Apple’s Big Mistake (and the solution)

Apple’s recent release of the iPhone 4 saw the Cupertino company make a blunder usually seen from other consumer product companies, rarely seen from Apple. The first rule of successful product development is to design your product the way people will use it, not how you want them to use it. It is an ongoing argument I have with most developers I’ve worked with. They see a simple solution to a user interface issue that will require users to learn how to use the interface in a different way than they had been. My retort is always: “But that’s not how they will use it”. We consumers are not stupid, but we don’t like to learn new things. When we do learn new things we want it to be a seamless approach, otherwise we balk. Apple forgot this lessen sometime in the last year.

Apple’s iPhone was certainly a new class of product; it used multitouch, it had sliding screens, no multi-tasking. But it was intuitive. My 1 1/2 year old’s favorite pastime is flipping through pictures or typing on both my iPhone and iPad. Despite the fact that multitouch was new, it was intuitive Even turning the device on for the first time was intuitive: you click on the big button, slide the button that says slide, and you’re in. Flipping the pages of your iPhone was like flipping the pages of a book.

The recent release of the iPhone 4 goes against the intuitive design sense that we’ve come to expect of Apple: if you hold it wrong, you’ll lose signal.

Now, according to Apple this is only happening to .5% of users and the media is blowing it up. (The takeaway from this should be that early adopters have big mouths, hate when things don’t work and are very adept at showing their displeasure through social media.) Steve Jobs says all mobile devices suffer from the same issue of signal degradation when a user cups the phone in it’s hand. Well, it didn’t have that much effect on my old Sony Ericsson that I discarded 5 years ago. Even if this is true as many antenna experts claim, the signal degradation was minimal or this would be old news. Apple’s second claim is that users, when holding the iPhone incorrectly, bridged the 2 antennae that make up the infrastructure of the phone. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is Apple’s assertion of users holding the phone wrong. This goes back to user experience and intuitive design: users will hold the phone the way they want, designers must make allowances for this behavior. Whether you’re a lefty or a righty we all hold a cell phone in a similar way. This doesn’t come from comScore or PEW, just a brief survey of people I know with cell phones, Apple or otherwise.

For some reason Apple decided to break up their 2-antenna frame at a key point where human hands would be gripping their product, thus causing the signals to be bridged and not work effectively.

It seems to me that common sense, with a healthy dose of real world observation would have given them a pretty obvious solution to the problem: change where the antennae break is located to a location that isn’t normally a point of contact for the human hand. Now, I don’t know much about mobile device development or antennae, but the problem, at least from reports from techblogs and Apple itself, seems pretty simple: avoid bridging the antennae. Does this help?

Give Your Customers What They Want

While work continues on Gathr.me, I spend alot of time thinking about what users, my customers, will want out of the product. I often blatantly ask, sometimes I just listen. My goal is to develop a product that my users will love. There has been alot of talk among the partners about the need for a desktop version of Gathr.me. Sure, beyond the web and mobile versions, a desktop version seems less important, but it will be important to the users who want a desktop version. That is why we are building Gathr.me in such a way as to accommodate any current platform and device, as well as trying to imagine future ways in which people will want to interface with us.

To make my life easier (or to keep me working everywhere), I’ve been looking at netbooks. Since I’m unemployed, pricing is a huge consideration or I’d just buy a MacBook Pro. Instead, these $2-400 netbooks will fill the gap and allow me to work without being chained to my desk. Of course, I’ve already researched which I can hack and load the Mac OS onto the easiest. Sounds extreme huh? To buy a perfectly good computer, whipe out the Windows OS and replace it with the Mac one? Not if you’ve used the Mac OS, or all your other devices are Mac. But this isn’t the point. The point is, that because Mac doesn’t make a netbook, and I can’t afford their laptops, I’m going to put in the extra work to create a Macenstein of my own. From my research I’ve found this to be a VERY large community. Which begs the question, why isn’t Mac making a netbook? Mac has said they don’t want to play in this space, because it is immature and the current product offerings suck. Odd, I don’t remember their being alot of great mp3 players before the iPod. Sure there were some, but they all kinda sucked. So why isn’t Apple giving their customers what they want? Maybe they just don’t know them well enough?

Speaking of which: I’ve thought for a long time that brands need to get to know their customers better. Social Media provides a great opportunity for this. My car manufacturer, sends me a notice every time I need to check something on my car. But retailers I use, like Target, iTunes, Home Depot, Borders, have ramped up their emails to sell me stuff. Don’t they know I’m unemployed? Facebook, MySpace and other social networks I belong to beat me over the head with singles ads, despite the fact that I’ve been with the same woman for 10 years. Do they know something I don’t, or do they just not know anything?

Even smaller groups targeting me don’t know me well. Today I got my ubiquitous email from Chris Brogan. He is one of a handful of blogs I am subscribed to. Oddly, this email was a subscription drive. If I’m already subscribed, after all, h has my email, why would he need to push me to subscribe? I’m assuming this is some kind of technical glitch, after all, he’s a pretty savvy web2.0 kinda guy.

All of these cases represent the same issue: not giving customers what they want, or giving them what they don’t want or need. This is usually caused by demographics, shallow research, or basing your business model on the “average customer”, not all of your customers. It’s obvious that brands, large or small, need to look at their customers, get to know them better, and deliver products, solutions and communications that they’re asking for.

How The Economy During The Depression of 2009 Changed The World Part 8: Marketing

How did the Depression of ’09 Impact Society?

