Top Bananas | "Thinking About Apple (and the Impact of Technology)."

The Many Uses of Siri

Posted on March 22, 2015 by admin Posted in User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Siri is a voice-activated, voice recognition system able to translate spoken words into text and computer commands.

When Apple introduced Siri with the iPhone 4S, the idea of a natural language assistant seemed like science fiction. Although early car navigation systems had offered voice recognition commands, you often had to speak in stilted sentences. Siri lets you speak naturally and still control your phone.

Although critics dismissed Siri as a gimmick, companies like Microsoft and Google quickly introduced their own voice activated assistants. Yet the real genius of voice recognition assistants has multiple benefits.

First, Siri allows hands-free operation. This is especially important for CarPlay, Apple’s in-dash automotive entertainment system. When you’re driving, you can’t be distracted fumbling with buttons or glancing down to look at a touch screen interface. Anything that draws your eyes from the road represents a serious distraction.

Yet with Siri, it’s possible to control CarPlay entirely through voice commands. Now you can drive and play music, answer phone calls, and send e-mail just by talking out loud while keeping your hands on the steering wheel and your eyes on the road.

Siri is also crucial for the Apple Watch as well. With its much smaller screen, the Apple Watch doesn’t have room for people to fumble around a touch screen interface with fingers that practically cover the whole surface of the Apple Watch screen. That’s where Siri comes in again.

One way to interact with the Apple Watch is through voice commands, courtesy of Siri. Instead of looking for an Apple Watch user interface, you can control your Apple Watch through voice commands. While it may look silly to speak out loud to nobody in particular, the Apple Watch becomes more useful through Siri.

Siri on the Macintosh can be useful for people with physical disabilities. Now they can control their Macintosh solely through voice commands. Best of all, Siri is a built-in feature, not an expensive add-on, which means every modern Macintosh can offer voice recognition control.

By itself, Siri is just an interesting project, but when placed on the Macintosh, on mobile devices, and in cars, Siri suddenly becomes a vastly more useful way to interact with different devices.

One especially handy feature of every Apple device is the ability to accept foreign languages. Through software settings alone, both OS X and iOS can switch to another language seamlessly.

Now combine Siri with OS X and iOS, and you have a voice recognition assistant that can understand multiple languages. For people who speak other languages, Siri lets them speak in their native tongue. For people learning another language, Siri gives you a way to practice your pronunciation in a safe environment.

Typically the way most people learn to speak a foreign language is through interaction with others who speak that same language. That means lots of embarrassment trying to say a word but mispronouncing it and getting strange looks from people around you.

With Siri, those days are gone forever. Practice dictation with Siri in a foreign language and see if Siri recognizes what you’re trying to say. If so, then you’re likely pronouncing the words correctly. If not, you get instant feedback from Siri without the embarrassment you might feel talking to another person.

Through Siri and foreign language support built-in to OS X and iOS, you can learn to speak a foreign language using Siri as your pronunciation feedback guide.

With so many different uses for Siri, it’s hard to believe that voice recognition systems have come such a long way in such a short amount of time at a price within the reach of practically everyone. Siri didn’t invent voice recognition, but Siri did help make it popular in our everyday lives.

That alone is innovation enough. Now with a little bit of creativity, you can make Siri even more useful to control your car, your Apple Watch, your Macintosh, your iPhone, and your iPad. Then use Siri to take dictation and help you practice a foreign language. Siri’s uses span a broad range of possibilities, which makes Siri one of the most influential technologies in the computer market.

About Siri.

The Genius of Apple Retail Stores

Posted on March 21, 2015 by admin Posted in Business Leave a comment

What it is: Apple retail are stored dedicated to selling Apple products from Apple employees.

Back in the 90’s, almost everyone used a Windows PC and one of the most popular windows PC vendors was called Gateway Computers. In every issue of PC World and PC Magazine, you could see full page ads from Gateway advertising some of the best prices for PCs in the world. Gateway further cemented their stellar reputation by shipping PCs in whimsical boxes decorated with spots like a cow.

Since Gateway Computers was so popular, the company decided to open their own retail stores where people could see and test Gateway computers. Within a few years, Gateway shut down all their retail stores. As their market share further deteriorated, Gateway soon shrank and became a shell of their former selves. Today, hardly anyone thinks of Gateway when they think of buying a Windows PC.

Back in 2001 when Apple opened their first retail store, David A. Goldstein of Bloomberg Businessweek said, “I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake.”

Cliff Edwards in Bloomberg Business also wrote an article with the headline, “Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work.”

