What does Apple get that Sony, HP, Microsoft, Dell, Samsung, and LG don’t?…. Usability in software. All these other geeks out there making hardware love packing on “specs”, stuffing big numbers like RAM, gigahertz, and hard drive space into small or cool looking gadgets. It all looks good on paper, but after you use one of their gadgets for more than a few weeks, you just want to throw it out a window. Thousands of new gadgets released every year all using the same-old crappy unfriendly, unintuitive, unattractive software. It’s no wonder so many are flocking to Apple when we can just pickup one of their simplistic products, start taping and swiping our fingers, and lo and behold… it just does what we want it to do. Of course, it isn’t easy, or cheap, to make software this user friendly, which is why everyone is having such a hard time keeping up.
As a software developer, I hear the phrase “I just want it to…”. Which, as any experienced software developer knows, is the most expensive phrase we ever hear. People have software needs all the time, which may require vast complicated effort to achieve, but they want it to hide all that complication behind a simple and user-friendly interface. What most people don’t know is that making software do just about anything doesn’t cost nearly as much as making it easy and intuitive for them to use. This lack of cost awareness is what ruins so many “brilliant” product ideas.
Sony is, in my opinion, the worst offender. In the past decade, I have seen Sony release cutting-edge gadgets to the market before anyone else. The PSP was an amazing gadget when it came out, in theory. It played music, videos, viewed photos, surfed the web, and of course, played games. The problem was that, excluding the last feature, it didn’t do any of them well. In fact, all the claimed features were so hard to use that almost no one could figure it out. Then, even more idiotically, Sony received reports that users were not using the extra features and stopped improving them! Sony could have been the what the iPod Touch is today, but lost the chance with bad software.
But I don’t just write this to rant, I write this as a warning to other business owners and entrepreneurs out there. Developing software and technology is one thing, but making it user friendly is another. In fact, usability can consume up to 80% of a project’s time and resources. That is, if your actually going to make something people will want to use. You have to build it, review it, fix it, test it, fix it, beta release, fix it, get feedback, fix it, get more feedback, fix it… and maybe… just maybe… people will be able to actually use it.
This is why the only mobile platform even close to keeping up with Apple is Google’s Android. Google is the only one in the fight with the know-how and resources to keep up. Even RIM, makers if the Blackberry, can’t keep their mobile software up to par, they have to invest in starting from scratch or spending huge resources in fixing what they have.
If you or your company has a “great idea” for an application or gadget, just remember, once you price the development… multiply it a couple times for usability.
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The point of this article is lost due to the zealotry use of Apple as the UX king. Apple’s empire is based probably more on marketing prowess than UI design. They also take the worst possible approach to that UI design: Make things easy by removing any options that might allow a mistake to be made. The points in the post are all valid:
-Larger companies have run out of excuses for not focusing the time and effort on UI/UX.
-Because a feature is not being used does not mean that no one wants to use it. Developers need to pay attention to their audiences and figure out what they are using their software for and how they are using it.
-Good Usability Engineering is hard and therefor expensive, partially due to that bias against it in traditional software development houses. The few people who are willing to focus on this are viewed by the old and intermediate schools of software engineers as Artsy Fruits, and associated with the negative bias already surrounding Apple for these developers. They also charge an exorbitant rate since many of them work as consultants and feel they can present themselves as the visionary artiste.
The wrong lesson here is to say that Apple is the crowned king of usability and no one will be able to compete until they join the ranks of the be-turtlenecked, rounded corners, “we must save the user from themselves!” engineers.
The lesson that should be learned is to in-house Usability studies. Take it seriously like the functional requirements. Don’t put it on an altar and make the entire application or system about what your UI designer says their vision is. Study Google, study Apple, study Ubuntu, study doorknobs for all I care. Study anything that you pick up and think “Yeah that was pretty easy to figure out”, sometimes companies who are not Apple do these things. Even Microsoft has had a few gems, mostly recent developments but still. STUDY these things and then draw your own conclusions. Don’t jump into the iHerd. “Think Different.”
