I have a new side project called freshly, it’s a service to help people find farmers’ markets. I had a problem, I mostly hate buying produce from grocery stores because it’s never very good, and I enjoy my food.
Problem is, I could never remember when the markets were open, or where they were. I got around this by just making a google calendar with all the markets listed by day and time. It worked pretty well, so I figured I’d go a step further and share with everyone by making a site.
This week I stole a first generation iPhone from my year and a half year old daughter. She had been using it for months to walk around with, perched between ear and shoulder, repeating “hello? hello.” It had saliva coated on over it’s once pristine face, but I got rid of that quickly.
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.
They paid so much attention to the little details, but kept it a simple experience. So important for a kid to be able to play without getting distracted by more flashing lights and bells.
I wrote this the day the article in question was posted, and never made it public. I don’t know why it slipped my mind, but here it is, a little late, but true as ever.
MDC partners has posted on their blog about the Reader function of mobile Safari, and are making it seem as if advertising will cease to exist.
So what exactly is Reader?
In a nutshell: Reader is a feature that allows users of the Safari mobile browser to prevent advertisements from being displayed in the news stories they read.
It’s actually a little more than that, Reader strips all formatting from the article, presenting the content as plain text on a page. It’s a great way to consume content, particularly long form text found in lengthy news articles. It’s not designed to prevent ads, ads are just one of the things that are distracting readers from their goal.
Their goal on a news site is to read the news, to consume content. The point of ads is to distract the reader in order to inform them of a service or product. These are opposing forces, with the advertisers trying to break the flow of the reader’s original intention. Readers aren’t going to a news site to look at ads, they aren’t seeking information about a product, the advertising has always been a necessary evil in order to pay for the production of that news. In the past, readers have just ignored ads, as shown by the abysmal click through rates. To fight this banner blindness, advertisers started to make their ads gaudy and aggressive -including actually blocking the content- so ad blockers became popular. Reader is the next evolution of this active aggression against ads, but also it’s an attempt to avoid over-designed content.
I make my living creating advertising, but my reaction to Reader is not that my livelihood is disappearing, instead I think this is a step forward in our evolution.
Banner ads were a reaction. They were news sites reacting to having a website for the first time, and seeing it as if the internet were paper, where ads covered the costs and made tons of money. They were a reaction from us advertising people saying we’ll handle ads the same way we did in newspapers except now we can make them move. The problem is, it was the wrong reaction, from both of us.
For the most part, we’ve failed to innovate, and have kept going with banner ads though the results were never extraordinary. Now it’s time that we look at ads in a different way. How can we get our message to consumers in a way that is useful, an experience, even delightful?
It’s time for us to stop complaining about the ad blockers, and start thinking about new ways to have a conversation.
http://www.mdc-ideas.com/2011/06/10/apple%E2%80%99s-new-mobile-browser-a-threat-to-online-adverting/
That’s a pretty bold statement, the BEST is something very reserved.
I don’t know his history, I don’t know where he learned this, but I’d really like to have a beer with this guy and talk shop.
He’s been somehow able to get rid of all the fluff, and in most cases remove all design to make the leanest experiences I’ve used, a ton of iphone apps.
I'm Michael Farley! I write things I think about design and mobile. I'm an Associate Creative Director at AKQA NY but this is all my blog, and anything I say here is more than likely my own opinion and nobody else's. Nobody shares the same thoughts. I rarely write, I'm too busy with the three things I've created. The first was hello, burrow!, followed by a little girl named Maddie, and my latest, freshly. I love reading email, so get at me.
