I had my first and only hands-on iPad experience yesterday, and it was unquestioningly crappy.
The scene - I was in the Delta departure area at JFK airport in New York City, with an hour or so to kill before my flight. Near the gate was a small seating area with tables and benches, with mini-walls or partitions in which were embedded Apple iPads. The idea being travelers could access information and services (check flight status, weather, news, order a club sandwich and a Toblerone, etc.) using the iPad screen.
Better than an iPad?
Really a neat idea, right? Information and services a mere touch screen away, and using the hottest tech device to come on the scene in years.
So what happened when I tried my hand at this wondrous device (again, while I have seen and heard about the iPad ad nauseam, I had never actually tried one out).
It was an altogether unsatisfying experience. The device was exceedingly slow. Many of the apps did not respond at all. The ones that did, (news, weather) seemed to hang endlessly waiting for the information to refresh. And quite honestly, flight status was readily available on the ‘normal’ airport monitors, and I could look outside to check out the weather.
The one and only thing that I really wanted to do, check my email, lead me into a hard sell for some kind of recurring deal for Boingo internet access. And one other thing, the sun was glaring in at such an angle that it made the iPad screens really tough to read, not that it really had much information anyway.
No big deal really, the airport is just trying to offer a new service, generate some additional revenue, and mounting iPads in the waiting area is probably a good idea. And on another day, without the technical issues, the sun, and my general crabbiness I might have left there and marched straight to the Apple store to buy myself the iPad.
But instead, I was left with a less than favorable experience. Who is at fault? Hard to know. But it feels like Apple, JFK, Delta, and Boingo all sort of conspired to deliver the suck. It is great for Apple to sell a bunch of iPads to Delta or whomever owns them, but I wonder if they care at all if their ‘coolest in the world device’ is being used to deliver such a lousy service message and experience.
I guess the question is once you ship a product, design a service, or otherwise offer your concepts and ideas to the market, how much do you need to care about how your work gets presented by third parties to the eventual consumers of your efforts? I imagine it depends on what you are really selling, just a product, or an entire experience that your product enables, and the extent to which you can and desire to manage those end user experiences.
I am sure the iPad is a fantastically wonderful life-altering device, my mistake was expecting an airport to deliver the experience the way Apple designed it to be delivered.
The scene - I was in the Delta departure area at JFK airport in New York City, with an hour or so to kill before my flight. Near the gate was a small seating area with tables and benches, with mini-walls or partitions in which were embedded Apple iPads. The idea being travelers could access information and services (check flight status, weather, news, order a club sandwich and a Toblerone, etc.) using the iPad screen.
Better than an iPad?Really a neat idea, right? Information and services a mere touch screen away, and using the hottest tech device to come on the scene in years.
So what happened when I tried my hand at this wondrous device (again, while I have seen and heard about the iPad ad nauseam, I had never actually tried one out).
It was an altogether unsatisfying experience. The device was exceedingly slow. Many of the apps did not respond at all. The ones that did, (news, weather) seemed to hang endlessly waiting for the information to refresh. And quite honestly, flight status was readily available on the ‘normal’ airport monitors, and I could look outside to check out the weather.
The one and only thing that I really wanted to do, check my email, lead me into a hard sell for some kind of recurring deal for Boingo internet access. And one other thing, the sun was glaring in at such an angle that it made the iPad screens really tough to read, not that it really had much information anyway.
No big deal really, the airport is just trying to offer a new service, generate some additional revenue, and mounting iPads in the waiting area is probably a good idea. And on another day, without the technical issues, the sun, and my general crabbiness I might have left there and marched straight to the Apple store to buy myself the iPad.
But instead, I was left with a less than favorable experience. Who is at fault? Hard to know. But it feels like Apple, JFK, Delta, and Boingo all sort of conspired to deliver the suck. It is great for Apple to sell a bunch of iPads to Delta or whomever owns them, but I wonder if they care at all if their ‘coolest in the world device’ is being used to deliver such a lousy service message and experience.
I guess the question is once you ship a product, design a service, or otherwise offer your concepts and ideas to the market, how much do you need to care about how your work gets presented by third parties to the eventual consumers of your efforts? I imagine it depends on what you are really selling, just a product, or an entire experience that your product enables, and the extent to which you can and desire to manage those end user experiences.
I am sure the iPad is a fantastically wonderful life-altering device, my mistake was expecting an airport to deliver the experience the way Apple designed it to be delivered.