The problem with reimaging the design of a smartphone is everything falls short
Every Sunday morning, Apple sends out the dreaded “Screen Time” report. I’m not going to share mine, I’m too ashamed. I know I’m not alone in wishing that number was lower. There are times I wish I could abandon my smartphone sometimes, but it also offers far too many conveniences as well. When hiking, I want to be off the grid, but Alltrails is also invaluable when trails become unclear. Like many, I am conflicted between my dependency and desire to ditch my phone, cue Tim Robinson’s “I have so much stuff on my phone” bit.
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Oddly enough, this was the topic of a Microsoft ad campaign in the early 2010s: “The Phone to Save Us From Our Phones”. No one owns a Microsoft phone today, they don’t exist, so this fact speaks to the success of the product. There is, however, a new product on the market that is making some of the same bold claims. Apple released the “Tiny Pod” this summer, and I have now seen it pop up a few times as part of holiday sales and ads. I started writing this piece in the summer, but now with several months behind me (I procrastinated editing) I can’t help but feel like Apple is repeating the same product mistakes.
The Apple Tiny Pod | Photo Credit: Tiny Pod
The phone that could do nothing
To understand this, we need to rewind back to the early 2010s. The iPhone completely redefined the idea of a cell phone in 2007 and revolutionized what could be done with a handheld device. Every other company had to pivot and compete with Apple on this new technology. Other competitors caught on with the Motorola Droid and later, HTC Desire (Nexus) and, the Samsung Galaxy line. The Windows phone was released in 2010 along with these other competitors and the field was crowded. Apple had set the bar and other manufacturers, on the Google Android OS platform, were in hot pursuit, but all of them were largely copying Apple’s formula. Every device was largely the same: rectangular box, fit in your hand nicely, does email, and makes phone calls. Realistically, most consumers were simply purchasing devices based on price, hardware, and software compatibility.
Software compatibility (apps) was a massive problem in the early 2010s. The Android OS and Apple’s mobile iOS were fundamentally different and forced most developers to pick a platform to focus on. When Vine was originally released in January 2013, it was only compatible with iOS devices. Vine was finally released on Android in June, nearly 6 months later. Vine was released for Windows phones in November, a full 10 months later. These huge release date gaps drove people to choose phones with better compatibility.
The Original Apple iPhone | Photo Credit: Mac World
It’s shocking how badly Microsoft miscalculated this problem given their supremacy in the desktop OS market. This same problem prevented Apple in the 2000s and early 2010s from becoming more than a niche machine for creatives in the workplace. The Windows phone debuted in a fast-paced market and it had almost no 3rd party compatibility. This also wasn’t a problem that could be solved overnight. Apps are developed by other companies, not Microsoft. Developers had to familiarize themselves with Microsoft’s technology and development tools before they could build apps for these devices. This was compounded by the impact of the Laffer curve. Smartphones weren’t new to the market. Early adopters had already committed to iPhones or Android devices. Anyone new to the market was getting in because their friends, family, or colleagues were enjoying these new devices and they wanted the same experiences. Users had to want to adopt Microsoft’s new operating system along with limited or no access to popular apps like Instagram, Vine, and Facebook.
The windows phone UI disaster
The Windows Phone emerged into the smartphone market with the “Phone to save us from our phones” campaign and virtually no focus on the interface or OS. Microsoft’s interface did away with icons on a central hub and moved to a modular tile system of apps, notifications, and information. The design philosophy was simple: cram everything onto a single screen so you only have to look at it briefly and see all the important information you need at once. You could check if you had unread emails, new texts, today’s weather, and the time in one quick look and then pocket your device. Said another way, the goal of the Windows OS was to consolidate what you need most.
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Android and iOS devices largely followed the same design principles for their UI. Their interfaces leaned into the existing design patterns of desktop design predicated on a home screen, applications launched from icons, customization of icon locations and orders, and folder management for files. Both platforms have largely stayed the same to this day, which speaks to their ease of use and ubiquity. Both companies were borrowing from established norms in desktop computers that stood for over 30 years. It takes real hubris to propose a complete overhaul of an established design pattern, and yet, Microsoft set out to do just that.
