I came across this excellent and well thought out article this morning by James Bridle on the differences between what we say and what we do. He discusses how we commonly fool ourselves into believing we should feel about a thing, because we think we should. His first example of this paradoxical behavior is the one that I connect with the most: Lord of the Rings. We both feel like we should like it for some unknown reason, and therefore struggle to admit to ourselves that we really view it as boring waste of time.
The same could be said about a movie like Citizen Kane. I love it for its groundbreaking innovation in storytelling, camera techniques, sound recording and noir-but-still-mainstream feel. However I’ve met few that find it anything more than a waste of time.
James states:
This willful lying to oneself is everywhere; it is particularly evident in attitudes to the future.
I have see signs of paradox on the web and the pre-iPhone era of mobile. Endless A/B testing has reinforced these lies into multiple lowest common denominator experiences and they are everywhere. No one can argue that they work, but the fail to inspire.
People often speculate about the circumstances of Apple’s revival. Why has Apple had such an amazing transformation as a company and how can I do it too? They often fail to understand that amazing success story is largely because Apple refuses to accept the lies people tell themselves. They believe that they can do better, using their own conscious as a guide.
The result is products we never said we wanted, but we immediately recognize their value when we see them. By addressing this psychological paradox Apple becomes one of the rare companies that is able to repeatedly have a transformative effect on our lives—even if we never use one of their products.
We prejudge endlessly. Because we have not experienced the emotions that new technologies trigger we assume that they will be less powerful than the emotions we already know. Just because we haven’t had these feelings yet.
The Information Age is rewiring our brains and therefore our behavior. We see this everyday—this transformation so clearly evident in mobile. A users behavior is closer to the truth than to the lies we tell ourselves. I think this is because mobile devices are so intimate and perceived as being private.
For example, think of the last time you walked past a co-worker and saw them looking at Facebook, maybe catching a few words of a personal message. Now think of the last time you were able to see the message of someones text. The smaller window into our personal lives allows for greater privacy. For this reason it is no surprise that people are using tablets much differently—being more for broad consumption—than smartphones.
This transformation in how and what we communicate creates a unique mental modal seen in many mobile experiences that you can almost breakdown to a simple equation to explain this paradox:
Privacy leads to Openness.
Openness leads to Honesty.
Honesty leads Trust.
Trust leads to Passion.
Passion leads to Dedication.
This is the world we are living in and we can either lie to ourselves about it or we can dive headlong into the new forms and effects that it produces.
The companies that realize and address this paradox are the ones that will see the greatest success. I’ve found that creating a good mobile strategy means taking hard look at the DNA of the company. I’ve done it with the largest companies in the world and more often than not I find that no one actually knows. This isn’t to say it isn’t there, it is just harder to find.
Just a few of the hard questions we ask at the start of a mobile project in an attempt to crack this conundrum:
What do you stand for?
What are the reasons you all go to work every day?
What is your business trying to achieve?
The trick to great innovation, to creating wildly successful products (or disruption in business-speak), to addressing this strange psychological paradox is not about the answers to these questions. It is the act of asking the question. That is the first step of creating something great and the first step towards the mobile age.
Having recently spent a lot of time listening to what people expect from mobile video on demand (VOD) products, this is another clear case of the end customer getting screwed over while big media companies publicly debate the nuance of fair use and licensing models.
It isn’t clear if the move by the media companies is to work more licensing fees from Time Warner Cable and it’s subscribers, or to clear the way for their own channel-based VOD products. I believe it is probably a combination of both.
We’ve found in our research that customers expect Big Media content to be included in mobile products and they expect it to be free regardless of their device or point of access. That isn’t exactly good news for the media companies, but when it comes to mobile, they need to wake up and realize that the world has changed and mobile users think and act differently. And guess what, everyone is a mobile user!
The iPad customers we talked to are a lot more sophisticated than your average Internet user. They have very high expectations as far as quality, fees and performance. While we were mostly talking to iPad users, few were long term Apple customers. But it was clear Apple’s influence of the mobile and specifically tablet market is having. People expect more from mobile, than they do from the web.
