http://stealthisidea.com Philip Haine's articles on Product Vision, Innovation and Design Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:25:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My rant from a few months ago about the inefficiency of the iPhone calendar application continues to be strike a chord. One of the things I criticized was how many steps it takes just to navigate to the calendar in order to check, tweak, or add an appointment.  On the iPhone ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/gestures-and-voice/ I've recently published two more articles on my sister blog, ProductVision.org: Product Vision Hall of Fame - catalogs some famous breakthrough products and what they did right.  These serve as role models to test our theories on how to envision great products. Choosing the Right Problem to Solve - talks about a ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/two-more-product-vision-articles-available/ Back in the dawn of digital cameras it was clear to me that they would rule.  (Serious photographers around me vehemently disagreed at the time.)  It was fun thinking about what future things might be enabled when image capture was mediated by a little computer inside the camera. Now we have ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/in-camera-hdr/ Here are a couple more articles on the Product Vision Blog. We talked about good and bad product visions, so we know what we should care about it.  Read this summary of The Goals of Product Vision.  Use this checklist to see how well your vision or strategy process is doing. Also ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/product-vision-goals/ We talked about bad product vision; now let's talk about the dynamics of good and outstanding product vision. http://stealthisidea.com/articles/product-vision-gone-good/ What are the types of bad product vision to look out for?  What are their causes and effects? Check out my new article over at ProductVision.org, called When Product Vision Goes Awry. http://stealthisidea.com/articles/product-vision-gone-bad/ Well, Apple's laptop introduction yesterday was an incremental step forward. The devices look great, but any leap forward in laptops will have to wait. They did do something subtle and brilliant, though. I've been moaning for decades about the absence of a proper second mouse button on Apple's computers. With the ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/trackpad-as-butto/ Apple is about to announce some new laptops. This could either be very boring, or very exciting, depending on whether it's time for Apple to make another great leap forward. In advance, I thought I would throw out some possibilities of how a great leap forward might look. The entire computer is ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/future-lapto/ Last week, over at productvision.org, I offered a definition of product vision. Now, we dig a little deeper uncover the components that go into a product's vision. http://stealthisidea.com/articles/what-goes-into-product-vision/ At productvision.org, I responded to a compelling post by Josh Porter called Activity-Centered Design about which frame is the best to use when conceptualizing and designing products. Josh was toying with activities as the core concept.  A commenter suggested that user goals should be the operative concept, in keeping with goal-directed ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/core-concept/ It's been bugging me that the focus of StealThisIdea.com was torn between multiple purposes: Getting a pile of design and product vision ideas off my chest and into into the wild. Releasing useful models and techniques that I developed over the course of fifteen years designing products, that I hadn't taken the ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/introducing-productvisionorg/ Here are some ways to improve the interaction design of GUI titlebars and saving documents, a 25 year old design problem. 1. Directly rename a document from the titlebar You just realized that the document you are working on is really about something else.  The original title was wrong, and now you ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/gui-titlebar-tweaks/ “Forms suck.” So begins Luke Wroblewski’s new book on how to design Web forms. He's right.  Nobody likes having to fill out a form.  It’s the red tape we must cut through before we get what we want. Before we are approved, there is an application form. Before we get to ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/web-form-design/ Many products induce love/hate feelings.  On the one hand, you love the product and cannot imagine being without it.  On the other hand, its limitations and idiosyncrasies drive you crazy. Here is my love/hate list for the iPhone after using it for a month: Love Hate that the iPhone is leap forward as ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/iphone-love-hate/ In April 2007 I threw out the idea of tilting a mouse to pan or scroll a document horizontally. Looks like someone implemented this concept on the iPhone.  Click in to see a video. Now we need a mouse manufacturer, or a university lab to design a mouse which does the same ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/tilt-to-scroll/ When beginning a SSNiFs analysis, you want to capture your thoughts as quickly as possible.  Starting with a pre-formatted template expedites matters.  