The Windows Phone UI | Photo Credit: Wikipedia
This was the first of two critical product failures of the Windows phone. The underlying assumption was that people wanted to get off their phones and back into the real world. There was only one problem with that assumption; I don’t think people actually wanted to be on their phones less. Sure, people might have aspirationally wanted to be on their devices less, but entirely too many elements of our lives are on our phones. That was true even in the early days of smartphone proliferation; these devices represented a chance to get off of desktop and laptop computers. In many ways, mobile devices offered freedom from being chained to a desk.
Later variants of the Windows Phone UI | Photo Credit: Ars Technica
As a UX designer, it seems to me that Microsoft was attempting to address a “number of clicks” problem. At the time, iOS and Android didn’t offer great solutions for quickly assessing the status of many items at once and Microsoft saw this as an opportunity. At face value, a centralized hub of information makes a lot of sense. Opening and closing apps to check if you had alerts is certainly suboptimal. The Windows hub created a worse problem though. The hub had so many moving parts and data points; so much clutter! This resulted in unnecessary levels of cognitive load for users that contributed to the problem it set out to solve. The underlying assumption was that users unlocked their phones to see if they needed to address anything. In actuality, most of us open our phones with the purpose of doing a specific task. Hypothetically, the tile system could facilitate this type of behavior, but it wasn’t measurably better than the conventional interface methods. Users had to put in effort to familiarize themselves with this new interaction pattern, whereas the conventional models leveraged existing user experience patterns.
Comparing early Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone UI Designs, notice how the Windows Phone is the only one to embrace tiles of information and alerts | Photo Credit: Vention
By my assessment, Microsoft fundamentally misunderstood its users and underestimated the marketplace. It’s not entirely clear how much Microsoft lost on this phone, but some estimate around $7 billion. By 2015, Windows accounted for about 2.5% of the mobile phone market, with Apple and Android comprising the rest. The whole project failed in just over 4 years.
Is apple repeating the same mistake?
Alright, back to the Tiny Pod! When I first saw this miniature phone, I was initially excited. The addictive nature of smartphones is well documented and many consumers are looking for ways to opt out of smartphones, either temporarily or permanently. The current market solution isn’t really a solution: buy a so-called dumbphone. Deciding to purchase a dumbphone over a smartphone doesn’t really feel like a solution as much as a regression. For this reason, I do believe there is a product gap for the “phone to save us from our phones.”
A collection of modern “dumbphones” | Photo Credit: Best Products
The Tiny Pod isn’t a standalone device and that alone is a deal breaker to me. The Tiny Pod is in fact, just a different configuration for your Apple Watch. Said another way, The Tiny Pod is another iPhone accessory. The actual product being sold is just a case for the physical watch device to dock into. Your watch and the device become tethered to your phone and then offer basic phone services, such as texting, phone calls, or maps. With a decent amount of storage, the device can also become something like an iPod.
Anyone who has ever owned an Apple Watch can tell you that the interfaces aren’t exactly easy to navigate. Developers don’t focus on the Apple watch, so the device also suffers from limited 3rd party compatibility. The physical Tiny Pod device hasn’t made any meaningful changes in how a phone is engaged with; it’s still a box with an interface. The watch is still tethered to an iPhone so it still requires ownership of a smartphone. People aren’t looking for another device to add to their collection. Outside of the Apple Fanboy market, I don’t know who actually wants this.
