Matt MacQueen

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how so many new products come to market are no longer islands of their own self-contained functionality. Everything from digital cameras, watches, media players, car accessories, phones (of course), running shoes and now even clothing have an important inter-dependence with a broader service or network component. As consumers become more connected, product are increasingly knitted to a larger ecosystem of touchpoints.
Retail stores, showrooms and service centers have to interface with products and customers too, and all too often there’s significant brand experience disconnects. The product is not alone, other factors can (and often do!) screw up the brand experience. Looking at the whole sum of touchpoints, and understanding the flow patterns and directions of discovery are essential to getting “the whole thing” right and delighting customers. (Ever had a bad experience at a car dealership sour you on a car you had already sold yourself on? Don’t worry, it’s common.)

To be fair, it’s hard to do it right. Experience designers have to uncover user mindsets and need states way upstream. They also need to get engineers talking with marketers and get a good grip of customer expectations and a shared understanding for critical success factors. The more complex the inter-dependencies of a product, the more opportunity for user dissapointment when there is friction or disconnects for users.

The simple, good-for-business concept of usability must be taken to a meta level – across networks and service touchpoints. When it goes well, it really goes well. A common benchmark used is the iPod + iTunes combination. The tangible iPod “product” experience becomes inseperable from the software created compliment it’s functionality perfectly. iTunes is what made the iPod successful, it became the functional muscle and brain to compliment the iPod’s pretty (inter)face.

What sparked my urge to write this down is due in part to Walt Mossberg, personal technology writer at the Wall Street Journal. He’s a good mass-media advocate for the practical user experience of new products, and looks beyond the manufactuer’s hype sheet to actually give things a try. I read him every week. On October 12th he wrote The New Sony Reader for Books Performs Like a Good First Draft. By the end of the article I was aghast he basically gave the product it a middling “good start”.

From my perspective the product had failed not because of the Sony Reader device itself, but based on what it depended upon for content, updating and making connections. Some key upstream and downstream touchpoints were at best pretty miserable, at at worst non-functional. Unfortunatley this is not new from Sony, who bungled the MiniDisc line of products more ways than I can count. Mossberg opens:

I’ve been testing a Sony Reader for about a week and have been evaluating not just the hardware itself, but the whole system. That includes the PC software that downloads and organizes the material and transfers it to the reader; and Sony’s new online electronic bookstore, where you can buy books for the reader.

It sounds like Sony improved on a previous version of the device fixed a lot of things that are all about lighter weight, readability and long battery life. Well, these are reasonable expecations of someone who a device to replace a paperback book, but not meaningful differentiation. Beyond the basics, Sony must focus innovation on getting rich sources of content on and off effortlessly, and allow customers to do tasks they only wish they could today with analog books — but Sony failed to look very far beyond the device. A summary of shortcomings noted by Mossberg here:

• it’s too easy to accidentally press buttons and land far from the page you were reading.
• in every PDF document I tried, the text was nearly unreadable and the text resizing feature of the Reader didn’t help. Sony concedes that PDF documents work well on the Reader only if they are created for the Reader’s screen size and resolution. But it includes no conversion software to make them fit.
• lacks features that would enhance the reading experience. You can’t enter notes, search inside books or documents, or look up words in a built-in dictionary. And while you can bookmark pages for later retrieval, you can’t highlight passages.
• it doesn’t automatically synchronize material. The online bookstore is poorly organized and has an awful search function. Its 10,000 titles are only about 10% of what you’d find in a typical big bookstore.

Randy Stewart, a blogger who saw an early model at CES, observed in a review round-up:

The Reader will only read RSS feeds that Sony has pre-selected and the Reader will only update those feeds once a day.

Isn’t the whole value of RSS syndication the combination of any source, updated to the minute? What do you think the chances of your favorite feeds in the long tail are on Sony’s “approved” list? Unlikely. I’m just sad all the things they could have done to move beyond a 1990’s version of an e-book reader were squandered. Sony could have partnered with a different provider or tried to strike a deal with Amazon or Google’s eBooks service at least, if broader selection is needed. If they would have, imagine using the Sony Reader to browse a chapter, and buy if you liked and get the rest upon your next sync. Opt-in to get excerpts from your favorite book reviewers and blog writers via RSS, passively loading but never getting in your way.

Some brands like Nike realized they’d rather partner than build their own software, with pretty well-integrated results for their own ecosystem of functionality and layered value.

Even the best product design firms can get the tangible “product” in-and-of-itself just right: the carefully vetted strategic mix of features and functions to enter a market, an effortless user iterface, and the form factor and aesthetics to make a unified whole. But even when these products fail to shore up pitfalls in the broader, contexutual user experience, they can fail.

Using scenario-based design methods that span many customer touchpoints is a better way to uncover every significant interaction a user will have in context. Weak customer touchpoints, even in networks beyond the control of the product designers, are essential to work to improve. The holistic user experience is only as good as it’s weakest link.

Having open vs. closed or propritary architectures is also a big factor in the success of a product’s ability (usually over-ambitious goal) to “corner the market”. It’s interesting to see devices like Chumby really taking the un-product approach and designed for hackability.

As more and more products (in our cars, what we wear, how we entertain ourselves and connect with those close to us) become inter-connected with service, retail environments and digital touchpoints, the thoughtfulness of each link between them is critical to the product living or dying the marketplace. Going the extra layers outward from the product to understand context of use and dependencies is the only way to model the experience for product ecosystem success.