April 3 @ 2:15pm
An Event Apart Seattle 2018
@lukew
Jeremy started us off this morning by starting with the future, but he was talking about flying cars and other fancy things.
He’s here to talk about the future but he’s primarily talking about what’s going on with computers.
There have been 3 main ‘Eras’ with computing:
- “Mainframe Era” – computers take up rooms and you don’t have one.
- “PC Era” – computers fit on desks and more and more people have one
- “Mobile Era” – everybody’s got one, and they’re with them all the time and are always connected.
This Mobile era of computer kicked off 10 years ago when the original iPhone was released in June on 2007.
“What we wanna do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been…” – Steve Jobs. He references this leapfrog affect where he wants the iPhone to ‘jump over’ where they were then and move to the next era.
The first ‘smartphones’ were things like Blackberry and Palm brand phones.
In 2007 there were roughly 70 million personal computers (desktops) shipped per year. In 2016 / 2017 the number of desktop personal computers being sold kind of plateaued and it really doesn’t look like much has changed in 10 years.
But then if you add in the ‘mobile line’ (smartphone and tablets), it’s skyrocketed and ‘plateaued’ around 1.7 billion devices. Pretty good place to plateau.
Skype took 630 days to 40M users.
Supermario Run which was only available on the iPhone app store took 4 days to get to 40M downloads.
So there are all these devices with all these audiences, but the audiences aren’t just for companies that are established. It’s not uncommon for something new that has emerged to hit millions of people quickly.
Clearly, building audiences is a totally different ballgame than it was before based on the computing era we’re now in.
Ok but is anybody making any money?
Let’s go back 10 years and analyze annual mobile payment volume for PayPal. In 2006 they did less than $1 million. Last year, it was $155 billion in 2017. More devices, more people, more money, right? And it’s also interesting to compare where we here in teh United States relative to the rest of the world. In United States the biggest shopping day of the year is CYYYBERRR MONDAAAAAAYYYY.
Cyber Monday
10 years ago did $610 million in online sales in one day
Last year it was $6.95 billion in one day for Cyber Monday
China: Their largest online shopping day is Single’s Day. They do $25 billion in online sales that day. 33% of sales in the US on Cyber Monday happened on a mobile device, but for Single’s Day in China its 90%!
We are hitting a point where all the addressable people start to become connected. And if you draw a line about 10 years ago to cut off the previous 20, you see a lot of change in a small amount of time. Seeing this change happen over the past 10 years or less, and making products that work on the backbone of the internet, and bring people data and services and connect them…. he’s very interested in ‘what have we learned?’
It looks like things have changed pretty dramatically, but HAVE WE?
Have we kept pace with this change?
To go back to the introduction of the iPhone – he likes looking at the iPhone because there’s a certain level of stability there. The original iPhone camera had 2 features: 1) take a picture, 2) look at your pictures.
But then came iOS 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7… and the introduction of flat design. And then of course iOS 8, 9, 10, and today we are at iOS11 where you can:
- Take a picture
- view it
- take a square photo, a panoramic photo, a live photo, a portrait photo, a video, etc etc etc.
Some people look at this like a case of ‘feature creep.’ It sure got complicated!
Other people look at this and say this was a great example of giving people a minimal viable product, and then you improve it.
If you go to a flat design you might not get the same impact you were hoping for… Lol.
Let’s look at messaging. In the first version of the iPhone, you could message some people, but you could text message them. There were NO EMOJIs. You could only send TEXT.
Now, not only could you send text, you can send images, you can record a video live, you can search for GIFs and embed them, you can use it as a walkie talkie, you can freaking record your heart beat and draw on top of it….
And back to the camera, you could share photos but you had to EMAIL them. What a terrible cruel world. Now, you can send images a ton of ways, you can customize those options, tweak them…
When you look at these 10 years of additions across all aspects of this operating system, what is the cumulative effect? Are we empowering people or terrifying people?
If you work on apps or websites, you do 1 or 2 things: add stuff or redesign stuff.
So let’s look at redesigning:
10 years of the evolution of the iPhone calculator app… have we come full circle? Does this ‘add up’ to a set up well rounded designs? Are we just going round and round? “I’m a dad, I could do this all day” lol
Let’s look at something else. Let’s look at the Twitter iOS app:
With Facebook Mobile, there are at least 72 versions of the mobile navigation live right now!
Looking at 10 years of eBay app design, he asks:
- How many hours of meetings went into 10 years of this?!!!!?!
- What is the weight of the emails if you printed them out of doing this?!!
- How many cumulative lifetimes were spent working on this over 10 years?!”
I guarantee things got better. I’m sure the latest version of the eBay app is working better than the first one. I’m sure it’ better, iteration is great. But he has to ask, “are we just moving pixels around?”
Have we just spent 10 years and x number of human lifetimes moving pixels around on a screen?
As we build for mobile are we just taking the same processes for desktop design and moving them over to mobile design?
Where are all of these iterations taking us?
Yes, it’s good to learn and iterate and make things better.
Login screens are important for lots of reasons. When we moved to mobile is we took usernames and passwords and just plopped them onto the small screen the way they were on desktop. Even though the keyboard is tiny and it’s super easy to screw up your password which makes it very hard to get it right, your password still appears as dots. So that was iterated on and improved a bit but it’s still just desktop procedure smushed into a phone.
