What's your favourite app?
I was asked the other day to write a short piece about “my favourite apps”. ‘No problem,’ I thought. ‘Easy. I’ll get it done tonight.’How wrong I was.
In the end, what I discovered when I finally brought myself to write something nearly 3 whole days later is that it’s far easier to criticise bad technology solutions than praise good ones.
So many of the things I started thinking about were ways in which updates to certain mobile apps had made them bigger and not better, thus my instinct was to write about ‘how x used to be’ or at least use that as a stimulus for what makes a good piece of software.
In the end, after desperately sifting through my own phone’s apps list, I forced myself to appraise what was a rather random choice, complimenting its simplicity, its intuition and its similarity to the desktop experience.
Why did such a simple task turn out to be so difficult? Partly, I figured, because when you use something regularly and get so used to its functions and foibles it’s difficult to take a step back and evaluate either of those things any more deeply than “just ‘cos”.
But it’s also, I realised, a consequence of the assumptions we make as consumers, especially in this age and especially about technology. We expect to be able to find what we’re looking for easily, to be able to interact in real time with people all around the world, to be presented with all the information we need – whether it’s about the latest news or where we should go on holiday.
We expect these things to happen seamlessly, without delay, without hassle and without the system crashing as it struggles to cope with the scale and speed of these demands.
This tendency to take (especially mobile) technology for granted also seems to be permeating other aspects of our lives; we expect to get what we want, when we want it and the way we want to get it.
The greatest irony is that modern technology now makes it easier than ever to capture and share instances when these expectations are not met, as can be seen regularly on social media and the occasional ‘compilation’ shows that somehow still command primetime slots on TV (which could itself by described as a ‘traditional’ form of Information and Communication Technology).
So next time you open your go-to app for the umpteenth time that day, think what it is that makes it so handy, be thankful for the people and the design process that made it that way, and be glad that – despite probably having a fraction of the budget – they made it work a whole lot better than the Facebook app.
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