Why were so many people sure Apple’s retail stores would fail? They had several reasons. First, they believed that a company store would compete against other retailers. If Apple tried selling products through their own stores, then other stores would simply stop selling Apple products. If other stores stopped selling Apple products, then Apple’s distribution would shrink even further. Therefore, Apple risked antagonizing other stores.

Second, the cost of retail space was too expensive. Apple products already held a minority share of the market, so how could Apple possibly sell products that few people even used?

Third, several Macintosh-only computer stores had opened, only to fail shortly afterwards. If Macintosh-only stores run by other companies couldn’t succeed, then why did Apple think they could succeed as well?

It turned out that Apple’s retail stores did not flop, did not close, and actually succeeded in bringing hordes of people to every new store opening along with every new product announcement. Apple Stores also earn the highest profits of any retail store. How did Apple succeed when so many people were certain they would fail?

The answer was that Apple’s network of store distributors was actually so small that competing against them wasn’t a problem. In other words, Apple had nothing to lose. At the time, most computer stores sold Windows PCs because that’s what most people were familiar using at work.

So rather then try to sell Macintosh computers, most stores spent the bulk of their time and energy trying to sell Windows PCs. Therefore Apple had nothing to lose by upsetting retail stores since the retail stores weren’t interested in selling Macintosh computers in the first place.

While retail space was expensive, Apple sold mostly premium-priced products to customers willing to pay more for better service and products. Despite capturing such a low percentage of the computer market, profits from the Macintosh were actually much higher than similar Windows PCs. When Apple introduced the iPod, suddenly the company had little competition. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they also had almost no competition. When Apple introduced the iPad, once again they had little competition.

The real genius of the Apple Stores wasn’t the expensive retail space, but the fact that you could buy products that other retailers weren’t selling, you could get help from a real human being (as opposed to calling a toll-free number to talk to someone in another country who tried to turn you into your own computer technician to troubleshoot your PC), and you could see and try all of Apple’s products in a clean, inviting setting without any pressure from sales people to buy anything.

In comparison, buying a Windows PC was often a horrible shopping experience. Windows PCs confused and intimidated people with a laundry list of technical specifications. To lower costs, PC manufacturers booby trapped their computers with bloatware, software from third-parties that often slowed down a computer and took up space while being difficult for the average person to uninstall and delete. Buying a Windows PC was an exercise in frustration.

On the other hand, buying anything through the Apple Store was fun, easy, and far less intimidating. You saw a product you liked, you could try it for as long as you wished, and you could buy it without having to wait in line at a cash register. If you needed help, you could bring it back and talk to an expert at the Genius Bar who would stay with you until the problem was fixed.

The secret to Apple Stores was having products that people wanted, making the shopping experience fun and easy, and providing customer service to reduce any sense of frustration.

Within a few years, Apple Stores now earn the highest profits per square foot than any other retailer on the planet. Apple is now opening stores all over the world, despite having a minority share of the computer market, a minority share of the smartphone market, a majority share of the tablet market, and possibly a majority share of the wearable computer market.

The key to Apple Stores is the same key to their success in their other products. Solve the customer’s problems easily, make the experience enjoyable, and make them feel they got value for their purchase no matter how much it might be.

On the other hand, buying a Windows PC means dealing with pre-installed bloatware that will slow down your computer and technical support that’s frustrating and time-consuming to use. The only redeeming factor of Windows PCs is their low prices that made you feel you got a bargain until you needed customer service.

Apple Stores simply worked to keep customers happy so they could become repeat, loyal customers. Over time, this small group of happy Apple customers became a global army of happy Apple customers, all because Apple focused, not on deceiving and cheating the public, but by making the customer happy.

Curiously, that’s one feature of Apple that rivals have yet to copy.

About Apple Stores.

Identifying Innovation

Posted on March 20, 2015 by admin Posted in Business Leave a comment

What it is: A new idea, method, or device.

When describing Apple, many critics dismiss the company as not innovative, despite Apple’s long list of products that have literally changed the world from the early Apple II computer to the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and now the Apple Watch. Yet what many critics miss is that they claim Apple doesn’t innovate, but they never define what innovation really is.

According to the dictionary, innovation is a new way or doing something. That right there insures that unthinking critics will immediately dismiss anything new simply because they lack the imagination to see its potential impact. When something new appears in the world, there will always be critics who claim the old way is better whether it’s claiming Morse Code and telegraph lines were superior to telephones or horse and buggies were superior to automobiles. Perhaps the surest way to identify innovation is to notice how much criticism a product attracts. The more vocal the criticism, the more innovative that product will likely be.

