iPad has the Attention of Consumers

I was in the supermarket this afternoon. I went in to buy milk, bread, ham and pasta. I came out with milk, bread, ham, pasta, a small pork pie and copy of Mac Format magazine.

Mac Format, which I haven't bought for years, lured me with its actual-size iPad cover. I had a brief conversation with the young woman at the checkout…

YWATC: "Ooh! Are you going to get one ?"
ME: "I think so, as long as I can afford it"
YWATC: "How much are they ?"
ME: "They're probably going to be about £400"
YWATC:"Oh, That's not too bad"

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law was talking about the iPad. Her techspertise, as far as I know, extends to buying stuff from eBay, using facebook and sending NSFW emails.

Ordinary people really want this thing. And before they've even seen one, too. They get simple in way that the average spec-blinded tech pundit never will.

The less said about the pork pie, the better.

Persistence Is Futile

The rubber thing holding my car exhaust in place has perished to the point that it's no longer holding my exhaust in place. I don't remember the last time I had to replace an exhaust, but it could be as long ago as 1993, back when I drove a 1978 vintage 1275GT Mini called Fudge. Things have changed since them.

I fired up google, looking for "tyre and exhaust" centres nearby. I found plenty of places selling tyres, but virtually none selling exhausts. I was puzzled. I wondered what had changed to make the replacement exhaust a thing of the past. My hypothesis is that as car manufacturers were obliged by law to add expensive catalytic converters to their cars, the exhaust ceased to be a regular maintenance part, and needed to last as long as the car. The costs appeared so high a few years ago, that a perfectly serviceable banger would be uneconomical to repair if the cat was knackered. Prices have dropped, but the quality of exhausts hasn't.

No doubt this caused a number of businesses to downsize, go bust to diversify. Instead of exhausts, they'll push servicing, they'll have become MoT centres etc. I don't recall a particular outcry against car manufacturers or environmental legislators lamenting the passing of these businesses.

When new technology emerges, be it durable car exhaust or broadband internet, it'll kill some business models. Businesses based on dead models will also perish. Businesses that make new models to exploit the technology have a pretty good chance, whether they're start-ups or not.

Media businesses seem to want the status quo to persist. It seems to me that media businesses are just middle men. The least imaginative, the least creative, the least entitled to the status quo.

Hadley Freeman: Grrrrrr!

I've just been reading this Grauniad article: Facebook groups are the new lynch mob, by Hadley Freeman. I was skimming through most of it. It didn't tell me anything new. People have deeply disturbing, nasty, dangerous opinions and prejudices and they're not afraid to tell you about them in comment threads on the web. Fine. Yawn. Yet another social media is bad article to annoy the Linehans and Brookers and Morans.

But then I read this :

The much-publicised Save 6 Music Facebook group was obviously well-intended, but perhaps if half the people who joined it had ever listened to the station before the threat of its closure there wouldn't have been the need for the group in the first place.

It's lazy. It's disappointing. It's an appalling use of hyperbole. Most of all it's wrong. I write as a 6 Music listener who had not joined the Save BBC 6Music group.

The only other campaigning facebook group I seem to have joined is For Simon Singh and Free Speech - Against the BCA Libel Claim. That one's more important even than a radio station, so please consider joining, if you agree that is.

Back to the hyperbole. The implication is that Save BBC 6Music has considerably more members than there are actual 6 music listeners. At the time of writing, the facebook group membership was 154,893. The 6 Music audience for February 2010 was 695,000.

Let's take the ratio Hadley suggests : 'half'. That's 77,447 (rounding up) people who don't listen to 6Music, but who think it's a good use of the licence fee. That would increase the 6Music audience to 772,447, or, if you like, a hike of a shade over 11%.

Sorry to say, Hadley, but bumping the listener count by half the facebook support, would make fuck all difference.

