Radical Intimacy and the Smartphone
Many
companies have not adapted to the deep connection their customers and employees
have with their mobile devices.
Humanity has arrived at a technological turning point created by
mobile devices, especially smartphones. For the first time, people routinely
carry around pocket-sized devices with great computing power. The mobile phone
is also one of the most ubiquitous devices in human history — far more popular
than the personal computer. As of 2015, about 7 billion people had cell phones
(whereas only 4.5 billion had access to indoor plumbing). Of those phones,
about 2 billion are smartphones: portable devices with voice and Internet
access, touch interfaces, cameras, sensors, and animatable screens. The phones
also have downloadable applications that allow people to customize a device and
evolve how they make use of it.
Smartphones change interactions between people and organizations,
making the connections radically intimate. Because the smartphone is integrated
with a person’s physical movement, held in the hand, and often kept next to the
heart, it supplants all the other tools people have traditionally used to communicate,
gather information, and express themselves. It’s the device through which they
get innumerable things done. The more people choose and use their applications,
the more the devices become an extension of their owners. Every smartphone is
potentially a wormhole between the persona of its owner and the world at large,
a visceral connection point, binding people together.
The rise of the smartphone thus raises a fundamental issue
involving user experience — an issue that is not just technological, but that
concerns the nature of human relationships. Businesses (and other
organizations) that can figure out how to adapt to this type of user experience
will thrive. Those that cannot will become irrelevant. Tens of thousands of
computer applications and the business processes they embody, including
thousands used by businesses to connect with their customers and employees, may
need to be reengineered for smartphones and tablets, or created for them.
Business has gone through such a change before, when, in the
1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, it reengineered its paper-based information systems
for mainframes and then personal computers. That seemed like a major shift at
the time. But in retrospect, it was smaller than the change introduced by
smartphones. The graphical user interfaces of Macintosh and Windows computers,
with their text-heavy look and feel and typewriter-like keyboard input, were
designed to evoke paper. People shuffled windows on those computers as they had
once shuffled paper documents. The computer system was simply a way to maximize
the output of people working at desks.
The smartphone and tablet, by contrast, are creating a new way of
interacting with and through machines. These devices are, as everyone knows,
essentially computers. But they are no longer relegated to a desk or an office.
Interacting with the old devices is like playing a piano; each key is a
discrete input normally pressed separately. Interacting with a smartphone or
tablet involves a much wider range of continuous motion. Like molding clay with
your hands, it gives you a more visceral, free-form connection to what you’re
doing.
For years, businesses have tried to use digital technology for
strategic advantage. They automate just about everything they do, but they find
themselves unable to gain the productivity they should. The reason is right in
front of them — or, rather, right in front of the people who are forced to use
their internal systems. Most businesses invest very little in appropriately
addressing their software user experiences, and all but a few of their systems
provide a terrible user experience.
The smartphone will, at long last, force businesses to change.
Most businesses have let smartphones and tablets become gateways to their
systems. They do this because workers who are comfortable with, and proficient
at, their tools make fewer mistakes and are more productive. Employees, for
their part, naturally expect to use smartphones at work, because the devices
are so closely connected to the rest of their lives. It seems silly not to do
things at work the same way they do things elsewhere.
But when businesses let people use their mobile devices, these
extensions of the self, a new orientation is required. The institution has
decidedly less control over its information, or the time and place of using it,
because of the personal nature of the connection. The workforce also has a new,
richer form of expression, in both providing information and collecting it, and
business applications need to adapt.
Freedom from the Form
To realize the depth of
this change, consider something that most people take for granted. The form, a
document in which people record data from the field,
is at least as old as the Old Testament. In Chapter 13 of
the book of Numbers, Moses sends 12 spies to scout ahead and gather
information about the land of Canaan, and he gives them the equivalent of
fields to fill in and boxes to check, telling them to report on “the land, what
it is like; and the population that is settled in it: are they strong or weak,
are they few or many; and what the land is like, where are they settled: is it
good or ill; and what the towns are like, where they are settled therein: are
they encampments or fortified-places; and what the land is like: is it fat or
lean, are there in it trees, or not?”
