Opine Consulting » Apple

Is iPad the end of free content?

Simon Kirby — Sat, 29 May 2010 14:25:25 +0000

My resolution not to blog about Apple is withering away in the warm glow of early adoption.

My iPad arrived two days ago turning me into a four-year old boy on Xmas eve. Yesterday, a queue of cooing colleagues snaked around my desk. Everyone wants one.

So two days into ownership, this is what I think it means.

1. It WON’T replace laptops … Not yet anyway.

iPad is a device for consuming media, not for creating it. It’s hideous to type on. But lovely to browse with.

It’s much nicer to swipe and tap with your finger than to point and click with a mouse. So whether tablets get physical keyboards or laptops get natural user interfaces, this will change device design.

2. It’s ALREADY the device I want to use for casual surfing.

How did I ever manage without something that’s always on, weighs nothing and doesn’t burn my thighs? Enough said.

3. It WILL change the way I consume newspapers and magazines.

WIRED magazine on iPad is highly readable and wow-inducing. It pushes the boundary of what’s magazine and what’s interactive media and for the first time ever I would RATHER have a magazine in electronic than print format.

Talking of formats, I’d much rather read the Financial Times on my little iPad than wrestle with a print broadsheet on the train.

Coincidently, my WIRED magazine subscription got delivered on the same day as my iPad. I still haven’t opened the paper version.

4. It MIGHT change the way I buy books.

Integrated search, in-line dictionaries and the ability to carry half the British Library in my hand are nice.

But I wrestle with this. You see, my Mother was a teacher. My maternal grandfather was a Cambridge academic. I’m co-author of a book (here … thank you for asking). Books are in my blood; almost religiously. I love the novelty and utility of eBooks. But they don’t take me back to when I was six years old and my Mum read poems to me. There’s almost something sacrilegious about them.

Maybe that’s just generational change-resistance.

5. It WILL make me pay more for media.

Hello iPad. Goodbye free content?

I know several entrepreneurs whose attempts to charge for online content succeeded about as well as King Canute’s wave management. iPad apps might possible turn the tide against free content because the experience is so good.

Pricing models for iPad media content are a little Darwinian right now. They range from The Times £9.99 per month subscription to Men’s Health’s $2.99 per issue to Wired’s free content. Which pricing model proves the fittest for the iPad environment remains to be seen. But I personally think it will be disruptive of the free content model.

In summary

Is the iPad useful? Definitely. Is it compelling? Hmm … kind of. Is it a disruptive innovation? Possibly. Is it the end of the laptop? No.

Now, repeat after me:

I must not blog about Apple. I must not blog about Apple. I must not blog about Apple …

Design for experience, not features

Simon Kirby — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:51:25 +0000

The problem with product development

The iPhone is one of the least usable phones for sending text and email but gets the highest consumer satisfaction of any smartphone. Why? It’s product design that’s based around experience not features.

Small usability, big love

An average iPhone user makes almost three times more errors per text message than someone using a hard-key QWERTY phone (see
usercentric.com). But googling the terms “iPhone love” gets about 336 million results and the iPhone has higher customer satisfaction than any other smartphone (see JDPower consumer research, here
).

Experience not features

It’s not just less usable. If anything, the iPhone has less features than many competitors. Mobile email, voicemail and mobile web browsing are hardly new, you can’t forward a text or voicemail and the camera is positively primitive.

But it does have Apple’s trademark obsession about experience. This isn’t just in the fluidity of the interface or the resolved simplicity of the case. If you buy one in an Apple store it will be “served” to you with a flourish like Michelin-starred food.

Product developers spend lots of time benchmarking product features and prioritising them using techniques like conjoint analysis. What we need to do more of is design, customer ethnography and journey mapping to build experiences out of our products.

How to time product launches perfectly

Simon Kirby — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:59:25 +0000

Here’s a contrasting tale of two Apple products that struck me recently. Wired Magazine carried a story about Apple’s 1983 design for an ‘iTablet’ here. Twenty-seven years later and the iPad is finally launched. In 1989, Apple did start developing the Apple Newton, an early personal digital assistant. Despite brilliant, breakthrough functionality, the Newton was canned in 1998, following a prolonged commercial flop.

Premature genius and the art of timing

The change curve in product development

Premature genius is one of the most overlooked challenges of product development. To visualise the problem, think of a change curve. Launch too early and no amount of marketing and development spend will get you to take off. Launch too late and you may not catch up with competitors.

There’s an important nuance in the story about the Apple Newton. It may have seemed like a failure. But, an ex-Apple staffer tells me that there’s a direct line of sight between the technical and human lessons which Apple learned on the Newton and the huge success of iPod and iPhone. No Newton, no iPod, no iPhone.

Three key disciplines for perfect launch timing

New product development needs to be framed in the present and future. There are three key disciplines for achieving that:

Trend analysis. Create private foresight out of public knowledge by identifying precisely what trends affect your product idea and understanding exactly where you are on the change curve.
Invest in corporate memory of rejected ideas and failed products. Put in place structured PRINCE2 style lessons learned documentation. Put old concepts on ice and review them regularly.
Identify the modular“components” of innovation be it an insight into customer needs, a process or technology. An entire concept may not have worked, but many of its building blocks could be entirely sound.