Once upon a time, and far away, there was a bookstore called Barnes & Noble. It sold books. But during the 1990s it started to sell fewer books because a dreadful competitor came along—Amazon.com. Through Amazon consumers could order any book they wanted without ever leaving their home. In addition, they could see how other consumers rate various books. Although the ratings were five stars 90% of the time, this feature seemed helpful nevertheless. Today Amazon thrives while Barnes & Noble struggles. History happened to the latter, while history was made by the former.
So how can we be on the right side of technological history? We need a vision of the future. And the way to obtain such a vision is by clearly understanding and focusing on user goals.
In his seminal work on user interaction design (UX) About Face, Alan Cooper states that we need to shift from feature-focused to goal-focused and need-focused design. We need to reorient ourselves away from features and technology to user goals.
Users have definite, concrete goals. And current technology meets those goals to a certain extent. We can figure out our users’ goals and the areas in which current technology is failing to meet those goals. And in this way we can get some understanding of the direction in which technology must move to fill up this lack.
Here’s a historical example. In the 1800s people used the telegraph to communicate over long distances. Consumers had a goal: to communicate with family or business clients in faraway places. But this technology had certain definite shortcomings in meeting this goal. First, you could only send short messages. Second, this communication was indirect and written rather than direct and vocal. Thus Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone which solved those two shortcomings, thereby meeting consumer goals better than the telegraph.
Let’s bring this closer to home. In the personal computing industry, all original operating systems were text-based. The upgrade to GUI allowed users to accomplish their goals even better and it allowed a larger audience access to the computer. The computer moved from being more of a professional tool in the direction of an everyday appliance. But still some “computer literacy” was required. You still needed to learn how to use the mouse and all sorts of GUI idioms. But today the computer continues to evolve in the direction of touch-screen interfaces with no need to learn the mouse and with even more intuitive idioms. The consumer computer is evolving in the direction of the “information appliance” with fewer and fewer layers of idiom and fewer and fewer steps required for users to meet their goals.
Getting a vision of the future is important to us for two reasons:
1. Vision is necessary for survival.
2. Vision allows its possessor to make the future happen and seize the direction, the momentum in his or her industry.
So be Apple, be Amazon. Don’t be Barnes & Noble. You don’t have to be a reactionary company, always surprised at new developments. You can anticipate technological development and even make it happen.
— Josh
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