Companies make similar requests today of the field representatives
they send to take inventory of store shelves. To be sure, instead of parchment
or paper, the form is now on an electronic tablet, a device that can take
photographs, record and play audio and video, and manage many other forms of
media. Yet in gathering information, most people still use the form on a tablet
as though it were paper on a clipboard. The doctor seeking data during surgery
or the building inspector looking at a boiler must turn away from the task at
hand and look down at the screen, to check for information or enter data, just
as on paper. This is not only an inconvenience, it is a possible danger,
because people are prone to errors. Interrupting the flow of what they are
doing, and requiring them to fill in data as they would on paper, or with a
keyboard, increases their chances of making a mistake, especially over time.
The smartphone is qualitatively different than a tablet. It
provides freedom from the form. It enables a new approach to human–device
interaction: an approach that doesn’t mimic an individual sitting at a desk
with a piece of paper, doing a task.
For example, a real estate app called MagicPlan uses the
motion-detection and photographic capabilities of the smartphone to capture the
dimensions and features of its environment. You can point a phone or tablet
toward the corners, doors, windows, furnishings, and other features of the room
and it will draw a floor plan for you. There are apps for physicians that
display customized images of the human body, making it easier to talk to
patients about their situation, and other apps that measure patient indicators
such as heart and respiratory rates, without requiring the medical professional
to look away. There are apps for fixing boilers, which allow building
inspectors and engineers to more easily recognize problems without having to look
up the technical specs. And, of course, there are a wide range of GPS-based
navigation apps, which must be simple enough for drivers to use safely.
The Once and Future Business Response
All these apps, and many more like them, are beginning to change the
way businesses connect with their employees. The apps transcend the limitations
of the paper form. They gather information automatically, or through gestures,
voices, and photographs, and then they translate it into data that is easy to
manipulate and retrieve.
Smartphone apps depend on having a user experience that people
find natural and comfortable. (That may not, by the way, mean easy to learn, if
learning the app is part of learning the job.) As a result, the rise of
smartphones has brought much-needed attention to the question of user
experience.
As a software developer, I know that information technology
professionals often think they are making work better simply because they’re
computerizing it. When we think that, we are wrong. We rarely even try to track
the fatigue, friction, and loss of commitment that stems from poorly designed
technology. And poorly designed technology is everywhere.
“When the inventor of the USB stick dies,” wrote the Twitter
comedian Cluedont, “they’ll gently lower the coffin, then pull it back up, turn
it the other way, then lower it again.” The time spent figuring out the right
way to insert a USB stick may not seem like much, but the distraction is real.
If someone has to call customer service because the buttons on the computer
interface all look the same, that’s more lost time. If a doctor won’t use a
patient records system because it’s too hard to figure out or too cumbersome
and error-prone to use, that’s even worse. All these things add up. You can’t
measure the productivity and quality that you would have gained if things were
better. So every company loses the time, trust, and benefits of the skills of
its employees, while assuming that it is winning.
As smartphones become the primary computer in employees’ lives,
companies will have to apply design thinking — a focus on people, how they
work, and how they use tools — to their interfaces. The process of creating
internal systems will change, incorporating great amounts of feedback from
customers, potential customers, workers, and potential workers. Businesses will
gain radical intimacy, a close connection with the people who buy from them and
work for them.
To be sure, radical intimacy presents certain problems for
business. Most people, as a rule, don’t want to be intimate with companies,
especially those they work for. A purely transactional relationship has many
benefits for the individual, including the expectation that he or she could
negotiate a better deal, and leave if it falls through. Moreover, the senior
decision makers in most companies don’t want radical intimacy either. They have
thousands of employees, and they believe that close relationships will require
an untenable amount of time and attention. Blindly emulating the social world
is inappropriate.
But mobile devices will force businesses to overcome these
obstacles. They can start by improving their user interfaces. User interface is
the touch point for human relationships and behavior, the connection point
between the person and the organization. At first glance, it may seem like a
minor thing to focus on, even inconsequential — but it is actually profound.
by Dan
Bricklin
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/Radical-Intimacy-and-the-Smartphone?gko=22da5&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20161013&utm_campaign=resp
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