Back in 2010, low-cost, underpowered netbooks were all the rage despite running an antiquated operating system (Windows XP back when the rest of the PC world was using Windows 7), an underpowered processor (typically a slow and weak Atom processor), and a cramped keyboard and screen. What killed the netbook? According to Slate, it was Apple.

Netbooks were nothing but a series of compromises. Cheap, small, and hard to use, the only redeeming value of a netbook was its price. of course that low price meant that profits for netbooks were also minuscule, but that didn’t stop people from claiming netbooks were the future of computing technology.

Then Apple introduced the iPad. Within a few years, every major manufacturer had stopped selling netbooks and the netbook market disappeared completely.

That’s because the iPad was innovative. Not only did it offer something new as a computing device, but it also proved superior to netbooks in so many ways. An iPad was more flexible, easier to carry, and more intuitive to use than a netbook. So innovation can be defined as something different that wipes out an existing product.

Look at how the telephone killed the telegram business or how streaming video killed the DVD rental business. It’s easy to create something new. It’s only innovative what that something new completely wipes out something people have been using for years.

The car wiped out the horse and buggy. The pocket calculator wiped out the slide ruler. Indoor plumbing wiped out the out house. When a product destroys the previous way of life, that’s a clear sign that innovation exists.

The iPod killed the Walkman. The iPhone killed Blackberry and practically every other mobile phone manufacturer. The iPad killed the netbook. Now the Apple Watch will help kill ordinary watches.

The next time a company introduces a product, look for criticism from people desperate to cling to the past, and look for an existing product that the new product will wipe out. When you can identify vocal criticism and the extinction of an existing product, that’s how you can recognize innovation right in front of your eyes.

About innovation.

Profits vs. Market Share

Posted on March 19, 2015 by admin Posted in Business Leave a comment

What it is: Market share can be a path to greater profits, but the real goal is greater profitability.

I once met a man who sold high-end luxury yachts to the ultra-rich where the average price of a yacht was $96 million dollars. How many yachts did this man sell in a year? Usually zero, but every few years he would sell a $96 million dollar yacht and the profits from that one sale would give him a great lifestyle and tide him over until the next big sale a couple of years later.

That’s the difference between market share and profits. Ideally, you want what Microsoft used to have with Windows, which was both market share and profits. If you can’t have both, then you want to follow Apple’s route and focus on earning greater profits. Or you can go the route that Android smartphone and tablet manufacturers are taking and try to grab the largest market share possible and make up for the profits in volume. Unfortunately for Android device manufacturers, greater market share doesn’t always translate into greater profits.

What’s the best strategy? If you focus on profits, you can make more money with less work and sell to customers who are willing to spend more. If you focus on market share, you often get into a price war trying to sell commodities that customers can easily buy from someone else. When this occurs, your only selling point is to keep cutting prices, until you have to make more and more sales while working harder and harder to sell to price-conscious customers who are the least loyal to any particular vendor.

Would you rather sell one $96 million dollar yacht and make a huge profit, or would you rather sell millions of row boats to make the same amount of money with far more work involved?

You always want to increase market share, but not at the expense of working harder to make less money. What you don’t want is to get into the commodity business of selling the same product as everyone else because then no one has a reason to buy from you, unless you want to get into a price war.

Even Samsung tries to differentiate their Android smartphones from other smartphone manufacturers by offering a smart watch that only works with Samsung smartphones. Amazon’s Kindle runs Android, but has its own app store to more closely tie it with Amazon’s content. With so many companies offering Android devices, they need to differentiate themselves from the competition beyond simply offering a lower price.

What’s been consistently odd is that Android users tend to connect to the Internet far less than iOS users, despite the larger market share of Android. For some odd reason, the average Android user seems to simply want a phone while the average iOS user wants a portable computer.

Around the world, Android smartphones and tablets tend to cost less, especially in countries where carriers don’t subsidize smartphones. Then again if people are only choosing a product based on price, those are often the least likely groups of people willing to spend more money. This might explain why Android users tend to buy fewer apps than iOS users. Business Insider even found that Android users tend to earn less than iOS users.

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons so many people harbor an irrational hatred of Apple is because they see Apple as selling products they can’t afford (or think they can’t afford). Of course, these people likely don’t hold such irrational hatred towards Ferrari, Harrods, or Tiffany. If you have to hate a company just because you think their products cost too much, you can hate plenty of other companies as well. Why not hate Embassy Suites because they charge more for a place to spend the night than Motel 6?

