MEX has a great post outlining the lessons learned by comparing the user experience design on two different touchscreen devices, the iPhone and the Blackberry Storm.
While the list is pretty informal, it captures so many important considerations of mobile product design:
- Touchscreens are just components – they do not represent an experience in themselves.
- Tweaking an existing platform and adding a touchscreen will not deliver a revolutionary new set of products.
- Touch interactions are fundamentally different from those performed with keys or even a stylus, and will often require a completely revised user interface. Nokia, which has been busily skinning Series 60 in preparation for the introduction of touchscreen products, would do well to take note.
- If you start your product design process with the premise of ‘we need a touchscreen device in our portfolio’, you can expect to end up with a bad user experience.
- The mobile industry has made this mistake time and again, seeking to sell users the promise of a particular technology rather than focusing on how that technology can be applied to enhance the customer experience.
- Touchscreens do not change the rules – remember, always start by designing for the user rather than designing around a technology.
- Following trends will only take you so far and it is easy for a company to lose sight of the unique characteristics which have made it successful in the past, especially when trying to expand into new market segments.
- In RIM’s case, it built its business on providing extremely reliable and easy to use products which are great at delivering an integrated email, messaging and voice experience.
- The arrival of the iPhone has produced a new competitive threat and RIM is responding to pressure by launching a touchscreen product.
- By launching too early, RIM has damaged its reputation with existing users and lowered the chances of customers acting as ‘ambassadors’ for its products.
- RIM would have been better served by waiting until its smart designers had come up with a genuinely differentiated touchscreen experience, built around the connected platform principles which have made it successful.
- For instance, video content works extremely well on a large touchscreen. RIM’s unique selling point for a device like the Storm could have been a connected video experience with the same reliability and ease of use as its email system.
- The real innovation would have been in the back-end systems and client software powering this – the touchscreen would have been the component completing the experience.
Read the whole post here.
