Sometimes ideas come together in a collision, creating sparks. And for one, brief moment, you can see something in a new light, something you may not have seen before.
This afternoon, I read David Pogue’s review of a new phone offering, the Shadow, designed and sold by T-Mobile in the US.
The review starts normally enough, praising the phone’s physical shape and layout, hard controls and aesthetics. It then describes the enormous list of features the Shadow has: WiFi, voice dialing, Bluetooth, stereo audio output…
But then Pogue gets into the phone’s software, built on Windows Mobile 6 which he succinctly describes as “a mess.” He describes the dozens of taps required to make the phone go, the wait times between screens (wait times on a phone!?…), bad navigation, hidden menu choices of important items, counter-intuitive functionality…in short, says that “it’s a shame that such bloated, baffling software runs a phone whose hardware is so close to perfect.”
The review is clever and cuts to the heart of the matter.
So why does this matter to me?
Because I’ve been reading Getting Real, by 37signals. And one of the things they hammer home is that it’s better to deliver half a product than a half-assed product. They argue that leaving features out in favour of delivering something simple, smart and coherent is critical. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Get a few things right.
I think that the Shadow phone Pogue describes is the sort of fully-featured, half-assed product 37signals had in mind. It’s loaded with everything a user could want and a lot more, but its navigation is so dreadful that it’s likely to be impossible for them to find what they are after, let alone use it. Whether this is the fault of the software built on Microsoft’s platform or of the platform itself…well, I’ll let you decide once you’ve read the review and handled the phone.
Now, consider Apple or Palm products for a minute…
Palm (and later, Handspring, then Palm again), for all its faults, for an operating system and products that some have described as “stale” in recent years, got it more or less right the first time around: deliver something that works as a phone, syncs perfectly every single time, and delivers single button access to the four major functions. To do this, they dumped a lot of functionality and kept things simple: no multi-threaded operating system, heck, there isn’t even a “Quit” button in most Palm applications. Palm explicitly told its developers that they shouldn’t use one, that they didn’t need one. They told developers to keep important, frequently used things on top, one click away, put less important things in menus or secondary screens.
And Apple’s products: plug in an iPod and it syncs. There’s no button to push, it just happens. Plug in a camera, iPhoto starts. Simple…not simplistic…just simple and smart.
The complaints about the iPhone have been loud and long – that it lacks features that are “obvious” like GPS, no flash on the camera, no picture messages, no file organiser, no Flash support. I can’t help but wonder if Apple chose to leave all these out to make sure they delivered a phone with half the features, fully realised, instead of a fully featured, half-assed phone.
You can stack complexity on Apple’s products; witness the number of developers running MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Subversion or a hat box full of excellent development environments that find a happy home on OS X. But that’s not where you start with Apple; you start with Safari and Mail, iPhoto and iTunes, simple, smart applications.
You’ve seen lots of terrible software and bad interfaces, as have I. I confess to having a very personal beef with an LCD display in the light and fan control in an overhead stove vent (“…Light…is…off…”). So there is no shortage of examples for the issues raised in Getting Real. But the clash between the sleek simplicity of this phone’s hardware and the transcendental awfulness of the its software really got my attention.
Perhaps simplicity is what separates passing fetishes from disruptive technology; witness Facebook, My Space, iPod, GMail, Flickr and others. I also think that this might be what’s driving the market away from Microsoft Vista. Start with the fact that you have to choose which version of Vista to use. We don’t want to think about versions, antivirus, antispyware, firewalls. We don’t want to play the whack-a-mole game with the interface. We don’t want to think about the interface. Rightly or wrongly, we want appliances — plug it in, insert bread, push the lever, wait, and toast pops out.
Thanks to Mark and Amanda for putting Getting Real on my radar.
Tags: Interactive, Learning, Reading, Technology
