It's How You Use It

Lukas Mathis over at Ignore the Code has an interesting article about the horrendous user experience of a Sony camcorder with a touchscreen. He demonstrates a point with which I think many designers would readily agree: the iPhone's killer feature is not, nor has it ever been, its touchscreen. Yes, the touchscreen offers a lot of advantages, but as we've seen with countless other touchscreen phones (BlackBerry Storm anyone?) as well as this Sony camcorder, the touchscreen is only as good as the design of the software that powers it. Mathis' example is perhaps one of the most egregious examples.

A parallel of this dynamic can be seen in the proliferation of computer-animated movies after the early successes of Pixar. Heck, for awhile even Disney had trashed their entire traditional animation team in favor of CG films (thankfully the addition of John Lasseter changed that nonsense). So many companies had gotten this idea that CG was the only way to go, that Pixar had been successful because they were using CG. In reality, I'd guess it was more that Pixar was successful in spite of their technology, which offered an entire array of new challenges. The point that Pixar had been making was that CG had nothing to do with whether a movie was good or not; it was the story and the characters that people care about. The same is true with touchscreens or any other single technological advancement: it's not having it that makes your product great, it's how you use it.