On Sep 1, 2009, at 5:42 PM, Jarod Tang wrote:
On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 1:49 AM, Andrei Herasimchuk <aherasimc...@involutionstudios.com
> wrote:
Apple focuses on the customer, the technology, the business and the
product itself. Simple cursory knowledge of their history, their
products, their design choices, and their culture will tell you
this is the case.
For e.g.?
Examples of Apple choices that involved more than just a focus on the
user:
* Implementing 3.5" hard disk floppies when they were not standard in
the market, but contained more data storage. This was a product design
and technology decision, and certainly did not help customers out of
the gate since it could hard to find these disks when the first Macs
shipped.
* Subsequently, Apple also dropped external hard drives from their
laptops first, aded in DVD enabled drives, and generally have always
pushed the next generation connections on all of their computers,
before they ever become standard in the general computing marketplace.
* Sticking to a single button mouse and clicking convention when the
rest of the market uses 2 or more. Especially games and entertainment
markets. The word on the street is that this decision has been
reinforced by Jobs only, but no one knows why Apple refuses to adopt
multi-button mice, especially considering it's pretty much required by
gamers, creative professionals, 3D animators and architects, all
markets that Apple should be trying to appease, one would think.
* OpenDoc, which never made it, but was not something that could exist
outside of the engineering that was required to make it happen. In the
end, it failed for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which was
that while a lofty design goal, it wound up being too difficult to
make happen technically and often made the resulting interfaces more
complicated, not less.
* The candy colored iMacs. Once again making Macs feel like toys. They
were more of a business and branding decision to grab attention when
Apple needed it most. If they were truly a great design decision aimed
at what their customers really want, and not a fad (which I think they
were), Apple would still be making them today.
* The entire graphical user interface system in the first place, which
was viewed by business users back in the '80s to be too much like a
toy. Apple didn't care. It claimed the GUI made more sense and was
easier to use. That fight last at least until the late 90s. These days
however, we have Google playing the role of being anti-aesthetic and
more "machine" designed, so I guess Apple may not have truly changed
the entire tech industry just yet.
* The Mac Cube. Expensive, but cool. People who own them claim them as
status symbols. And while they are indeed cool, they certainly weren't
aimed at even a large portion of their die-hard fan base.
* The iPod spin wheel. Not sure how the spin wheel is user focused.
It's a technological solution to an interesting design problem of how
to make easier access to long lists of items on a 3" screen. In fact,
when you are presented new users an iPod and they had not seen one
before, most people had know idea how to make the spin wheel work
until shown. Also in fact, the spin wheel breaks down once you have
very long lists to navigate. Still easy to use, but not the best
design solution over all compared to other devices.
* The iPhone touch screen and interface. While it has it's
cheerleaders, my daughter is like a lot of folks: they want the
tactical keyboard for texting. Even after all this time, Apple hasn't
come out with a solution for those people, who probably will not move
over to the full touch interface. Quite frankly, the touch screen and
the resulting interface are classic Apple: cool, new technology that
allows for a new form factor and opens up a new interaction and
business model that wasn't possible before. In this case, unique Apps
that can only exist with a touch screen interface.
* The original Finder. As an operating system, it was one of the first
that polled for user events rather than sit back passively. This
allowed for the creation and concepts behind the feedback loop with
interfaces. It was also, in fact, probably the genesis for pretty much
everything having to do with software and interaction since. It was
not created to solve a customer problem and if you asked, customers
would still to this day have no idea what it is. It was a
technological advance that allowed Apple to create new types of
applications that could do more than what was being offered in DOS at
the time.
I could go on and on. Apple has a long history of making products that
are more often than not, a combination of technical, business, design
and customer choices. Very rarely have I seen Apple make a choice
based solely on "user centered" anything, and more often than not, the
products people love most that come out of Apple are the ones that hit
that magical combination of new technological advances, cool aesthetic
and design, a few killer features, and just within reach on price
point that they can justify getting ahead of others who wait for the
me-toos in the market.
--
Andrei Herasimchuk
Chief Design Officer, Involution Studios
innovating the digital world
e. and...@involutionstudios.com
c. +1 408 306 6422
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