User Interface Engineering

I’m betting, on June 29, 2007, there was a team of developers inside Apple corporation who were not very cheery about the successful launch of the iPhone. I’m betting, if such things were available, they were wearing their “Why not us?” t-shirts.

The launch of the iPhone proved to be very important, at least from a user experience perspective. People lined up for hours to get a phone, only because of the experience it promised.

Consumer electronics manufacturers everywhere (and producers of most other products) are now wondering, “how could we duplicate that experience?” How does someone build another product that matches the fervor which we saw on June 29th when the iPhone was officially released?

One manufacturer is probably the most curious of all: Apple. It is believed by many that Apple has the golden touch. But, based on what we saw this spring, it’s clear that’s not always true.

Announced on the same day as the iPhone was a sister product: Apple TV. Apple TV is to television what the iPhone is to mobile communication. At least, it seemed that’s what Steve Jobs wanted us to believe as he described it at the January product announcement.

It also seems the market doesn’t agree. Whereas the iPhone sold 270,000 units in its first few days of sales, Apple TV has only sold a few thousand. A few weeks ago, Josh Porter and I had the opportunity to go to the 5th Ave Apple Store in Manhattan (the temple known as the “cube”) and we watched people wander around the products. Every products (including obscure ones, like the external hard disk drives) had people playing and poking and generally hanging around.

Except the Apple TV. If you didn’t know better, you’d assume there was a force field around the demo unit. Not a person was anywhere nearby. It was a complete anomaly.

The Cube isn’t the only place I’ve observed the force-field phenomena. (Say that five times fast!) I’ve seen it in a dozen other Apple stores.

What happened to Apple TV? Why didn’t it take off? Was it that Apple didn’t do its homework like it did with the iPhone? Did they lose their Midas Touch? Did Steve screw up?

I think the answers are found in a couple of different places.

Strict Requirements

First, the Apple TV has some heavy requirements. You need to have HD television to get the most out of it. You need to want to watch movies. You need to be ok with watching fairly low-res HD movies. You need to have the patience to wait to download the movies. You need to restrict your movie choices to those available from Apple’s iTunes. (These aren’t strictly true, but this is the gist of it.)

So, to make Apple TV work for you, you have to constrain your television watching to a fairly strict regimen. The question then becomes, to what benefit? And that brings me to my next point.

Not Much To Disrupt

The second place to look is at recent advances in television technology. The TV world was disrupted a few years back with the advent of the TiVo. TiVo lets users watch TV at a time they choose, by recording the programs for later playback. It also gives pause, rewind, and fast forwarding capabilities, allowing users to control their experience.

The cable business leaped on the TiVo idea right away, with the introduction of a myriad of equivalent Digital Video Recorder (DVR) offerings.

The other big disruption has been with the advent of high-definition (HD) viewing. HD televisions are coming down in price, but the low-end sets don’t really offer something dramatically different than a good, crisp regular definition TV. Plus, HD viewing requires expensive cable services or limited-edition HD movies (which are often premium prices).

The Apple TV offering didn’t do much to enhance either of these things. All it really does it make it seamless to move movies from your computer to the set, which is nice, but apparently not enough to capture the imagination of the tv-peripheral-buying pubic.

No Improved Experience

One of the iPod’s advantages over its competitors was how easy it was to get music on the device. You plug it in and it’s there. For example, if I hear a song on my favorite radio station, it’s now two clicks to go from finding the song on the station’s playlist to playing it on my iPod. That’s a smooth experience.

Apple TV has a much more difficult experience. It can take hours for the user, from the time they have the urge to watch a movie to the time they can watch it on their machine. It’s not nearly as slick as the iPod experience.

The iPhone’s advantages

Over the last month and a half, I can’t tell you the number of Oh-you-have-an-iPhone!-Can-I-see-it? experiences I’ve witnessed at restaurants, parties, and meetings. The mobile-phone-using public has been desperate for a new, disruptive approach to mobile experiences. The technology promised a new experience and Apple seems to have delivered on it.

Apple TV isn’t there yet. The one person I’ve met who ones one said, “Yah, it’s not a whole lot different than my Microsoft Media Center and I don’t really use that very often.” It’s not compelling, which is why nobody lined up for it on it’s release day and nobody is getting cool-points for owning one.

Taking Risks

Apple has had failed products before. (See the Apple III, Lisa, QuickTake, Newton, and the Cube, to mention a few.) They are a company which sees value in taking risks.

It’s almost certain Apple will learn something with their venture into the television world. And, depending on what they learn, we’re likely to see something as a result, though it may not be for a while.

But what is more interesting is what the rest of us can learn from this. Just throwing a bunch of talented designers at a marketplace doesn’t necessarily produce a winning design. It seems you have to do your homework, but the market has to be ready for you to play in its sandbox. Timing is as important as anything.

The world seems to be ready for what an iPhone could be. It seems less ready for what Apple TV could be.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 10:07 am and is filed under Experience Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.