Made out of people

On Shiny Features and Dull Features

Someone mentioned during one of the HCIC talks that car makers often sell cars based not on gas milage, speed, efficeincy--but on the convenience of the cupholder. We heard from Nokia a long discussion of features on the cell phone company side: converting address books! transfering memory sticks! All this was pitched in terms of the out-of-the-box-user experience.

Something about that didn't ring a bell for me, though. I may just not be enough of a cell phone user, but I really don't care too much about the pain of transferring data from cell to cell. Sure, it's annoying--once every two years, for an hour and a boring half.

But the feature that I need, and that I will happily switch phones for, is a phone with a better battery life, better signal quality, and, on the outside, perhaps one that I can bring to Europe inexpensively. Really. The camera is cute, and the GPRS-to-bluetooth is fun for sending email from the airport, but that's not what I'm looking for. Indeed, I look with a bit of suspicion at the phone with the high quality ring synthesiser and the color screen: how much juice are they draining in order to flash me an animated logo at boot up?

But, I think, we've seen a change in the field. I don't see "talk time" advertised on the phone boxes and web sites in the way that it was three or four years ago. Is this because the batteries have gotten so good that we don't care-or is it because the makers have found it doesn't pay to advertise on that?

And why don't they? Is it customer demand, or is that they don't advertise on it because no one else advertises on it, and vice versa?

Perhaps we need several dimensions: There's Shininess, which are features that are slick to demo and easy to advertise. There's Smoothness, which are features that are easy for users to see, but hard to advertise ("hey, check out those cupholders!"). And then there is Strength, which are those more basic features--like actual talk time and --that are both hard to advertise and hard to see.

But these don't actually explain why we don't see advertisements with some guy chatting for six hours at a time: "The new Nokia XXXX lets you chat forever!" After all, we get the "Can you hear me now? Good!" ads, which are marketing on the range and quality of the network. But just barely: as far as I can tell, no one is counter-advertising ("no, our coverage is even better!").

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I brought some of this up to Don Norman, who was at the conference. He pointed out a much simpler explanation: you don't advertise on your weakness. No one runs ads saying "Our coverage is terrible." You instead say "our color screen is REALLY vivid." And you don't advertise on it until you are ahead of the others. So if suddenly Nokia comes out with the six month battery life phone, they'll let you know. But until then, the users pretty much have their attention turned away from the weakness, and they buy another charger or two.