Iphone screen broken. Is it more valuable now?

The day after the ipad was announced, my iphone tried to commit suicide. I synched it with my PC and it decided it was time to start from scratch and would not synch. Instead all content got erased. I had to basically format it and start all over.

Yesterday, my iphone decided it was not enough and leapt out of my hand onto the concrete floor and the screen broke.

The touch screen still works just fine although you can feel the seams as you use it

I am at Interactions10 in Savannah, GA and had been to two great talks about how our relationship with objects change over time. Richard Banks presented a talk called “The 40 year old tweet” on how we imbue meaning into objects that reminds us of special occasions or periods of our lives and went on to talk about how we also have that relationship with at least some digital objects. Matt Cottam presented a talk on “Heirloom Electronics” in which he discussed how time adds patina to objects and how that seems to make them more valuable to us. Both great talks.

Today I have taken extra special care of my iphone.

I am afraid I might break it more, so I take it out of my pocket more slowly than before. I touch it more gently so I don’t break the screen more.

I have also started to notice new things. Like the button in the middle. It is obviously not part of the glass surface, but I had never thought about that before. Also, the phone has become more a thing in itself. I suddenly look at it differently, it means something new. Before it was just a glittery tecno object with little soul, its only purpose being a portal to the contacts and information made possible by the applications. Now, it draws attention to itself and I look at it without turning it on. Examine it even, and I have begun thinking about other ways to make it more personal. Maybe i will try some acid or some burning on the back of it to see what it can take?

I  guess I will try to fix the screen because after all, even though it’s got a lot more personality now, it is no longer able to really serve its original and primary purpose, but if I end up buying a new one, I think I will keep this one around, if for nothing else, as a reminder of my trip to Savannah.

Definition of memorable

Memorable is the difference between expected experience and actual experience.

Really bad and really good experiences stand out because they were far from what we expected. On the other hand you can used to a lot. Once you have eaten at 5 star restaurants a lot, they stop being special, and if you are a plumber, then things other people would find gross, are just everyday work to you.

Usability does not matter…

…anymore than Security and Performance

I am not going to ever have another argument about whether usability is important. That is so 1990’ies. I will walk away from every such discussion saving my breath.

I just needed to get this off my chest.

I think we are almost over the “is design important” discussion and soon, hopefully within the next 5 years or so, we will also be over the “does it really matter to establish an emotional connection to people in your product design” question. I am looking forward to that day.

Till then, still lots of convincing to be done.

I hate ‘users’

Users are Humans, not users. The word ‘user’ is looking at people through a product lens as if their purpose in life is to use that particular product. But users are not users. Users are human beings of flesh and blood who behave in predictably irrational ways, with real goals and dreams and jobs and most importantly of all, with other things going on in their life than using our product.

It can be a bitter pill to swallow when you pour your heart into your work, your oeuvre, the application that will solve these users every need and then being told that your application is less important, a lot less important to these people that you could hope and wish for.

Don’t get me wrong. Not thinking about the people who are going to use your product in some way is just fundamentally wrong. But on the other hand, when we talk about User Centered Design today, it sounds as old fashioned and as inhumane as Business process reengineering.

Do I have an alternative? Sure, it is about building on Don Norman’s concept of activity centered design, having the right understanding of how human works, and Dan Ariely and  Dan Lockton both add significantly to that understanding, and then we must talk to actual people who will use actually the product, and we must keep talking to these people throughout the product cycle.

But really, it starts much simpler than that. Instead of saying “what will the users want?” say “what will the people who are going to user our product want?”. It is a small change, just a few more words, but I find it really changes how you think.

 

All of this may seem a little abstract. A friend of mine pointed me to this Argentinean example of adapting to real people.

Summary: In Argentine Pepsi is pronounced Pecsi by a significant number of people. Pepsi embraces that and launches Pecsi.

I love it. Instead of trying to reinforce the name, they change it to what people call it anyway and play on it.

Useful? yes. Usable? yes. Desirable? not so much…

 

Today Seattle Times ran a story on what can only be described as sloppy work by the Seattle street department. See the picture above for an example of a curb that had to be remade three times. The first question that comes to mind is how anyone would walk away from a piece of work like that straight faced. And the second question is how often something similar happens in software products or other products.

The article is an instructional piece on what can go wrong when the culture of a group is mismanaged. But it is also a great piece on when the designers and the crew do not communicate and when neither is willing to give in and listen.

I don’t think a lot of bad code is actually shipped, but I do think there is quite a few products where the various pieces of code fit together about as well as the curb stones in the picture above.

I also think that the Seattle Street department is not the only one marred by designs from less than fully informed designers:

Homeowners couldn't get out of their driveways without scraping the bottom of their cars after a new sidewalk was installed in December 2007 in the 8200 block of Ravenna Avenue Northeast. Bookman said the problem stemmed from poor design. The project designer was a relatively young, new hire who left the department shortly after the work was completed, he said.

Dan Ariely -Predictably Irrational

I have been wanting to write a book review on Dan Ariely’s excellent book Predictably Irrational for a while now. Instead I will just say that is is a fantastic book that is absolutely worth reading for anyone and especially any designer and link to a few Ted Links.

A blog post on Ted by Dan Ariely about behavioral economics:http://blog.ted.com/2009/05/dan_ariely_2008.php

And two talks that cover some of the fundamentals of the book: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html and http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html

All I can really say is that this book has given me a language to talk about and data to back up my long held skeptics about rationality.

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