It’s all about context, yes. Some immensely complex UI’s are necessary in certain domains, for certain workflows. But sometimes you can just look at a UI and know that, for whoever its intended users are, it’s a horrible failure.
So it is with this Ferrari steering wheel. Via FastCompany and @JasonSpector, look upon the horror and of course watch the vid. Bonus points for the headline “Ferrari F10 Steering Wheel Looks Like a Robot Barfed on It.”
Yes, the world has another after-the-fact design modification to add to its motley collection of hacks, patches, fixes, taped-on signs, and Sharpie-improved user interfaces.
Found at the Kent State University bookstore, where I ducked in to buy an umbrella during a downpour. I was there to do some customer observations for a product line I’m working on, and had to walk between buildings in a solid rain storm.
Notice the attention to detail on the mod. The counter clerks must’ve really been tired of walking people through the transaction flow. They even highlighted “BLUE LIGHTS” with blue marker, just so people would get the message.
I used to be a semi-professional musician. For a variety of reasons I didn’t stick with the professional part. I still play, mostly for my daughters and to keep my fingers limber. But my repertoire has gone to crud.
That happens when you don’t play for an audience anymore. You just forget most of the songs you’ve learned. I can honestly say that I do *not* miss the low pay, late hours, and second-hand smoke. But when I was single, let’s just say I definitely benefited from the pull that singing and playing guitar had with the ladies.
Even GarageBand gives me conniptions. I just want to lay down some beats and play along with them. But I’ve fallen cleanly into the gulf of execution – I know what I want to do, but have no way of divining *how* to do it. And that’s a big bummer.
Yesterday I posted about a discussion Jared Spool and I had about the import of the iPad.
I made the claim that the handset would continue to be the innovation driver, and as soon as it had the computing horsepower to drive a large LCD monitor and run productivity applications, it would be the primary and dominant computing platform.
Several smart commenters weighed in as well, so check out their comments here at the post’s permalink.
Anyway, it turns out I’m not much of a prognosticator. It’s already being done.
Check out the video to see Citrix’s Nirvana phone driving a full-size LCD, keyboard, and mouse, and running Windows.
I really thought I’d be able to resist bloviating about the iPad. But then I read this tweet from Jared Spool:
Is nobody else talking about the iPad’s interesting facet? It brings the gap between phone & computer manufacturers closer together.
It got pushed to his Facebook as an update, where I flippantly responded:
And that’s a good thing why?? :-)
Graciously, Jared ignored my dumbass comment and persisted, writing this:
Seriously, I think there’s going to be some really interesting synthesis here. Nokia, LG, and Motorola really haven’t done anything scaled up before. The laptop & netbook players haven’t gone this small.
The competition will be interesting. Of course, there will be a lot of crap produced. (It’s Sturgeon’s Law.) But, there will be some really interesting innovations.
All because Apple had the balls to try something nobody else had done before. I think that’s the most significant part of all this….
(And here’s a question: How will Google respond? After all, they have Android on the low end and Chromium on the high end, but neither will really talk to each other.)
His follow-up got me to thinking. I didn’t respond point-by-point to his last comments, but his points helped me to suddenly sharpen my thinking and spin out a scenario in which tablets aren’t the wave of the future, but phones will continue to be.
So below I present to you my reasoning for why and how tablets are at best a diversion, and the real innovation will continue to happen with handsets. Read on for yet another opinion on the future of computing.
I agree with what you’re saying J. But my thinking is that until we have a truly convertible handheld-slash-desktop (and mobile computing) solution, the gap will continue to be a chasm into which product after product will fall into.
Now I’m not the most visionary person in the world, but it seems to me that the big, latent, unmet needs are this:
I need a mobile device that fits in my pocket, that allows me to do [pretty much what the iPhone, Android, and BB handsets do].
I need a computing device that gives me my familiar input devices (read: keyboard and pointing device), gives me access to my apps and content, and provides a large enough viewing area so I can work productively.
Notice that I didn’t say “contains my apps and content.” That was intentional. It doesn’t take a tech visionary to see that both our apps AND our content are migrating to the cloud.
Anecdotally, I can affirm that I am mighty tired of “curating” the content on my hard disks. I’d rather that stuff just lives in, is accessible from, and gets backed up in the cloud. And I WILL pay money for that. So, long story long, you’re right, the iPad comes close. But I think the real opportunity is this:
My phone-like mobile device does it’s thing while I’m mobile.
When I need to sit somewhere and work, I dock it. Then it pushes (at the VERY least) 1280×800 to an LCD, and automagically connects to my keyboard and mouse, to my suite of apps (wherever they may live – Office Live, Google Apps, whatever), and to my content. (And of course it brings up all my social interfaces.)
Obviously, handsets don’t have the horsepower to do this…yet. But they will. It’s clear that current PC architectures have massively oversolved for the computing horsepower problem, and if you’ve read any Clayton Christensen you know this is a scenario that’s ripe for disruption by a “good enough” solution that addresses the market’s new value dimensions.
Netbooks are an ongoing attempt to serve these new dimensions of value, but they’re constrained by having to run either bloated legacy OS’s or not-ready-for-primetime Linux distros. Plus, they don’t serve as phones very well. Imagine holding one up to your ear… it’s like Maxwell Smart with a shoe to his head.
And you probably noticed I didn’t address the “how do I work productively when I’m mobile?” scenario. I’ll grant you that. But it’s certainly not an impossibility…I can envision a netbook form factor device with a big-@ss slot for receiving – you guessed it – my mobile phone-slash-computing engine.
So, to sum up:
You’re right, things are getting interesting, and
If product makers can make the phone the bearer of CPU horsepower, connectivity, and OS, then everything else becomes a terminal that the phone docks to or slides into.
And I’m adding here that this last point is what makes tablets superfluous.
Old-school readers of UsabilityBlog may remember my (ranty but well-reasoned) diatribe against EULA’s and how they’re presented in software user interfaces. (Also check out my follow-up posts here and here.)
This picture I took the other day reminded me how easy it is to corrupt and degrade the user experience with obtuse and unfriendly language.
In this case, I was at the bank setting up an account. The rep handed me the account agreement, and then told me that the bank didn’t require me to sign the actual forms anymore; they’d recently begun collecting signatures electronically. I have to admit that bothered me a bit, because my “electronic” signature looks nothing like my pen and ink signature.
Putting that aside, the experience of providing my signature on the device was not good.
The face of the device I needed to “write” on was raised about 4-5 inches, and there was no way to comfortably position my hand while signing. The bezel was not flush with the screen, which caused the edge of my hand to bend in an unnatural way, further deforming my signature.
And then there was the lawyerly language. We’ve all had the intimidating and negative experience of viewing a legal document in paper form. I don’t think a single person will dispute the fact that legalese is intimidating and obtuse. Not surprisingly, that experience is intensified when rendered digitally. And then there’s the ridiculous aspect of referring to something “herein”, which applies to a document, but certainly not to anything “in” the UI of the device I was interacting with.
And no, the full agreement was not presented onscreen for me to page through. The rep simply handed me the written agreement, then slid this device across the desk for me to “sign.”
The various user experience disciplines – usability, information architecture, interaction design, etc. – have been laboring for the 20-odd years of the tech boom to create great user experiences. Let’s not let the lawyers screw it up.