Here are the templates I use, free FREE for you to download and share: SSNiF Analysis Part 1: Introduction to SSNiFs Part 2: How SSNiFs fit into the product creation process Part ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/ssnif-templates/ Hopefully I have persuaded you in Parts 1 and 2 that SSNiF analysis is a worthwhile technique for modeling scenarios and understanding customer needs. Here are some pragmatic tips to help you get going, based on several years of practice. SSNiF Analysis Part 1: Introduction to SSNiFs Part 2: How SSNiFs fit into the ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/ssnif-tips/ David Cortright (who has posted here before) observes that too much choice paralyzes us from making purchase decisions. His proposed remedy is over at KPAO.org: For every product and service category I review, I will give you one recommendation. That's right, there's no decision to make (other than whether or not you ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/rated-bes/ In the Introductory article I described Big and little SSNiFs, showed a couple of examples, and laid out the benefits of capturing scenarios in terms of Stakeholders, Situations, Needs and (potential) Features. Here I'll  talk about how they fit into the product creation process. SSNiFs have a role to play in ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/how-ssnifs-fit-in/ We're happy to announce the brand new Product Vision Newsletter. This free, low-volume email list will publish our most significant new essays about product vision and strategy, hot off the press.  We will not share your personal information, and you can unsubscribe easily at any time. Click here to subscribe and be ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/newsletter/ 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 ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/ssnifs/ Streaming music has become the dominant way we listen to music in our house.  No muss, no fuss, no files to manage.  We're at a plateau, but not at the pinnacle of how it can be. Here are a few possible improvements: 1. Load me up. Make streaming music playback a multimedia ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/streaming-music-tweaks/ Let me just start off by saying, I think the iPhone is close to being a masterpiece.  I am blown away by the imagination and quality it exhibits.  Way to go, Apple designers; please get in touch with me and let me take you out to lunch. That said, I'm disappointed ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/palm-vs-iphone/ Why is great design so elusive?  Why do requirements so often shift late in the game, wasting months of effort and millions of dollars?  Where should we look to come up with breakthroughs product concepts?  How can we make our design process less chaotic? For years, I have sketched out ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/design-pyramid/ Tomorrow, Microsoft will stop selling Windows XP, forcing everyone onto the villainous Windows Vista. Interesting strategy.  Rush a broken product to market, leaving a gaping opportunity for the competition.  Then, with customers desperately clinging to the prior version, cut that off too, leaving no credible OS offering. Could Apple have wished for ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/microsoft-gives-apple-another-gift/ Look in the mirror, Patelco. [Cross-posted from KPAO.org] Dear Patelcoмебели, You and I have been together a long time. Over fifteen years! I have nostalgic feelings for you. I know you so well. I haven't had to deprive you of my warm wallet to make a gadget purchase in ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/farewell-patelco/ Speaking of portable music players, I've always been curious about why they don't use audio more in the UI. They are intrinsically audio devices, after all. The only other way an iPod has to communicate to you is with its display, and that is useless when your ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/audio-ui-in-music-players/ [Cross-posted from kpao.org] Paradigm shifts for key events in human history You know that feeling we all have these days? That boy, things sure are different than a few years ago? Where we can type a few keystrokes, get a recommended restaurant, its location on the map, directions to it, ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/accelerating-returns/ Dedicated buttons for expressing your pleasure with the current song, or lack thereof Music is so easy to come by these days. We should be in sonic bliss, right? But we aren't, because so much of what we have on our music players is, well, crap. Our shuffled ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/thumbs-up-music/ Speaking of mobile phones... Apple already got AT&T to do the work to support visual voicemail. This is a good thing for users, since it's much faster to be able to use one's eyes to navigate interfaces than only one's ears. But why must voicemail be accessible only from your cellphone? ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/web-based-visual-voicemail/ Today, if you want to commission one mobile phone, you must decommission another. Why must this be so? Cellphones are so cheap. Why can't we have multiple active phones tied to the same number? A call to one would be a call to all of them. Then you could ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/multiple-mobile-phones/ We're so lucky. We have cellphones and GPS, cheap high speed Internet, free shipping and Wiis. I'm grateful, I really am. The progress has been astounding. But there are some perennial UI issues in everyday products that year after year never seem to get fixed. Every year ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/2008-ui-wishes/ [Cross-posted from Kpao!] Years ago, my friend Ania Moniuszko started a company making reusable shopping bags to help combat the waste of disposable bags. She designed them herself and calls them MyOwnBag, as in: "Paper or plastic?" / "Thanks, I have MyOwnBag." MyOwnBags come in many fabrics and colors Ania designed a ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/reusable-bags/ [Cross-posted from Kpao!] I plunked down my credit card no more than five minutes after seeing David Creemer's mention