One complacent Apple can spoil the whole bunch

It’s no question that Apple is an outstanding company that takes pride in building beautiful, desirable, usable products that consumers want to own, touch, interact with, and adore.

However, in creating a product line that generates obsessive fan boys and fan girls worldwide, comes a deep responsibility: never stop pushing the envelope, and keep innovation at the forefront of your business model.  We’ve seen it before where the wildly successful company begins to become complacent, especially when they’re no longer being pushed by competitors or consumers.

We challenge Apple to keep “Thinking Different”, by improving the craft of their digital design to meet the innovative level of their product design. And as a community – both of designers and consumers – we need to keep from getting caught in a cyclical pattern of blind positivity toward Apple, and be willing to point out the flaws and to push for better products.

As part of the digital product strategy work we do for our clients, we spend hundreds of hours observing and interviewing people around the world as they use – and struggle with – technology.  And it’s not all roses in Cupertino: there remain some clear challenges for Apple.

Nine fix-its for Apple (or opportunities for competitors!)

1. Shopping and experiencing don’t go hand in hand

While Apple.com is a visually pleasing website that clearly showcases the design, functionality, and even the environmental friendliness of each product, there’s a definite distinction between shopping and experiencing: After you’re done being mesmerized, there is no obvious, inline call to action to buy that iPad you’ve been saving up for - rather, you have to hunt for a tiny ‘buy now’ button at the top of the page.

Instead, their IA is designed to completely separate the two actions, both within each page and within the top navigation, with an obvious distinction between “Store” and “Mac”. As consumers, we do want to learn about a product, investigate the specs, and marvel at the design, but it should be automatic and seamless to move from experiencing a product to purchasing a product.

Inexplicably, Apple breaks some of the basic standards of ecommerce design, visually disconnecting the Call to Action from the related product, and making it more difficult to buy an item when you’re ready to. When I have my credit card in hand, that button had better be there.

2. Who Moved My Media?:  A call for complete integration

People want to get their hands on great entertainment in an integrated, streamlined, and refined marketplace. And when using iTunes on our laptops and desktops, it’s all right there in front of us, familiar and fully integrated into one app.

However, when using the iPad this model breaks down: our music is in one place, movies in another, shopping for media in a third, and shopping for apps in yet another. There is a distinction between purchasing and consumption, and users are unable to simply listen, watch, browse and buy simultaneously. We need a one-stop-shop for all of our media engagement.

3. Applicable Apps: The lack of organization in the App Store

There is an entire industry devoted to IA, yet it’s as though the App Store has been built without a blueprint. The overall experience reads like it was developed piecemeal, and not as a comprehensive, well-integrated whole. There are well over 300,000 apps in the App Store, but it’s incredibly difficult to actually locate genre-specific apps within this variety and choose your own personal experience. Instead, the push is toward “New and Noteworthy” apps, “Hot” apps, or a random smattering of front-page-profiled apps that seemingly have no reason to be headliners over the thousands of other apps available in the section you’re browsing.

There is no clear method for discovery or conceptual search, and no indication of the possibilities within each app section; what’s hot for a teenager doesn’t always mesh with my personal interests – go figure – and the appropriate app for me may be buried among the thousands of others under “See All”.

For example, if you’re looking for shopping apps, you’d have to browse tens of thousands of unorganized titles in the “Lifestyle” category. And, if you search for “shopping”, there isn’t one retailer listed in the first pages of results.

4. Sync Stinks: It’s difficult to sync media on multiple devices

If I have an iPad, iPhone, and a MacBook, I want to be able to download a movie or song on one device and seamlessly play it on another. While there is a way to do this, it’s not obvious, clearly defined, or better yet, done automatically. We live in a cloud computing, mobile society, which changes our expectations to assume a simple, instantaneous merging of my data across all platforms. Media should flow seamlessly across my devices and be independent of the device that happened to be in my hands when I acquired it.

5. 2+1=1: Solve the problem of having multiple users on one account

There’s a good chance, if you live in a household, that there are multiple users on your iPad or iMac, and each person has different media interests. In developing iTunes and propagating downloadable media, Apple has truly altered our media-sharing experience: where we used to be able to buy a CD or DVD and play it throughout the household on a variety of machines, now we’re relegated to downloading the same song or show on each account we want to play it on, should we want to maintain separate accounts.

As a result, we have seen that many households have had to resort to sharing a single iTunes account to avoid duplicitous charges for downloading the same songs and shows. Why not simply have the ability to create multiple profiles under this master account? Each person’s iTunes should feel personalized and proprietary to their own tastes, not like a giant stew of media spanning generations. And when you do want to share music within your home, it should be easy to see what others have been downloading and grab it for your own profile, or vice versa, across accounts. Though there is always the inevitable possibility of account abuse, we challenge Apple to develop a shared account system that is defined by personalized profiles.  We shouldn’t feel trapped with our media.