While it’s easy to gloat that the growing market share of Android proves that it must be superior to iOS, the truth is that every product targets different users. More people buy cars sold by Ford and Toyota, yet no one uses Ford’s and Toyota’s market share to “prove” that Ford and Toyota cars must be superior to cars made by Lamborghini and Ferrari.

As the total market share continues to grow, Apple’s share of the smartphone and tablet market continues to shrink in comparison, even though their products keep selling. The time to worry about the lack of market share is when your products stop selling and your profits start dropping. Just ask Blackberry how it feels to have declining market share and declining sales and profits from products that fewer people are rushing out to buy.

You always want to increase market share, but never at the expense of profitability. General Motors could dominate the automotive market share just by giving away cars for free and paying people $1,000 a month to drive them. No one doubts that this tactic would gain GM massive market share overnight. The problem is that it’s simply not sustainable.

Where financial analysts go wildly wrong is when they forget this basic principle. Market share is a path to profitability, but it’s never the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is always profitability. If you only sell one $96 million dollar yacht every five years, your market share is close to zero, yet your profitability is extremely high. If you sell 96 million rowboats and make a $1 profit on each one, you have to work extremely hard to earn the same amount of money.

The real goal isn’t market share but a balance between profitability and effort. Ideally you want to work less and earn more. Chasing after market share often means working more and earning less as all those Android device manufacturers have learned the hard way, right after seeing all those PC manufacturers learn the same thing.

When you chase the wrong goal, it doesn’t matter if you achieve it. You still wind up with the wrong goal and outcome. Apple chooses a balance of working less, earning more, and turning those extra profits into continuing to offer intangible benefits to their customers. Before Apple introduced their retail stores with a Genius Bar where you can get help with your computer, other computer companies tried to cut costs by outsourcing their technical support.

Such outsourced technical support meant speaking to someone over the phone who would try to turn you into a computer technician and help you troubleshoot your computer without actually seeing what the problem might be. This experience often frustrated customers because it tried turning them into their own computer technicians. When was the last time you visited a car mechanic who spoke to you over the phone and told you how to do your own oil change?

Market share is a numbers game that ignores intangible benefits like customer service, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty, which can’t be easily measured in a spreadsheet. That’s why chasing market share is a path for certain failure if you’re willing to ignore product quality, customer service, and customer experience.

If you value saving a penny in exchange for poor product quality, lack of service, and increased user frustration, then you’re not the type of person who understands how business really works. Business is about solving problems and keeping customers happy. As long as you keep customers happy, they’ll be willing to pay any price. The moment you confuse and frustrate customers, your price will always be too high no matter how low you may cut it to increase your market share.

See if you can spot the delusion surrounding market share.

Force Touch – A New Way to Interact

Posted on March 18, 2015 by admin Posted in User Interface Leave a comment

In the old days, people used command-line interfaces and thought that was how you used a computer. Then the Macintosh helped make the graphical user interface and the mouse popular. After many MS-DOS users initially dismissed the mouse and graphical user interface as useless, it quickly became the new standard for how to use a computer.

For decades, that hasn’t changed. Although people have substituted a mouse for a trackball or a trackpad, the basic mechanism remains the same. Now Apple has introduced a new way to interact with a computer called Force Touch.

The idea behind Force Touch is to provide tactile feedback when giving commands to the computer. Press hard on a Force Touch trackpad and the computer responds different than if you press lightly in the exact same spot.

For artists, this lets you draw different size strokes based on the pressure you exert on the trackpad. For ordinary users, pressing lightly or strongly on a trackpad can make the computer respond differently. In most cases, a hard press is an urgent request from the user while a much lighter press is likely less urgent.

Force Touch now gives trackpads a new dimension on the user interface. Instead of just manipulating a mouse pointer in two dimensions, a Force Touch trackpad lets the user receive tactile feedback on their actions. Play a game and you can literally feel the differences between pressing softly or forcefully on the trackpad.

What this means is that a whole new wave of software will appear taking advantage of Force Touch interactions. Computers and software that don’t respond to tactile pressure will seem as antiquated as command-line interfaces in the age of graphical user interfaces and a mouse.

Force Touch gave the smaller screen of the Apple Watch another way to get feedback, but it will likely be adopted in all newer Macintosh laptops along with newer models of the Magic TrackPad and Magic Mouse. Tactile feedback is now a standard that will soon become commonplace on computers, smartphones, and tablets along with wearables.