Another look at the Tiny Pod, notice the side buttons similar to an iPhone, this version is missing the click wheel that was added to the finished product | Photo Credit: KnowTechie
Here’s the problem: nothing about the “smartphone” problem has really been solved with the Tiny Pod. The inability to escape the central design of a phone really highlights how hard it is to imagine a new design paradigm because of human physiology and physical limitations. Phones aren’t the only hand-held devices in the world; before cell phones, we had walkie-talkies, calculators, pagers, walkmans, and countless other handheld devices. The Braun ET 44 calculator basically established the template for how handheld devices should operate over 90 years ago. Before handheld devices, we had countless other products designed around human hands. This is similarly why chairs, pens, and cars are exceptionally hard to reimagine as entirely new objects. I’m not saying it is impossible to discover a breakthrough in one of these spaces, but if one sets out to innovate on the phone or pen they’re taking on decades if not centuries of design and a millennia of human evolution.
The Braun ET 44 | Image courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.
The Tiny Pod is not designed to compete with the iPhone (no reasonable business would ever compete with its own products). One can intuit, therefore, that the goal is not to save you from your phone (in fairness Apple doesn’t exactly claim this as their goal). One of the measures of product success in the field of user research is the user’s unmet needs. The clear unmet need of the market at the moment is a phone that offers core features (maps, phone, texting, photos, web browsing, etc) while being smaller, less intrusive, and addressing the addictive nature of smartphones. The Tiny Pod doesn’t really address this desire. One could argue a “lite” smartphone already exists in the market, but of course, these are conventionally just older versions of phones with lower fidelity cameras, worse batteries, and lower quality materials. As a solution, using a smartphone as a “dumbphone” rejects the core Bauhaus value of Gesamtkunstwerk or the ‘complete work of art’.
Seemingly, the unmet need of a simple but well-built smart-ish-phone is easily addressed: just make a smaller phone with basic features and limited app integration. There are of course a few problems with this simplistic approach. First, Apple and Google make revenue from their app stores. Offering a solution that is disconnected from that market does not align with their business models. Secondly, creating a secondary OS for a device like this creates unnecessary maintenance for the company. Even if the UI is the same, the OS would still have to be reworked with to address the intentional limitations added to the device. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, I once again don’t think users really want to be free from their phones. As much as I want to stand up and virtuously declare that I do not want to have a smartphone, my phone is simply too attractive to give up. This might seem like a case to actually buy the Tiny Pod, so one could “cosplay” a dumbphone owner for a time and then return to their smartphone. I still think that users honestly, just want their phone and the comforts of a single device that does it all. Like “The One Ring” no matter how badly I want to cast it into the fires of Mount Doom, I cannot bring myself to destroy “The Precious.”
Epilogue: can we really escape our phones?
I’ll end on this: some philosophical advice for those seeking the elusive “phone to save us from our phones”. Earlier this year, I read How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. At face value, the title is sort of absurd, and Odell acknowledges this. In actuality, it is remarkably hard to do “nothing”. Our whole world is now screaming for our attention 24/7. Our attention is a valuable asset to platforms and the advertisers who pay their bills. The smartphone invited advertisers into intimate parts of our lives; reaching far deeper than a TV or laptop ever could. It’s tempting to seek a wholesale rejection of this way of life, but to do so requires immense privilege. Odell suggests that instead of seeking escape (getting a dumbphone and living off the land) we should seek authenticity. This can look like many things, but for me, it’s been woodworking, gardening, reading on the couch with my wife and cats, or rock climbing with friends. Paradoxically, this involves choosing to “do things”; it’s just that these activities are disconnected from the performative nature of everything online. I can get lost in these hobbies for hours and hours and they ground me in a very primal and real way. The slow nature of these activities allows me to appreciate the dragonflies who perch on my tomato cages and hunt mosquitoes, feel a deep connection to the centuries-old practice of making something beautiful and useful, get lost in a book with my best friend, and connect with my friends over a shared activity.
This is a bit of a departure from where I started, but I would actually argue that we don’t need a product to save us from our phones. What we really need is to seek authenticity outside of our phones. Go touch grass, as the kids say.
If you want to learn more on this topic here are some resources I recommend:
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
iBauhaus by Nicholas Fox Weber
The Demise of Windows Phone and What We Can Learn From It by Peter Smulovics
The phone to save us from our phones was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
