HP wants to Listen *and* Learn?
With a recent post on the webOS Developer Forums (you can find that post here) we heard that HP wants to Listen and Learn. When I saw this, I was very happy. If you are thinking what I have been thinking over the past week, it has been something along the lines of “What are you thinking HP?! This is not what webOS needs!” and now HP wants to listen to what *we* think. And they will supposedly learn from what we say too. What more could you want?
I think we should all take a part in this, and tell HP how we feel about the recent news, and how we think they can fix it. They say, you don’t get what you don’t ask for.
So, I think we should all tell HP what we think about this past week here.
Are webOS and its apps too elegant to be intuitive?
Despite issues with webOS hardware, the operating system as a whole is nearly universally hailed as one of the, if not the, best mobile operating systems. WebOS is elegant, intuitive, powerful. I’ve wholeheartedly agreed with that assessment, but the in the last few days I’ve begun to wonder about one of those qualities – intuitive.
A couple of days ago I was reading through Twitter. One of the people I follow is Phil McKinney, CTO of HP’s Personal Systems Group. Some of his tweets caught my eye and started me on this train of thought.
In response to someone commenting “Glad to see you using Bad Kitty 
”, McKinney replied “I love Bad Kitty! .. All it needs is an “email” option to make it perfect”. Another user pointed out the scrolling button bar at the bottom of Bad Kitty’s screen. McKinneys response – “Wow, great tip! How in the world did you find that one!? [now bad kitty is perfect!]”
Now, Mr. McKinney is a pretty bright and tech-savvy person. If this very simple function eluded him, what chance do ordinary users have? In fact, I can relate to this exact situation. I have used Bad Kitty for a while and had no idea that there was any more to the button bar than what is normally displayed – after all, there’s no visual indicator that there’s any more. Quite by accident I discovered the additional features. When reading a tweet, I performed a back-swipe to return to the timeline. By chance my finger was a little to high and, instead of going back, I saw the button bar scroll! What a great discovery.
This made me think about other fuctions that exist in apps that I don’t know about and would only discover by another accident or someone’s help. Just looking at Twitter apps, I found that it’s actually very difficult to learn how to use the programs. If something isn’t blatantly obvious on screen, many advanced, quite useful feature will never be learned.
On my phone I have seven Twitter apps (Bad Kitty, Spaz, Twee, Tweed, Twit-x, weTwit, and Yak). Although most have an entry for “Help” on the in-app drop-down menu, not a single one of the apps had any actual help text within the app. Let me repeat that. Not one, zero, of these seven Twitter apps had any in-app help. Nada.
Even more interestingly, most, but not all, had links to a webpage in the “Help” or “About” entries in the menu. When you get to these webpages, you either have to dig around a bit to find anything resembling help (slim pickings when you find it), or, more often – including Bad Kitty’s site, even online there is no help. Many of the web pages don’t give you any more than what you find in the App Catalog listing with no pretense of support. The sole exception is Tweed which has some good, basic, how-to info, but nothing advanced.
As I start broadening my search, I find that over 2/3 of the apps on my phone have no meaningful in-app help. Some do have online help, but not many. A curious thing is most of the apps with in-app help are games. ”Useful” apps – the ones that would most benefit from help because of their breadth of features – for the most part leave users with no idea how to use apps they’ve paid good money for. In my own case, since my Bad Kitty experience, I find myself tapping and swiping and meta-tapping all over the screen trying to discover what I might be missing in an app.
This clearly isn’t the best way for developers to serve their customers. How difficult, for example, would it be for Bad Kitty’s developers to add arrows on the ends of the button bar indicating that there’s more to it? How difficult would it be for developers to spend a bit of time putting some helpful information on the help screens?
Right now, the webOS community is relatively small and the remaining users are relatively skilled. If our hopes and expectaions are fulfilled by HP’s announcement on February 9th, the user base might change dramatically. If HP manages to pull a rabbit out of the hat and somehow get some momentum back in the webOS market, we will gain a lot of users who might have no experience with smartphones or have no idea how to access the nuances of webOS.
If we want to turn those new users into enthusiastic users of webOS, developers are going to have to go the extra mile to make their apps as useful, accessible, and transparent as possible. They can’t assume anything about the skill set of users. A certain measure of hand holding must be built into every app.
Many people think that a smartphone platform lives or dies on the back of its apps. To an extent this is true. No one can deny that, even though there are many good apps in the App Catalog, the webOS app situation has been very slow to expand – just limpning along actually, nearly on life support. In one month, Microsoft has managed to amass as many apps for the new WM7 platform that webOS took over a year and a half to achieve.
If HP webOS is to have a renaissance, the quantity and quality of apps will need to be a priority. Every effort must be made to persuade developers beyond the “webOS faithful” to join the stable. Every developer needs to be encouraged to make their apps accessible with sufficient help to teach users how to use all features.
If HP announces a bajillion fantastic devices 2/9 but there continues to be a paucity of apps to utilize that hardware, webOS, in my opinion, will have lost its last opportunity to be a relevant platform. I hope this isn’t what happens. I dream of a world with webOS devices for a variety of uses with sufficient apps to perform all the work I need. Hopefully HP and the development community will bring that world to us.
PS – I know this sounds like I might be picking on Bad Kitty. I’m not. Bad Kitty is a wonderful app. It just happens that Bad Kitty is where this journey began. The above concerns & issues apply to a lot of developers & apps.
Sources:
Phill McKinney tweet #1 and #2
Friday Open Discussion – 10/8
What a crazy week it has been, we have learned a lot this week and I for one, am very excited about the coming months for HP/Palm.Below are some of the topics we discussed this week, lets hear your thoughts and opinions on what’s on your mind!
- Mojo Messenger open beta
- Palm P102 device details emerge
- Mint considering webOS app
- Palm Codename: Mansion details
- Chris Shaheen is a featured developer
- Free Palm devices for developers (shipping)
Also, please welcome our new contributors to WebOS World: Eb, Panagiotis and Aurash!
Let the discussion begin!
Friday Open Discussion
It’s Friday and we’d like to bring a new category to everyone here at webosworld.com. The Open Discussion will be exactly what it is, an open discussion to talk about what’s on your minds – anything Palm/HP. A lot has happened in the past week and we would like to let our readers talk about anything they want. From the screen shot leak, to the app leader board, to the node.js meet up at Palm next Tuesday, to jobs at Palm, to webOS 2.0 – it’s all you today!
P.S. We will be announcing an official WebOS World logo early next week, stay tuned!
Recent Comments