I think the post is pretty much spot on. Apple does do a lot of marketing but is not the reason people like their products. People like Apple’s products because they ARE easy for them to use. If you make sure that something you make is going to be locked down and difficult to break but not to the point where you take away usability then people will love you, iTunes is a prime example of this. The only people that want a device to do everything are Geeks.
A perfect example is an ipad, it’s not for us geeks, it is for our parents, grandparents, people who have trouble with technology, which is why it is an oversized ipod touch. The key is finding a proper balance between usability, security, performance and functions. Right now Apple can do no wrong, it will be interesting to see if they can keep it up into the future or if Google or Microsoft (if they can keep their act together)
Phil, are you talking about Macs, or about other products? If you’re talking about the iPhone family, I have no argument.
But if you’re talking about Macs, I have to disagree. MacOS offers far more flexibility in serious customization than Windows. It’s more scriptable, the moving parts are better documented and easier to get at, and overall it’s a programmer’s dream by comparison. After many years of developing on both, I don’t take Windows platform gigs anymore, it’s just too unpleasant fighting against Redmond every step of the way.
I’m working on implementing a $130M system for my company. The GUI is absolutely atrocious and unusable. A good portion of it is completely non-functional. When I ask the vendor engineers how to get something done if the GUI can’t be made to do it they say, “GUI? We never use that. We do everything through the back door.” And it’s true. They do everything by writing SQL queries and writing snippets of C code. Since they do everything that way, they never question the fact that the GUI is unusable for the end consumer, my operators. My operators don’t have the expertise to use the backdoor methods, nor am I going to give them that kind of access. The GUI has to work for them.
I think this is the mindset behind Windows and most of the Dell, HP, and Sony hardware in the world. Apple’s success is due 100% to their willingness and ability to depart from that model and put themselves in the end user’s position and mindset.
Restricting possible options is exactly what 98% of people want. Almost no one wants to “figure out” how to use a device or use software. That’s what UI engineers are paid for.
@Phil
You are completely full of shit.
Every one who picks my iPad can use it without a 1000 page manual.
That is what makes Apple great.
Apple’s S/W strategy reminds me of the automotive industry; just because you CAN enable multiple features, that doesn’t mean it will improve the users experience. Focus on what experience the customer expects, then stick to it. Like Sony of Microsoft, too many good ideas get hijacked by feature creep that turns an elegant design into a swiss knife of bland. Think Porsche (most profitable automotive company!) and you imagine 911 performance, but GM (bankrupt) has a wide family of bland.
@ Phil,
What are you talking about ?
U.S. Army Officials Visit Apple Campus as Agency Weighs Purchasing and Development Plans
According to Army representatives, the military is looking to take advantage of Apple’s reputation for building intuitive devices and software that require little training to operate and to not only take advantage of Apple’s existing efforts but also apply lessons learned by Apple to the Army’s own development projects.
Thanks PHIL.
@Phil
Your UI might be fine but you have some software, uhm, possibly hardware limitations…
cheers!
Spot on post.
IMO Apples design, quality and user interface is far superior to the competitions.
This “iherd” joke is complete BS. Just because many people prefer Apple products doesn’t mean they’re stupid, ignorant or following the pack.
At least for now it’s very simple, Apple is just better.
What a lot of people don’t realize is the iphone OS is decades in the making. The iPhone OS is a super refinement of OS X that was released in the early 2000′s which itself is a super refinement of the NEXT operating system released in the 1990′s which itself is built on a solid foundation of BSD UNIX developed in the 1980′s. The iPhone OS thus represents hundreds of person years of development (when taken times the number of engineers who worked on it.) On top of that, all of this development except the UNIX part has been tightly directed by a man with a singular focus on usability.
Any OS is extremely difficult to create from the ground up. Microsoft had a very difficult time getting Vista out the door. Apple too tried to create a new OS to replace OS 9 but failed; their solution being to purchase NEXT and bring Jobs back.
This is the reason the competition is having a such a difficult time competing. Jobs has been plugging away at this for a long, long time, all the while the world was deriding his efforts and scoffing at Apple. As a result, there is extremely mature sophistication in the iPhone OS that can only be truly matched if a company spent a decade + of highly focused work on it.
