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09/15/2011, 10:12 AM
#1
I had started and posted this as a response in another thread, but afterward it became more than a response... so here's a thread. Discuss.
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Both Android and iOS uses a tool-based paradigm as the primary guide to their user experience. That is, it encourages users to get to know all the "tools" aka apps in their "toolbox" aka device and pick one when they need to do anything. It's a way to place a lot of importance and emphasis on the apps, and imo is a very deliberate move to build the market ecosystem.
webOS, on the other hand, despite its name, is really what-do-i-want-to-doOS. It uses an action-based paradigm as the primary guide to the user experience. That is, it encourages users to think about what they want to do, and then just do it aka "just type." The same paradigm explains why the card-multitasking metaphor exists: What do I have going on in my hand? If I want to get rid of it, what's the most natural thing to do?
It's a brilliant move from a UX perspective. Unfortunately in a market dominated by the desire to make money on a gazillion apps, that turned out to be a achilles' heel of a predicament for webOS: it's so good at some things that webOS users don't care about having 15 or 20 of the same apps, but the lack of apps creates a negative perception of and perpetuates the platform's viability (it's not the only cause of course, but one of).
Rightly or wrongly, what we are seeing with the mobile OS growth is a great example of "good enough," where the majority of users aren't aware of the X% better because their Y% is good enough for what they need to do.
Consider for a moment how dumb-phone OSes worked, and even how the original "smart" phone OS (PalmOS), worked. They all use the same tool-based paradigm of the two dominant mobile OSes of today. iOS brought an improvement in consistency and major simplification of a familiar paradigm. Android brought back the power and control that iOS lacked. It's not a coincidence that the Android marketing blitz's main focus is all about power.
That leaves us in an interesting place today: webOS not gaining traction and people entrenched financially within the ecosystem that they've bought into. Both Microsoft's re-adventure into the mobileOS land, and RIM's QNX-based new OS are carrying on the flames of the webOS torch in a way. They both bring really interesting and genuinely innovative ideas, in addition to heavily borrowing from webOS. But just like webOS, they introduce radically better ideas into a world that embraces the good enough familiarity of a incrementally better idea. It's frustrating to see, but not completely unexpected.
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