Really?  Apple is going to do better than Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video and so many other streaming services?  These guys have been refining their offerings for years.  Netflix streaming is already awesome.  Is there really room to do much better than the beloved Netflix?

Yes, lots.

A radically improved video delivery mechanism could:

1. Let you download the entire program locally, not just the next minute.  This eliminates pauses for rebuffering when the network connection gets flaky.
2. Have continuous high speed fast forward, not the jerky frame skipping that we’ve become inured to on both video and digital audio.  DVDs are better than streaming; analog VHS tape was better at this than DVDs, but continuous fast forward and rewind has the potential to be cleaner, smoother than streaming, DVD and analog tape.
3. Let the viewer instantly, continuously rewind to catch that moment one more time.  Have you noticed that you rarely rewind anymore?  The pain of rebuffering makes it rarely worth it.
4. Play that scene in continuous slow motion. This is another feature we haven’t seen since the VHS days.
5. Establish a queue of top titles to trickle down while you sleep. After a couple of days of background downloading you will have weeks of programming available to you.
6. Allow the video content to be viewed without any Internet access, (not even for DRM checks) for when you are in the subway or at the cottage or overseas.
7. Provide a hybrid of streaming and offline download.  You might, for instance, preview a title and if it’s worthy, click a Download button to add it to the download queue.  Or, go down your list of movies and click the download button on those that you wish to bring locally.  Better yet, have the top 20 titles in your list download automatically.
8. Download the highest resolution.  Individually paint every pixel on all 1040 glorious lines of resolution on that expensive high-def TV.
9. Provide full 5.1 Dolby surround. Please?  My receiver, speakers and ears are feeling neglected.
10. Download and access the entire content of DVDs.  I want my DVD extras back, and multilingual subtitling, and alternate audio tracks of director’s commentary, and other languages.
11. Let the viewer switch between different aspect ratios for when the movie’s dimensions doesn’t match your TV’s ratio.  Do you want the bars along the edges and a smaller image?  Or a full screen image that cuts off some of the periphery?  It’d be ncie to have that choice again.
12. Let the viewer zoom in to part of the action to study it closer.
13. Proactively download programming I will probably like.  Advertise this content to me on the video perusal experience to entice me to it.  If I ignore it, replace it with something else.
14. Proactively download subscribed TV shows.  They’re on your devices automatically, they day they’re released, ready to watch in full HD after you’ve had dinner.   This would obviate 80% of the reason to pay for cable.
15. Stream live events. Live events are the last bastion of cable programming.  But 200 channels with cable?  Pshaw.  How about providing a selection thousands of live events happening worldwide.  Any match, any sport, live:  American football, Irish soccer, Indian cricket, Australian Rugby, Chinese ping pong, Japanese sumo — you name it.  When there is a crisis, watch local coverage live.
16. Synchronize your viewing position across all of your video devices.  Pause the video on your big screen, pick up your iPhone and continue where you left off while on the subway.
17. Transfer video peer-to-peer within the house. One device downloads it; it syncs  to other devices directly over the LAN, much more quickly than downloading it again from the mother ship.
18. Download directly to the NAS (Network addressable storage; essentially a huge hard drive with brains) The NAS then serves the video to all the devices through your house.  It’s like your own internal mini-cloud in your closet (a.k.a.  fog or mist) that wirelessly serves terabytes of video to all the TVs, tablets and phones in your house.  (A 2 terabyte hard drive can hold 40 blu-ray discs and today costs about $80.)
19. Point out to your friends which parts of the show you thought were amazing. Skim to segments of So You Think You Can Dance that the mob thought was amazing.
20. Have a shared playlist with select friends.  in the old days when millions watched Seinfeld simultaneously and discussed it the next day.  This has been lost in a world where no two people are watching the same thing at the same time.  Create your own film festival centered on Marisa Tomei, WWII, or 70′s sci fi.  Have a closed discussion with your friends.  This would help make watching video a more social experience again.
21. Make the content available worldwide. Bandwidth and connectivity limitations around the world can make reliable streaming an issue.  But they aren’t an issue when you are trickle-downloading.  Give it a couple of days and plenty of video content can be collected in a couple of days.
22. Provide all of these capabilities free in exchange for mandatory advertising. The consumer gets access to any content, for free, conveniently, in exchange for their eyeballs.  With all these features, even pirates might lift the eye patch and check it out.
23. Have the advertising be interactive, targeted, choose-able by the viewer. Advertisers get far more effective ads that they know are being experienced, and feedback about what’s viewed.  Consumers get more tolerable advertising that they may even enjoy.  There are many

As you can see, there is plenty for a radical innovator to upset the applecart in video.