The iPhone OS hums. The iPhone OS/Snow Leopard OS X is a flexible, highly trained thoroughbred athlete of an OS while Android and maybe Palm’s WebOS are like amateur athletes who have a membership at 24 hour fitness. Sadly, all the rest of the competition are like couch potatoes that have been told they have to get up and start training for the olympics.
So even if the competition embrace the suggestions in this article, they still need the one resource they cannot afford: time.
This article is right on target, and it applies to much more than Apple. If you take a look at the history of computing you will see that good interfaces drove out specifications every time. Do you remember when Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect dominated the market? They fell fast and hard because the UI for Microsoft Office for Windows was far superior to the UIs for these products. As an aside, has anyone noticed how close the Blackberry UI is to Lotus 1-23′s?
@Phil,
I understand your point but I think missing the real point, people just want it to work.
Computers are tools not Code Gods to worship. If it ain’t easy it will fail. The only reason
MS got the market was because there was no better choice. Now Apple will have the market until someone else makes something easier.
You might want to start doing Apple development if you want to stay relevant.
Why did HP’s tablet fail where Apple’s has succeeded? One Word, Windows.
@thomas:
what you dont realize is that all the big manufacturers have spent thousands of work years in tuning their OS:s. You seriously dont think MS has spent less devtime on their OS than apple ?
the reason appl is triumphant at the moment is that their os is simple to adapt and to use,and it is pretty. It is like in stone ages, when some clever folks came up with hammer, still the most popular tool was stone out of pink rock. That is what situation is which “smartphone” competition in US nowadays.
@tmu
I think the difference for MS is 4 fold: when DOS and Windows was begun, networking and the internet were only vaguely foreseen and the issues with security were not addressed at the onset and were tacked on later. UNIX was conversely developed at universities from the ground up with network security in mind.
Also, MS did not focus nearly as heavily on clean interfaces and refined usability. Yes it was very accessible for a geek, but did not take into account the points in this article.
Furthermore, MS’s OS did not have a single driving vision throughout, but instead was sort of designed by committee and managerial infighting.
Lastly, Windows has become a rat’s nest of legacy driven spaghetti code where as Jobs has put a real emphasis on modularity and clean coding. He was/is also willing to dump legacy code to keep the OS modern.
So yes, Microsoft has put the person-years into their OS. But Windows, over its years of development, has lacked the direction of a driving force with the same singularity of vision OS X has had. I do not mean to bash Windows, but under the hood it is a bit of a bloated mess that cannot be easily scaled down for mobiles.
As for the others: Linux (and therefore Android) is in much better position to compete having been based on UNIX. Google is bringing a respectable effort to Android but still is a distance behind. As for the rest, they don’t appear to have the expertise to put it together when competing against the sophisticated core frameworks in the iPhone OS.
@thomas:
good reply & valid points.
What comes to MS, theyre out, i’ll agree. My point was meant to be against your “OSX decades in the making” comment. I am sure that all major players have invested more and failed in making their mobile OS as usable as appl.
In the long run though, winners will be Koreans and most likely Nokia. They’ve had their hiccups now, amd soon theyll roll out an armada of phones. Their cost-effiency cannot be beaten, if you compare quality with price. With quality, I meand Q of 3g radio of phone, chipset or battery.Things that matter in long run. UI/UX they will copy from appl if it is decent. Im not sure it is. (great feats& expandable with apps, lacks modification for serious smartphone users)
what comes to OS wars,
iphone os is the plat to beat now, in terms of usability.
In other categories, it plain loses to any other main platform available (android, symbian, meego/maemo, Bada, MSOS)
Of those, I simply dont understand why one uses android, while there are free linux mob OSes around.
I also find quite amusing reading US analytics’ comments abt smartphone OSes. They ALL think their small neighbourhood is dominant marketplace. funny.
Apple products are simple to use, not “simplistic”.
Writing with poor English reduces your credibility.
Phil you have no idea at all what you are talking about.
Wow. As a consumer, I respect and love the companies that put out great products. Good job guys.
