blog364

I love Apple products. I love how they look, I love how they function and I love how they make me feel when I use them (Seth Godin was right in All Marketer are Liars when he said that we don’t buy products, we buy the stories that we tell ourselves about the products we buy!), but please don’t call me a “fanboy”. A “fanboy” has nothing but great things to say for the brands/products he/she loves. As much as I can see and appreciate the greatness in Apple (whether you like it or not they’ve come back from an ‘almost’ assure extinction), I can also see its shortcoming, mistakes and fumbles. From the app store approval process to the recent “antennagate“, Apple has had and will continue to have its share of issues. But one issue that no one seems to have brought up or made much fuss about is the current inability to delete any one of the pre-installed Apple apps on any of the iPhones.

My iPhone 3G came with 20 pre-installed apps. Of all these, there’s only one that I can think of that shouldn’t be deleted: Settings. This would be the same as deleting the Control Panel on a PC or System Preferences on a Mac. Clearly there’s a need for it. But why can’t I delete any of the other applications, such as: Weather, Stocks, Clock, Photos, et’al? Certainly, there are thousands of other applications in the App Store that can do the same things that these pre-installed apps can do and better. Why is it that Apple will let me uninstall pretty much any application that came pre-installed on my MacBook Pro but won’t let me do so from my phone?

So I decided to call Apple Care (I paid a pretty penny for it, so I figure I’d put it to some good use). After a little bit or “routing me around” I finally heard what I was expecting: “We don’t support that functionality. If you don’t want to see the pre-installed apps, just move them to the last ‘page’ on the phone.” Again…. F#$*ING LUDICROUS!!! Move them? Shove them under the proverbial “carpet”? OMG – LOL! This to me sounded much like the, now infamous, email from Steve Jobs to the user complaining about the iPhone 4 reception issues where he tells him to “Just avoid holding it in that way.”

I’m not saying: “don’t give me any pre-installed apps with my new phone”. All I’m asking is to have the choice to remove them if I want to. It’s my phone, I should be able to have a saying in what I put in it and what I remove. Can you imagine Ford telling you that you cannot change the tires on your new car or the stereo? Ludicrous!!!

Not too long ago Microsoft was made to capitulate about including Internet Explorer with Windows OS. Microsoft argued that it needed to include IE with Windows for the OS to work. The courts didn’t buy the argument and Microsoft had to provide a way to remove the intruding program (albeit in a way that made you feel that you were better off WITH the program rather than trying to go through the week long process to remove it!). That was ONE program. My iPhone has over 10.

To: Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Apple designers, et’al: your customers are smarter and more capable to make choices on their own, even if you don’t agree with them, than you give them credit for. Exercising such a tight control over your products long AFTER they have left the factory and been paid for will only help, in the not so-long term, to alienate your core supporters and only leave the “fanboys” behind. Of which, I’m sure aren’t enough to sustain your delusions of grandeur. You created the BEST MP3 player in the world but you didn’t tell us how to fill it up. You gave us great laptops but trusted us to fill them with useful applications…. please trust us that we are equally capable with your….err…. OUR phones!

Sincerely,

A loyal Apple user, but NOT a “fanboy”

This post is similar to the previous one about “Baby proof my stereo” in that it finds, yet, another everyday household item which could use a little bit of TLC-UX redesigned aimed at parents with young children. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like having a young kid in the house to teach you a thing or two about the difference between how product manufacturers intend their products to be use and how they actually “could” be used.

Two days ago, I got a very clear demonstration. I was in the kitchen preparing breakfast when I hear the door of the microwave oven close and the a series of beeps. I hadn’t heard anyone come into the kitchen but I figure it was my wife warming up her cup of tea, so I said: “Good morning love.” The answers surprised me…”Hi daddy!” I turn around and see my son standing there, adorable as always, with a big smile on his face. He’s a very happy kid and smiles a lot, but that morning there was something particularly suspicious about it. It was a mix of angelical with “Oh boy am I gonna get in trouble now or what!” I said: “Dash, are you playing with the microwave?” Without losing his smile, he said: “No. I’m drying clown fish (don’t worry, we don’t actually have a living fish in the house!)” Clown fish is his favorite stuffed animal. Trying hard not to lose it or laugh I asked him why was he putting him in the microwave. He explained to me, with terms and logic that only a soon-to-be three year old knows how, that he had wet his pants and “clown fish” and he wanted to dry him.

