Quickly, “cool sites” began appearing with interfaces looking like the came from an HR Giger piece. Real world, “life like” virtual experiences became cropping up left and right. Navigation backgrounds and footers made of steel and aluminum were all the rage. Anyone who remembers these websites or witnesses them today (you can still see then now and again as young designers test their Photoshop skills), remembers a sense of “uneasiness” to the experience. Despite the intention for replication, the design’s felt “unnatural” and, much to the designers chagrin, completely unauthentic. Closer to reality was the goal, not the other way around. It quickly became obvious that just because you could, doesn’t mean you  should.

Another good example of this is in Character creation and CGI work. When you see a movie like Shrek, you never doubt the characters as they are created because there is a purposeful non-lifelike creation in their design. Your brain disassociates reality’s expectations and “goes along for the ride”. Authenticity is more easily accepted because the shackles of expectation are removed. An opposite example of this is was Robert Zemeckis’s Polar Express. I for one found the children in this movie somewhat creepy and would always get distracted from the story because the efforts to achieve “realness” had crossed a, albeit subjective, line.

You see, the space you are reading this very posting in is a different medium. It is a different space. You may project yourself at times into that space, but in the end, you deal with it in a different context than watching television or sitting in a movie theater. No matter how much you try to fool the brain, the consciousness is a complicated mechanism. Peripheral vision and the other senses are so much more involved in perception of reality than we ever give credit too. Depth and effective lighting simple isn’t going to fool a million years of evolution.

Instead, I propose designers work within the medium to create an experience, don’t fight it. Don’t replace something that doesn’t need replacing. I pose the question that just because we stack things with our hands in “real life” does that mean stacking things in “virtual life” creates a more authentic experience? Don’t get me wrong, these explorations are exciting and sometimes fun, but I recommend cautiousness in declaring innovative and next-gen products. You may find yourself going down an evolutionary dead-end.

As needs become more ubiquitous on hardware that better suites those needs, its my prediction we will see less “generalized” devices such as the “notebook”. Smart Companion devices will be more focused yet flexible. Will the notebook makers be ahead of this curve or behind?

“I’m tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The “This will work in the next version.” The “It’s in our roadmap.” The “Buy now and upgrade later.” The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn’t tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I’m tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years…

Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products.”

Netflix is investing in telephone customer service, based in Oregon,
to provide the edge they need in building an all-around good
customer experience, to beat Blockbuster. An interesting strategy
for an online company.

Here’s a NYT story - http://urlx.org/nytimes.com/5937f - that
discusses the investment:

> Netflix [decided against] other lower-cost places in the United
> States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would
> present a friendlier voice to its customers. Then in July, Netflix
> took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated
> e-mail-based customer service inquiries. Now all questions,
> complaints and suggestions go to the Hillsboro call center, which
> is open 24 hours a day. The company’s toll-free number, previously
> buried on the Web site, is now prominently displayed.

Netflix teaches two lessons here in customer experience management:

- Fix the site first: For an online company, the website is the
primary experience. Netflix did the right thing by optimizing their
site first, and then looked to optimize the secondary experience -
customer service requests, which only crop up after the customer has
gone through the site experience.

- If you invest, do it right: Netflix invested not just in “more
call reps” (which may have been nice in a press release but not
great in reality) but in a more expensive domestic call center. And
not just any domestic call center; it found the best city for its
needs - polite Portland, Oregon.

The outcome of the Netflix-Blockbuster battle is yet undetermined
(the latter has size and retail locations as advantages), but I like
Netflix’s ongoing commitment to customer experience.

Data presentation can be both beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data ables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/

Feature creep is also in evidence in cosmetics: “When Lancome discontinued a moisturizer called Nutrix in 2004 to make way for a new version, Nutrix Royal, the company received more than 1,000 phone calls, e-mail messages and letters from bewildered devotees.” Lancome eventually relented and re-introduced the original. In cars, BMW has evolved “from a nimble and relatively small car” of the 1980s into a “heavy luxury liner” today. A Honda spokesperson also admits that the company “might have abandoned its old customer base, those who want small, practical, inexpensive cars.” It responded by introducing “the compact $13,850 Fit wagon … and sold all 50,000 imported into the United States.”

MAC Cosmetics, meanwhile, “has a section on its website called Goodbyes, where it sells limited edition or discontinued products, like Speed Demon Lip Varnish.” However, some companies see the value of sticking “with a successful product even as fashions change … Since 1993, Casio has been selling the same dependable digital watch, model F30-9, fo $7.95, with the same functions — time and date in a black case, on a black band, nothing more. And since 1983, the company has sold 45 million of its G-Shock series of digital watches.” Casio plans to celebrate its 25th anniversary next year with “a special version of its first model, the DW-500, which came only in black.” Except that this time it will be white. As Casio’s David Johnson explains: “White is wicked hot in watches right now.”

Only $240!!

Get more information here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/splat/sets/981332/

Last week, I spoke at a cellular-industry conference in Lake Como, Italy.

