Apple iPhone Debut to Flop, Product to Crash in Flames

The forthcoming (June 29) release of the Apple iPhone is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld (dating myself again, aren't I) combined. And it’s not for reasons of price, or limited cell carrier options, or lack of corporate IT support, which are the mainstream media’s main caveats when they review it. (See the June 19 issue of the Wall Street Journal for the latter).

Instead, the iPhone is going to fail because its design is fundamentally flawed. The designers and technophiles who encouraged development of the iPhone have fallen into the trap of all overreaching hardware and software designers; thinking that their users are like themselves. As I expound in great detail in my book Why Software Sucks (Addison-Wesley, 2006, http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com/) your user is not you. The iPhone’s designers have forgotten this fundamental law of the universe. The market will severely punish them for doing so.

I have three specific reasons why the iPhone’s design will cause it to crash in flames the way Apple’s late and unlamented Newton did, only much more loudly and publicly because of all the hype it’s gotten:

First, the iPhone ignores the main reasons that the iPod succeeded: simplicity and ease of use. The iPod is very easy to play and very easy to load, much more so than any other device had ever been. Even more important, the online ITunes store made buying music much simpler and easier than it had been. You didn’t have to drive to the store, you didn’t have to even wait for the UPS man to deliver a CD from amazon. You could listen to the whole song before you bought it, not just a small clip. And you could buy individual songs that you liked instead of having to buy a whole CD of mediocre gunk to get those one or two good songs. (There hasn’t been a packaged album side worth listening to the whole thing in order since Abbey Road.) You didn't have to carry the CDs around with you and change them and worry about losing them. The iPod was a success not because it made complex and sophisticated things possible, but because it made simple things (listening to the music that you liked) simpler and easier than they ever had been before. The iPhone is doing the opposite.

Second, the iPhone crams too many functions into a single box. Putting everything in the same package so you only have to carry one box sounds like a good idea, until you want to listen to music while surfing the web or reading your email or playing a game. Then users will find it essentially impossible to use one function of the tiny box without disrupting the operation of another. A few dedicated technophiles might, just MIGHT, figure out how to do so, but it will require far more dedication than an ordinary user is willing to invest in learning and then remembering. This combination condemns the IPhone to a tiny niche at best.

Third, users will detest the touch screen interface due to its lack of tactile feedback. Using a thumb keyboard, as on the very popular Treo phone, allows the user to feel the keys and know subconsciously that he’s about to press this one and not the one next to it. A touch screen doesn’t allow that, so the user will have to be looking at the keyboard at all times while using it.



Consider the case of an airline passenger relaxing in her seat, eyes closed, iPod mini hung around her neck with a cord, or maybe just lying in her lap -- the very picture of relaxation. Suppose she wants to skip forward or back in the song list. She just presses the forward or back button, which her finger can easily find by touch, a one-handed operation for which she doesn't even have to open her eyes. Now think of the same thing with in iPhone, which doesn't have separate forward or back buttons, just an icon on a touch screen. The user has to interrupt her blissful reverie, open her eyes, come back visually to the yucky airplane that the beautiful music from the iPhone has been helping her escape. She then has to pick the phone up in one hand, lift it up to where she can see it, use her other hand to press the forward button, and put the phone back down. Instead of a one-hand, no eye operation, it's a two-hand, two-eye operation. Please explain to me how that's an improvement.



Also, touch screen keys are small compared to the fingers that touch them. Even though its keys are small, a thumb keypad focuses the force of the finger, so it works even if the user doesn’t touch the key exactly in the center. If the user rolls his fingertip at all while removing it from the touchscreen, which is hard to avoid, he’ll change the key that he THINKS he’s pressed, which is not the case with the thumb keyboard or the iPod controls. The designers and early technophile testers of the iPhone were willing to retrain themselves to deal with the touchscreen’s shortcomings, to always look at the keypad and to move their fingers exactly in the required manner, because they like technology and are willing to adapt to it. The vast majority of users don’t care about technology in and of itself, and are therefore not willing to do so.

When the 100 million iPod users said, "Oh, if only Apple made a phone," they meant that they wanted the simplicity and ease of their iPods to transfer to a phone, not complex, hard to use stuff that they had never imagined. An iPod with just a cell keypad on the back would have been, may still be, a smash hit product for someone. But the iPhone as currently consituted? Forget it.