In my continuing series on the Depression of ’09, or Bush’s Collapse, as historians have come to call it, I will focus on how marketing and advertising was effected. In 2038 it’s hard to believe that only 30 years ago quotes such as “no one ever got fired for doing television” and ideas like Mass Marketing weren’t ridiculed. One needs to remember that back then Social Media was used to differentiate a particular form of “online engagement”. Of course people still used the term Internet to qualify where they absorbed a particular piece of information. Most Gen A kids today are still confused by the fact that during the Gen X/Y days we received information from multiple devices with screens: one you could interact with, and one you just stared at. I won’t mention “radio” for fear of veering too off topic.

Leading up to “Dep II” folks used the Internet to gather data, purchase goods, and be entertained by music, vids and games. In most cases a company I’d individual would “post” media to a “web site” where users could read, click, watch, or download it. Users had very little choice on what they got, generally being given only a few options. Something was about to change all that though.

Just prior to the election of President Obama, to the first of his 3 terms, several print publications (see links for definitions) named the consumer as the Person of the Year and Marketer of the Year. The average citizen was beginning to take control of how goods and services were presented to them. Up to this point most manufacturers and service providers would build a generic product then hire marketers to create advertising campaigns to promote their product. The advertisements would, almost without exception, be focused on a wide demographic. Men: 18-45, teens: 12-22, were typical designations. Of course no one today would waste time on such a broad and incongruous grouping. Even now, at 79, I can remember being a teen, none of us were very similar. There were jocks, studes, vocies, rockers, stoners, rich, poor, popular, geeks, etc. It still amazed me that anyone sold anything in such a broad way. It’s important to remember that back in the 20th Century and into the singles of the 21st Century, most people just accepted that they belonged to a demographic and accepted products and services as they were: Corporate America was in charge. Of course that is no longer the case: we get goods and services tailored personally to us, we brag about the cool advertising generated by our profile. Lime most of history, it is easy, in hindsight, to see the tipping point: The Attack on Pearl Harbor, the Chinese Colonization of Mars, Secretary Michelle Obama’s Global Union Initiative, etc. Bush’s Collapse changed the relationship between consumers and corporations forever.

It is unfair that the Collapse be completely blamed on George Bush, it is so named primarily because the Iraqi Folly put such a financial burden on the country, at a point when a brief financial meltdown was imminent. It took several decades of corporate greed, governmental missteps, and an economy based on speculation and Wall Street, to cause the Collapse. The “Silly President” just happened to push it over the edge.

The hardship had many unexpected consequences including the collapse of the television, radio (much different than what we consider it today), music and oil industries. The collapse of the oil industry and it’s evolution into an international conservatorship has been widely discussed and is irrelevant to this story. The Big Media collapse has direct bearing though.

Citizens attention was divided in their entertainment, communications and informational options then: between a television, telephone and radio or a computer. With meager incomes most had to choose between the two. History shows they chose computers. These bulky, desktop machines were far less elegant than our current solution, yet they offered information, communication, entertainment and productivity in one package. This primitive machine had been used to market to consumers in a 19th Century manner, with 20th Century technology. A few technology advances offered the ability for social networks to begin to crop up, all separate and distinct. Very quickly more niche networks emerged, focused on specific subjects, forms of communication, and psychographics. CGTalk, Twitter, and Ning are examples of each that I was immersed in. Very quickly the populace found they had replaced one fractured interface with another, as their attention was now divided between multiple separate “sites”.

Yet the seeds of control had been sewn. Many of these sites, oddly called “networks”, offered personalization features as well as the ability to be viewed on mobile devices. Soon a demand was met: the ability to bring all of their desired content together under a universal, personalized ID, that they could interact with on any device. Early mobile and computer companies began building customized devices receiving customized information. Soon behavioral targeting was giving users information they wanted before they asked for it. Advertisers couldn’t bridge the gap. Most companies were still selling generic products using mass marketing tactics. The people demanded better. They had the power to make demands. It was easier for a mom & pop operation to deliver customized goods, promoting them with customized messaging, easier than large companies. Product and Services industries as well as their advertisers couldn’t compete on such a micro-level. This signaled the end of marketing as it had been for decades.

Early social media proponents recognized early on that talking to one was better than shouting at a million. Advertisers and companies, in their desperation finally began to listen. An entire generation of marketers and advertisers was displaced. Their seats were filled by social media evangelists managing hundreds of non-employee brand evangelists. These weren’t just mouthpieces, they weren’t even paid! They were brand fans. It was the pyramid management system. One SoMe evangelist would invite brand loyalists, even competitive brand loyalist to try products and report on them. These loyalists in turn were followed by thousands, who, in turn, influenced millions of others.

Many companies during this time abandoned the strategy when they received negative feedback. The smart ones began to see this as positive input. It wasn’t long before companies were creating custom products for their loyalists. It was expensive. This soon drove the desire from all consumers to have personalized products. Advertisers soon got in the act, creating individually customized messaging (at the time called hyper-targeting, now just called advertising). Consumers had long given up the idea of privacy or anonymity online. They were comfortable with advertisers knowing their personal information, provided it offered them better search, purchase and entertainment choices. Their tracked behavior, purchase history, financial background, resume, even family medical info now fed shared databases from which technology evolved to serve advertising unique to every recipient.

It seems odd, in this day and age, that a single add would be the basis of an entire product campaign. Teens in college, sports fans in bars, even the few that still work in offices, share their commercials as a bag of identity, as unique as a fingerprint. Just today my grand kids and I were laughing over our implant OS updates from Apple. I’m still on 10.4.2!

Who knows how personalization will effect us in the future. If I have to spend 4 hours on an airship to visit my grandkids on the West Coast, I’d like a seat that knows I have a bad back!