6. No Time for Popcorn: Unreasonable limitations on movie downloading

While we realize that Apple has to deal with rules and regulations rife within the film and TV industries, they are leaders in their own industry and drivers of innovation and should continue to drive change when it comes to digital rights management. Steve Jobs did it with music – now it’s time for film and TV. Oddly, the bricks-and-mortar Blockbuster model was more lenient than the current model, where we simply lose our video just 24 hours after renting it through iTunes (if we’ve started watching it), and reach our expiration 30 days after rental if we’ve never watched it at all.

Why must there be a countdown? Of course there needs to be some sort of limitation on a rental, and the ability to pause, stop, and rewind are critical. However, the 24 hour limitation requires us to consume media on Apple’s schedule, not our own. In addition, many users like to download a slew of videos in one fell swoop, but need more time than 30 days to actually view them all. Let us watch at our leisure, within reason, and then remove the video from our library, unless we then choose to purchase it.

7. Locked in the Filing Cabinet: We’re still filing and foldering like it’s 1980

Sure, there are updates and changes to the general façade of making files and folders, but has much innovation occurred outside of the R&D labs in the past couple of decades? We have a need to store and categorize increasingly large amounts of information, and then easily access and share it with others. Push the boundaries and create a better file-making experience that reflects our personal context and individual item-finding thought-process.

On the iPad, Apple is moving to app-specific document storage. Especially apparent in their iWork suite, each application (such as Keynote, their version of PowerPoint) has its own storehouse for documents that you’re working on. There’s no alternate way of organizing documents, and no way to collect multiple document types into a single conceptual location. Moving to app-specific storage, like what’s being done with the iWork suite on the iPad, is simply a step in the wrong direction. 

8. Tip of My Tongue…er, Fingers: Quickly and easily inputting information on iPads and iPhones

There’s no question we’re in a social networking renaissance, with endless opportunities to post, comment, like, share, and save information online. However, both the iPad and iPhone are still better as consumption devices far more than they beckon to be input devices. If you want to share information or comment on a post, the process for inputting data is cumbersome and slow, to the extent that you lose interest (or patience) in being social altogether.

Apple is especially disconnected from the market for business users, who are still turning to RIM and Android devices with keyboards in order to quickly read and respond. We realize that Apple created the iPhone and iPad with the intention of keeping the design clean, simple, and beautiful - but in the process, they have lost a good portion of functionality by not offering an integrated physical keyboard. These devices need to inspire quick and efficient sharing and creating, matching the beauty of the physical device to the potential beauty of interaction and engagement they beg for.

9. Oversimplified: Great form, but function has fallen by the wayside

To create a streamlined design aesthetic, Apple has simplified many functions within their operating systems. However, streamlined doesn’t always equal simple - and frequently it creates new usability issues. One example of oversimplification is in the removal of scrollbars on the iPad. We respect Apple’s objective to remove all that’s unnecessary and cluttered within a device or interface, but scrollbars aren’t an eyesore. Users need visual cues when watching a video or reading a document, in order to reference where they are in the media, and the overall length or number of pages of that item. While perhaps we don’t need an entire bar to tell us how far along we are, a simple indication to show us – without dragging on the screen to make something appear – wouldn’t be hard to provide. But removing it altogether in order to place the focus on the media simply means we’re lost in our own content.

In closing…

Apple has done a lot for digital design community, from raising awareness of great design to emphasizing the importance of desirability. As a community, we need to continue to push for innovation, or else we’ll support complacency.

The rise of the curator

Conventional wisdom holds that the influence of the retailer is on an inexorable decline, as the flatness of the web allows every consumer goods company to put out its own shingle, spin up a solid social media presence, and sell direct to consumer.

However, we’ve been seeing an interesting trend that started about 10 years ago. In working with our ecommerce clients and spending quality shopping time with their consumers, we’ve noticed that there’s something new happening: the rise of the ‘curator’, both offline and online.

Curators are retailers that bring their customers a hand-picked, tailored selection of products within a category or group of categories. Rather than trying to sell anything and everything, they provide a limited set of products, selected based upon specific attributes such as lifestyle, product quality, or compatible corporate ethos.

Many times, these curators become name brands in and of themselves - such as Anthropologie or Sephora in the United States - and begin to carry substantial weight in the mind of the consumer. Sephora, for example, carries both name-brand and lesser-known products under one roof. While the underlying brand of the products themselves may not be well-known or advertised, the fact that the retailer has chosen the brand instantly confers upon it a level of credibility - and can drive significant sales volume in a short period of time.

Given the increasing noise on the web and the ever-expanding circus of products available at a whim and a click - combined with consumers’ lack of desire to take the time to sift through the long tail - we foresee strong growth in the business of curation as the gateway to products, both on the web and in the physical world.

