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