of the Chumby. Here is the first product I have seen that embodies the future envisioned at the dawn of the Web era. An unobtrusive, wireless, sub-$200 Internet terminal with no specific purpose. The ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/chumby/ The competitors are clustered, copying one another, slowly drifting to where the customer is. Don't add yourself to the fray by copying what they do. By the time you catch up, they will be elsewhere. Instead, do a better job at figuring out where customers really are, and chase ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/chase-customers/ David Cortright says it well: the thing that continues to amaze me is that smart people at successful companies still form weak visions based on features, assumptions and the competition, not on customer needs. [..] Executives ask the question "How are we going to beat [most successful competitor]?" Features are added ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/071105-comment/ [caption id="" align="alignright" width="270" caption="$10,000 Honeywell Kitchen Computer from 1969. No units were sold. You can visit it at the Computer History Museum."][/caption] One era's flop is often another era's success. The typical excuse given for failure is something vague like, "the market wasn’t ready for it" or "the product ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/kitchen-computer/ [caption id="" align="alignright" width="280" caption="BART, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system "][/caption] I had trouble with the BART (San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit) mobile phone user interface for checking out schedules, so I sent them the following email. The improvements are just good old-fashioned information design and matching the ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/bart-ideas/ Have you ever lined up a set of browser tabs of pages to want to read, but before you got to them, had to close your browser? Or, have you wanted to close the browser to free up resources but hesitated because it would close the tabs you lined ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/browser-reading-lists/ iPod touch Here are some initial reactions to the iPhone touch based on the guided tour. I have not personally tried the device, so please forgive and let me know of any errors! (By the way, anyone else find the guided tour a bit creepy? Something about the jovial, disembodied ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/the-ipod-touch-is-not-a-great-media-player/ Marty Cagan has written an excellent post comparing product management vs. product marketing. Marty points out a troublesome pattern at some companies where there is no single product owner. A "business person" defines the high-level product definition and the product manager writes the requirements.The problem is that neither person truly ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/vision-before-details/ Measured Against Reality lists 50 Phrases that Kill Creativity. Any of these sound familiar? http://stealthisidea.com/articles/070816-kill-creativity/ If there's anything that Apple has proven to the industry over the years, it's that aesthetics matter. Not everyone believes this yet: one need only look around at all the less than beautiful products to see that the message has not fully sunk in. But when, at a 2003 ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/keycap-backlighting/ The brilliant Paul Graham wrote: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now. Rumors of the desktop's demise are premature. As described in my analysis of Hosted ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/long-live-the-desktop/ In UI Friction and Apple’s Front Row I describe gadgets that lack globally accessible buttons for most frequently used operations. Let's call it "buttonphobia," the fear of adding buttons that are actually needed. It is a form of UI Friction -- design choices that impede the most frequent ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/buttonphobia/ In my article describing the use cases comparing hosted vs. local applications, I pointed out how hosted applications like Google Calendars, and DabbleDB, while interesting, were useless to people like me who need to maintain control of their own data. I ended with a vision to steal: please come up ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/either-or-apps/ Another glorious example of UI friction is Apple's Front Row. If you are watching a video, to get back to the computer desktop you have to press the "Menu" button several times to navigate up the strict menu hierarchy. Apple's Front Row UI Each button press requires that you wait for ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/front-row-friction/ Apple submitted a patent for a button-less pan & zoom ability on a mouse : Patent Application number 20070080945 details a mouse having a button-less pan and scroll switch. [..] the mouse would sense different hand positions and act in different ways according to how it is being held. "In one embodiment, ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/tilt-mouse/ In UI design, when debates about how how a feature should behave reach a stalemate, someone will typically suggest adding a preference as a compromise. "We can't know, so let's let the user's decide!" they say. Giving the user the choice may sound like a user-centered solution, but it's the ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/default-options/ Earlier I spoke about email encryption and how surprising it is that we got this far with such insecure communications. More recently there was a story about Internet café's here in San Francisco and how one of the premier hotspots is just a few blocks from my house. I would love to ... http://stealthisidea.com/articles/encrypted-wifi/