Sunday, March 4, 2018

Delivering a product which evolves and not involves you...

Let's dive directly onto the point - what is user experience?

Let me give an example - we talk of AI - Artificial Intelligence today and dwelve into dreaming of a magician which can do things for us just by hinting at it.

How? 

Let's take an example - How many times have you been in a car connected to phone via bluetooth and trying your level best to play the right track of music you want or trying to search for a location and unable to get the right result despite your best attempt.

I swear something for the 10 minute drive, one just struggles to get the right track for 8 mins and then gives up.

Well, that's not customer experience - by any way far by off, customer discomfort - maybe - 'yes', and it is definitely not AI. 

Then what is it?

It's a technology which is built around rules for safety made to make a simple task complex to the point of it being a threat to your safety. 

Some would argue - that we should be more 'adept' to the way the voice control works on different phones and use that understanding to 'make it work - right'. Well, if the customer does the hard work and then pays for the product - that's not what was the part of the deal or was it?

Well, now let's come to another argument - am I putting myself in a greater danger when driving to get the voice control to work by distracting myself from driving and running into a disaster, just because someone constructed an app - may be a car sync app which prohibits me to doing things simply and complicates them in a way that is utterly discomforting and annoying.

AI - is by far an overstatement -  not needed in voice controlled devices to run with the cars - simple things which make me do my basic manoeuvres or tasks easily while in a car is what is needed.

It can be as simple as setting up a 'speed dial' to do the same task -- this brings me to my discussion on classifying a product into one of the 4 types in current market - 

1. Which is built for selling, but doesn't have any use.

      These are gadgets which are built for fancy purposes, marked symbols or icons of show off, but might not be useful - it's like taking a 10k $ worth computer, which I use to take notes, just because that's the latest product in market.

2. Which is built for selling, and does have some use.
     
     These may be either gadgets or apps, utilities which are have some use, like the 'scribble' on the apple watch.

3. Which might or might not be built for selling but works for 95% of daily use stuff.

  A low cost notebook which manages my notes, keeps a record of todos, gives me the right note when i need it and gives me features to maintain the notes effictively.

4. Which might or might not be but for selling, works for 99% of daily use stuff and evolves to your needs in future.

    An interactive note app which monitors my notes and gives me suggestions how to organise them based on the type of notes I frequently use, although it always gives me an option to go back to classical view because it knows it's 'smart' but it's not 'me'.
     Or 
 An adaptive search engine (not yet developed - i know some companies have given a try but we are still not there yet)

So today we can put a product into one of the above 4 categories, unfortunately most products fit in either 1 or 2 or maybe if tried hard enough 3 but we are far away from #4.

Once we reach #4 - that's when we start talking AI basics, simple terms are more useful if tasks are just simple.