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Use technology to make life better

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Use technology to make life better – for your family, friends, neighbors, customers, suppliers, partners, and yourself. 

Sounds obvious, and yet sometimes it’s not.  Take the so called “mobile web”, which excels primarily in sucking.  So often people try to do the wrong things with mobile devices.  Perhaps it’s human nature to take what we know from the web and try to move it directly to the latest new screen.  In any case, it doesn’t do much to make life better, IMHO. 

Here’s some advice on how to re-think the so-called mobile web (and thanks to Steve Clayton for the pointer).  

An Internet Watered Down

View more presentations from John Pettengill.

Some really excellent advice in there!  Also: the basic concepts are not limited to mobile devices.  Whatever you’re designing, think about how you can apply technology with broad context of what users are trying to accomplish in their lives. I sometimes talk about this as understanding the consumer value stream (which this great cartoon helps illustrate). 

To re-use an example from my post here: when my wife asks me to pick up milk on my way home, I’m not really shopping – I’m commuting.  Any shopping experience I have exists within that larger context of my commute.  My local Kroger store recognized this and now puts milk at the front of the store – which means it’s more likely I’ll choose Kroger the next time my wife calls and says we’re out of milk. 

Creating a positive impact in people’s lives with technology often means spanning boundaries between compartments that exist in their lives -- showing those boundaries to be artificial -- and doing it in a way that helps them achieve things they value.  This might require experience designers to expand the way they think about the business they are in. 

A few good examples..

  • The car didn’t always have a radio – bringing entertainment to driving a car was huge! 
  • iTunes figured out syncing, organizing, and acquiring new music are best done together. 
  • Live Search on Windows Mobile brings together searching for a business, and then finding it’s location (and me) on a map.  Plus, it lets me speak the search, and read the results.  (And yes, this was copied on the iPhone, too, but original credit goes to TellMe and the Live Search folks).
  • Ford Sync lets me control my media experience in the car with steering wheel controls or voice controls, and yet also take my media with me on Zune (or ipod, or Sensa) when I leave the car.

And a few examples where things could be better:

  • My car tells me when it needs service, and my phone (with calendar) is connected… why doesn’t my car propose actual service appointment times that matchup when I’m free and when the service shop has appointments available? 
  • On the grocery store front, here’s a sampling of opportunities… (and see here for a lot more thoughts on improving the shopping experience)…
    • Why do some grocery sites have up to 3 different online shopping lists – none of them connected to each other? 
    • And even though the grocery store knows everything I’ve previously purchased, why is that information not available for me to create a shopping list? 
    • And why is there not a task-oriented version of that list automatically on my phone so I can check things off as I buy them? 
    • And when I get an idea for something to cook off of Food Network, why can’t I just click a button to send the ingredients to my shopping list? 
    • And if my regular store is out of stock on an item, why doesn’t the grocery chain tell me about another store in the area that has what I need (or suggest an alternative ingredient)?
  • Why can’t I check rates/availability for hotels from within my Outlook calendar -- where I do my trip planning and store travel itineraries? 

I’m not saying any of these examples would be easy to implement (but neither are any of them technically that hard, I suspect).  And I’m sure other folks have better ideas and better examples than what I’ve listed here (and I’d like to hear them). 

All of this is just my 2 cents, of course.  My sincere hope is that the slides above, and this little post, will help at least a few folks think about how to enable and empower users in ways that make their lives better.  :)

Technorati Tags: innovation,mobile,consumer value stream

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