Maybe a little backstory.

When the iPhone was first released, I was in the process of moving to San Francisco. The second day I was there, I stopped by an Apple store, picked up this amazing phone and my mobile experience was changed forever.

A couple years later, I was still using the same phone, that first generation iPhone. It worked great, though I had to jailbreak it when I moved to Canada. The 3G came out, then the 3GS, then the 4G, and I was still using that great iPhone. Eventually Google released Android, then the Nexus One, a phone I like to call “the greatest phone ever made behind the iPhone”.

Because I work in mobile, and a very large percentage of mobile users are on Android devices, I decided to jump on the Android bandwagon and order that Nexus One from Google. I was excited about it, and it worked well when I was excited. Once the shine wore off, the imperfections started to stand out to me.

Almost immediately I started to get dust under the screen, an annoyance only surpassed by the fact I couldn’t see the screen in sunlight. I could see my iphone screen. It didn’t get any dust in it either. This was really a small thing, although the longer I dealt with it the more it began to escalate from annoyance level to anger.

What really got to me was the design. This is my career, my livelihood, and my love. With my iPhone, things flowed seamlessly from one app to another, and I never had to learn a new way to work. With Android, I never knew what I was going to get. Some included the menu in the app, some were under the menu button. Some used the back button in app, some back buttons sent me to the home page, some to the last app I used. To make this more frustrating, when I tried to tap that back button, it’s hit area was higher than the label, something I’m told is known but has never been fixed.

A few months ago I started thinking about the iPhone 5. I knew it was coming, so I wanted to hold off on replacing my increasingly more frustrating Nexus One, which had started giving me “out of memory” errors, no matter how much I deleted. I heard it was going to be August, no problem, I can make it. Then September, damn, a little long. Now I’m hearing October and I can’t do it, I was too pumped up about a new iPhone, especially since I had been leering at my wife’s iPhone 4 for 5 months at this point.

So I stole my kid’s phone. She’s got my Nexus One, I’ve for a 3.something iOS first gen iPhone, which besides the lack of GPS, has been far better than my latest Android experience.

For the next couple of months I will keep going with this archaic iPhone, and I’m happier about that than I have been for the last year and a half of Android. I’ll keep the Android around, I need to test, I need to understand what’s happening over there, but I can’t do it every day anymore. I can’t keep setting design aside anymore.

I’ve missed you, iPhone, and I’m looking forward to version 5.

I’m participating in Movember this year, growing a ‘stache to raise money for prostate cancer research. In 2010 4,400 men will die of prostate cancer, and I’d like to do my small part to help stop that.

My embarrassingly scratchy progress will be posted on my movember page http://ca.movember.com/mospace/784546/ where you can also donate to the cause.

Thanks for your help!

1. Don’t take advice/rules lists too seriously, they’re all made up of people’s personal experiences and aren’t law.
2. Empathy will make you a better designer, especially when you’re not designing for yourself.
3. Develop your own list, based on real life experience, not what other people have told you.

The first problem I keep having with these lists is that many of them are so definite, as if the author’s experience fits the reader’s perfectly. It may be a pet peeve, but there are no absolutes, and passing down an individual experience as an absolute isn’t helpful, it’s constricting the world view of the person who takes it as gospel.

The second problem, is that by sharing their life experiences as rules or advice, the list becomes about ego. Granted, most blogs are about the author’s ego to start with, but when these lists are shared, they become the Fox news of blog posts – quick snippets taken out of context that are easy to pass around and share without putting any critical thought into them.

What I’ve found is that everyone needs to develop their own list, and that means taking other people’s experiences and your own, and factoring in context. We all owe it to ourselves to think through the rules we follow, and to keep that list of rules changing for our whole lives.

Why aren’t agencies putting all their work on YouTube by default? Every spot we make should be automatically uploaded and properly keyword written. There is no excuse for running a spot on television that can’t be found online, especially when that online component is free.

Missy ended up finding it here.

I couldn’t have said this better. We’re spending too much money on products that don’t last when there are better options that have been available all along.

