By Alexander Baxevanis on 10 February 2010
Over the last week after the Apple iPad was announced, I decided to conduct some totally unscientific but very informative ethnographic research project: I walked the full length of the train on my way to and from work, and looked at what sort of electronic devices other commuters were using and, more crucially, what they were using them for.
As you may have noticed if you’ve ever been on a peak-hour commuter train, there are lots of people using a laptop. All of the ones I noticed were engaged in one of the following tasks:
- Reading or writing email
- Reading or editing a document (Word or PDF), spreadsheet or presentation
- Watching a video
- Browsing or editing photographs
In fact, in a couple of years of commuting & randomly peeking at people’s screens, only a few times I saw people doing any other specialised tasks such as editing videos or using architectural design software. I’ve also seen over time a few people using more specialised devices such as eBook readers & portable DVD players.
If most of the above sounds like a list of things that the iPad is designed to do very well, I doubt it’s a coincidence. After all, commuters are an important demographic (according to a 2009 study, workers in the UK spend on average 52.6 minutes commuting every day) and I doubt Apple would want to ignore it.
And before you say “oh, but the iPad doesn’t multitask”, I’ve got another observation up my sleeve. One of these days I sat next to a couple of people using their laptops for the duration of my trip. All of them seemed to work on one document all the time, and were mostly reading or making minor edits. This is also why we shouldn’t worry too much about the ergonomics of the iPad. Sure, it’s probably not well suited to typing long documents (not without an external keyboard), but the seats and tables on a train, bus or plane aren’t really designed to accommodate long typing sessions on a laptop either.
As I’m typing this on the train, I have to keep my hands at an awkward angle in order to use my laptop keyboard. Maybe an iPad sitting in my lap would be better?
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By Alexander Baxevanis on 28 August 2009
Today is the official release day for “Snow Leopard (also known as Mac OS X 10.6), the next iteration of Apple’s operating system. There’s been little fanfare about this release - perhaps because it has few major new features, but many small “under the hood” improvements. However, I’ll be more than happy to fork out the £25 that Apple is charging for this upgrade, because I’ve always thought that user experience lies in the details.
Some of those “details” include:
- Space savings: Apple claim they’ve managed to trim Mac OS X by 7GB for an average installation - giving some breathing space to those who (like myself) are reaching the limits of a small laptop hard disk
- Easier to select and copy text from PDF files - if you’ve ever tried to copy text out of a PDF file only to find out that it comes jumbled up with parts of the text in the wrong order, you know what I mean.
- Larger file icons that can show a detailed preview of a file before you even open it
- Last but not least, a suite of improvements to the built-in accessibility features
People looking at a complete system can easily think that “it doesn’t do anything special” and “it’s easy to build this from scratch”. Benjamin Pollack has written about the design of Stack Overflow, an online community for developers:
… most visitors seem to agree that the user experience is smooth, from start to finish. They feel that they’re interacting with a polished product. Even if I didn’t know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success has to do with [the technical details] … There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable.
Fortunately, people are taking note. Ubuntu, the open-source Linux-based operating system, is an interesting example. We recently blogged about their One Hundred Paper Cuts project, aiming to find and fix 100 minor problems that degrade the overall user experience.
When was the last time you looked into the details of your product or service and tried to streamline things instead of focusing all your resources on building grand new features?
Photo credit: whybesubtle via Flickr / Creative commons
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By Mru Kodali on 11 August 2009
With Apple rejecting apps written for its iPhone for one reason or another, both developers and consumers are increasingly going underground and creating an alternative marketplace. Developers are able to flog their wares while consumers can find what they’re looking for, even if Apple says no, and fully harness the power of the iPhone. Google Voice, which was controversially rejected by Apple recently, is now available through one of these underground app stores.
The biggest barrier to the use of these underground, unofficial apps, is that the iPhone has to be ‘jailbroken’ (i.e. hacked into, to bypass Apple’s restrictions), which of course voids any official warranties. Jailbreaking is much like unofficial unlocking of phones and it’s a practice that’s increasing in popularity, in no small part due to widely available software that makes it reasonably straightforward to hack into an iPhone.
