How many of your team’s ideas are in the iPhone?
by KimWith the launch of the iPhone, I’ve been hearing many grumblings from interaction designers who’ve worked for various, well known consumer electronics companies. We can all see in the iPhone aspects of our concepts from years past that were brushed aside or died prematurely. Our concepts are suffocating under the pile of NDA verbiage, never to see the light of day. What sets our mere concepts apart from this final product however, is a company with leadership who has the fortitude to take the risk, find the budget, and push the technology for the single cause of designing compelling user experiences. Apple got it right.
For my own concepts, the valuable lessons I’ve learned are that I could have done a better job navigating internal politics as well as communicating the advantages of the concepts. In some cases, I was unable to translate my passion and conviction about experience design into reasons to build the products. The accelerometer (portrait to landscape) my team wanted to include in one of our designs was killed simply because it cost $20 per unit. Playing with the iPhone, one can see that’s $20 well spent.
In the end, everyone I’ve spoke with are tremendously thankful for the iPhone’s release - this product launch has single-handedly raised the bar of what’s possible. Since the rumors of an iPhone began last year, there was a shift that happened within many consumer electronics companies. My hope is that this is only the beginning of change in the roll of interaction design within consumer electronics.
This is the opportunity for all the UX Managers, Directors, VPs, CCOs, and CXOs to push for more. For some it will be a new seat at the C-level, for others it will be to move the UX team into a visible location on the org chart — out from under Engineering, Marketing, Research or QA — and for others it will be creating an interaction design team from scratch.
If your company still needs convincing of the value experience design brings to your product and you’re in need of more funding for staff, training, etc., I encourage you to create a case study of the iPhone and pitch it to your CEO. With the rumored 1 million iPhones sold in less than a week, now is the time get what you need.
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July 5th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Lots of people predicted and even designed aspects of the iPhone - I’ve been writing about it since 1979…
July 5th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
[...] en de mobiele telefoon. Een aantal ideeen die we hadden zie je nu terug in de iPhone. Er zijn meer mensen die een dergelijke deja vu ervaring hebben. Maar uiteindelijk draait het niet alleen om de [...]
July 5th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
[...] on telecoms and mobile devices. Some of the ideas we had are now visible in the iPhone. There are more people with a similar deja vu experience. But in the end it’s not just about having ideas, [...]
July 6th, 2007 at 7:15 am
We talk about product branding for consumers but I stumbled across Tom peter’s BrandYou that talks of me and you as a brand so in order for the decision maker’s to connect with what we want to do we have to tell a story that is authentic ( we told a story and delivered the content before.. even if a small step forward)and then deliver the promise of the story.. which is about making ideas tangible by visualisation and prototyping early. When someone engages with the story the $20 dollars becomes “only $20 dollars” for those benefits/experiences/opportunities. But it does mean we need to do more upfront homework to explore possibilities playfully before we engage the decision-makers and we need to find the opinion formers too! It’s the world of Make-one, play-with-one, break-one then move-on.
July 11th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
[...] adaptive path » blog » blog archive » How many of your team’s ideas are in the iPhone? Will the iPhone’s release *really* ‘change the game’? I’m looking forward to the first reports of people actually using it as a case to get UX higher on the agenda. (tags: UX userexperience iPhone innovation business) [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:37 pm
As someone who’s gone through this, let me add the to the rest of your potential conversation with your managers.
My conversations go “did you see what *company name here* did? I think we can do something just as slick. Remember the issue with *insert previous problem here*. If we do *enter your idea here* we can *expected outcome*. What do you think? I can have this up and running in no time”
For example: “did you see what Google did with the type-ahead? I think we can do something just as slick. Remember the issue with inconsistent data entry? We can provide a drop down with commonly keyed data and increase the clean/good data entered in the system. I can have it up by tomorrow. What do you think?”
What did does is make you:
- aware of innovation in the field
- able to come up with innovating ideas
- aware of a issues that exist
- able to provide a solution that contributes to the business
- properly set the expectations of your manager
- able to deliver
If you do have a good idea, it will be hard for your managers to say no. Do this often enough you have your managers coming to you for ideas.
What also helps is a little humility by giving credit to your manager. It will make them look good to his/her manager, which can pay huge dividends.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
[...] How many of your team’s ideas are in the iPhone? [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Accelerometers have gone down in price in the past five years. You can now buy 3 axis accelerometers for $3 or $4 dollars ( and that is single quantity prices).
Source: digikey.com and/or mouser.com