Topic: ease of use

Single Purpose Devices vs. Flexible Platforms and Functional Cases

Bernhard Kappe, Tuesday, February 9, 2010 @ 6:54 am

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Skype Video Phone, part of a trend towards trading needless complexity for simplicity and ease of use. It's also on the wrong side of another trend: The trend away from single purpose mobile devices to flexible mobile platforms.

For a while there was a trend towards more and more purpose built digital products, from ebook readers to portable picture frames and pocket size digital cameras, all the way to to digital recipe readers ($299) and tablet pcs with tough cases, handles and barcode scanners for the medical industry.

The iPhone, the iPod Touch and the soon to be launched iPad signal a reverse of that trend. Apple has designed and built flexible platforms that combine the ease of use and simplicity that single purpose devices with the flexibility of general purpose devices, and that is proving to be a compelling value proposition.

On the iPad, for example, you can easily get as good or better a recipe reader experience as you would with the demy digital recipe reader, a better digital picture frame or slide show experience than with a digital picture frame, likely as good or better of an ebook reader experience, and likely as good or better of a bar code scanning medical tablet experience.

How is that last possible, when the iPad does not come with a bar code scanner? The solution will likely be through peripherals built into functional cases. As an example, take a look at the digital checkout devices like Apple's own EasyPay touch (used at Apple's retail stores), Verifone and Morphie - that combine a magnetic card reader, a bar code scanner and a battery in a case for an iPod touch.
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Software Development

The Importance of User Experience – Do You Understand It in Your Bones?

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, June 29, 2009 @ 6:51 am

Business Week had an article earlier this week on Cloud Computing that made a complete hash of the subject. However, there was one paragraph that was right on the money:

Apple and Google understand in their bones that simplicity and ease of use are essential to broad adoption of products and services. That lesson doesn't come so naturally to Microsoft and IBM.

That's why we integrate user experience design into the agile development process, and that's why we advise our clients to release the simplest software they can early, so they can learn from real user feedback and continue to make improvements based on that learning.

It's like John Gruber writes over at Daring Fireball:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
—John Gall

If there’s a formula to Apple’s success over the past 10 years, that’s it. Start with something simple and build it, grow it, improve it, steadily over time. Evolve it.

Do you understand that in your bones?

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