Chad Vavra

My last post/response questioning the desktop metaphor on mobile devices got me thinking about one of my favorite user experience books, The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. In it he recalls the design and features of the first Mac.

for 1987, far ahead. It automatically resumed from where you had left off working, even if you turned off the machine in the interim; it had a screen-saver; instant on with any keystroke (and you didn’t even lose the keystroke); it would have qualified for a “green” sticker had they been invented then, it had true document-centric operation with a level of integration beyond any of today’s suites, OpenDoc, or OLE; an ease of use that has yet to be duplicated; the boot time was about seven seconds but seemed instantaneous due to a psychological trick; it featured full-text retrieval of anything, no matter in what application; had built-in communications including an auto-answer, auto-dial modem; the communications were available and integrated with all the application areas; and so on. — reference

Phones today may be more powerful than the first Mac in terms of processors and memory but I can’t help but wonder with all of Mr. Jobs talk of quality assurance for the lack of Flash, why the current mobile devices don’t equal the user experience and functionality of something from 1987?

Everyone seems to think the the power of Apple is in its user experience, but I firmly disagree. The power of Apple is in it’s industrial design – the physical shape of the object. User experience in mobile devices is bad. INDUSTRY-WIDE BAD, when measured against 23 year old computers.