What’s amazing from a product vision standpoint is that these have been possibilities for years.  All the big players who attempted to take on Netflix – Walmart, Blockbuster, Amazon – could have been working towards many of these unfulfilled needs.  Instead, they chose to copy the leader rather than innovating themselves and coming up with a differentiated offering.  Now, if the rumors are true another industry has left it to Apple once again.

—

Philip Haine is VP of User Experience at SuccessFactors, where we are hiring world-class user experience designers.  Please contact me if this is you!  (email: phaine at successfactors dotcom)

One of the best skills a designer can have is empathy with the user.  And one of the best ways to achieve empathy is by looking at things from the user’s perspective using scenarios.

Scenarios have been around a while in different forms and flavors, but I haven’t found the standard formulations entirely satisfactory.  They are either too verbose, or too unstructured, or not scalable, or they don’t articulate the underlying need or explain why the need exists to begin with.

Over time I converged on a different, simpler way of composing scenarios which I thought worth sharing. I have been using this technique since 2002.

Elements of a SSNiF Scenario

The technique is based on the observation that there is a common storyline and set of elements to all good scenarios.  There is a stakeholder, typically a user or customer or persona, in some situation.  The situation results in a need. The need is resolved by a feature, or by the product as a whole.

The first three elements, Stakeholder, Situation, and Need, express the problem.  The Feature is the solution.  Adding a gratuitous “i” to suggest a pronounciation spells SSNiF.

I like the metaphor: on a new project we need to SSNiF out the domain to make sense of it, as a dog sniffs out strange new territory.  To test whether a proposed idea is a good one, we SSNiF it out.

Big SSNiFs

SSNiFs come in two sizes, big and little.  Big SSNiFs describe the overall purpose of a product or feature.  Little SSNiFs delve into detailed use cases.  They describe why individual features exist, or aspects of the design.

Let’s look at some big SSNiFs related to the iPod.  One key group of stakeholders are those who must take public transportation on a regular basis.  The journey is long, repetitive, and boring — that is the situation.  The need that results is for something to make the idle time more enjoyable.  The iPod is the solution that addresses the need.

We can lay this scenario out in a SSNiF table.  I’ve added a few other Big SSNiFs representing other key usage scenarios of the iPod:

Some Big SSNiFs for a portable audio device

These Big SSNiFs clarify why the product is needed. In fact, the essence of a product concept can be conveyed in terms of few Big SSNiFs.  With a tight set of Big SSNiFs in hand you should have no trouble conveying to someone what problem the product will solve for customers.

Little SSNiFs

Whereas Big SSNiF are for clarifying the big picture, little SSNiFs are for working out the details. Here are some little SSNiFs of mass transit commuters:

Notice how each feature is connected back to its underlying use cases.  We could enumerate all of the features this way, tracing them to their purpose.

How SSNiFs fit into the product creation process

SSNiFs are involved at each level of the Design Pyramid.

• At the Understanding level, customers research is made more actionable by synthesizing it down to a set of big and little SSNiFs.
  
• At the Vision level, we can sift through the all the big SSNiFs we discovered, and sculpt a product vision out of the right set of Big SSNiFs.
• At the Requirements level, we can play out the Big SSNiFs into lots of little SSNiFs.  SSNiFs make wonderful requirements, as I’ll get to in a minute.
• At the Design level, we create a solution with the scenarios in mind.  We test our design by walking through the selected big and little SSNiFs from each stakeholder’s perspective, asking ourselves, “does the solution we came through truly address the SSNiF?”

If you chose important SSNiFs, and if your solution addresses them, you will have a pretty good product.

So what’s the big deal?

SSNiF scenarios have a number of benefits:

SSNiFs are relentlessly user-centric. SSNiFs force us to figure out not just what users need but why.  This emphasis on understanding why is unique to this method.  Knowing why is the test of true mastery over the user’s world.  It is what lets us interpolate and extrapolate from what customers are able to articulate to us directly.  It is a critical aptitude for visionary thinking.