It’s easy to dismiss Force Touch in much the same way that people initially dismissed the mouse and graphical user interfaces. Just like the mouse and graphical user interfaces, Force Touch will likely become the new standard.

It’s not important to get a Force Touch trackpad today, but you’ll want it eventually as more programs take advantage of it until it becomes an everyday item. Force Touch is another example of user interface innovation that seems trivial at first, but will become critical in the coming years. Force Touch is the new way to interact with the computer of the future.

About Force Touch.

Thinking Beyond Boundaries – the User Experience

Posted on March 17, 2015 by admin Posted in Education Leave a comment

What it is: User experience combines liberal arts with technology by putting the focus on both technology and design, not just technical specifications alone.

Visit any university and you can find people segregated into separate fields of study, yet this artificial division of knowledge makes no sense whatsoever. An English major may study the literature of Lewis Carroll like “Alice in Wonderland,” while a math major may study Lewis Carroll’s mathematical work.

Of course, Lewis Carroll also used math as a philosophy tool, so philosophy students may study Lewis Carroll’s philosophical works while completely ignoring his literature and mathematical work. By studying separate aspects of the same man, each college major only gets a partial understanding of Lewis Carroll while focusing only on their own interests. When you study topics in isolation, you can’t help but get incomplete knowledge while fooling yourself that you understand the complete picture.

That’s the problem with every aspect of life. Most politicians are lawyers, so they make laws without seeing the consequences of their actions from a social scientist’s point of view, or even understanding the topics they’re regulating from a scientist’s point of view.

In the computer world, you can see how early computers were designed by computer scientists for other computer scientists. The result has been an endless series of complicated computers that are too difficult for most people to use and understand unless you’re willing to invest hours of time until you’re accepted into the closed ranks of the tech-savvy users.

Such tech-savvy users then protect their hard-earned knowledge by defending the status quo. If computers are hard to use, then the solution is to either pay tech-savvy users more money to act as an interpreter between the user and the computer, or spend countless hours becoming a tech-savvy user yourself. This type of thinking makes as much sense as forcing people to become radiation engineers to use a microwave oven or becoming automotive engineers to drive a car.

You can see the influence on computer products designed from an engineer’s point of view. They simply parade a laundry list of technical specifications in front o f bewildered customers and expect confused customers to understand what those technical specifications mean and how they translate into an important feature for the user. When people compare technical specifications, they’re only seeing a product from an engineer’s point of view, which means they’re not getting the complete picture.

What products need to do is appeal to all aspects of a user’s needs beyond just technical specifications. Companies need to consider the aesthetic features of a product in addition to the functionality of that product. If a product is just crammed full of technical features, those features may be too difficult to use, which makes them as good as useless. Just think of a typical TV remote control with so many buttons that most people rarely use more than a handful of buttons. The remote control offers dozens of other features, but if you can’t use them, they might as well not even exist in the first place.

First, products need to work. Second, products need to make it easy to use. Third, products need to be beautiful.

If a product just works, it may be hard to use. If it’s ugly, most people won’t want to use it. If a product is easy to use, then more people will find it useful and want to buy it. If a product is also beautiful, then people will not only use it, but they’ll be happy to use it. The happier people are to use a product because it meets their needs, the more likely they’ll buy from you again.

That’s the business philosophy of Apple. Rivals constantly release similar products with more technical specifications, but if those products aren’t easy to use and don’t make the user happier using it, all those better technical specifications are a waste. Most people use a Macintosh not because it has better technical specifications, but because it makes them happy and it’s far easier to use than a more powerful and less expensive Windows PC. Even though a Macintosh typically costs more than a Windows PC with better technical specifications, it doesn’t matter if it’s harder to use and frustrates people more often than it helps them.

Life isn’t divided into separate boxes that can be defined through a laundry list of features. Products only shine when they combine multiple fields of study to present a user with a well-designed product that solves a problem for the user easily. User experience triumphs technical specifications everyday. Apple understands this. Most rivals don’t because they’re locked into seeing their products only from a technical perspective. Despite winning the technical specification battle with Apple every time, they consistently lose in the user experience and aesthetic appeal every time, and then they wonder why their better technical specifications fail to topple Apple.

Then they repeat the insanity by thinking more technical features must be the answer. When you see the world only through the narrow prism of your own specialty, you’ll never see the complete picture. The secret to Apple is plain for everyone to see, but only if you’re willing to look beyond a single discipline and realize that life is more than the limited knowledge of a specific field of study.

About User Experience.