iPhone shows that good design = good usability

TIME Magazine just crowned the iPhone as the best invention of 2007 (see Invention Of the Year: The iPhone).  I know what you're thinking, and I thought the same thing: can we please stop talking about the iPhone now?  Well, almost.  But let me just quote one thing from the article.  The author gives 5 reasons why the iPhone deserves this honor, and the first one is this (emphasis added by me):

The iPhone is pretty

Most high-tech companies don't take design seriously. They treat it as an afterthought. Window-dressing. But one of Jobs' basic insights about technology is that good design is actually as important as good technology. All the cool features in the world won't do you any good unless you can figure out how to use said features, and feel smart and attractive while doing it.

An example: look at what happens when you put the iPhone into "airplane" mode (i.e., no cell service, WiFi, etc.). A tiny little orange airplane zooms into the menu bar! Cute, you might say. But cute little touches like that are part of what makes the iPhone usable in a world of useless gadgets. It speaks your language. In the world of technology, surface really is depth.

I think Apple is showing us all the good usability can look great too.  They understand that it's not just about accomplishing your goal, but also about feeling "smart and attractive" in the process.  I think as usability professionals we often feel constrained by design, as if design stands in the way of making something truly usable.  Let's go beyond that -- let's keep the usability great and make it pretty...

The Amazon MP3 search experience

My colleague Michael Morgan did an interesting evaluation of the search experience on AmazonMP3 Beta, and I wanted to share his thoughts here because I think it's a very good overview of what works and what doesn't...

Overview

Some of the high points include DRM (Digital Right Management) Free music that can play on iTunes and Windows Media Player, a nice collage of fun facts (Top MP3 songs, Top Artists, and Artists Spotlights), and very inexpensive full albums and single tracks (.89 to .99, compared to iTunes costs of .99 to 1.29). As a comparison, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a 26 track album costs $16.99 on iTunes but only $7.99 on AmazonMP3.

First Impressions of the Finding Experience

I really liked the Top MP3 and Top Artist Spotlights as I found this engaging and a place where I would come back to check who is in the Top 25 week to week. However, the music search experience is mediocre. The default sort is by relevance but I found the list of music arduous to comb through. After applying the ‘Best Selling’ sort, I had an easier time traversing the list as the songs that I knew (i.e., the popular ones) were at the top. The "sort by" setting does not stick from session to session so that is a bit annoying.

Albums are presented like all other merchandising is on Amazon, off to the side and on the left. After initial discoverability issues, I did find the albums as this was what I was originally looking for. There are not many reviews as the site is new but the music is very old so they could have easily used the CD reviews. I was initially unimpressed with Amazon’s search experience.

Final Thoughts

The Finding experience needs some work but I think the value and abundance of cheap DRM-free music is enough for me to come back and at least try it out. I don’t think there are any breakthrough experiences with respect to Finding, but there are other aspects that make this service compelling. Although I was not compelled to buy any music right away, I do think the new service as a few things going for it:

• Value. Songs are very inexpensive compared to iTunes DRM-Free tracks that sell for $1.29
• Abundance. Unlike the iTunes Store’s DRM-free tracks that only come from EMI, AmazonMP3 has secured 2 million DRM-free songs by more than 180,000 artists from over 20,000 major and independent labels
• Engagement. Publishing top 25 lists on songs and artists is very interesting.
• DRM. All songs are DRM-free, encoded at 256 kilobits per second, in comparison to iTunes' low bit rate, DRM saturated site.

Design as differentiator - what we can learn from Apple

There is a great article in Technology Review about how Apple uses design as a product differentiator.  You can read it here, but the web site requires registration - if you don't want to do that you can download a PDF version here.