This is a binder clip. You can buy 60 of them for $4. If you, at any time, have more than 60 open bags that need closing you’ve opened too many bags. They are stronger than any clip you’ll buy specifically designed for that purpose, and they’re made out of metal, not plastic, so they’ll last forever. You can buy this one box of clips and never need to buy another clip again.

http://www.thesundaybest.org/2010/05/keep-it-simple.html

See also: http://lastyearsmodel.org/ I’m as guilty of upgrading my phone as anyone else, but my last phone was an original iphone, so it lasted almost 3 years until I got the Nexus One. I’m getting better!

The problem is, I realized today that I spend $50 each month for my wife and I to have internet access on our iPhones. Slow, unreliable, specific task based internet.

We’re with a discount carrier, Fido, who is owned by Rogers. For the sake of comparison, I’ll use Rogers’ numbers. Their cost is even higher, their mobile subscribers will pay $35 per month for 1gb of data. When you compare this to internet at home is where it begins to get outrageous. A Rogers subscriber at home will pay $25.99 per month for 2gb of data. 25% less money for 50% more data.

If I were a Rogers subscriber, I would pay a total of $95.99 each and every month for internet at home and on two iPhones. Again, slow, unreliable, specific task based internet is the large chunk of that. You see, I can’t use the more expensive internet on my phone for lots of things. Peer-to-peer is out, any video beyond YouTube is out and no Flash based sites (that’s a huge chunk of data transfer gone.) I won’t use FTP, I’m not downloading much music over iTunes and I’m not chatting all day. I’m using this internet in quick bursts. Check my email. Look up an address. Find that address on Google Maps. Squash a barroom argument about what the capital of Arkansas is. It’s Little Rock.

Why are the carriers so expensive? I am not a tech person, maybe for some reason it is exorbitantly expensive to send that data over the air. I can’t believe that’s the case though when I look at the profit. Rogers’ wireless data revenue accounted for 20% of their wireless revenue, and that’s only going up. My math has never been great, but I calculate their profit around 48%. Somehow, people are buying into internet that is less useful and more expensive than the internet they have at home.

We seem to be accepting that this is just the cost of downloading wikipedia entries in the bar.

I’m now calculating all the costs of communication in my house, including television, VOIP, internet, cell. I’m over $300 per month so far, so I think I’ll stop counting before I start thinking of all the Mexican vacations I’ve wasted.

Take a look at where they were most recently:

This is a standard, tech-style kind of logo you would find on an internet company’s wall. It says their name, ostensibly tells you they are “moving forward” with that arrow pointing the way, which without going on a side tangent, is a fairly hackish way to guide a viewer. It’s bubbly and blue, and just bleeds how INTERNET AOL is. Aol. could have kept going with this for some time and been just fine.

They didn’t keep going though, they started thinking about their brand perception and how they’re being seen by the world. They’ve gone from an All Caps AOL to a sentence case Aol. Note that period after Aol. As an aside, I’m actually struggling to include these periods in this post without throwing off the whole flow, and I’ll stop using it from here on out. So Aol period is now a slightly friendlier name, as far as you can go without actually having an actual word as a name. The period actually serves a purpose, separating the name from the category, Aol.Sports, AOL.News and so on.

Friendly typography sounds like a load of crap, but it actually works. It allows users to connect with a company that seems to be the equivalent of a buddy you can have a beer with. Now they’re embracing how users think of them already going from a harsh acronym, to hide the days of America Online to what is almost a word in itself. Eh-oh-ell.

Now the interesting part to me is how they are using that typography. They’ve created a flexible logo that changes according to the context. They can now add this logo to almost anything, owning the imagery. Football scores? Stamp “Aol.” on Terrell Owens. Weather reports? Stamp “Aol.” on imagery of the actual weather.

This is a not just a flexible logo now, it signifies a flexible brand that can expand well past America Online and start touching on their world of properties. With this brand backed up by solid changes to the company, they can attempt to shake the perception of an out of touch dotcom age company catering to grandparents, and start engaging customers on the level they are capable of, potentially as a challenger to Yahoo!’s services. They’ve got the awkward punctuation down.