My topic was the increasing number of cool services that tie together the phone and the Internet. I’ve reviewed a number of these service in The Times recently: GrandCentral, which makes all your phones ring at once so people don’t have to hunt you down (and was just bought by Google); Teleflip, which turns your e-mail into text messages on your phone; SimulScribe, which turns voicemail messages into text that arrives on your phone or ine-mail; and so on. The talk went well, but in the end, I wound up learning as much from the attendees as they did from me.

The cellular industry is going through insanely rapid change. Almost everyone there - 800 attendees from 200 phone companies in 65 countries - was running scared of VOIP. That’s voice over I.P., better known as Internet phone. VOIP includes cheapo unlimited home-phone service like Vonage, as well as absolutely free computer-to-computer calling with programs like Skype. It’s all growing like crazy, which is making a huge dent in these companies’ ARPU.

Oh, yeah - that’s Average Revenue Per User. Telecom companies live and breathe ARPU. The talks at this conference were all about “Improving Your ARPU.” (They *love* acronyms in this business. Typical seminar description: “Learn how ISM and FSM can decrease your OPEX and CAPEX and boost your ARPU!”) Most of these carriers intend to fight off VOIP by growing into a Double Play, Triple Play, or even Quad Play. What, you don’t know those terms either!?

If you’re a single-play company, you just provide landline service. Add cellphone coverage, and you’re a double play. Add Internet service and TV, and you’re a quad play. You can see the same syndrome here in the U.S., too, as cellphone companies try to deliver TV service, cable companies roll out phone service, and so on.

On the exhibit floor, companies were demonstrating very, very cool next-generation services for the onrushing era of unified communications. FastWeb, a company that started only in 2000 and is now a $365 million quad-play company in Italy, lets its customers watch any TV show that’s aired in the past three days, on any channel, whenever they like. It’s like retroactive TiVo.

Other demos included upcoming services that let you text messages to and from characters inside Second Life, the virtual-reality game; a software module that brings your phone’s incoming text messages onto your computer screen, so you don’t miss them and can reply with your keyboard; and various systems that unify your communications (voice, text messages and chat, for example), giving you a single address book and mailbox for all of them.

You know how young people are spending $10 billion a year on ringtones, just because it lets them express themselves? The next big thing, I’m convinced, will be avatars. This feature, too, was on display: You design your own little character, or avatar, choosing a hairstyle, clothes, facial features and so on. Then, whenever you call people, your character appears on their cellphone screens. I’ll bet avatars will be the next huge teen fad in 2010 or so.

But don’t look for any of these goodies here in the United States.

I get the distinct impression that American cellphone carriers are calcified, conservative and way behind their
European and Asian counterparts. (For one thing, I wasn’t aware of any cellphone companies from the United States at this conference.)

One guy at the conference told me that his company, which sells software modules to cell carriers, had developed visual voicemail-a highly touted feature of Apple’s iPhone, in which your voicemail appears on the phone like e-mail messages-*three years ago.* It had no takers among American carriers. (”This week, our phones are ringing off the hook,” he told me sardonically. “We’re digging the CD’s out of storage.”)

I also remember hearing friends on the Palm Treo team tell me what a nightmare it was to sell their early phones to the American carriers, who traditionally wield veto power and design control over every feature of the phone. The Treo team had all kinds of great ideas for improving the design and software of cellphones - but those carriers turned up their noses with a “we know what’s best” attitude.

As you can imagine, the iPhone was a primary conversation topic at this conference. Lots of grudging admiration and amazement at what Apple pulled off.

Not just technologically, either. The biggest impact of the iPhone may be the way Steve Jobs managed to change the phone maker/cell carrier relationship for the first time in years. “We’ll give you an exclusive,” Apple told AT&T, “and you’ll let us do whatever we like. We’re going to handle the billing. We’re going to take the signup process out of your stores and let people do it at home. You’re going to redesign your network so that it works with our visual voicemail system.” And so on.

Stan Sigman, president and chief executive for wireless at AT&T, is on record as saying that he had no idea what Apple’s phone would be like when he agreed to this-a deal that would have been unthinkable in the pre-Jobs era.

If the iPhone becomes a hit, then, it could wind up loosening the carriers’ stranglehold on innovation. Maybe phone makers’ imaginations will at last be unleashed, and a thousand iPhone-like breakthroughs might bloom.

The cellular executives at the conference didn’t seem to oppose this development; indeed, several were thrilled by the shift, as though they’d been feeling just a little uneasy about the whole “we’re-the-gatekeeper” thing themselves. That’s really exciting stuff.

Note to the cell carriers: Go with this new flow. You’ll only improve your ARPU.

(P.S. … As longtime Pogue’s Posts readers know, my biggest cellular pet peeve is the endless recording you hear when you reach someone’s voicemail: “To page this person, press 2 now. You may leave a message at the tone. When you finish recording, you may hang up. Or press 5 for more options”- and so on.

At the conference, I asked one cellular executive if that message is deliberately recorded slowly and with as many
words as possible, to eat up your airtime and make more ARPU for the cell carrier. I was half kidding - but he wasn’t fooling around in his reply: “Yes.” The secret’s out.)