In the pithy and well written book, The Viking Manifesto - The Scandinavian Approach to Business and Blasphemy, the authors contend in Chapter 22 that there are millions of brands, but only two essential types: meaning and entertainment.
They could be right. However, in the brilliant book Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, he argues, quite convincingly, that news broadcasting - which we might ordinarily categorise as ‘meaning’ - is almost exclusively an entertainment phenomenon.
Anyhow, let’s say that there are two types of brand meaning, or brand experience. Might this explain the perpetual struggle between the usability purists and the eye-candy designers? Is one group appealing to the meaning in the interface and product experience, whilst the other is appealing to the entertainment value?
In which case, do we have to also think about entertainment as a design parameter in user interfaces? Is that what Jobs really means when he says he wants the icons to look so great that you want to lick them? Let’s face it, if you’re a Mac user, then, apart from congratulations being in order, don’t you think that the wave effect through the dock icons is a fantastic experience? It’s almost pure entertainment. I catch myself almost always flicking up and down the dock at least once before I settle upon the app icon that I’m looking for.
Is it any surprise that the best phone - by far - that I”ve ever owned or tried (and I’ve got to try most of them in my 18 years, and counting, as a mobilist) is the iPhone. Please don’t bore me with the ‘usable web browser’ story. Yes, if you like, it has that. But it’s just so damn fun to use that it makes you want to surf the web, even on the crappo edge network, if you can get it.
What irony perhaps that the usability purist Jakob Nielsen told us that the killer app for mobile is killing time. That is. Pure time-idling entertainment. I’ve written about this so many times that it’s no longer entertaining.
This leads me back to the experience. Always back to the experience. The great Google search brand. Is it meaning or entertainment? It struggles to make its intentions clear. From a visual perspective, it’s almost entirely about the meaning. How bland and functional could an interface be?
No doubt, it will occur to some readers that it’s not meant to be exciting or entertaining - it’s a search engine. People type - they want results. It’s like a book index - and could anything be more bland? If you’re having these sorts of thoughts, well done - you’re probably a good engineer. But, you’re wrong if you dismiss product ideas because of their entertainment value, thinking that this falls outside the bounds of requirements. I guess it’s to be expected. After all, we do tend to write these documents called ‘functional requirements specifications’. Who writes the ‘entertainment requirements specification’?
There is a perpetual struggle between meaning and entertainment in certain strands of philosophy. Maybe this reverberates in today’s thinking about products and services. Perhaps we need designs that skilfully navigate between the two. Google search delivers meaning, but it also delivers entertainment (and I don’t mean the Google Whack). Texting can deliver meaning, perhaps not much in 160 chars, but we know that it provides an awful amount of entertainment. Countless studies have shown just how ‘frivolous’ the bulk of texting is.
No doubt, for mobile, we do need extra efficient interfaces and applications. We don’t have much screen space or network speed to play with, nor much user attention or tolerance for large periods of time. Under certain conditions, meaning is everything - ‘when’s this bloody train supposed to arrive?’ ‘Sell everything.’ ‘Buy everything.’ ‘You’re fired.’
Under other conditions, killing time - entertainment - is everything. Twitter, twitter, twitter…
Google will be beaten soon, just as sure as history teaches us that heroes always perish in the end, or become tomorrow’s bad guys, depending on how history works that day. I can’t help feeling that a completely new interface paradigm will blow them away. Sorry, but whilst the current one might ‘work’, as in it’s very functional (we presume, because we don’t actually how the algorithms work), it’s just so boring. I want visual search, like CoverFlow. I want multi-dimensional graphics, spider diagrams, floating videos and all that stuff that doesn’t really work very well in browsers. For heaven’s sake, I want that brilliant sheet-of-glass UI from Minority Report. If I’m going to sit in front of search results for the rest of my life, I want Club Penguin! I kid you not.
As The Jam said - ‘That’s Entertainment.‘
Technorati Tags: Viking Manifesto, Neil Postman, iPhone
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6 responses so far ↓
1 Martin // Mar 6, 2008 at 9:02 am
.. in my view this is why lots of people end up in Phone vs. N95 debates. The struggle to explain entertainment vs. function in a mobile phone and the user experiences that sit on top (or even fashion/feature phones vs. smartphones discussions).
Talking of designs that navigate between the two, the iPhone is creeping towards more functionality ~(via the SDK) and the smartphones are moving towards better usability, simpler UI’s…so maybe we’ll start seeing this more in next gen phones.
Who would’nt agree, that Apple have resurrected the sleeping giant that is usability and user experience - for mobile phone entertainment and function ?
2 Paul G // Mar 6, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Thanks Martin. As with the Mac, you can keep adding functionality via apps, but the basic experience is the same. It’s strong entertainment value is there. Of course, the Apple brand has meaning, but its strong userbase is more like a fan base or a bunch of groupies. Such ideas are firmly rooted in entertainment. It’s actually fun to be ‘with Apple.’
There’s a lot of talk about innovating through services and open access, but what about the device? Where are the utterly cool devices? Let’s not forget that people queued up for the iPhone. Has that ever happened for any other mobile device? Who can create another device so compelling? That’s the challenge. It ain’t easy. Look at the dismal O2 Cocoon!
3 vd // Mar 8, 2008 at 1:05 am
Right, experience and killing time, the two most common features for any service, but I think that there’s one that surplus them, the “be in touch” service. People want to be in touch, to receive updates, to know that people are doing. They can do that with the phone, by calling someone, but there’s nothing that connects people in a way that they can be in touch (knowing everything from everyone) all the time. - maybe in a few month I can explain this better
4 Paul G // Mar 9, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Thanks VD - you are right about ‘being in touch’ - actually, this was the name of the first ever mobile product I developed ‘In Touch”
I think that Lifestreams are going to be important here, but I also think that we need to take a step back and see how we can develop a framework for managing staying in touch in a consistent fashion. We need standards, otherwise I will have to get Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Talk, Twitter and all these apps on my phone, but only to find that my friends move over to some other tools/networks and I am no longer in touch. We need a meta-layer above these apps.
5 vd // Mar 10, 2008 at 5:05 pm
We need standards, otherwise I will have to get Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Talk, Twitter and all these apps on my phone, but only to find that my friends move over to some other tools/networks and I am no longer in touch.
That’s impossible
The “business” in the social behavior is to lock down someone in one network (like the hobbit, one ring to rule them all). OpenSocial and Social Data Portability can solve the “migration” problems. I know that each concept is different, but bear with me. Every social application can connect to the concurrent, but that’s different from migration. I believe that’s the way to some survive, connections between them.
But I understand the “meta-layer” necessity. We need a “social tube”, with and ESB properties to be the base for user connectivity (not network or service).
6 Paul G // Mar 10, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Thanks for your comment vd - I understand what you’re saying. I use the term ’standards’ loosely, or perhaps even incorrectly. The meta-layer is the issue. Do we use OpenSocial? Perhaps. It’s only a partial solution.
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