DrunkenBlog

The Opaque Apple

Back in "Heading over the cliff while whistling", Carl said:

Following the general thread of these comments, I think we should make a wiki of some sort to list out and detail complaints about UI devolution. I could host it if there's interest and no one else wanted to do it, but I think it would be better if DB sponsored it...

This has actually crossed my mind before, and instigated one of the few times someone working at Apple actually went apeshit on me. This settled down once things were clarified, but the man wasn't happy.

The original reason for broaching the idea was that I was volunteering some time at a high school with kids interested in computers, who were looking for an excuse to get down and dirty with some scripting languages and databases, and it seemed like the type of project that would be easy to start, but make them take a whole lot of things into account they may not otherwise encounter until they moved on.

Now, this was awhile ago. What sparked the idea in my head was Apple's Mail client for OS X... there were things in it, or rather things it lacked, that just blew my mind. As an example, there was no way to delete an SMTP server from the app without editing a text file. How it was shipped without it was beyond me, it's just not the Mac way, and I heard people complaining about it constantly.

This, to my mind, was a basic functionality gap. I'm remembering two other things from Mail that:

• Sending attachments to Windows users
  There is a whole big thing about why this caused problems before 10.3, which I have written out somewhere but can't find... but basically, sending attachments to people who weren't also Mac users was a crap shoot because of how things were wrapped up. I heard about it constantly, and while you could make a case that Apple wasn't doing anything wrong by going the route they were going, in the real world it caused huge problems.
• Re-wrapping tools
  One of the things that just kills a mail client for me are when there are no basic tools to work over the text to keep things remotely decent looking... like re-wrapping. Nothing insane, but if you deal with lots of emails they start to become a must if you're remotely anal, and having to copy and paste your emails into 3rd party tools to make things look ok shouldn't be necessary. I'd put this square into the feature request column.

If you're a normal user, and you really wanted those features, your only real recourse is Apple's Feedback Form, which is remarkably simplistic considering the varying types of communication it has to deal with. This is, until 10.3, how users are able to interact with Apple Computer regarding their products.

Now this feedback form ties into a back-end app on Apple, and there are people whose job is to help categorize things, which are then viewed to have an idea of what people are after. It doesn't necessarily mean that if huge amounts of people are asking for a specific feature it'll get in, as there are things like deadlines, opportunity costs, and homegrown-features that have to be calculated in towards a release.

It's what they work off of, and it's not a black hole to the developers of the projects... but it is a black hole to the user. The user just has no idea whether or not their feature request or bug report has really gotten in, whether a human has really seen it, and whether it'll ever be fixed. As far as they're concerned, it's just a black hole.

With Mac OS 10.3, a new type of feedback channel was opened between the user and Apple Computer: the crash-submitter. This was modeled after what many others were doing, and basically just meant that when an app crashed, the system triggered another little app to open up. This little app contained a bunch of debugger information useful to the developers to track down what was going on, and allowed the user to write down the basics of what was going on at the time.

Assuming you were online at the time in some form, you could press a button and your crash report would go off to Apple's system. Great idea, as it has been a great idea for others who pioneered it -- it lowered the barrier of effort for users to get useful information to Apple regarding problems they were having in a big way.

Users really dug this -- I kept encountering people who thought it was cool as hell that Apple was actively trying to get information about what was causing the problems in order to fix them. However, after a time, and I'd guess that Apple's own statistics would reflect this, enthusiasm for it died really quickly. I'd notice this when an app would crash and the user would just click the crash reporter to close, when before I'd see them fill it out, and it's piqued my interest.