The underground community has existed right from day 1 (remember those headlines within days of launch that the iPhone had been successfully hacked into to allow use on any network?). But once Apple released an official software development kit (SDK) in 2008, most developers chose the official route. Now that Apple’s operating a pretty opaque app acceptance system and seemingly randomly rejecting apps, it’s not surprising that developers are going back underground and consumers are following them.
It’s interesting that it was Apple’s iTunes that reversed the trend of illegal music downloads yet now Apple’s own restrictions are tipping the scales towards making underground stores and unauthorised apps for its products not only viable but also attractive. So much so that there are now entire businesses dedicated to monetising unauthorised apps for the iPhone.
Photo credit: jimpg2 _PEACE via Flickr/Creative Commons
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By Jon White on 6 August 2009
The news that there are now more than 65,000 apps available in the iPhone App Store is food for thought, particularly if (like me) you own one of the smartphones that is in the market of trying to compete with the iPhone. The post on Mashable also stated that more developers are starting to work on apps for Android.
However, as a Blackberry Storm user, I was very keen to find out how Blackberry’s App World is faring in this market (at least in terms of app numbers) - the answer is not well. Browsing through App World on my Storm, I counted (the number of apps in each category is helpfully listed) less than 1,400 apps - around 45 times less than what’s on offer in Apple’s App Store. The question is why such a disparity?
Yes Apple’s App Store has been around a lot longer, but it seems that there’s a big problem in user awareness and ease-of-use when it comes to getting hold of Blackberry’s App World. The App Store is a clear selling point for the iPhone, yet handsets like the Storm do not really focus on apps to market the device. In addition, where the iPhone comes with the App Store pre-loaded, the Storm required me to actively go and download App World from the Blackberry website (something which actually proved quite difficult on the handset itself, so I resorted doing it through my desktop).
Perhaps a concerted effort by Blackberry to offer App World pre-loaded on devices and to drive user awareness of this would see more developers looking to create Blackberry apps.
An opportunity for Blackberry could be in the business app arena, where Apple was recently criticised in a Business Week article for offering a poor selection of business apps. But, without increasing the prominence of App World, Blackberry will surely only fall further behind Apple in this market.
So, do you think there is any opportunity for Blackberry (or anyone else for that matter) to get anywhere near the iPhone in the app market?
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By Mru Kodali on 4 August 2009
Google Voice is a free new Internet telephony service that lets users screen, block and make calls, get voicemail transcripts, place conference calls and more. Sounds like a pretty handy app to me (shame it’s US invite only at the moment). But Apple has decided that it’s one app they can do without and blocked Google Voice on the iPhone - a move that seems motivated by competitive protectionism. The US Federal Communications Commission (a communications watchdog) seems to think so too as it’s now launched an inquiry into just why Apple banned Google Voice.
It’s about time someone looked into these seemingly more common exclusionary tactics and stood up for us, the consumers. After all a free market is about choice and surely Apple, with arguably one of the most popular phones ever to be released, can deal with a bit of healthy competition. Interestingly, this comes at the same time as Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google is resigning from the Apple board of directors because Google is increasingly moving into Apple’s space of operating systems (with Chrome) and telephony (with Android).
And now there’s a case of Apple trying to bribe a girl and her father to keep stum about an exploding iPod with an offer of a refund (which one would expect in the event of a device exploding in any case!). So is Apple, once only known for cutting edge and cool design, turning into a soulless corporate? We’ve seen Microsoft behave similarly with its exclusionary tactics and an attributable change in its brand perception. Google, the other tech biggie, has so far managed to stave off such a decline in image but for how long.
What disappointed me most about Apple’s move is that it comes at a time when we’re living through a recession that’s brought business ethics into serious question (in the financial sector at the very least). And Apple’s audacity in thinking that such a move would go unnoticed and/or without repercussion is simply astounding.
Is the tech sector going the same way that finance has in the past? I sincerely hope not as I for one have always thought of the tech sector as a refreshingly innovative space with humane workplaces and solid ethics. Is my continued optimism and belief in tech naive? Is this instead a taste of things to come?
Photo credit: William Hook via Flickr/Creative Commons
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