Joyce’s Musings

Reviewing many of the reactions to the newly announced iPad from Apple, I’m struck by how many people are dissing the thing for reasons that no ordinary user will ever care about. I think that the problem is that most of these folks are geeks, and geeks traditionally don’t get it.

What’s the difference between a geek and an “ordinary” user? Let’s look at what they want:

The Razer Naga Mouse is a geek’s wet dream. Covered in a million buttons, this thing is perfect for whatever application the user wants to approach it with. It’s designed for World of Warcraft, but I’m certain that geeks would hunger for these buttons to be available for every single application they were using. They want a million buttons and absolute control over their device.

Now look at the Magic Mouse. How many buttons do you see? None. How many buttons are there actually there? Well, one, unless you enable right clicking in software. The geeks cry foul and spit upon this mouse, but your average user looks at it and goes, “I get that!” I point at things on screen, and then I click! I don’t need to spend any time trying to figure out which button to click!

Let’s look at another comparison between what a geek wants and what your ordinary user wants.

Ah, the venerable PS3 controller. 2 analog joysticks. 8 velocity sensitive buttons. A velocity sensitive D-pad. 3 option buttons. This thing is a delight for your average geek. Sit them down in front of a game, and they have complete control over their character, with a button for every action that they might want to take. Shooting, jumping, attacking, selecting items, running… It’s all here, and they have every feature they want, right at their finger tips.

I think you can guess where I’m going with this next.

The Wii remote. When it came out, geeks were complaining about its lack of buttons. You control your characters by wagging it around? What?! That’s crazy, and you look silly while doing it! 4 ordinary buttons and 3 option buttons and a D pad are all you get with this button starved device.

The Wii remote’s innovation comes in the fact that you control it through moving the wand. Want to slash your sword? Swing the remote like you’re doing so. Throw a bowling ball? Mimic the action. This is far easier for the average user to understand. Instead of having to memorize the behaviors of 11 buttons and 3 directional controls, they have to simply do the most natural thing in the world. If they have buttons to memorize, they have a meager 7 buttons and 1 directional control to consider. For more advanced, geek-oriented games, there are other controls that add more buttons, but for your average user, this is going to seem a lot less intimidating. Furthermore, most of the games targeted towards this market tend to use only one or two of the buttons at most.

This is the options screen for the X-perl Unit Frames add-on for World of Warcraft. It’s a third party piece of software that allows you to customize your interface to your liking. The number of options here is staggering and delightful. You have absolute control over every little feature of your interface. They’ve done a great job of exposing everything to the user and enabling you to tweak everything to be perfect. This is a great example of the sort of geeky options pages I see in a lot of open source software, especially on linux.

I don’t have an example from Wow, so I’ll just show a completely separate options page to show the different aesthetic. Let’s compare to the OS X options page for changing screen resolution

Still geeky and trying to show some pretty technical information to the user, but take a moment and count the number of buttons. How long will it take even the dimmest user to figure out how to user this screen? I’d wager not nearly as long as it would take them to learn a screen with a million buttons on it.

So now let’s get to the meat of the matter.

This is your representative netbook, an Asus eeePC. This thing is awesome, especially if you hack it to run Mac OS X on it. But even without that bit of effort, you can do some pretty incredible stuff on this. Run multiple applications simultaneously. Access all of your favorite software. Surf the web. Do it all at the same time! Hell, on my Macbook, my standard use case is to be listening to music, talking on IM, browsing the internet, and playing video games or coding all at the same time. I regularly have close to a dozen applications running simultaneously. I can also download software from virtually any place on the net to run on here. It’s great! The eeePC also has a number of peripherals that you can use with it. Mice and keyboards and webcams and a thousand other bits of electronics and wires. This is a great little geek device for computing on the go.

And now the iPad. Geeks hate it. Where is my keyboard?! Where are my buttons?! Where’s my multi-tasking!? I can’t even install software from my favorite open source website here! I have to go to a single location to get any apps! That sucks! It lacks features, flash, peripherals. Why would anyone ever buy this?

Well… For a geek, it makes not a lot of sense, but for your average user…

Have you ever watched an average user try to user a computer? They don’t understand multitasking. I’ve watched someone re-open an application over and over again because they didn’t get the concept of a program being “in the background.” Trying to run just 2 things at once would be overwhelming to them as they try to grasp the concept of what they’re doing. They *like* the lack of multi-tasking. It means that the only thing they ever have to think about is the application that is right in front of their face. They don’t need to memorize what applications are running, or learn how to use the mysterious task bar or dock to figure out what is currently running but not appearing on their screen.

Peripherals? They’ll never buy those. Too complicated. Flash? What’s that? Software? Gods, how nice it is to go to a *single* place to get all of my music, applications, and books. Why, I don’t even need to go to a store or ask my grandchild what I should be running! And how wonderful it is to be able to directly *touch* what I’m interacting with instead of learning that weird mouse thing that seems really challenging to use.

(Seriously, have you ever watched the average user use a mouse? It’s wince-worthy.)

This is their device. Sure, it’s more expensive than a comparable computer and does a lot less, but it makes up for that in software. You can do things easily with this machine that you could not do with others. They’ve exchanged power for ease of use. The models are all about direct interaction. What you are looking at is all you need to think about.

Geeks are complaining about the lack of features. Meanwhile, the first time their grandparents or parents grab one of these, they’ll never buy another computer again. It’s *easy.* And that’s what sells. Not features. Ease of use. That’s what made the Wii so popular. That’s what makes Mac the #1 computer over $1000. That’s what makes simpler mice so convenient to your average user. They don’t want buttons and features and control. They want all of that to get out of the way so that they can get their work done, and that means the simplest, easiest, most direct interaction that is possible. That’s what sells, and that’s what changes the world.

But the geeks don’t get that.