A priceless parody (of  more than one thing). Make sure to stay until the end…

Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path has written a nice article over at Business Week about the new Jitterbug phone and service created for older people who may have difficulties with conventional mobile phones.

For mobile-industry veteran Arlene Harris, the opportunity was too good to pass up. Harris is the mastermind behind Jitterbug, a company launched last October that combines a unique mobile phone (designed by Jitterbug and manufactured by Samsung) with a suite of services designed to meet the needs of older users. Because Jitterbug controlled both the product and service design, it’s able to deliver a seamless, innovative cross-channel experience, a rarity in the mobile-phone industry.

It’s a great example of “the system is the product”:

Harris recognized that a product alone couldn’t meet the needs of her audience—it had to be combined with services to create an overall system. As a result, the product was designed in tandem with services that would be delivered to subscribers….

This system approach took Jitterbug’s partners at Samsung by surprise. “They knew that we would have to be a service provider, but they had no idea the extent to which we wanted to integrate [the product with the service],” Harris says. “For them it was a handset, for us it was a system. The handset was just one element.”

Exactly.

I love how they have dial tones, too.

Vodafone has done very well with its Simply phone, though from what I can tell Jitterbug is going quite a bit further with the system integration. And Simply started out as a no-frills phone aimed at budget-conscious customers but turned out to be attractive to older users once it got on the market, whereas Jitterbug is specifically geared for that demographic. This area of designing for aging baby boomers is going to be huge, and right now it’s a market littered with crap that they won’t want to buy. Hello, opportunity.

I just picked up one of Moleskine’s new City Guides (Paris in my case). It’s a delightful little affair. It’s the usual small Moleskine notebook size with the trademark elastic strap and expanding note pocket in the back. But it has a lot of special features geared toward the active tourist:

• City maps in two different scales, with very refined and easy to read muted colors and gray shades. There’s also a street index. It’s not as comprehensive as a full city map (or a Paris Par Arrondissement or a London A-Z, for example), but good enough for most uses
  
• Sheets of tracing paper with adhesive at the top (like Post-It notes) to place over the maps so you can trace out an itinerary
• Metro/subway map
• Pages for planning Before Going and while-you-are-there itineraries
• Clothing size conversion charts
• Tabbed pages for noting restaurants, people, places, events etc. that you’ve experienced
• Additional blank tabbed pages that allow you to make your own categories

They also supply a couple of sheets for noting inaccuracies so that you can email Moleskine and let them know. And it has three separate cloth bookmark tags (in 3 shades of gray) to mark different pages. My only complaint, as is the case with most Moleskine books, is there’s no way to securely slot in a pen.

Finally, Moleskine has an accompanying website and blogs for each city (Paris, for example). One wonders if in the future they will open it for the general public to contribute to.

All in all a smart move for Moleskine, filling a need and making good use of their brand and legacy in multiple ways. 

(As a side note, Moleskine’s new Cahier notebooks are my favorite walkaround notebooks - small, flexible, lightweight, good paper, cheap. In kraft brown please. Sold in packs of 3.) 

My colleage from frog, Tim Leberecht, has written a poignant note about how blogging means he has lost the ability to simply “consume”:

I cannot just consume anymore - I feel an ever-present pressure to produce. Consuming is only good when it leads to production, says the personal brand voice in me….

The new read-write culture has chained me to the laptop at all times. The delta between consumption and production has been abolished, and the time between contemplation and action has shrunk to a brief guilty moment of Zen. Reading means writing. Everything I read is a feed which I then instantly turn inwards out and broadcast. Inspiration is a permanent presence, an aggregate state not a single unique moment. Content generation is my modus operandi.

 I have to say I feel a lot of sympathy with this. All reading, indeed almost any activity during a week, now cannot simply be done for pleasure and there is always a nagging thought in the back of my head asking “how can I use this?” Pleasure has become work, in fact pleasure creates work.

It is not inevitable I suppose - perhaps there is a way to switch it off. That’s the theory with Blackberries too… 

Great article in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki on why the feature-count keeps going up and up on products. Partly it is about the people designing the products not being the ones designing them, as is often discussed, but there’s also an unexpected cause: users themselves.

You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity. A recent study by a trio of marketing academics—Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust—found that when consumers were given a choice of three models, of varying complexity, of a digital device, more than sixty per cent chose the one with the most features. Then, when the subjects were given the chance to customize their product, choosing from twenty-five features, they behaved like kids in a candy store. (Twenty features was the average.) But, when they were asked to use the digital device, so-called “feature fatigue” set in. They became frustrated with the plethora of options they had created, and ended up happier with a simpler product.

Actually this is not really news to anyone that has done much user research. As the saying goes, users ask for features like kids ask for candy — and like candy too many features are bad for you.  Surowiecki goes on to talk about how people are generally rather poor at assessing their skill level with a product (even one they have used before) and how often they will use a particular feature. This is why user researchers seek to get behind the symptoms (which features typically address) to understand root causes. This often allows you to reduce complexity by dealing with underlying needs.

There’s another cause for feature creep: retailers. Retailers love features. The longer the list of checkbox items, the better. And if someone tries to enter the market with a reduced feature set the retailers often reject it because they don’t think they’ll be able to sell it easily in comparison to others. They know that a) their staff sell on features, and b) customers buy on features. Everyone has been trained to use the length of the feature list to evaluate product quality.

It doesn’t always work that way, however. The Motorola Razr had a relatively poor feature set (mediocre camera, mediocre battery life, OK call quality), but emphasized other fresh elements (dramatically thinner, innovative use of materials and lighting). Here’s a great article on the development story of the Razr.