The home page is dead. Long live the home page.

Ever since the dawn of the Internet, the homepage has been the point of focus for website design, a front door of sorts through which visitors unlock all of the goodness within that we’ve built for them.  And quite a bit of web design is done accordingly: get the homepage design right, the theory goes, and the rest of the site will follow.

But as we continue diving headlong into a connected, social-media-aware, bot-crawled online world, the homepage is fading into irrelevance.  No longer do we surf the web by flitting from homepage to homepage, but rather by diving right into the depths of sites thanks to deep links from Google, page recommendations from friends, shopping aggregators … or even apps on our phones.

What’s happening here is an important shift in web design: your homepage is no longer your homepage.  Rather, anywhere a user might land on your site - be it from a Facebook link, a bit.ly link embedded in a tweet, or a reference on an obscure blog somewhere - becomes your de-facto homepage.  Every page needs to grab the user’s attention, give them a reason to be there, and a reason to stick around for a while.

Looking across our research and design projects, we’ve seen a few key ways to make every page a ‘homepage’:

• Location: Every page should give a sense of location: Where am I on the site? What’s similar on the site, like related products or information?
• Structure: Every page should expose the structure of the site: How big is it? What major features are there? How do I get around?
• Big picture: Every page should quickly give the big picture, answering What is this site? What’s special about it? What can I do here?
• What’s new: Every page should include something dynamic, even if it’s just a small widget in the corner, highlighting what’s new or interesting - and for ecommerce sites, what’s a deal, what’s a steal, and what’s on sale.

Will the iPad save traditional broadcast media?

For years, technology innovation has been drawing audiences away from broadcast media, siphoning attention off into a land of free and non-monetizable content. But the advent of the iPad holds the promise to redefine how the world produces and consumes media, and may just bring us all back under the wings of the major media houses. Through parallel storytelling, shared experiences, and new social interactions around media, the iPad — and ideally many new devices to follow — can give broadcasters rich new ways to engage us, our friends, and our families in their media events.

Parallel storytelling

Take a look at the media we consume today: nearly all of it is in the form of a single stream of content. Stories told among friends, books, movies, and broadcast media are all constructed from a series of vignettes that combine to tell a story. However, reality is much more messy: multiple things are going on at once; there are subtexts and back stories. Even when movies explore time shifting (Pulp Fiction) or alternate outcomes (Run, Lola, Run), the underlying format is the same: a string of events. However, people have a thirst for multiple streams of information: think record album liner notes, DVD extras and director’s notes, and the 1990s hit “Pop-Up Video” television show on VH-1, which visually overlaid little snippets of information on top of music videos.

With the advent of the iPad, media producers will be able to capture this thirst for additional information and explore new realms in parallel storytelling. Rather than just sitting back and passively watching a TV show, for instance, people will be able to simultaneously explore the back story. Imagine leafing through coffee-stained pages of the CIA dossier on Jason Bourne while he hides in the Caribbean, or training a virtual spycam on Godot to see what the heck he was up to while Vladimir and Estragon were endlessly waiting. And this doesn’t necessarily have to all happen on the iPad itself; we’ll see the rise of simulcast media, watching the main story on satellite or cable on the big screen in the living room and interacting with this sidecar content on our iPad from the comfort of the sofa.

Read the rest of the story on VentureBeat.com

Building trust through experience quality

While in the field doing in-home research, we recently passed a new house on the market for US $2 million. From the street, it wasn’t possible to see if the structure was sound or the quality of the construction was good - but what we did notice was the house number stickers on the mailbox. They were the cheap stick-on type from a local hardware store, with each digit slightly askew. And that made a big impact: what else did they skimp on?

Websites work the same way: they are a direct and immediate reflection of the company behind them. We’ve seen consistently from our research that no matter how much social media, web 2.0 interactivity, and rich media you build into a site, it’s the little things that quickly add up. Poor website quality affects not only clicks or sales, but can also create a strong and lasting negative impression of a brand. Frequently, each individual issue isn’t that grave - users may not even consciously notice them - but in combination they erode the experience:

Amateur visual design: confusing page layouts and low-quality graphics, especially those with compression artifacts

Lack of alignment: no sense of grid or other visual structure to the page, making it difficult to parse and understand

Inconsistencies: lack of cohesive feel throughout the site, such as a button marked “Buy” in one place and “Purchase” in another

Outdated design: use of antiquated visual design styles or methods of interaction (aa.com comes to mind)

Difficulties finding: issues with finding content or features, whether on a specific page or across the site

Weak Copy: bland, corporate-speak, excessively long or content-free text that does not bring immediate value to the visitor

Lack of content: missing details on products, lack of selling messages (“Why should i buy this? Sell it to me!”), and lack of depth on company

Technical bugs and performance: layout and font issues, dead-end pages, poorly-designed UI widgets, and slow response times

What do you think?