Advertising that I don't mind

Ads are annoying, but they don't have to be. Take Tweetie, for example. I use the free, ad sponsored version. I may get the paid, ad-free version, but that would be because I want to send some money Loren Brichter's way for a job well done. (Find Tweetie here:http://www.atebits.com/). It would not be because the ads annoy me.

This is what ads look like in Tweetie:

They're not very frequent. They're usually well designed. Some are even pretty. They're not intrusive. They sit in a little well so they don't sneakily look like tweets. They just slip between the tweets, and I can scroll past them just as I'd scan and scroll past some tweets I don't think I'm interested in today - e.g. I'm in the mood for some Amanda Palmer, sometimes not, so I just skip past those tweets next to her pic without reading.

I have clicked on the ones in Tweetie. I may even have bought stuff that was advertised there. So I'd be concerned about the paid, ad-free Tweetie, because …gulp… I like the ads, and I think I'd miss 'em. They seem well targeted to me as a long-term Mac user.

Other ads I don't mind much at the moment are those in streaming TV, on 4OD, for example. I appreciate that they're a small price to pay for the content I'm getting. If the ads start to take over the content, then it'll be a different story. Right now there are fewer ads in streaming catch-up TV than in broadcast TV, which is nice. Easy to get, legal, with some ads beats torrenting. TV networks are looking more and more like middlemen. I look forward to shows that exist online in this way without having to be bought by a network and broadcast, that become popular by word of mouth and where episodes are released simultaneously across the globe.

Bosses buy bad UX

User Experience matters to users. In Enterprise, users usually have no say in the software they use. Those decisions are made by bosses, bean counters or 'IT'. UX may not even be on their checklist.

Most bosses won't be using the software. Not even email in many cases. They have a secretary/PA for that. This is not a criticism. It's an observation. It's just the nature of their jobs.

Accountants should look at the bigger picture, the TCO, but they'll have a hard time seeing beyond tangible, measurable costs.

In organisations where IT call the shots, I don't think they have the best interests of the user at heart. Or rather the UI that they use is the admin end. How easy it is to configure and maintain users on the system. End user UX may not be of great concern. If it's really bad, they'll get swamped with support calls, but most likely, they'll get no calls from disgruntled users who can work software that they hate and bitch about it to their colleagues.

I can think of only one case where universal hatred of a product caused change in a large organisation. Said organisation moved from an ancient but functional email system, Teamworks, to Lotus Notes. Initially most people were quite excited to get a modern client. There were some initial problems. There was some initial dislike. This is normal. People don't like change. They'll grumble. They'll pine for the old, unless you give them a chance to try the old again: then they'll run from it screaming.

What's not normal is for universal long term hatred of a new product. It took about two or three years of mass user complaint, but eventually, thankfully, it was dropped in favour of Outlook. The product became known as 'FLN' ("F*cking Lotus Notes"). The only person I've ever heard defend FLN worked at basement level IT, made his own Roman clothing for re-enactments and knew his way around a twelve-sided die. He also derided users for not being able to use the unusable FLN. (He's a really nice bloke, but he's more Moss than Roy. )

Outlook is far from perfect, of course, but the UX improvement, compared to FLN, was astonishing.

I've worked on products that have appalling UX. Old fashioned, like some Windows 3.1 app. I worked for one company for a short time that took pride in its applications looking shit. They drew attention to it in the brochure. They didn't call it 'shit' directly, they called it something like 'focused on utility, not on eye candy'. Anyone trying to make it look better to work better would probably get a formal warning.

The terrible thing ? They were right. Looking shit was a genuine advantage for them. Some kind of negative reinforcement. The message was 'Hah! Look at the eye candy in [rival product]. We didn't waste time on that nonsense, we made our product work'. This marketing was successful because the people buying the product were amenable to the message, and they were not the ones who would have to use it day in, day out for hours and hours.

When function and form are treated as mutually exclusive, it's often the user that suffers, not the bloke signing the cheques.