I just read an article on TechCrunch titled “Siri, Why Are You So Underwhelming.” In this article, Jordan Crook talks about some of the disappointments she’s had with Siri, and how her initial jaw-dropping reaction to the concept has taken some hits.
This article was completely unsurprising to me. In fact, the whole time the tech media was slavering over Siri, I just didn’t get it. What were people SO EXCITED about? After all, the application had already existed before Apple bought it. voice-input was already integrated in almost every native Android action. Yes, I understand that Siri is more integrated, context-sensitive and “gets what you mean” than Android’s straight-up text input. And I get the excitement about the step toward better NLP. But why were all these tech-savvy folks so amazed and making such huge claims about usage? Is it really so much easier to “talk at” your phone than tap a few times? Are people really going to want to do this?
I think a part of my reaction boiled down to my doubt that the *user experience* of “talking at” one’s phone was the experience many people actually wanted and would do. This lack of usage had already been shown in other applications – for example, in the Android operating system, how many people actually use the built-in speech-input instead of the keyboard? Yes, it’s cool, yes, it’s handy sometimes, but I’m doubtful that a large percentage of users regularly utilize speech input. How many people at a dinner party want to say “switch songs” loudly to their stereo system instead of just pressing a button or tapping their phone while their compatriot is chatting to them? Has Apple done any user research (perhaps diary studies?) to try and really find out “is this something people will actually use? When will they use this?” Let me know if so, because I’d love to see that kind of thing.
I’m not meaning for this to be a rant – I’m just trying to get at the core of people’s excitement.
My coworker Kimra mentioned that maybe this whole “telling your machines what to do” thing could be not based on user research, but on a kind of “tech fantasy.” This makes sense to me, especially based on all the articles that came out about Siri, with titles like “A voice-controlled future is finally upon us”, “Apple’s Siri points to an exciting future”, and “Apple’s Siri is the fulfillment of a dream from 1987.” These articles frequently reference science fiction visions, with sections that read: “This is all very Jetsons-type stuff, the kind of ‘they promised us jetpacks’ future we’ve all been waiting decades for” and “Ever since HAL refused to open the pod bay doors for Dave we’ve all wondered when we’d get to talk to our computers. Well now thanks to Apple and Siri we can.”
People talking to their machines (and the machines responding intelligently) has been a key staple of science fiction for years. Maybe people aren’t actually going to use Siri, but they’re in love with the “vision of the future” – in other words, people are excited by the fact that technology is getting more like science fiction’s “vision of technology.” But we all know that science fiction books and movies aren’t based on user research – they’re based on the author’s fantasies and visions about what they *think* people will want and use in the future. It will be interesting to see if these science fiction visions will actually translate to adoption and usage.
Maybe in the end, Siri *is* something people want and will use. Maybe it *is* an amazing step toward the future. But if so, it will have to work nearly perfectly. People will have to be able to rely on their voice commands working with just as much regularity as their touch commands, or else there’s not all that much point in using it. I think part of the reason people have been disappointed is because Apple and various articles promised this near-perfect fantasy. When we actually get to that point technology-wise, I’ll be excited to see what people do.
11/17 Update: I’ll be adding resources to this post periodically, I just added a few more 
I’ve been putting together a presentation deck for a mobile user experience workshop we’re running, and I thought – man I’ve collected a lot of resources in my time designing for mobile, why not share the wealth? If you’re a mobile designer who’s looking for more resources, or someone who’s just taking the plunge, hopefully you’ll find this post helpful.
User research tends to be pretty similar across the board in terms of methods. Whether you’re designing for web, mobile, or some other experience, methods like observation, interviews, diary studies, etc, can all be used to great effect. Of course, there are certain ways people use their mobile devices that should be taken into account when gathering user research. In the book Mobile First, Luke Wroblewski details some of these usage patterns in the following way:
While some principles in the web design space certainly transfer over to mobile design, mobile design is an entirely different arena in a lot of ways. With touch interaction comes new expectations and design patterns, and though it may seem overwhelming, it is important to realize there’s a whole set of tools and resources out there these days that can help you. Below I’ve listed some of the resources I’ve found helpful, separated into different design activities (get ready, there’s a lot!).