I don’t know why but the image of the “Gremlin in the microwave” image immediately rush through my head. And then… a more sinister thought: what if he tries to put our cat in it? OMFG! This got me immediately thinking: how can you “baby/kid poof” a microwave? The answer came pretty quick. The SAME way that you baby proof a stereo!

Remove the interface controls in the unit and put them on a remote control. The only button should be the one to open the door. Nothing else.

Microwaves have simple enough functionality that fitting it in a decent size remove shouldn’t be too difficult. With bluetooth or some other wireless technology, you could even control it from any room in the house. If you have small children in the house this would be a wonderful solution. You’d never again have to worry about how the microwave “could” be used or whether the family’s pet might end up in the nightly supper stew, or whether they kids might set the house on fire (clearly the cooking stove is another candidate for this, but this article is not about “baby proofing” it. At least not yet!).

Now, this idea of removing the interface to all our daily household appliances and putting them on a remote control might seem over simplistic, or extreme, or both. But why not? The only reason that microwaves and stereos still have controls built in, instead of being remote-only operated, is because that’s how these products have been designed for decades. And they were design with these built-in controls because the technology to use remote controllers didn’t exist yet. But today, that’s not the case any more. Today we have technology to get satellites to send us photos from million of miles away; I’m sure we can warm up a cup of tea from another room. The cat would surely feel safer for it!

Now, a slight detour….

Having objects that can only be control in one particular way, from one particular location doesn’t fit any more with the way in which we want to live our lives. We are constantly searching for ways to improve how we do things, become more efficient, more flexible and unconstrained. It’s only logical that we start thinking on how our current products and services can be redesigned to fit with our new routines and always-on-the-go habits. So let’s take this remote controlled microwave a step further. Why not build one that can be controlled from our smart-phones? You can control your TiVo with one!

Imagine, you get home from work one Friday evening. You are planning on sitting in front of the TV (multiple remotes in hand) to eat some pizza and have a few beers. You open the refrigerator and, in horror, realize that you don’t have any. You decide to run to the supermarket to get some, but before leaving the house, you put a pizza in the microwave. You don’t start it because you don’t know how long it will be and you don’t want the pizza to get cold (you hate re-heated pizza. It’s so saggy). You grab your smart-phone and get in your car. Once you are in line at the supermarket to pay for your beer, you estimate that it will take you 20 minutes to get back to the house. You reach for your phone, open the MicroCook app and set it to: 10′ defrost – 5′ cook @ 90 power <RUN>. Presto! You get home 20 minutes later and you have a delicious and warm pizza waiting for you.

Oh, the possibilities! It’s not just about “baby proofing” our products and lives. It’s about getting more control without having to sacrifice our freedom, independence and flexibility. We are, slowly but surely, morphing from a “push” society into a “pull” one. This means that we want products, services and data available when/how/where we need it. We don’t want to have to be at a particular place and/or time to be able to take an action. Technology exists today to give us 24/7/360 access and control to most things that we need to from any where in the world. It’s time to start thinking whether we want to be restricted and constrained in what’s possible with the products or services we use and start re-thinking and breaking out of our user-experience boxes and designing and demanding the experiences that we truly crave.

Hopefully, some of this will become a reality in a not too distant future. Hopefully before “clown fish”, Shamu or Pipking the penguin get nuked!

Ok, so here’s another product that I think could use a little user-experience redesign and I think most of you will agree with me as I’m sure all of you had suffered the same fate at one time or another.

A few weeks ago, my family and I moved to a new house. About the second or third night being there I woke up around three in the morning feeling very thirsty. As I’ve done so many other times in my life and in my previous house, I made my way down to the kitchen, still half a sleep and with my eyes almost wide-shut!

I’ve always been pretty good finding my way around in the dark, which is pretty convenient given that I didn’t want to turn on the lights and wake up any more than I had to. I just wanted to get my drink and get back to bed.

So I found my way in the dark, walked into the kitchen, reached for the refrigerator door and ….

Blinded by my refrigerator