Effectivus Product Management » product definition

How the iPad could change the world

Chris — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:29:56 +0000

The gushing praise for the iPad is now turning into concrete numbers as this last week analysts have been clambering over each other to predict that Apple will ship.

Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster originally expected iPad sales of 2.8 million in 2010. Then Morgan Stanley upped the ante to 6 million, before their analysts Katy Huberty and Mathew Schneider reported that iPad suppliers are forecasting 8 million to 10 million iPad shipments in calendar year 2010, double the previous estimate of 5 million.

I know nothing of this. As a consumer I have felt the need for some years for a handy internet browser that would always be on and could be used anywhere in the house. There is the Ocado order to be completed in the kitchen, whilst checking the contents of the fridge. Then there is follow up research to settle arguments over dinner and digging into schedules and program details the few times we actually sit down and watch the television.

Is the iPad the device to do this? I don’t know, but I do know that $699 seems a bit steep for the whatever additional benefit it might have over my $300 netbook, which by the way, supports Flash.

But I can see one way in which the iPad could change the world.

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Don’t touch me there!

Chris — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:07:18 +0000

Great story in New Scientist on Skinput (the product of Microsoft Research) which can project an image of buttons onto the skin, and then recognise which button you have pressed using body acoustics.

I’m struggling to imagine the type of muli-user interaction that this could lead to…

Barriers to adoption

Chris — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:58:12 +0000

Ever get the feeling that you are working in a mental asylum? Of course, I’m not talking about any of my client companies. They are all completely sane and sensible. I’ll skip over the fact that the defining experience of working in one of their offices is being pelted with Nerf gun pellets at regular intervals.

Ten years ago I had the interesting experience of moving from what had been a start-up to a big corporate. Not only was Kodak huge, it had a lot of history, it was based on the other side of the continent and it was an old time manufacturing company that was going down the tube but had yet to face up to the fact. You can still see it struggling with this in recent advertisements in American Cinematographer: “Film No Compromise”. Wake up and smell the coffee Kodak, film was dead 10 years ago.

One of the wackier things I discovered there (and it was a year packed full of wacky stuff) was George Eastman’s devotion to the International Fixed Calendar. In 1926, George wrote about “The Importance of Calendar Reform to the Business World”. In this short article, he explains how the variations in the length of the calendar month cause all sorts of problems with the proper management of a modern business. I’m sure you are aware of this and have frequently stumbled over the 11% difference between the length of March and February or the shocking 17% difference in the number of working days in those months. And, that’s not even mentioning the vexations of a “wandering Easter”.

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Post tags: film, management, marketing, users

Sketching User Experiences

Chris — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:31:34 +0000

In the late ’80s when I first began contributing to commercial products at Spaceward I came across a book which opened my eyes to the issue of how we interact with products and particularly software products. It was “Readings in Human-Computer Interaction” edited by Baecker and Buxton and changed the way I thought about my products in a fundamental way. Bill Buxton’s latest book has had a similar effect.

Reading “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design” feels like leafing through a designer’s sketchbook, a sketchbook of a lifetime of contributing to designing high tech products. Ideas come at you from all angles and then drill down into incredible detail before spinning off in another direction.

Bill Buxton has worked at both EuroPARC and Xerox PARC, Silicon Graphics, Alias Wavefront and most recently Microsoft Research. He has been lecturing and writing on the human computer interaction for 30 years.

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Post tags: Book review, design, UI, users

Effectivus’s predictions for 2010’s technology products

Chris — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:51:00 +0000

This last week the technology press has been agog with 3D TVs, Slates and Google’s Nexus One at CES, and predictions for the next decade. I wasn’t there. I don’t mind too much because Vegas is so unreal that it is easy to get carried away with the marketing hype and miss the big picture. So, to offer a little balance, I’d like to propose some alternative predictions for the next decade.