Because its designers forgot Platt’s First, Last, and Only Law of User Experience Design (“Know Thy User, for He Is Not Thee”), that product is going to crash in flames. Sell your Apple stock now, while the hype's still hot. You heard it here first.

Norton Internet Security Doesn't Just Work, and It Should

Norton Internet Security is sold as a turnkey system for novice users. They certainly need something of the sort (although a case can be made that security is now so important that it should be the operating system vendor's responsibility). Users need something that keeps the bad guys from hurting them, without requiring a whole lot of fiddling with, because they don't know how to do it. That's why they buying that product, right?

Unfortunately, Norton Security is written by geeks, who are unable to shed their geek mindsets and produce something that Just Works, as their users need it to. Here's an example of their doing it wrong.

Carbonite, as I've shown you on this blog, is an automatic Internet backup system that not only Just Works, but is my poster application for the Its Just Works movement. Carbonite, like many other applications, periodically updates itself with bug fixes and (we hope) improvements. When Carbonite communicates back to its Internet home site after an update, Norton security detects it and pops up the following box, which caused my wife to come running to me in panic:



If the ultra-smart geeks at Norton, who do nothing but eat, sleep, drink, and live security, can't figure out whether allowing Carbonite to access the Internet is safe or not, how the heck is my poor wife supposed to know? In fact, I MYSELF do not know whether this box is crying wolf, or whether it actually has detected something bad, such as Carbonite being hijacked by bad guys. Take that one step further, and I MYSELF don't know how I would even go about figuring out whether this communication is safe or not.

Norton seems to THINK that this situation is probably benign, as you can see by the "Low Risk" label and the recommendation of "Allow Always". And I think, or at least I HOPE, that they're right. But if that's true and the action really is benign, why is Norton bothering to ask me? It's the same confirmation mindset that I've decried over and over again on this blog. Rather than put themselves in their users shoes, Norton is forcing the user to put on security programmer shoes, and there's not a chance in hell that any user on God's good earth, and I mean NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON, can possibly do it properly. Instead, by crying wolf when no lupine creature is in sight, Norton is conditioning users to click "Yes" every time they see a security warning. They're making all users less secure. Bad idea.

Maybe Norton's lawyers made them do this so that they can disclaim responsibility if they actually do make a mistake. In that case, it wouldn't be the designer's fault, and I will hereby transfer my annoyance and scorn to the lawyers. But Norton messed up here, because they did not put themselves in their users' shoes, as they should have.

From a Reader, About Just Working

A reader named David (no relation) wrote thusly about stuff just working:

"I'm in the United Red Carpet Room as I often am. I just spent 45 mintues (of the 90 I had to spare) trying to log in to purchase a one day pass to the TMobile hotspot. These guys should be flogged in public in front of their families. Every time I didn't get the exact sequence right it would clear out all fields and make me pull out my wallet to enter my Amex details and much more information; over and over and over. I state again, I'm a Technology Manager...it should not be so difficult that I can't spend my money with these people. I buy stuff online all the time. It makes me hostile and makes me want to go back to Continental where intenet access is free in their club in the first place. Shame on Tmobile (I'll cancel my cell phone contract next week) and shame on United. Is their goal to make it so hard to use people will want to subscribe to their outrageous 20 per month access fee or just make it so difficult that no one will want to try so they won't have ! bandwidth problems? Please consider adding this to your suckbusters as this is a defcon 5 suckfest"

In addition, he writes, "I read your fine novel [not sure I intended it as a novel, but OK, I'll take what I can get], and as a development and project manager I made it required reading for my entire team. It's part of our mantra now, thank you for so deftly identifying what we all have known all along. We are in the process of reengineering an applictation (internal proprietary) which is a full on 11 on a 1 to 10 scale of sucking.

You may consider it added, David. Thank you for writing.

Another Application that Just Works, At Least To A Point

I said in my book that this blog would contain a Hall of Shame for bad applications. After further reflection, I think that it's more useful to praise good applications rather than only slam bad ones. At the very least, I'll make sure to show a good application alongside every bad application. And today I'll show a good app without a bad one for contrast.

Microsoft's Movie Maker application, which comes with Windows XP, gets lambasted in critical circles for its inability to do this or that complex but (to the reviewer) necessary task in piecing together a movie. Without considering its ability to do large and complex things, I am going to pat its designers on the head for making the simple operation of getting video from a camera onto your computer about as quick and easy as it can be.

