As you can probably tell from my past posts, I’m a big fan of Apple product, especially the iPhone. This video does a great job of highlighting the marketing and design savvy that comes from Apple. It’s terrifically funny, too.

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

This is a picture of a late night broadcast of SportsCenter during playback through my DVR. What’s interesting to me is the column of topics along the right edge of the screen. The current story is the highlighted topic at the top of the column. As the story finishes, the list scrolls up and the next topic moves into the highlight and sits at the top.

When watching in real time, this is useful by letting me know what’s coming up in the broadcast. But the real value is when I’m watching from a recording. For me, SportsCenter is the perfect candidate for recorded viewing. In an hour broadcast, there’s probably only about 15 minutes worth of content that I’m truly interested in. And that’s why this list of topics of so useful. I’m able to fast forward to exactly what interests me in a very easy way. I don’t need to guess what the story is about by watching the picture on the screen - I can simply look at the topics as they scroll up.

This is a case where the UI is embedded in the content with a usefulness that is maximized through DVR usage. Brilliant. I don’t know if this was the intentional design (if anybody knows, please let me know) or if it’s a wonderful side-effect of putting a topic list along the side, but the value it adds to the way in which I watch SportsCenter is significant. 

This last week, we had two types of tangerines in our fruit bowl. One was wonderfully juicy and sweet. The other kind was enjoyable, but not nearly as succulent as the first kind. I ended up finishing off our stock of the second kind first. Why? Because they were really easy to peel.

Yes, I know. This is a fairly trite example and really, how important is it that I can peel one kind of tangerine 20 seconds faster than the other kind? Well, important enough that I ate them all first and I go to the store looking to buy the easy to peel kind and not the other. That’s 10 seconds vs. 30 seconds of peeling!

So imagine that the taste of the fruit is the feature. It’s what the customer eventually consumes. It needs to be promising enough that the fruit is an attractive purchase, but it doesn’t need to be the best. What it does need is easy access. By making the innards significantly easier to access, the growers can sell me a fruit that is whole lot more enjoyable, even if it’s a little less tasty.

That’s what a great user experience is all about.

Update 6/5/08:

Apparently, lots of other people agree with me.

“Addressing Usability in the Wake of the iPhone”. This was the title of a session I attended at CTIA a couple weeks ago. Based on the title, it sounded promising and I was excited to hear what the panelists had to say. Unfortunately, it was a major letdown and showed me that too many people still don’t understand what user experience and usability are really about.

The panelists included senior management of some intriguing newcomers as well as long-established companies. But the entire 90 minutes was spent talking about the features that they would provide in their products. There was lots of talk along the lines of, “We have this new, great technology that users definitely want and it’s important to provide a great user experience.” Then they would describe in detail the feature set without further discussion about how to bring the great user experience to life.

This showed me that focus in the industry is still very much on feature lists with minimal understanding of how to create great experiences that involve those features. Yes, it would be great if I could perform x feature on my phone, but only if the threshold of usage were low enough that I would actually use it. Unfortunately, this message was completely lacking during the panel. This wouldn’t have been so thoroughly disappointing except for the fact that the title of the session was “Addressing Usability”!

Overall, what I saw at CTIA was disappointing from a UX perspective. There is some great industrial design happening and definitely some wonderful technological features being developed, but in my mind there’s still only one major player who has demonstrated a commitment to excellence in mobile UX. (That would be Apple, in case you’re still wondering).