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Behaviors
I have a love / hate relationship with my Apple iPhone. It's a groundbreaking, marvelous experience and it's a broken one at the same time. Still, I'm not close to being ready to leave it for anything else. My AT&T service is decent. If they provided MMS, better call quality, faster 3G, and lower data costs similar to what I had with Sprint, I'd be happier, but it works at my office, so that's a plus. It's actually the Apple part that stokes the powerful ying/yang of love/hate. I'll detail why.
Love
Multitouch - there is nothing so marvelous as the multitouch touchscreen. It's smooth, doesn't gather dust and looks great. Being able to double-click to zoom in on a webpage rocks. Pinch or stretch and you can zoom in or out or rotate objects to make them easier to see. This function mimicks what you might do with a real-life object and it fits my behaviors.
I have a love / hate relationship with my Apple iPhone. It's a groundbreaking, marvelous experience and it's a broken one at the same time. Still, I'm not close to being ready to leave it for anything else. My AT&T service is decent. If they provided MMS, better call quality, faster 3G, and lower data costs similar to what I had with Sprint, I'd be happier, but it works at my office, so that's a plus. It's actually the Apple part that stokes the powerful ying/yang of love/hate. I'll detail why.
Love
Multitouch - There is nothing so marvelous as the multitouch touchscreen. It's smooth, doesn't gather dust and looks great. Being able to double-click to zoom in on a webpage rocks. Pinch or stretch and you can zoom in or out or rotate objects to make them easier to see. This function mimicks what you might do with a real-life object and it fits my behaviors.
SMS Meets IM - The iPhone finally proved me right. When I was an Executive Director at AOL in the Advanced Product Concepts team, I made the claim that SMS would become indistinguishable from IM behaviors. My teammates said that studies by Nokia showed that I was wrong, but I could see what was happening. IM is semi-realtime chatting. Texting is also semi-realtime chatting. The difference is a matter of what's in your hand. The iPhone made the aesthetics match up with the behaviors such that texting looked like IM and suddenly it became obvious to others. Last week, one of my former AOL colleagues even asked if anyone is using IM anymore because now we all treat Facebook as we did IM. This last point is a starting point for another blog entry to come.
Sirius Radio for iPhone - I have a portable Sirius Radio "headunit" that goes between my car and my house to deliver whole home satellite radio. Now I can listen to those same stations on my iPhone anywhere without the headunit for a very small monthly fee. Combined with my Bluetooth wireless stereo headphones, it rocks even when I'm listening to Craig Chaquico instead of Nickelback.
Google Maps and GPS - I bought a GPS unit for my wife last holiday season. Bad move. I did it because she is an interior designer and often has to find homes in out of the way places. I love her and wanted to keep her safe from getting lost. She did not approve of the ugly unit that talks at her and, frankly, hates gadgets as gifts. My oldest son ended up "buying it from us" (no sign of that payment to date). My iPhone with Google Maps and GPS is the better deal aesthetically balancing form and function. Yes, it does not yet speak to me, but someday it will. It is however always with me and therefore always helpful to find something. I can also browse the Internet to get information and my Tom Tom could not.
Copy & Paste. Click image to view.
Copy & Paste - This was a Hate in all previous versions of the iPhone software. Now it is a Love. I knew that they could do it and they did. They found a wonderfully elegant way to copy and paste that is easy and powerful.
Hate
It's All About Apple - Stop trying to stifle my creativity while you claim to be the stylish choice. My PC wallpaper is one of my most amazing photos. It sets a positive tone whenever I sit down to do work. I can use any application that I desire as long as it is compatible with my PC. I can modify the look of the experience to fit my moods or my personal usability needs. What about on the iPhone? Since phone calling is the weakest link in the product, I don't really base my allegiance to it on the phone aspect. So stop treating it as though it is primarily a phone and subject to those "rules".
Ringtones - I'm not naive. I understand that there is a long fought battle with carriers who have benefited from closed-systems for years and profited handsomely from ringtone sales, but the iPhone is much more than a phone, so act like it w.r.t. this feature as well. If I buy a license for a song from iTunes ($.99) and put it on my phone, why do I have to pay you again ($.99) to listen to a small chunk of that song when the phone rings? There are ways around this now, but you lost some trust on this one.
Themes I created.
Custom Theme Examples Possible Only After Hacking. Click images to view.