75% of people that forget their password don’t complete the password recovery process and then don’t checkout. Seeing their password as they type it in makes everything easier for them and increases business for the company.
75% used SHOW to unmask the password. 88% of people unmasked the password after typing their first character.
But all of this makes him wonder if we’re just doing our damndest to make desktop stuff not super bad on mobile?
Amazon now lets you sign in with your thumbprint if your phone has that ability.
We need some kind of vision to drive us – something that’s really far out that is our North Star. As we optimize for today, where can we be tomorrow?
This is technology making humans contort to it ^.
And why do we even have login screens?! Because everybody has it? It’s just a checkbox on a list of tasks.
We’re doling out human misery on a daily basis. Go watch a human try to login to something.
If we can just rethink the design of some of these things (like forms or something like a flight search) for mobile
Luke showed an example of a 22 checkout form on desktop that Staples was able to get down to 5 fields!
How do you do this?
- Avoid splitting inputs (like having Full Name).
- Have a 1 line address field with inline validation – really quickly you can narrow down to a complete address for them.
- Then phone number and email fields also with inline validation to help cut the number of email hard bounces.
- Then for payment, you use an input mask which is a single input field to type a credit card number into which allows you to scan a credit card…
- And a checkbox to allow you to use the same address to billing.
Amazon has reduced checkout on a phone to a Buy Now button and then a Slide to Buy. 2 ACTIONS!!
(I KNOW, I BUY SO MANY THINGS SO QUICKLY ON AMAZON HELP ME)
But can we go further?
AMAZON GO
A line of stores in Seattle that GETS RID OF CHECKOUT ALTOGETHER!
There’s some really complicated stuff happening behind the scenes to allow this frictionless thing to happen.
- You walk in and scan your app to check in.
- Cameras capture items that you pick up and what you put back (cameras are making sure that you actually have that item)
- There are microphones that tell the cameras where to point
- They have sensors that also tell the store information
- There are load sensors and pressure sensors and cameras and microphones serve to give management a real-time understand of where things are in there store.
- Then in real time they send you a bill and process payment. All this stuff if making it possible for you to just walk in and take stuff.
But for a user, all of that complexity isn’t there. That’s the point right? Let’s take all this technological complexity on us so that human beings can just be human beings – take their sandwich and walk out!
The Amazon Dash button is another great example of a super simple thing that humans can use to make things very easy, even though there’s quite a complicated system behind that.
Apple released something called AirPods. To connect these wireless headphones to your phone, you just OPEN THE CASE NEAR YOUR PHONE! Have you ever done the bluetooth dance? It’s awkward.
With AirPods, there’s almost no graphical user interface at all!
Smart speakers like Google Home are another great example. You can just talk and ask it questions to get an answer or manage tasks!
I hope you’re starting to see a pattern here. The way he would characterize this pattern is: Natural User Interfaces – something you just naturally know how to do things from a lifetime of living.
Ex: How do you recognize someone? Look at their face.
Ex: How do you get an answer? You ask a question.
NUI (Natural User Interface) can be a North Star for our work!
Snapchat glasses – it’s so effortless to take a video with these (one button), but then you have this terrible multi-step process to actually see or do anything with that video!
Mobile is about right time and right place to serve the appropriate actions.
Let’s look at how people really use mobile devices.
- With a laptop there are a few, long sessions.
- With a tablet there are more, shorter sessions.
- With a phone, there are a ton of really short sessions.
The average person unlocks there iPhone 80x per day! Roughly every 12 minutes or so, people unlock their devices. When they unlock it so many times per day, how long as they in there? More than half of sessions on a phone are 30s or less. So there are a lot of very very short sessions on these devices. That’s why we care about them being fast and frictionless.
Experiencing mobile delays is apparently more stressful than watching a horror movie!
There was a camera tracking study that found the average interaction time was 38s. But the average interaction time with a smartwatch was 7s. It’s WAY tougher to design for a smart watch.
We can learn some stuff by seeing how the apps for smart watches adapt. The old workout app required you to hit SAVE, but now they just save it for you. It also learns from past behavior and puts the workout you did most recently up top and bigger.
He has an example about an app on an iWatch that notifies you of a satellite overhead. It taps you on teh wrist, then you lift our arm to see what’s up and it displays that notification and because of the tracking device in the watch it tells you where to look to see said satellite. There is so
Let’s stop optimizing graphic user interfaces for mobile. Let’s just make it work for mobile.
How about instead of optimizing login, how about no login.
Or how about instead of optimizing checkout, how about no checkout.
On the new iPad pro, if you tap the screen with a pencil it just opens to the notes app where you left of writing / drawing.
These areal examples of increasing amount of technology working behind the screens to help people do what they naturally do.
As our world gets more complicated, more dystopian if you will, who is gonna help the world deal with it? Who is going to make it their calling to manage these relationships to allow people to live their lives instead of manipulating gadgets every day?
Mobile Design Now:
- Immense opportunity
- Optimize for today
- Aim for the future
Now, with Natural User Interfaces, we have the type of technology that allows us to do this kind of stuff! Now’s the time to act on it!
@lukew
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