Jan Borchers wrote this article for the latest edition of Interactions magazine.
”...Sweet-spot products make your life simpler, baroque ones more complex. Sweet-spot products support you in a new way, making a previously difficult or awkward task change fundamentally. Learn just a few new things, and you get an almost magical boost in productivity, simplifying your everyday life. Baroque products just tweak existing processes, trying to make them more efficient in some situations, but often complicating other tasks (and sometimes the most frequent ones — think microwave ovens). And to use them, you often need to learn a fair amount of new interaction concepts, operations, and other lingo.
”...Cell phones hit their sweet spot in the mid-90’s: pocketable handsets, with several days of standby and calling charges that didn’t ruin the average consumer anymore. What a change! Within years, people moved from carefully planning their evening out to “call us when you’re ready, we’ll tell you what bar we ended up in”...Today, cell phones have moved squarely into their baroque stage. In a 2007 study we did for German’s largest mobile technology consumer magazine, connect, virtually all models we tested gave users problems with even the most basic and essential tasks: turn on, mute ringer, call number. Being able to browse the web, take pictures, watch or record movies wherever you are is great, mind you, but it has overloaded the sweet-spot product and interaction design of the traditional mobile phone beyond recovery.”
Link: Sweet Spots and Baroque Phases of Interactive Technology Lifecycles (rwth-aachen.de, also at interactions.acm.org, via)
