Apple, Amnesia, and Experience
I love my iPhone. It’s becoming an extension that I count on constantly through the day, from firing up email and Twitter as I roll out of bed to checking amusement park hours or showing my kids flying lemur video as we’re reading the encyclopedia article on Mammals. It’s both a conduit to a wider world and an anchor for my daily personal activities.
I’ve never had a better phone.
I also regularly want to toss it across the room in frustration:
- Despite firmware updates, typing can stall out, so that I’m reduced to one character every few seconds on the laggy keyboard.
- battery life is weak, demanding the phone be charging frequently. My mobile experience is often tethered to a charging cable.
- apps crash with sadly dependable regularity (I’m looking at you, Mobile Safari and YouTube).
- last week, all of my downloaded applications quit working. Somehow, the DRM authorization for my third-party apps went missing, so everything quit as soon as it was launched.
- the much touted ecosystem of iPhone+iTunes means I *have to use iTunes* which is a really inferior piece of software that is geared to drive Apple revenue above ease of use. Creating playlists, managing syncing, managing music libraries and navigating the iTunes Store are all teeth-grittingly aggrevating. My experience with iTunes is awful.
- Speaking of ecosystems, in Canada, Fido and Rogers don’t have any iPhone replacement options-if you break your phone, the only way to get a new one from them is to sign up for *another 3 year contract*.
- I could go on, but that’s enough for now…(thank goodness I didn’t subscribe to Mobile Me)
And despite all these shortcomings, I still think the iPhone is the best all-around mobile device on the market (RIM’s Blackberry still holds the email crown).
Why? Why with all this frustration, this poor design both for the system and the software, am I a fan? I think it’s because I have experience amnesia. If you take an intro cognitive psych course, you’ll learn that people don’t remember everything about an experience. Instead, they use heuristic recall to compress the memory – just keeping the start, end, high and low points as shorthand for the whole thing. If the net result is positive, then the overall memory and impression of the experience is positive. While the iPhone constantly fails, it succeeds far more often. That success is what I remember when I think about the phone, and that amnesia underwrites a lot of the success seen by Apple and other innovators.
My friend Brandon Schauer talks about this in his Long Wow material found in Subject to Change. I think it’s useful to consider during evaluation projects and research projects too, not just during design phases.
p.s. turning my data on to ‘fetch’ at 15 minute intervals instead of realtime push has made battery life bearable. And my DRMed apps started working again after some fiddling in the App Store.