Jul 2 2007

The iPhone Effect

Here’s the back-story. I’ll admit that I’m a gadget addict. My wife will attest to the same thing. Normally when I purchase a device of this caliber (meaning number of features), I tinker and toy with it for a few days, just learning the ins and outs of how to use everything. It’s a process, and honestly, I’ve always found it very fun. Then comes the iPhone.

After my hellish activation story (I’d rather not talk about it right now), I was finally able to sync and start using my iPhone. I immediately opened the iPod part, and toyed with the cover-flow, the playlists, etc. All my music was there, and accounted for.

Then I went straight to email. My accounts were already in place and working properly, including all IMAP folders, SMTP settings, and more. Awesome.

Then, to Safari. Browsing was a breeze, brought up this site (looks fine, though I didn’t look everywhere), and a few others. Full featured, and very simple.

Then to my contacts list in the phone. They’re all there. I flip up and down through them to watch the elastic scroll do it’s thing a few times.

Then into my Photos. Albums are all there, my photo library optimized, and there for me to browse. I flip through my recent vacation photos to get an idea of the responsiveness of the back and forth flip motion. Just as I would expect.

Then to one of my favorite spots: settings. Normally you can browse around in there for hours, I know I did on my Motorola Q. Flipped through the list, noticed what could be changed, and agreed with every setting in there. Easy enough.

Another minute or so was spent on the other widgets, apps, SMS, and anything else I hadn’t looked at yet. All ridiculously straight-forward and simple.

So about five minutes after I took it off the dock for the first time, I put the iPhone in my pocket, and went about my business. About twenty minutes after that, I had this kind of empty feeling. Not quite buyers remorse or anything, but still, my initial reaction was that it FELT like the iPhone didn’t do as much as I thought. It was a moment of near disappointment.

And then it hit me. I just already knew how to use it! I went from newbie to power-user in 5 minutes.

After that sunk in, I was truly astounded. Yes, Apple did what I believe was the perfect campaign for such a device with those thirty-second demo commercials on television. Those, joined by the fantastic tutorial videos on their website taught me a lot of what I needed to know about how to use the iPhone. Their marketing and preparedness helped prepare me to use the phone.

But no video online can truly prepare you to physically interact with something. Which is why this next part is so important. Interacting with the device, in nearly every nook and cranny of the software, is perfectly natural. I have never used a touch-screen device before, and I didn’t have to learn. I don’t need to think about how to use it, I just do. Apple spent countless hours, months, who knows, maybe even years, perfecting their user interface, and it shows.

It’s not that I couldn’t end up figuring things out my Q. In fact, except for the music part, it did most of what the iPhone does. But in this case, the user experience wins out. And the thing is, it seems that if I didn’t already think so much about UI, I probably wouldn’t even notice.

So it proves to me, again, that user interface really does make a difference. Software designed for the user, not the developer or the company is best. Simplicity beats out features. I’m not going to say “less is more”, because I don’t believe the iPhone IS less. It’s more, simplified.