Reading the article got me thinking about design as differentiator, and how we can learn from Apple and apply their success to other products.  The following principles stood out for me - the points are followed by direct quotes from the article:

1. Design focus has to come from the top.  It was largely [Steve Jobs] who established the company's emphasis on industrial design. Indeed, some would say that he made design a higher priority than technology.  Even in the early 1980s, [Mark] Rolston says, "Jobs wanted to elevate Apple by using design." Jobs, he says, not only cared personally about design but saw that it could be a way to differentiate his company's products from the PCs of the day, which often looked little evolved from hobbyist boxes. Ken Campbell, a codesigner of the Apple Lisa, was quoted in Kunkel's AppleDesign as saying that Jobs wanted Apple to be what Olivetti was in the 1970s: "an undisputed leader in industrial design."
2. Don't be limited by standard engineering requirements - push for innovation.  But Apple, Rolston says, "will change a whole factory's process." What's more, he adds, the company keeps its eyes open for new manufacturing possibilities, no matter how obscure. One example is the "double-shot" method of combining layers of different or different-colored materials. Apple "saw that a manufacturer had a special process for this on a small scale," Rolston says, and incorporated layered materials into its designs--for example, the clear plastic layered over colored materials in iPods and older iMacs. "[Apple] pushed them to do it on a much larger scale. Apple helped the manufacturers master the process and product."
3. Design innovation doesn't just happen automatically - it requires significant resources.  [Robert] Brunner estimates that today Apple spends 15 to 20 percent of its industrial-design time on concept--far more than most other computer companies--and the rest on implementation. He says that Apple rides herd on manufacturers, sending design-team members to factories for weeks at a time to see what can be done and to push manufacturers to find new solutions. If the designers see a true innovation, they can integrate it into their designs and check the quality of execution at the point of manufacture.
4. User experience needs a seat at the table from the very beginning of product development.  [Donald Norman explains:] "There were three evaluations required at the inception of a product idea: a marketing requirement ­document, an engineering requirement document, and a user-­experience document," Norman recalls. [Mark] Rolston elabo­rates: "Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is 'Here's how people like to do things.'"  "These three [documents] would be reviewed by a committee of executives, and if approved, the design group would get a budget, and a team leader would be assigned," Norman says. At that point, he continues, "the team would work on expanding the three requirement documents, inserting plans on how they hoped to meet the marketing, engineering, and user-experience needs--figures for the release date, ad cycle, pricing details, and the like." And the team's progress would be continually reviewed as the project went forward.
5. Don't lose sight of the end product.  "Critical to Apple's success in design is the way Jobs brought focus and discipline to the product teams," ­Norman says. "[Jobs] had a single, cohesive image of the final product and would not allow any deviation, no matter how promising a new proposed feature appeared to be, no matter how much the team complained. Other companies are more democratic, listening to everyone's opinions, and the result is bloat and a lack of cohesion.

These principles placed design at the center of the product development process at Apple, and it is why their products are differentiated by being both beautiful and simple to use:

One direct result of that sharpened focus is Apple's unique ability to create simple products. Though the idea of a simple high-tech device seems counterintuitive (why not offer more functionality if you can?), it's worked for Apple.  "The hardest part of design, especially consumer electronics," says Norman, "is keeping features out." Simplicity, he says, is in itself a product differentiator, and pursuing it can lead to innovation.   Rolston agrees. "The most fundamental thing about Apple that's interesting to me," he says, "is that they're just as smart about what they don't do. Great products can be made more beautiful by omitting things."

And finally, on why design is such a powerful differentiator, I have to agree with one of Donald Norman's final quotes in the article, where he says that "Attractive things work better.  When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn't it? Or at least feels like it does."  

Did the iPod's design evolution influence Apple's stock price?

The Wall Street Journal just published an interesting graph overlaying different iPod releases with Apple's stock price: 

Core77 Design Blog points to this as proof that good design can influence stock price.  This is what they say:

The clarity of their cohesive design language and its evolution over time is also instantly appreciated at a glance. If ever business needed confirmation that design can have a significant effect on your ROI, then this piece of infoporn is it.

At first glance I'd love to agree right off the bat, because I am a strong believer in the ROI of good design.  However, the researcher in me has to take a step back and ask if we can really say this based off this one chart.  As every researcher will tell you, correlation does not imply causality.  Just because 2 things happen at the same time, it does not mean that one event causes the other. 

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but there are hundreds of factors that influence the stock price, and we simply can't prove causality just by looking at this graph.  For example, how do we use design to explain the sudden drop in stock price between the iPod video launch and the redesign iPod shuffle launch?

Having said that, I do think that this poses an interesting question about what effect good user experience has on business metrics and revenue.  I guess if we can find a way to prove that beyond the shadow of a doubt, we won't have to spend half our time convincing people that good user experience is important...