The purpose behind each feature is clear at all times. Every feature is connected to the scenario it addresses.  You will appreciate this if you have encountered features in your product whose existence no-one can explain.

Real-life SSNiF table in Excel

SSNiFs distinguish stakeholders – There is a common trap of thinking of “the user” as part of a single, homogeneous bunch.  You cannot fall into this trap if you do SSNiFs, because identifying differing stakeholders is inherent in the process. SSNiFs help us stay connected to to the different worlds of different audiences.

SSNiFs are scalable enough allow you to model as many narrow user groups as you come across in the real world.  You can capture and model what you see without oversimplifying it.  This is useful because observations about obscure groups and their predicaments is grist for the idea mill.

SSNiFs give us a place to capture the hot feature ideas, but without committing to them.  No designer enjoys it when our colleagues wildly jump ahead to the feature they envisioned while taking a shower.  We’d rather have a calm conversation about what the requirements are, then work out the best possible solution from there.  Designers are always trying to get product managers to think in terms of requirements, not concrete features.

In practice though, our human brains can’t help but think in terms of the concrete.  SSNiFs offer a compromise: it gives us a slot to place our (possibly lame) initial solution as long as (a) we agree to call it the potential feature, and (b) we back-fill the other columns of the SSNiF.  The spontaneous feature idea then turns into a vehicle for getting at the scenario.  The initial solution is traced back to the problem (where the important part of the idea lies anyway), and from there we can move forward and see if we can find a better solution to the SSNiF.

Which leads to the next benefit:

SSNiFs leave the door open to a better solution – By labeling a feature as potential, we are making it clear that this is a tentative idea on how we might solve the need.  The door is open to other potential approaches.  If someone comes up with a better way to solve it, we’re happy to toss the earlier concept.  Because this is built into the process, this helps prevent us from getting too wedded to our ideas.

SSNiFs make user research more actionable – Have you ever attended a fascinating, informative research presentation that was completely forgotten by the following morning?  The problem is that the findings just are not boiled down to an actionable format.

I have found that almost all of the actionable findings from ethnographic research boil down to either SSNiFs or “key observations and their potential implications to the product” (the subject of a future article).  SSNiFs go a long way towards making user research actionable.

Anyone doing basic user research should try distilling their findings down into a prioritized table of SSNiFs.

SSNiFs provide a reality check – To fill in a SSNiF that backs a proposed feature you must ask some key questions: “What need does it solve?  For whom?  Under what circumstances?”

Merely asking these questions puts the new idea in perspective.  We’ll find that there just aren’t that many users of that type, or that the situation just doesn’t come up that often, or that when it does, the need is not terribly strong.  At this point we should take a courageous gulp and just cut the feature.  Worthwhile features will have solid answers to these questions.

Next time someone proposes a feature, try asking the three key SSNiF questions to see what is behind it.

SSNiFs are thorough – some approaches to scenarios buckle under the weight of complex-real world design problems.  They become onerous to author, review and maintain.  SSNiFs scale easily from a handful to scores or even hundreds of SSNiFs for large-scale initiatives.

Process benefits

As a process for capturing scenarios, they have more benefits:

SSNiFs are easy to understand – a SSNiF table makes sense to anyone on first reading.  Others can jump in and start contributing right away by following examples.

SSNiFs are concise – SSNiFs distill the minimum and sufficient elements of a scenario into a tabular form.  This makes it possible to categorize, prioritize, sort and filter any numbers of SSNiFs.

My preferred medium for capturing SSNiFs is the spreadsheet.  I use Excel when capturing lots of little SSNiFs just before doing a design.  I’ll even capture SSNiFs live, while conducting customer interviews, dropping new insights into any of the four columns and back-filling the other columns later.

SSNiFs work in a group process – Initial SSNiFs can be captured using a spreadsheet projected onto a screen or with a wall of sticky notes.  I also have had success with Google Spreadsheets, because it allows anyone on the team to annotate or refine the SSNiFs at any time.  (See also: Free templates for SSNiFs)

SSNiFs get everyone’s assumptions on the table – It is fascinating what comes out of a group SSNiF process. Different team members will have different insights, ideas and scenarios weightings.  SSNiFs provide a medium to capture the “best of” multiple peoples’ perspectives.  When a fundamental difference in belief about a user scenario arises, we can add it to a “to be researched” list and get to the bottom of the discrepancy later.