Like every proud daddy in the world, I've been recording my two daughters' milestone events on video, such as Annabelle singing in her Kindermusik chorus or Lucy ice skating by herself for the first time. (Don't worry, I won't inflict them on you.) But my parents live a few hundred miles away from me, and naturally they love to watch their only two grandchildren growing up. I'd like to send them the video electronically which means first capturing it onto a PC.

I sat down one Saturday morning to do this for the first time, cringing mentally at the pain I expected to suffer from bad applications. I don't get to say this very often, but I was pleasantly surprised by how quick and easy it was, because Microsoft Movie Maker more or less Just Worked for this particular application, figuring out about what I wanted to do and doing it for me.

I plugged my camcorder into the PC using a USB cable, wondering which of the dozens of applications on my PC would get this done. XP's plug-and-play mechanism detected the camcorder, realized that plugging one in meant that the user almost certainly wanted to download video, knew which application worked with it, and popped up the following box, which saved me any amount of poking around:

A hard-core developer would no doubt say, "Platt, you dimwit, if you don't know which application you want to use, go back to playing Solitaire, if you can remember it, or better yet use your PC for a boat anchor before you hurt someone." But that's 100% ass backwards. It's not the user's job to know about the developer's application; it's the developer's job to know about the user's needs and wants. It's very hard for a developer to get that through his head, since he spends all day every day working on his application. But the user doesn't care whether his electric drill comes from Makita or Sears or Black and Decker. He only cares how fast and how well and how easily it makes holes, which are the true object of his efforts. I used my computer not because I wanted to capture video, and neither does one single person in the entire world. I wanted to HAVE CAPTURED video. And the sooner I get to that state, with the least amount of effort, the happier I and any user will be.

OK, video capture is what I want. Click OK. Next it asked me which camera, because it also saw the tiny webcam that I use for instant messenger, which sits on my PC all the time. This question was probably unnecessary, seeing as I had just plugged one of them in, the detection of which caused the wizard to start. But the new one was selected as the default option, so one click got me past it.

Next the wizard offered me the choice of where to put the captured video. A good default folder was selected, and decent default title provided. The title's text was even selected so that all I had to do was to start typing to change the name, I didn't have to click on the text box and select the text. That's about as easy as it gets.

The video settings page was next. This could get tricky, if the user had to think about technical options, but again, the wizard designers had abstracted the choices away. The options were clearly explained in non-technical language for users who had never seen them before (as I had not), and the correct choice for most users was selected as a default. Specifically, the explanation was written in terms of what the USER wanted to do, keep it on a computer or copy it back to a tape. Links to additional information were available to an advanced user, or one of the few who was interested in the capture process, but it didn't get in the way of the vast majority of us who just wanted to get the damn thing done so we could get on with something we really cared about, like watching Mighty Mouse ("Heeere I come, to save the d-a-a-y!"). A simple click on Next gave me the right settings.

The next wizard page asked which parts of the tape did I want, all or some? Again, no problem understanding what they were asking. Since I only wanted a part, I selected that.

Finally, up came the capture box. Then there was the box saying start, stop, with video controls. Again, the choices were well laid out. Step 1, click Start. Step 2, click Stop. Step 3, repeat steps 1 and 2 until finished. Easy. (OK, I'll inflict just one snapshot on you. Aren't they cute?)


The only piece that I didn't care for was the "Create clips when Wizard finishes" box. I didn't want to do anything else with the video, just email it. So this sent me into an editor which I had to cancel out of. (I think that's the editor that the critics don't like). All I cared about was the file that it wrote on the disk up to this point.

Lessons for designers from this simple interaction:

1. Your user doesn’t care about your application, often to the point of not even knowing the name of it. Never has, never will. It's your job to care about him anyway.

2. The items on the wizard pages were logically grouped, for example, information about the input device was on one page and information about the output file was on a separate one, even though that wasted space. The user had to deal with just one thought on any given page, he never had too many things to juggle.

3. The default options were logical. They picked what most users wanted most of the times. The meanings of the selections were clearly explained.

Lessons for users from this simple interaction: good, simple, easy-to-use software is possible, and at least sometimes does exist. Demand it. Use it when you find it. Don't settle for less.

I do not know how good or how bad a job Movie Maker does at the rest of its tasks. But at this simple task, it did an excellent job of Just Working. As Donald Norman wrote in The Design of Everyday Things: "… the next time you pick up an unfamiliar object and use it smoothly and effortlessly on the first try, stop and examine it: the ease of use did not come about by accident. Someone designed the object carefully and well." That's right. They made it Just Work.