Comments on: Why Products Suck #5: Wrong Technology

By: Zack Perry

Zack Perry — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:09:01 +0000

What if you are working backwards, trying to define your customers and how this new to the world technology might match up? Seems their would be some level of ambiguity as to how the technology could be implemented.

By: Dorian Taylor

Dorian Taylor — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:50:56 +0000

I’m quite confident that the technology-centric process goes something like this: Business guy makes a bullet list of features of competitors’ products implemented in various technologies, hands it to an engineer and says “Make this”.

Engineers speak in terms of implementation, as if they’re building whatever it is in their heads as they speak. If the boss mentions a specific technology, they latch onto it. If not, they just use whatever pet technology they like the most.

Businesspeople and engineers don’t need designers to make something that technically works and that can be sold. The happy couple has been functioning like this for centuries (depending on how you count).

Where the designer comes in is to turn something that would otherwise be marginally successful into something stellar. That role, in my opinion, is between business and technical interests, interpreting back and forth and synthesizing a plan.

By: awa64

awa64 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:43:04 +0000

Worse yet with the iPod Touch, the fastest way to “play” or “pause” is two button-taps and a screen-press. That’s the action that I find myself needing to perform most often, rather than “skip song” (which can be accomplished via a quick shake, assuming you’re in ‘shuffle’ mode) or “change volume” (which has two dedicated buttons, and considering it’s a ‘set it and leave it’ control rather than a ‘I need to react to something’ control, I’m OK with losing the granularity of the scroll-wheel volume control).

I guess, to stop it, I could yank the headphone cords out of the iPod… but that takes even longer when I want to start the music back up. At best, it’s inelegant, and at worst, it’s encouraging the user to break their headphones.

I’d go back to an iPod Classic if I didn’t value the web browsing, email client, and myriad applications so heavily.