preoccupation at the time, hence the pun.

Here's one of the comments on the original post. I reproduce it because the link's a good one, and on topic.

Tim Says:
January 29th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Nicholas Carr’s article from last year “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” deals with this and related topics in detail.
Among other things, Nick claims that there is an implicit trade-off between breadth and depth of knowledge taking place - we are skimming more, but reading in detail very little.http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
-Tim