From my own asking around, this basically came down to three things, which somewhat blur together:

• Psychologically, users expected things they were experiencing to go away because they'd get fixed, and when they didn't they'd become disillusioned. In some cases they got worse. Depending on the apps you use, you either hate putting your computer to sleep because apps will start crashing, or you have a 50% chance of a kernel panic when you wake it back up. Those types of major things often don't go away with a point release, but in a way users expect them to once they're giving their effort.
• This ties into the former, but basically users became disillusioned because they were often submitting the same type of crash over and over and over. Submitting "I woke my computer up and this app crashed" or "I woke up my iBook and now nothing will launch without rebooting" 50 times leads you to just start clicking it away. You've already submitted it a bunch of times, and once you start clicking away the crash reporter, when new things arise you're already conditioned to close the crash reporter and get on with your day.
• It's a black hole as far as the user is concerned; it may be in the system, it may not. Apple engineers may be working extremely hard on fixing it, or it may be relegated into "could not reproduce" batch that'll never be looked at again. The user has no way of knowing what is going.

Out of all of them, the black hole aspect of feedback is probably the one that drives all the others into the ground. Things have a habit of crashing when you most want to use them, and when you are working on your paper or spreadsheet, it's tempting to just relaunch the app and get back to work instead of taking 5 to 10 minutes to write out a crash report when you have nothing tangible to show for it.

Now, it's worth reiterating that it really isn't a black hole -- that feedback actually does get to Apple, and one way or another gets acted upon or not acted upon. To the user though, Apple is this opaque corporation with an opaque development cycle. Apple's culture, by its nature, has led it to not be a very transparent company to its users.

Users aren't the only ones with this problem. It wasn't until the shite really hit the fan that Apple started to change some of how it interacts with people who find security issues. Developers high enough in the ecosystem are able to view bugs, including ones they've submitted, but there are real issues there too. This just isn't an area Apple is leading the pack on, but ideally it should be.

One of the things I mentioned awhile ago was the idea that the product is becoming synonymous with the company in terms of branding. You see this when people, much to Apple's chagrin, refer to the Apple Store as the 'iPod Store', or their marketing for the iMac G5 basically saying "Hey, we also did the iPod". The iPod is an extreme example of a burgeoning trend, in that branding alone in many of the online markets isn't what it used to be.

Brand loyalty is important, and so is having a relationship with the consumer. As corporations become larger, and in a way more abstract from the products they push, creating relationships with the users and engaging them is key. Blogs are a way of doing this, as companies are starting to learn, but the big thing that blogs do is that it makes the company, or at least that aspect of it, approachable.

It engages the user, and make them a part of the process, and gives them a further investment in the product and company they're supporting. Their entry into the feedback form may be a black hole, but the comment they leave on an engineers blog has a chance of being read by someone.

This phenomenon is real, there's just no way of getting around it. I've watched it first hand, and seen how someone's view of the product changed when they were able to interact and voice their opinion to the developer working on the product. Whether in person, via email, on a blog, or a listserv, while that engineer might say "You need to a file a bug report...", that users entire outlook on the problem was changed because he knew a real, live person heard what he was saying.

While the phenomenon is real, this really isn't Apple's way, even though it's starting to seep out at the edges. While the individuals in the company may want to engage more with the users, Apple has actively pushed away from it. No engineers are listed in the credits of apps anymore, it all comes from Apple Computer... the exact individual involved shouldn't be important.

When people have real problems with something in Apple's discussion forums, those threads have a habit of... disappearing. While Apple will allow you to comment, and rate, Mac-specific products in its store, you aren't allowed to do so for its products.

Now, other corporations are seeing this phenomenon for what it is, and looking at ways to pierce the corporate veil, or at least make it more transparent to the users, in ways that engender loyalty. Surprisingly, chief among them has been Microsoft.

As an example, they have a whole system up for developers to peruse, and submit, not only suggestions but bugs on their products, which anyone can view and comment on. This is geared towards developer products, but it's only one thing they're trying out of many.

There are places you can go to vote on product ideas they are considering, places where you can give detailed feedback about their server products and see other feedback. Now, these are all just initiatives, to see what works, but I don't think it'll be long until there is a system setup, similar to the one for developers, but for consumers. And you better believe it's a good thing.

And then there are blogs. Microsoft, along with other companies, have been seriously testing the waters on employee blogs. A good example of this is the IEBlog, done by the guy who is responsible for the upcoming Internet Explorer 7. Now, I've watched this with some fascination -- most notably watching how users came around on it. Users who read it are more involved with the development of what will be Internet Explorer v7, and can directly say "We want tabs" or "We want this".

