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The Age of User Experience
Andreas Pfeiffer argues in ACM Ubiquity that features don't matter any more; user experience is all.
Why Features Don't Matter Any More: The New Laws of Digital Technology
In the seemingly never-ending debate about Apple's successes, announcements, new products and predicted-but-unannounced über-gadgets, features and technical specifications often seem to dominate the debate. Yet if there's one lesson to be learned from the company's recent successes, it is a very simple one: features don't matter any more.
Welcome to the Age of User Experience.
One key aspect of modern digital devices is that technical specifications are easily copied and replicated: mega-pixel count in cameras, storage capacity in music players or processor speed in personal computers are the same everywhere. As a result, they provide only poor distinguishing factors for consumers when it comes to choosing between different brands.
That's where the overall user experience comes in. As computing and digital devices move more and more into the consumer space, features and functionalities will increasingly take the back-seat as motivators for technology adoption: as the iPod abundantly shows, user experience (along with a strong brand, and clever marketing) is much more important for the success of a device then technical specifications. Web designers have grasped the importance of good user experience a long time ago; now it is time the big technology providers to understand where the industry is headed.
All true. But how true-- or new-- is it? In the 1980s, Regis McKenna was saying that people don't really know enough about technical specs to evaluate high-tech products on the basis of processor speed, etc., and that other factors-- particularly influencers-- were more important. Still, perhaps what matters today is that an argument like this seems to self-evident.