INTERACTION DESIGN
Reviewing Design Patterns
Sketching
Wireframing
Prototyping
VISUAL DESIGN
Creating Mobile Icons
Viewing Your Design on Mobile Devices
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Fireworks
Paper Prototyping
Task-based Usability Testing
Heuristic Analysis
(there’s a lot more books out there, I simply found these two to be the most relevant of the ones I’ve read)
Enjoy! And if you have more awesome resources let me know and I’ll add them to the list.
Thanks for sharing!
-H
Konigi, a designer who always posts interesting insights and contributions to the design landscape, recently wrote an article about his thoughts on Thomas Malone’s paper about design & learning from games. Definitely worth a read.
The concept he focused on is the idea of designing a multi-layer experience, where the majority of users can be satisfied with the simple features, but power users can “unlock” more advanced features, as they do when gaming.
The section below that he quoted from Malone’s article definitely reminded me of usability tests I’ve done:
In a sense, a good game is intentionally made difficult to play, but a tool should be made as easy as possible to use. This distinction helps explain why some users of complex system may enjoy mastering tools that are extremely difficult to use. To the extent that these users are treating the systems as toys rather than tools, the difficulty increases the challenge and therefore the pleasure of using the systems.
It brought me back to those times I’ve tested particularly technical products, like testing the set-up and configuration of routers. Sometimes the participants (usually engineers) being tested will say things like “oh yeah, this is fine, I like it this way” even though the system seems unnecessarily difficult to use. They’ll start acting like they’re in a game, saying things like “I know I can find this” or “maybe if I use the command line or <insert some other incredibly convoluted route here>, I’ll be able to finish this task.” And this type of person won’t get frustrated – they’ll get stimulated. And they’ll feel special and smart because they’re figuring it out.
Now, I’m certainly not advocating making an unnecessarily convoluted system for power users. But I think this speaks even more to the necessity of user research before design. It’s important to address and simplify the usability issues. But it’s also important to identify the key frustrations and pain points of users. For example, maybe you looked over a software system, did a quick heuristic analysis, and noticed 5 usability issues. It’s not until you talk to the user that you would learn that 2 of the issues you thought were more minor are actually super frustrating to the users because they’re annoying details they have to do 10 times a day. And maybe one of the other issues is not necessarily an issue for this user group but a challenge that contributes to the users’ sense of worth and achievement in their field.
right, how to design a simple, intuitive interface while seamlessly integrating ways to unlock or reveal advanced features is definitely difficult and intriguing. This post is a bit more a tangent about those users who think of more convoluted interfaces as proving their worth, etc. All inter-related and interesting.
Clumsy last sentence there. Really meant to say “…so there’s a tradeoff, and it’s important to know how to select the right defaults and execute on the powerful and more advanced stuff.”
I’m with you. Identifying key points of pain is in the same category to me as finding the tip of the iceberg. I feel like that’s a huge part of my job, and why I do customer service as a large part of my work every day. If a point of pain is expressed repeatedly and often enough, it’s likely to be happening because the feature is being utilized heavily by an important user group, and I can take that as an opportunity to address the issue.
I certainly wouldn’t advocate for making difficult interfaces on purpose, but I would advocate for making visible what’s necessary and important given a product’s purpose and the given the expectations of the primary personae. Figuring out how to progressively expose or activate the features that aren’t utilized heavily is the challenge that I’m most concerned with. Having a huge tool that meets and exposes every need comes with a cost in terms of simplicity, so the trade off is in knowing how to select the right defaults, and when and how to execute on the powerful and more advanced stuff.
[...] mulled Siri as tech fantasy before, and now Gizmodo’s Mat Honan is finding that the reality of Siri can’t stand up [...]
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