More examples of SSNiF Scenarios

Here are some prior articles that involve SSNiFs:

• Open, yet encrypted Wi-Fi
• Hosted vs. Local applications
• Marriage Sav-R Toothpaste Tube
• Who Read your Email this Morning?

Summary

SSNiFs are a concise way to model scenarios that emphasizes the connection between features of a product and the underlying customer scenario and need.

Please give SSNiFs a try and feel free to write me with questions or comments at: phaine at obvious design dot com.

Continue to Part 2: How SSNiFs fit into the product creation process >>

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

[6/24/09 Did editing pass based on feedback]

Micropayments are a good idea. Today, providers of worthwhile content must make a difficult choice: do they charge for their content or for a subscription, knowing that a miniscule proportion of visitors will ever do so? Or do they give it away, hoping to fund their efforts via advertising? Micropayments will allow vendors to charge an amount small enough to be inconsequential to the buyer. If done in an unimposing and efficient way, they can open the floodgates to a torrent of impulse purchases.

How else can micro-payments be used?

Here are some scenarios:

• Content providers large or tiny could provide much of their content for free, convey how high their quality is, and charge a nominal amount for extra content.

• Pay to download: pay $0.50 and get a royalty-free photo, or a template or a sound or a font or a set of flash cards to study with.

• Web tools : charge per usage of speciality web apps, calculators, etc.

• New York Times: Read today’s editorialists, or any article from the archive for 5 cents.

• Video: Watch last night’s Jon Stewart without commercials for $0.50.

What are today’s precedents for micropayment user experience?

• Amazon’s One Click checkout – the ultimate enabler of impulse purchases

• Microsoft’s Passport: We know who you are and you’ve given us your purchasing credentials. When you log into a site you’re also all set up to buy something.

• PayPal: vendors, generate a button and stick it on your site. Visitors need only click it, authenticate, and be almost done with the purchase.

• iTunes Music Store: You’ve charged up your account in advance and can now make purchases based on it.

• BitPass seems to be on the right track. Their system is simple for vendors and for customers. [Anyone know how they are doing? Are there other more successful competitors?]

What are the ingredients for micropayments to thrive?

The concept of micropayments is not new, but after years it still hasn’t taken off. However the specifics play out, for micropayments to take off the systems need these characteristics. The absence of these factors has deferred the future explosion of micropayment.

• Standards and interoperability – Credit cards wouldn’t work if there were dozens of clearing houses and fragmentary usage among consumers. Desirous as we are for competition, we need a small number of standard providers of micropayment services for the concept to take off. If they can agree to interoperate it will be better for the entire market. (Think of SMS interoperability agreements that in Europe versus in the USA.) And as a natural consequence of any such market regulation will eventually be required to counterbalance the power of the monopoly or oligopoly.

• Tiny transaction fees – one penny for a five cent transaction, five cents for a 25 cent transaction. [Can someone tell me if there is a minimum transaction fee for credit cards?] Building up the infrastructure and demand will be expensive and we can expect impatient banks to want to recoup these costs quickly. And banks will walt to start from a price they can reduce later. Greed will kill the concept, however. Everyone needs to remember that the point is huge volume and no-brainer impulse purchases. (Steve Jobs understands this: consider his battles with the music industry to keep all songs at $0.99.)

• Instantaneous purchase. Avoids registration hassle with each vendor, a cost in its own right. Amazon’s one-click payment is the ultimate. Requiring authentication is the maximum amount of extra effort on the user’s part that would be imposed.

• Incubation time – Email is a pretty good idea, wouldn’t you say? But if you remember it took quite a while for it to catch on. Similarly it will take some time for consumers to get over the hump and fund micropayment accounts en masse. The more it catches on, the more it will catch on.

• Content worth purchasing – some think that micropayments will fail, then cite as examples things that are no more interesting than any random thing on the Internet. It will always be hard to sell such content in volume. Payments will work if the content is valued highly enough. The tricky part is getting users to trust that what they will get will be worth their dime as well as their time.

