“Apple’s introduction of the iPhone on Tuesday underscores the lesson Motorola learned with the Razr: A sleek, sexy design can create lots of buzz and drive sales, but without smart, usable interface design, consumers will end up angry and disinclined to buy your next ‘hot’ mobile-phone offering,” Jessie Scanlon and Helen Walters report for BusinessWeek.
Scanlon and Walters report, “Design has nominally been a priority of cell-phone makers for a while now, at least since Nokia took the No. 1 spot in the market, thanks, in part, to its focus on color and style. Samsung played the design card in its rise. Then came LG, with its ‘Chocolate.’ But design, as these companies have embraced it, is little more than styling. It is design in the service of product lust, rather than user experience.”
Related article:
Chocolate Cellphone Only Looks Sweet; Its Design Is Flawed – Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, August 03, 2006
Scanlon and Walters continue, “The navigation system of its iPod was both radical and defiantly simple—and it is with this same philosophy in mind that Apple has mounted its charge on the cell-phone industry. For some, it hasn’t come a moment too soon. ‘Finally we have what appears to be a cell phone designed for ordinary human beings, not just for children with incredibly thin fingers, brains of scientists, and better than 20-20 vision,’ says London-based designer Malcolm Garrett, creative director at the Applied Information Group.”
“Incorporating the existing Mac OS X operating system into the unit is a major step forward, one which Adaptive Path President and usability expert Jesse James Garrett reckons will provide a major headache for competitors. ‘Apple has been able to work backwards from its own OS, making adjustments to work on a smaller screen,’ he says. ‘This is not functionality that you can tack onto the existing phone operating systems out there. That has to be very troubling to the competition because it’s going to take them years to develop similar technical sophistication. Mobile-phone Web browsers are uniformly awful.’ The iPhone, of course, uses Apple’s own Safari browser,” Scanlon and Walters report.
Scanlon and Walters report, “The gauntlet truly has been thrown down. No doubt between now and June, when the iPhone is released, competing cell-phone, smartphone, and PDA makers will be scrambling to come up with devices that have the look, feel, and functionality of Apple’s offering. Let’s just hope that the hardware makers and carriers alike grasp the power of user-driven design and great customer experience. Like the music industry before it, the cell-phone industry needs a shakeup.”
Much more in the full article here.
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