Enthusiast
Phase
(Hobby)

h%XPLOIT ME v

Professional
Phase
( Work)

h(ELP ME WORK v

Consumer
Phase
(Life)

h%NJOY ME v

Sweet Spot

Baroque
Phase
h,ET ME DO IT ALL v

Adapted from Bill Moggridge

The phases of technology adoption.

remaining awkwardness for a wide range of users and their daily tasks.

Obviously, the entire user experience counts here. You can actually go and buy this thing in a department store today, stick it to your windshield, turn it on, and after making a few obvi-ous(!) choices, enter your first destination and be on your way. This is careful design. Some companies, such as TomTom and Apple, get how important this “first-encounter usability” is, from just the right software default settings, to physical device design, to the printed quickstart, to the design of the packaging. It’s no coincidence that for a brief, innocent period, Googling “iPhone porn” actually led to slideshows of devoted users unpacking their new gadget.

So what can we learn from the TomTom story? At some point the mix of features, technical feasibility, and task-centered product, software, and user-interface design came together to shape a product that could make such a radical difference to people’s lives that its popularity skyrocketed. Of course this takes years of market research and iterative product development, but it creates a qualitatively new product genre that brings an unprecedented and realistic promise to the market and fulfills it. I call this moment the “sweet-spot” phase.

A telltale sign that a product has reached this stage is that people get its usefulness within 15 seconds of explanation, even though they may not know the technology yet (or even understand it afterward). Non-geeks start telling you about this new

thing and begin to evangelize others about it.

Another sweet-spot indicator is that social behavior around the associated tasks changes. These days, when someone gives me driving directions— a sales clerk on the phone, or a friend inviting me to his house—I find myself politely cutting them short, just asking them for their street address, which I then write down and later type into my TomTom.

Clearly, using these devices also has questionable consequences. For one, we quickly begin to rely on them. Usually, after going to a new destination with my Tom Tom, I still can’t go there on my own: There was no need to memorize the route. A more subtle effect is the potential loss of a mental area map— with a TomTom, you never care to develop a picture of your city as a whole in your head. Will people forget how to describe the way to their home to others? Will real-estate owners bribe TomTom to direct traffic away from their upscale properties? Studying these effects will keep us busy for some time. But even such potentially adverse consequences show the fundamental change that a specific technology can bring about.

Now the bad news: Feature development doesn’t stop at its sweet spot. Beyond the idea of providing reliable, easy-to-use directions, TomTom has since added an MP3 player, live updates through the wireless network, connections to “Buddies” (the use of which has escaped me so far), cooperative street updates, photo slide shows (I’m not kidding), and a stream of other features. Some