Apple’s marketing works, in part, because their message is true to their brand and their products.
You see, to reach most consumers you must convey your product’s Benefits — not just its Features. (“Batteries Included” is a Feature. Your child having fun the very moment they open the box is a Benefit.)
And Apple is a Benefit-providing company at heart.
Sadly, most software companies can’t resist the lure of what some call “Feature Creep” — that oh-so-tempting urge to pile on Feature after Feature, while paying little or no attention to whether those features provide real Benefits. “What’s the down-side?” is often the engineer’s implicit question. Unlike in hardware, in software new Features are practically free! And often, so-called marketing departments really believe that saying “Over 100 new Features!” is a unique selling point.
But it’s not. It’s just a number that conveys a grand total of ZERO Benefits. If, before proposing a new Feature, software designers would simply ask “What’s the Benefit for the end user?” our world, and the technology that powers, it would be made better. And I have no doubt that Apple employees asks themselves this question a hundred times a day.
Accidentaly stumbling over this forum I could hardly avoid to laugh out loud. This is a post from geeks for geeks. Most of these opinions have hardly anything to do with the expectations of the rest of us (99,9% +).
By the way, since “poor English seems to reduce credibility”: Sorry for my poor English – it is not my first, not even my second language.
Being a consumer and not a geek and as this in the company I work for responsible for the organisation and their processes I’m in a constand figth with the the technicians over software solutions and user interfaces. They can build pretty much everything what’s possible but who in the world wants this. Almost no user wants full flexibility and all the features which are in the box. All they want is an easy solution for the problem to solve; and in this it should always be an improvement over the past (including ease of use).
This said, the main effort in all our software projects is / should be put into user acceptance and positve user experiences. It’s al about user acceptance and with it comes image. Positve Image supports acceptance and so on. A technically good software solution will never be used according to plan if there is no acceptance or positive image attached to it.
And in case of Apple this seems to be (at least to me) the reason for their success. Most of the time they deliver a great user experience, gain acceptance for their solutions, improve their image and keep up with what they promised. The few shortcomings of their products (and there are some) are mainly overlooked because the rest of it works just perfectly. Additionally I – as a user – participate from apples image which adds to my good experience.
@Phil
“Make things easy by removing any options that might allow a mistake to be made. ”
For a consumer product like iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc.. that sounds like a darn good idea. People want to push a button and watch things work, not spend time figuring out what button to push.
Many years ago, I wrote my PhD dissertation on a Mac.
Then, after entering the industry, as an ergonomist, at work I had and have to live with a Windows PC as it is company standard. Having to learn Windows and MS Office was a nightmare for me. But because of job requirements I also have a PC at home. As a result I am spending about 10% to 20% of my PC time figuring out what went wrong, or how to do this or that. I actually started writing my own “tutorials” or “manuals” for things I had figured out so I will be able to do them again next time. Am I too stupid? Well, I am a user not a geek. Computers for me are like screw drivers – they are a tool to do something with. When I grab my screw driver I want it to work, immediately, and the way I expect it to work.
Under these conditions my ergonomic evaluation of Windows based PCs and MS software usibility is simple: it’s crap.
Last year my wife finally wanted her own lap top. She was sick of having to share my PC and use my time asking me how to do this or that. And – frankly – I was sick of telling my wife that it is NOT her fault and that she is not too stupid to use a PC. MS is still a crippling disease without a cure…
So I bought my wife a McBook for Christmas. All problems were solved. Except one: my 16 yr. old son is now mainly using her McBook. Guess what he will get for his 17th birthday…
If you think usability, Apple has the edge. And this by far. I am glad Apple exists – otherwise the geeks at MS would still tell us that it is not possible.
Apple shows us that Usability oriented software design is possible.
@Phil hear hear, I strongly agree
Apple understand the user’s mind. Their design is about thinking things that is not needed rather than cramping in more and more stuff like Microsoft. Just compares Microsoft Office with Apple’s iWork. You see gazillion icons and menus in Office that you don’t bother to use and clutter the screen, while in iWorks, it has only few icons.