How To Respond To The iPhone?

from the Insight Community by Steve Litchfield

The Apple iPhone, of course, comes at the whole arena of smartphones completely from left-field and seemingly reinvents everything. And, although the iPhone has some huge omissions and flaws, there are some lessons from which existing smartphone manufacturers and smartphone owners can draw.

Apple's cleverness is not, in my opinion in the way they've produced the first practical mass market capacitive touchscreen device(!), although that's an impressive start, but in the way they've managed not to over complicate the whole idea of a smartphone.

Because S60, UIQ, Palm OS and Windows Mobile have 'grown up', so to speak, evolving over many years, features and functions have been incrementally added, to the point where something of the simplicity of the iPhone seems a breath of fresh air. Now, there's a direct relationship between simplicity and ease of use, between functionality and complexity, but in Apple's case they've bent this usually straightforward relationship, allowing perhaps 70% of (say) a S60 smartphone's power and functions while being twice as easy to use, for a newcomer at least.

Of course, it's that last 20% of functionality which is the most techy and the hardest to introduce in a non-confusing way, which is where the challenge lies for the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and HTC (to name the top 4 smartphone makers in terms of market share).

The iPhone has raised the bar in terms of ease of use, as many observers have already commented. It's not just about having a touchscreen (which is why the HTC Touch will fail miserably) - it's about keeping the user in the loop about what options are available at every single point. It's all very well an application on a S60 or Windows Mobile 6 device having 100 different functions and menu options, but if only 10% of them ever get used because most people never find them, then there's a big usability issue to overcome.

In addition to greater use of context-sensitive menus (from which items which aren't relevant are omitted), there's scope for hiding many application functions behind an 'Advanced' menu or on-screen button, so that users themselves can decide which bits to use and which to ignore. Perhaps applications could themselves be run in 'novice' or 'advanced' mode, along the lines of what Eudora Mail did five or six years ago. With 'Novice' set as a system-wide setting, new users would get along faster and could graduate to 'Advanced' when they felt ready.

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