hyalineskies

We are, as humans, in some way or another, products of little more than our deepest insecurities. We are beings that find great utility in patching our biggest fears: we find escape from our own mundane lives in the gossip and drama of others; we seek solace in social subcultures of like-minded people; we glorify select parts of our society — and have them further glorified in advertising and buzz — in turn contributing to what eventually becomes American consumer culture.

Perhaps the most socially malleable of our society exists as teenagers: at that time, we are in a constant state of testing, shaping life philosophies and self-images, experimenting with substances, society and sex, eventually — hopefully — finding who we are sometime through high school and the earliest years of college. Meanwhile, teenagers, pulled at from every direction by parents, friends and love interests, torn apart by their own psyche internally, are potentially the most fragile members of America.

It is within the teenage years that we generally gain the greater grasp of a worldly aesthetic: those not following the high-school social ideal are quickly ostracised into the strongest of social cliques; those plagued with little interest toward trends of teenage self-image become the persecuted, the dejected, those limited to a teenage social wasteland where the greatest, most aspirational positions go to those on top of the mainstream trend ladder: those at the top of the superficiality become the alphas of an already microscopic social hierarchy, the everything and nothing of high school, gaining not only the date to the high school prom, but the self-confidence that stays with them long after graduation day.

One of the biggest issues that plague adolescents is that of acne vulgaris, the rather harmless skin disease that does little but create an aesthetic nightmare. Acne causes a disastrous amount of stress for girls and boys alike; it is the quintessential uglifier in high school society aside from obesity. The blemishes caused by acne are a cultural disaster, evoking mental images of squalor and sub-standard social class, a stereotypical condition of the societal rejects in high school life. In the 1800s and early twentieth century, acne was considered the marque of a chronic masturbator, a sign of potential venereal disease and sexual promiscuity, signals that could ruin the image of a respectable girl and cause some ridicule (although much less in the time) to boys.

With the release of tretinoin cream, known to most with any dermatological exposure by its brand name of Retin-A, a miracle drug became available to the sufferers of acne and its associated stigma. Although expensive compared to non-prescription cosmetics, Retin-A offered the plagued teenager a new lease on a social life, gradually working to clear the skin of its users. Since the drug’s initial release in the 1967, tretinoin is still the standard for an array of skin issues. The New York Times devoted a whole column to sing its praises on 30 November 2006, describing its use as a skin rejuvenation tool for not only acne but for that other awful skin blemish: wrinkles.

The adolescent issue of tretinoin may seem trivial, but its creation and widespread use, as well as its extended use by those far outside its original generational use underscores the self-conscience that we maintain throughout our lives. The tretinoin example, although seemingly much more “medical” than other social improvements, really does nothing to help someone physically; the effects are almost entirely aesthetic.

However, the aesthetic obviously carries social consequences: with the person’s own aesthetics improved and some stigma set aside, their overall happiness increases. They are given more social opportunities than would have been previously attainable under the uglier model. Tretinoin is, in the end, a good whose sales are marketed by the cultural pressure of aesthetic improvement. It is, in essence, an item of design, not really changing any core part of the self directly, instead simply giving a superficial improvement to that self.

Of course, those superficial improvements mean everything to many, especially in a high-school environment. One high schooler I know is the owner of a perfect black iPod nano; this same student, however, has no access to the Internet — or even a computer at all — from his rural home. Instead, the nano is populated with hundreds of pirated music files on friends’ or relatives’ computers. Why, then, does the student own an iPod? Even in the most rural of American towns, where broadband infrastructure is largely non-existent, the iPod has become a symbol of social class. No portable CD player or alternative digital audio player will do.

Even the most trivial of things, such as owning a pair of the little white earbuds, mean everything to the social mobility of the teenager. The iPod — as well as other common devices such as the cameraphone — are requirements of life for the teenage socialite.

Like tretinoin, the iPod phenomenon spans more ranges than that of teenage angst. On campus and in the city, the white iPod earbuds are e-bling, declaring to the world that you’re hip. The iPod has positioned itself (rather inadvertently) as an aesthetic ornament first and audio player second. The exterior aesthetic of the device is as much for the enjoyment of others as it is for its owner, and its simple aesthetic is a primary factor in the user experience of the item. The iPod is the tretinoin of tech, an item that, while it has intrinsic utility, is leaps and bounds above a competitive user experience because others say so. To compete with iPod cool, you have to outdo it on the self-consciousness front.

The external user experience

Most geeks and technical reviewers wax poetic about iPod + iTunes, the simplicity of the iPod scroll wheel UI, and the great music store integration. The iPod really does offer a gold-standard user experience out of the box compared to the Sansa or Zune; however, these devices — sans the Zune’s initial product installation hurdles — have built devices that can compete with iPod on some level. Setting iPod’s market saturation and consequent DRM lock-in aside (both of which we will tackle to some degree later,) competing device hardware could technically stand a chance against the iPod.

Suppose, however, we were able to match the the iPod’s user experience exactly with a competing device. What if someone was able to build what effectively was an iPod clone with a different aesthetic? (Think Zune without its issues.) Then what? Chances are, even if the user experience between our iPod clone and the real iPod would still favour the iPod, it winning in the hearts and minds of users because of its trendiness. The iPod’s user experience comes with an easy-to-use device plus social fluidity and the idea that you’re “with it.” Apple’s pricing certainly reflects this to some extent.

In economics, this trend of buying things as status symbols is called conspicuous consumption and the idea of buying goods to increase social status is certainly nothing new; the original research into such patterns was done by economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899. If people buy iPods to succumb to fads instead of because they fit their utmost functional requirements, they’re effectively creating market distortions by pretending to be part of a higher socioeconomic class. The consumer is paying an extra “membership fee” to (temporarily) jump up the social ladder.

