The ‘Duh’ factor –Mass adoption

I know that
studies are often necessary to document and substantiate
something. Occasional frustrations aside, I have seen many good
studies that do an excellent job of shedding light on problems
and defining potential courses of action.

I have tried to
surf the Internet from my pocket cellphone but because of that
experience, a phrase kept coming to mind. I read two recent
studies documenting that Virginia Internet access via WAP-enabled
cellular phones is difficult and hard to use. You can not do any
serious work on it, the effort of punching phone keys outweighs
the threshold for perceived value and that less than one percent
of wireless-happy Europeans surveyed this year have used their WAP-enabled phones to purchase something is.

Well, Duh! It is
currently just plain unfriendly! But as we will see, it does not
have to stay that way.

WAP is not the
villain!

Before we
identify the scoundrel in this drama, let us realize that public
opinion aside, it is not really WAP. The Wireless Application
Protocol is basically a reasonable protocol designed to provide
Internet access over a very slow and intermittently connected
hostile wireless infrastructure. As such, it does a pretty good
job.

What people
mostly complain about when they say WAP, is the part of a
cellphone Internet session that they wrap their hands
around–the cellphone itself, which typically has three or
four short lines of hard to read text, and a telephone keypad
that was never designed for entering Web addresses, passwords, or
anything beyond short strings of numbers.

Given this user
interface, it is no wonder that people tend to play with WAP
Internet access for a short time, and then abandon it. (Even I,
who have been known to happily spend hours interacting with
computers using arcane ‘command line’ interfaces,
rarely use the WAP features of my cellphone, for just those
reasons.)

But this can
change! I am a firm believer that applying aesthetics and
ease-of-use to just about anything—and especially to
communicating computing appliances—can make all the
difference in the world. Let us explore a couple of examples:

The Mac attack

In the beginning,
there was the command line. Some of us really did not mind using DCL, DOS, MUMPS, and many other arcane computing chants and
incantations. But I venture to say that if, in 1984, Macintosh
had not started the computing industry on the road to windows,
then the mythical ‘average people’ who now represent
the vast majority of computer users, would never have taken the
plunge and the computer industry as we know it today, would not
exist!

Most people
simply had no desire to learn and use those command lines, or to
stare at green screens of text. But the addition of aesthetic
graphic windowed interfaces and color displays made the computer
far more approachable to the rest of us—and the result is
history.

Internet to the people

Second, I suggest
that exactly the same phenomena happened with the Internet. The
Internet was around for many years before Tim Berners-Lee
invented the Web, and the 1994 NCSA invention of Mosaic, the
first popular Web browser. But pre-Mosaic, even though windowed
interfaces had softened the harsh world of computing, the
Internet remained the domain of command line-fluent geeks (I use
that term in the nicest of ways).

The Internet
just could not entice the average person to leave their fair
lands of icons and mice for rugged command lines and text
output–and so the Internet remained largely unknown until
Mosaic gentled the Internet by making it aesthetic and easy to
use.

The trend here
is not too subtle—aesthetic + easy-to-use = mass adoption.
And I suggest that this same trend will also apply to the
wireless Internet!

The next (Aesthetic) step

Current WAP
implementations might be likened to the command line environments
that first defined computing, and later the Internet—really
interested and dedicated people do not mind (or even notice) the
pain, and they use it. But the average person doesn't find it
worth all the bother.

In Japan though,
DoCoMo's iMode pocket Internet demonstrates how bringing
aesthetics and ease-of-use to the scene has helped make DoCoMo
the largest ISP in Japan. And now DoCoMo is beginning to spread
iMode to the U.S. and Europe! In fact, iMode will likely have
penetrated into these new areas enough to be noticeable by around
2004. Which interestingly, is 10 years after Mosaic changed the
face of the Internet (which is 10 years after Macintosh changed
the face of computing).

Aesthetic +
easy-to-use = mass adoption. Duh!