Wallpaper - People love to personalize things to show a bit of their identity. This is especially true for their mobile phones which have become a symbol of who you are. All you need to do is take a walk through a shopping mall and you will see kiosks with all sorts of phone adornments and the iPhone case market is huge. So why can't I have the wallpaper of my choice behind my icons? Why can't I change title bar colors and such to match my business branding? I actually used to hack my iPhone to make this possible, but I'm staying pristine with this release for a while. All hacking really means in this context is that I made my iPhone just like a Mac or PC is out of the box. I took off the protective electronic wrapper that kept me from customizing. I thought angry thoughts about Apple's design decisions the whole time that I had to do this.
Applications - With a PC or Mac, it is my choice and my responsibility to be smart about what I put on my system just like it is my decision who I put in my car. Apple has made their App Store a clearinghouse of what can be on my mobile browsing device/"phone". Recently, the dark side of the Apple/AT&T lock on what we can use has become clearer as the FCC probes various application rejections such as Google Voice. Is this anti-competitive? I don't know and personally don't care as much about that as I do about what it says about whether Apple is serving my best interests with the iPhone or primarily its own self interests. It is the latter. Once a user frees an iPhone from Apple's force field, there is an application installer called Cydia that showcase just how ingenious and prolific innovation can be. Cydia makes Google Voice available for the iPhone. Even better, Cydia makes Winterboard available which offers users broad control over how their phone looks. It lets users express themselves rather than looking like an Apple drone.
Icon Positioning - Apple came up with an interesting idea for how to place icons on the iPhone desktop. The desktop is in pages of 16 icons each. To move them, you touch and hold until the icons get wobbly and then you can slide them one at a time to a new position. If you have few icons, then it's rather fun. If you have more than a few screens of them, it can be a wrestling match. Sadly, I have eight screens. Sliding a wobbly icon so that it jumps to the correct page without displacing icons already on each passing page until I get it where I want it is a hassle that I don't need in my day. Let me simply have the option to see an item listing with page numbers and let me go down the list and say you're on page 1, you're on page 4, you're on page2... Sometimes "cool" has its limitations. Know them and solve for them.
Making a Call, The Chore - Why did Apple seem to forget usability with regard to the core function of the phone - dialing? On my Palm Treos before this (and on many other smartphones), you can start typing a number or name and the phone does a quick lookup and suggests who you might be trying to call and autocompletes the entry. I basically never experienced a lookup process. I was dialing and the phone anticipated my needs and shortened my dialing process for me. How helpful! This meant that to call someone who was not in my "favorites" still only took about three characters. Not so on the iPhone. The iPhone forces you through a two stage process - the lookup and the call. You can't type a name or partial number to call. You need to enter search mode or scroll through your contacts to find the person and then select the right number and then click it to call them. While the new Voice Dial feature could help to simplify this, the failure rate for me has kept me from using it after my initial embarrassments demoing it to friends. It actually started to call a former AOL Executive Vice President with whom I had worked instead of my daughter. I hope I stopped it before he heard it ring.
Serve my behaviors and passions, not primarily your ego or your business model if you want me to remain passionate about your product or service. Don't make me conform. It's counter to who we are, especially in America. Apple's mistakes could be similar to mistakes that you might be making. Let's summarize them:
- Hide Your Business Model - We all have business models that make our customer relationships pay in the first place. However, the most successful business models don't impose your model as the experience, but rather let the business model semi-transparently occur as a result of a compelling user-centric experience. Google is a prime example of this. They are making reams of money. You probably know how they are profiting, but if you didn't read critiques of their model you probably didn't care because they make money while you just go about your life searching, finding and going places.
- Leverage Behaviors, Don't Try To Fight Them - How does it hurt Apple's business to allow customization of the iPhone? They may claim security and reliability issues, but in truth, those are red herrings. It's a control issue that is in disharmony with demonstrated behaviors across numerous platforms including their own Macs. Figure out how to make your customers' behaviors a benefit rather than a wrestling match.
- Demonstrate Goodwill - Customer relationships all depend on a level of belief and trust that customers bestow on us as product or service providers. Earn that trust by listening to them, demonstrate that you've heard them, but don't depend on them to tell you where to go next. As Google says "Do no evil." Ok...they don't always succeed, but they try. If I start to think that they've stopped trying, I will start to care more about Bing.