For the math geek This membership fee equates to economic rent, the price a consumer pays for an object that in this case forces them into a higher socioeconomic class perception over another device with the same functional purpose. In this case, this rent would be the price of an iPod minus the price that the user could’ve paid if working entirely toward the practical goal of satisfying functional requirements (without the status symbol, er, status.) Note that this is the rent that they have to pay to maintain that status perception at that time; if the iPod becomes obsolete or otherwise uncool, the rent must be paid again with another status symbol to regain that socioeconomic perception. This differs from consumption of people on that social class such that their consumption on those goods is not done for the purpose of “status symbols,” instead, it is done because it is the most efficient device within their income range.

This iconic status of the iPod is no doubt a large factor in its user experience today, and the extra benefit of this UX comes without any user interface design knowledge at all. Apple’s design team gave the iPod its base aesthetic, but in the end it was society that gave the iPod the popular cachet that it has today.

This utmost trendiness, where the iPod has become something of a materialist obligation, may certainly be part of the product scope that its competitors simply fail to recognise as an extant competitive hurdle, and unfortunately it is one that non-design-oriented electronic manufacturers may be entirely helpless against. It’s part of the brand scope that Zune hoped to fix with their device aesthetic, “cool” taglines and “social” device behaviour; it is the same cultural chic that Grey attacked in its failed iDon’t campaign. Any audio player manufacturer would fail in attempting to dethrone the iPod in a swift revolution. Instead, the competitive edge that would work in this instance would be to build great, beautiful hardware today to send the iPod to the guillotine tomorrow. In doing so, the device would need to match the existing iPod hardware on the core UI / hardware / software level (including Fairplay or maybe iTunes transparency via iPod emulation) as well as extra features like those found on the Zune. Even then, the lead time to start an MP3 player revolution would take a few years. All of iPod’s competitors to date have attempted to assassinate the king through clever marketing today, totally disregarding what could happen tomorrow.

Create today, attack tomorrow

You can’t make chic today; the failures of others have made that painfully evident. Traditional evidence, however, says that you can create chic tomorrow, thus blowing open the market for competitors now. Those marvelling at the iPod user experience — as well as engineers, marketers, and others at competing companies — should be examining their enemy today. Copy everything and improve on it. Build your own innovations into the standard iPod feature set. Test the prototype and return if you don’t end up with something slightly better than the current available products of today. If you don’t end up building it right, re-examine and go. In the process, the device developed is fundamentally superior to the iPod, yet is still inferior in the moment due to the brand cachet of the iPod.

In the iPod analogy, this is what Zune could have been. The device works, looks alright, and the on-device UI works great; however, its overall experience got killed by its just-oversized form factor and terrible desktop software. It isn’t fundamentally superior to the iPod and dies in the light of its rockstar competitor.

This working for tomorrow by solving today’s problems isn’t a random business idea from the mind of an admittedly business-naïve student; it has been fundamentally proven in multiple industries with multiple products. This process, ironically, was the same that Apple followed with the iPod.

Very few non-techies remember the Creative NOMAD Jukebox, the Discman-sized, hard-disk-based digital audio player released by Creative in 2000. The NOMAD Jukebox offered a then unheard-of five gigabytes of space, vastly over that of other flash-based devices of the time such as the Rio series by Diamond Multimedia, which had upper-end capacities of around 128MB. This extra storage capacity gave power users reason to buy the large blue box; those wanting portability sacrificed the enormous size for the flash-based players.

The market changed on October 23, 2001 with the release of Apple’s original iPod. Available in 5 or 10GB capacities, the iPod was a FireWire-based, Macintosh-only device in the days when OS X was just over 10.1 and OS 9 was still the primary operating system for Macintosh users. What did the iPod do? It built itself into a device that matched competitor strategies and outdid the current devices on the technical front. It built a solution for the day, a companion for Macs, and put a drastic amount of UI and industrial design behind their new venture, building an innovative navigation structure while making the hard-disk-based player drastically smaller than the NOMAD Jukebox. Meanwhile, given the iPod’s hacks-only support for Windows, the first-generation iPod was largely a geek’s toy.

The original iPod had no outward pretence of taking over a market dominated by flash players. In Mac and geek communities, the iPod’s first and second generations became that of a hot geek item over the course of two years, with Windows users confined to MusicMatch Jukebox, then the Windows standard. With the second-generation release in 2003, Apple wasn’t being forward-thinking or trying to capture tons of market share; competitors still couldn’t match the iPod’s aesthetics, and it was not really considered much of a threat to the flash-based dominance of the digital audio player market. Eventually, with the release of the third-generation iPod and subsequent release of iTunes for Windows in 28 April 2003 and 16 October 2003 respectively, the iPod began to catch the eyes of those not within the technology community. By the fourth generation in 2004 — nearly three years after the original iPod design — the iPod caught on and became a must-have fashion item throughout America. The white earbuds became ubiquitous. Those with other players were fashion-clueless. By October 2004, the iPod had seventy percent of the digital audio player market share.

Time-scaled user experience

The end result is that user experience matters on a device level, but the UX designer for a competing product needs to be looking at the tortoise pace. The object is to beat the device, not the craze, and the craze will eventually follow in the future. Set fashion aside and let the iPod win now; market the device, but not aggressively. Most of all, beat the iPod hardware every time on every front (yes, including iTunes.) The early adopters, not afraid to jump off of the bandwagon they once led, will follow the better product.

As for the insecure, the teenagers, the trendwhores and the conspicuous consumers, let them continue on the road of the competitor. It is that same person that misses the minute-improvement method in their own products, tretinoin, technology or otherwise. Those that do know better, however, are the ones that matter, and, in a few years, you may end up on top.