My problem with the logo and brand as it is, they’ve taken this great flexible idea and piled it on a bunch of shit imagery they seem to have grabbed from a stock catalog. This was their opportunity to grab some compelling imagery related to each section of Aol and integrated it into their communications. Now I realize this was all sample imagery and they haven’t rolled it out across the board yet, so when this comes to their site I hope they do something a little more aggressive with it.

I’ve added in my own quick little paste up of what I think it will look like, but I suspect they will probably launch a completely revamped web presence soon though, something that uses this brand system a little more effectively than we see now.

Overall, great idea, horrible implementation AS WE SEE IT. I have high hopes for this moving forward.

This is an example of a great idea that has been poorly implemented. If Expedia were to say “We don’t believe you should have to pay for insurance, so we won’t charge you if the trip falls apart” then that is a solid promise. Saying “We don’t think you should pay until December, but after that you’re on your own” is just disingenuous.

I kid, I kid. This is horrible. Bad istockphoto.

I had a teacher in school once, a photography teacher, who said “never ever let someone have your work for free.” He was adamant about this. If you let someone have your work for free once, you’ve set that value in their mind.

I know there is the argument that these are pieces you wouldn’t get paid for anyway, and the people who buy these wouldn’t have paid full price for a logo anyway, but I’m not sure I buy that. Will your full price paying clients lose respect for your work if they know you are selling a log for $5 that you would have charged them thousands for?

And what are the ethical implications of selling work that was paid for and developed for someone else but rejected on the path to the final work? Is that rejected logo yours, or that client’s?

The whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Or maybe that’s just the $5 Starbucks I just had.

Unfortunately, the only option I had was to SIM unlock it for use on the local network. This served me well for the last year, until I accidentally updated the firmware today before reading the warnings and turned my iPhone into an expensive paperweight.

With my mobile being my sole telephone point of contact, I figured I had better get something fast. I had $95 reward dollars on my Fido account, so I went down to the Fido store to check out my options. I found something that didn’t look bad, had a full keyboard, and apparently had web and email capability for $175, so I paid my $100 (including tax, minus reward dollars) and left the store in communication with the world again.

My satisfaction lasted about as long as it took to get home. This phone’s operating system was obviously designed not for user experience, but to make as much money as possible. All the apps on the phone, including games, were demo versions. The wallpapers were downloads that cost $2 each. Everything on this phone was branded “Fido” and seemingly put their brand advertising ahead of every experience.

The phone itself was a frustrating experience in which I had to continuously rotate the phone from horizontal to vertical to get anything done. I took a photo of my wife for the background, but the phone didn’t allow me to rotate to a portrait mode, and I had a sideways photo.

One of the main reasons for choosing this phone, the email, turned out to have a preset list of email services I could use, none of which I actually use. I didn’t think Hotmail was that relevant anymore, and I don’t think I needed 2 versions of Yahoo! mail. I did manage to install the Gmail app, but this meant I gave up the phone checking for mail, and I would have to open the Gmail app every time I wanted to check my mail.

On top of all this, the hardware is clunky, doesn’t feel right when you type, and the keyboard has confusing coloring that caused me to click the orange button to get to the orange characters, which was incorrect.

The next day I returned the phone to the store where I was told they were surprised I brought it back so soon. Normally people don’t realize how bad it is until 2 months after they buy it when it starts to randomly shut down and the screen fails.

You know this already?

If this is such a bad piece of user experience, and the hardware is flawed, and Fido KNOWS this, why did they let me buy it to start with? Why do they carry it at all?

I switched it out for a $65 Motorola Renew, a dead simple phone made of recycled plastic bottles. It doesn’t do anything besides make calls and text message, but my expectation is that it will do those things and nothing else. When I discovered Tetris on it, I was thrilled. It is tiny and light, and didn’t cost me any cash, just some of my reward dollars.

Until I can get my iPhone working again I have a way to stay in contact. I’m happy with this, and all it required was meeting my expectations. The LG Neon failed in almost every way by trying to give me everything and not meeting any expectations, while the Motorola Renew succeeded by not trying to be anything but what it could do capably.

This is a good lesson for all of us in design. Do things right if you decide to do something at all. Giving a user a broken experience is much more costly than doing things properly to begin with.