I think that in a world running out of resources it is time for the technology industry to grow up and shoulder its responsibilities. The planet is running out of food, land, water and energy which is pretty bad. But it also running out of scarce metals and minerals which are required to build our high tech playthings. This is going to be tough because most technology products are bought to replace perfectly serviceable products with only a small margin of additional functionality, and sometimes little, or negative, additional benefits[1].

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Post tags: design, lifecycle, vision

The devil in the detail of product design

Chris — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Last night I was sorting through the programs recorded on my Humax PVR. After you’ve negotiated an initial menu screen (surely getting a list of what you’ve recorded is such a common task that it deserves a button?), it initially displays the list in reverse chronological order – so the latest programs are at the top of the list. You have to press the blue button twice to change the sort order to chronological (oldest first) and then alphabetical so that all the programs from the same series are displayed together. But guess what? When it sorts alphabetically, if the names are identical, then the order of those programs appears to be random. So, if you are catching up on the latest “Garrow’s Law” (as we were), would you want to watch them in a random order? No! Whoever designed the interface never tried to use it for one of the most common user tasks, did they?

It is not just me being a grumpy product guy. Ordinary users pick these things up too. Here are a couple snatched from AVForums:

“the Humax UI was designed by people who don’t watch TV and deliberately avoided the conventions we all learned with VCRs. It’s a jarring experience” – Paul Shirley

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Post tags: design, development, product, specification

We don’t make that sort of product here

Chris — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:45:28 +0000

We were relaxing after a dinner in a busy restaurant on the waterfront in Stockholm. We had been with the product designers all day, thrashing through the issues of the physical design of our new product. It was tough and we’d filled wipe boards, notebooks, cut stuff out and mocked up prototypes. We’d walked through user scenarios and talked about different personas. We’d discussed materials and components and littered the tables with samples of them. We’d talked ergonomics, about comfort, about how your hand met the product and what it would be like to use the product for hours on end.

The good Swedish food and beer were helping me relax, so the conversation finally moved away from the work of the day to our families and interests.

I asked one of the designers, a particular whizz at AutoCAD, what he did outside work.

“I design sex toys” he said with a completely straight face.

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Post tags: fun, process, product

What is a product specification?

Chris — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:31:46 +0000

We’ve all seen those product specifications that run to dozens or even hundreds of pages with every little detail described. Why do we do it?

Innovative products change their markets. We have to accept that this is the case or there would never have been markets for Personal Computers, Digital Cameras, Television, electricity, the wheel. The market does not exist when the product is first introduced and then goes through an often rapid development as consumers adapt to the new possibilities of the product type. Can we foresee how all of that will pan out before we introduce the first product of its type? Of course not.

As Helmuth von Moltke the Elder apparently said “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” and I would extend that for new product development to say that no product specification survives contact with the user.

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Post tags: process, product, specification, theory

There is a hole in my product

Chris — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:21:25 +0000

The engineers on the other side of the video conference call were getting more and more frustrated. “You can’t even tell us what shape it is,” they cried. The project had been running for a few months and even though we had made a lot of progress in the early design, they were right; we were not certain what shape it was yet. One engineer compared the process to designing an aircraft; “At least we’d know what shape it is”, presumably negating the possibilities of biplanes, triplanes, flying wings, rotary-wing and many others yet to be dreamt up.

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Post tags: design, development, ideas, product

Tell me a story

Chris — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:00:25 +0000

The phone rang as soon as I sat down at my workstation that morning.

“Hi, it’s Puck. I’ve got a problem”

Puck, I thought, recalling a giant of a visual effects artist. Isn’t he in California? And it’s just before 10am here in London. He went on to describe the problem that he was having in Matador and why it was so urgent that the job he was working on was finished in the morning. Morning? I thought. It’s already 2am there.

“Listen, I’m going home to bed, ring me at home when you fix it and I’ll come back into the office”. He concluded, after I’d promised to try to fix the problem immediately.

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Post tags: development, Matador, product, users