• Brand name sponsorship – There is an “activation energy” needed to get consumer over the hump and sign up for something new. A well-known, trusted brand needs to step up, offer something people want and put it behind a micropayment, to kick-start mass adoption. Notice Apple’s iTunes Music Store essentially did this, albeit with proprietary, Apple-only accounts and relatively large micropayments. People barely notice the new business model they are partaking in, and partaking in it they are, by the tens of millions. Similarly, for payment processors, a MasterCard or Visa will carry more trust and credibility than ElCheapoPayments.com.

• Anonymity – As a consumer, you have good reason to be concerned about what is being gathered about you over the course of decades of living online. (Expect this to come to a boil in the next few years.) Micropayments can do well without this need being addressed. But those establishing the standards now would do the whole industry a favor by offering consumers the peace of mind that the transaction is certifiably anonymous. Remember, the game is to maximize purchases by eliminating every barrier to purchase. Hopefully these factors will come together soon, so I can charge you a nickel or two to get in.

Visions to steal

What would a StealThisIdea article be without an idea or two to steal?

Vision idea #1: CMS and blog tool makers: integrate with micropayment infrastructure. Let bloggers indicate what content is paid and what is free. The visitor would see the title and excerpt of the article and a button: “Click here to continue reading. You will be charged 3 cents.” They click once and they’re in the article. Even better, facilitate Salon-style user choice between paying with loose change versus paying with a moment of your attention. On the server side, allow hits from search engines to get in for free once per day so they can index this valuable content and have it be findable by content.

Vision idea #2: Micropayment vendors and/or CMS & blog tool makers: set up referral incentives. So if B refers visitors to A’s page, B gets a cut of the take. Recommendations are important because the user needs to feel that what they buy will be worth paying for.

Vision idea #3: Micropayment vendors: provide web content vendors with a dynamic pricing model, where the cost adjusts itself automatically in response to demand. If a product sells well at 3 cents, raise it to 4, 5 and 6 cents, until total revenue — cost times volume — rate peaks out. The market could then value a piece of content dynamically and automatically.

Vision idea #4a: MasterCard and Visa: offer one-click web micropayments as an extension of credit and debit cards services. No special authentication is needed if you are using the same browser, say, transactions of 25 cents, up to $5 in purchases per month. Provide this service to millions of vendors as easily as PayPal does to its. (In other words, no merchant account required.) Micropayment totals are included on the regular credit card bill. This space is just waiting to be owned!

Vision idea #4b: PayPal: provide a special "instant payment loop" to content providers. The user would see a PayPal version of the "click to view. It will cost 5 cents" entry point. Present the customer with an option to buy with one click from this browser, to a maximum amount.

Vision idea #5: Web publishers and CMS tool makers: Once the user has bought two or three articles at 5 cents each, they may be reluctant to keep buying. Rather than charging 5 cents to view every single premium article, consider charging 15 cents to view all premium articles for a day. To be even more customer-focused: automatically top out daily expenditures per user once they’ve reached the daily rate. And stop collecting money from a user once they’ve hit the annual subscription maximum of $25. This is radical and the opposite of pricing theory. Th point is to experiment with the pricing mechanics to minimize the customer’s discomfort.

[Readers: got other ideas?]

Other reading

• Jakob Nielson has argued for micropayments for ages and thinks they should have happened long ago.

• Not everyone agrees that micropayments will ever happen. Clay Shirky thinks that micropayments will always fail because they are simply an untenable idea. (Compare his reasoning with the ingredients to success above. I think he is missing the psychology of the impulse purchase.) He reaffirmed his belief as recently in 2003 and was lucidly rebutted by cartoonist Scott McCloud (whose book Understanding Comics is required reading for everyone).

My lazy rebuttal: what if Apple were to charge ninety-nine cents to download a song? Would they sell any music?

• There’s a worthwhile discussion of micropayments at MetaFilter.

• Commentary of 8/19/05 on Amazon’s micropayment scheme.

Updates

October 2005 – The New York Times has decided to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I guess times are tough and they need more revenue. Their drastic response was to put their most popular content — their editorials — behind a new TimesSelect service that costs $50 a year. They will soon know whether this will pay off business-wise. Certainly their readership numbers will be slashed along with the powerful influence of its editorialists, who must be awfully sad at the loss. It would have been interesting to see them experiment with a micropayment scheme or at least a Salon-like forced ad choice. I expect they will.