Just a few of our takeaways:
Customers feel they are already paying for access, and quite honestly they are already being underserved.
They know how to get content for their iPads for free and they aren’t afraid to do it.
They have little channel/brand affiliation, they only care about good content and it being available on their devices of choice. There are exceptions, like HBO, but not as many as your might think.
They have many options for access and aren’t interested in paying for content twice.
There is a high level of skepticism around VOD services. They look to their cable/satellite provider as their primary provider.
We live in an on demand world, and if the media companies don’t deliver, they will get it someplace else.
When the VOD product we worked on goes live, we will of course have a lot more to say about what we learned here. The big takeaway is that people expect content, media and all of their various electronics to just work. It is really just common sense when you think about it.
First we had Papa Sangre, the iPhone game that was experienced purely via audio. The next obvious step was voice controlled gaming (well, obvious for some I guess). Welcome to Pah!, the iPhone game controlled by your mouth – or, as Brian wanted me to specify, by your voice. You need to yell “Pah!” at the game to get started, and then to control your spaceship you yell “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” to not hit a bunch of comets. I’m not sure how you shoot, I was laughing too hard to figure it out.
It’s an infinitely silly game, and worth the $0.99 for the ridiculousness value alone, although the novelty only lasted about 30 seconds for me. What I do find interesting is the potential for voice controlled games, particularly among the disabled community. Think of what a voice controlled game for blind people might sound like. Or what about those with motor neuron issues who aren’t as dexterous with the iPhone screen as some – the possibilities are endless, and could actually be incredibly valuable.
Voice controlled apps are now on the pinch/zoom ideas blackboard for areas to experiment with with our spare time.
PayPal has long been sitting at the wheel with no direction. Recently they have been doing some interesting pilots, but it may come too late as mobile friendly payment systems are on the rise.
This new service from American Express is simple, clean, inexpensive, easy to use and most importantly mobile friendly out of the gate. In a word: it is everything PayPal is not.
A site dedicated to terrible Android design or as they put it “arguments for closed systems.” Many of these screens are reminiscent of the Symbian apps that helped killed the platform as far as I’m concerned.
Our Dicky Award for bad mobile design is going to change a lot of hands with a site like this.
While there are a ton of snarky remarks floating around about Nokia these days, they still know more about mobile design than most people. I’m especially impressed by their new typeface Nokia Pure, which is designed to provide super clear type on compact screens like mobile devices. You can clearly see the attention to detail in the above screenshot that compares Nokia Pure to the venerable Helvetica.
I’m a fan of infographics, and this one tells an interesting story about the evolution of mobile. But at 9029 pixels tall, it is a bit hard to consume (it would have been better suited as a website). Nevertheless, lots of good morsels of data here.
Fixed-width design isn’t going away, because it’s easy. It’s like playing the game Connect Four versus playing Twister. One is simple and straightforward, the other multivariate, so much so that you can’t really formulate a one-size-fits-all strategy. Which isn’t to say people shouldn’t endeavor to do responsive sites, just that they can’t expect the heavy lifting to be done for them.
My book Mobile Design and Development is now available online—in its entirety—for free.
The book has sold amazingly well on Amazon, for Kindle and in book stores all over the world. Obviously mobile is a hot topic right now and many are trying to understand how to get started. But missing from many of the blog and twitter conversations is the context of how mobile works and some of the timeless best practices I’ve gathered over my ten year career in the industry as a mobile designer, that are captured in the book.
For this reason I wanted the knowledge contained within my book to be available to all. Hopefully helping people avoid the timely and costly mistakes that are too often found in the mobile medium. Although truth be told my intentions by publishing my book online aren’t 100% altruistic, there is the practical matter of updating the book. The entire site has been converted over to a private wiki and having the text in this format is easier for me to parse and update section by section. With the support of the amazing team at O’Reilly, they have allowed me to publish my book online for free while I go through the arduous process of updates and revisions.
First we had 