You have to realize, that there wasn't a lot of good mindshare about IE 7 going forward -- to many, IE 6 had become a stagnant product with major shortcomings for the those who really want to work with CSS or PNGs. Name your technology, users have something to say about it, as do web developers. By opening the channels of communication though, users now had a voice to directly say "What I really need is this part of the CSS spec", and know that it was heard.

It won't necessarily make converts to IE over Firefox, but most people can recognize that Internet Explorer isn't going to go away, and just by being involved in the development process, even in a small way, that person now has an investment in it. Internet Explorer 7 won't be out for quite awhile, but instead of just waiting a year to see what it is in, people are drawn along with the development process.

Another good example of this, on the Apple side, is Surfin' Safari, and I can guarantee you people would be much pissier about aspects of Safari development if that blog, and the channel of communication (both ways) it's opened didn't exist. You could rattle off all types of examples here, everything from Mike Pinkterton's blog on Camino to Wordpress.

The investment part is key -- as probably just about any successful shareware company can tell you. I've seen it personally, just in my own interactions with various developers and how I view their products if I feel like my email is going to a black hole instead of actually having an impact.

Development times are going to become longer and longer for many types of products, especially software, and allowing the users to feel like they are part of the process is going to be key to keeping that loyalty. What you may lose in 'wow, so that's what they're doing' factor, you make up for in users feeling invested, and hence loyal.

Company PR channels to the outside world aren't going to go away, but they are going to have to become more organic and transparent with the users. It's just going to have to be that way, and you can either lead and influence the trend or eventually have to quickly play catch-up and pretend that it was there all along.

A company PR channel isn't going to explain some misconception about the product to the base, at least not usually, but a developer on a blog can and will. The user, feeling educated, then passes that information around to others. Understanding why something is the way it is is actually really important to users, and can really change their feelings on a subject.

To go back to where I originally started -- the independent 'bug and feature' database -- something that the Apple developer said really stuck with me: "Online petitions are just popularity contests, I hate them".

He had a real point, which is something you'd want to avoid.

The original idea I had would be a system broken out by product, and features, and bugs, moderated via points. A user might get 6 points per month, and it might cost them 3 points to suggest a feature for a product and 1 to demote/promote a feature someone else requested, while being able to say exactly why they were doing it. Probably not optimal, but I'm sure someone smarter could figure out a smarter way.

Now a black-hole-esque system, like what currently exists, means most of the petition-popularity-aspect goes away. People taking the time to specifically request a feature know exactly what they want, but like all polling, your results are skewed because these are generally the more advanced users who are anal enough to go through the hassle. However, there might be something lots of users would want, but it just hadn't occurred to them.

However, how many times has someone said "I wish this feature was in..." and you went "Oh wow, I can see how that would be useful." There are really valid reasons to see what others are suggesting, as well as the bugs they're finding. As an example, if you've never used the Outlook-plugin on Windows that allows you to click and have the email you're reading translated by an online service, it just might not occur to you that OS X could benefit from something similar.

When it comes to UI, things become a lot trickier. You can point out lots of specific problems with Mac OS X, broken down by app or System, but how do you say "Please be more consistent in application interfaces", or "The Quicktime Player interface really kinda bites." As it stands, people do say what would make it better, but their ideas and thoughts basically exist on blogs and sites. You could pull them all together into an independent system, and that would be really valuable for everyone, but the key phrase is 'independent system'.

There are actually some problems with having an independent system, and good reasons for why Apple should do this themselves.

A basic reason is that when it's coming from Apple, it's just going to have more users, especially casual users. Over time, something that's independent could be a real success, but having these types of things as a tab on the home page is a night and day difference in demographics and content.

There's another, more insidious problem. Corporations are often very paranoid about ideas that didn't come from the 'inside', especially when it comes to anything creative. If a designer, or just a normal user, happens to hit upon the Golden Ticket™ for making the QuickTime Player not suck, they hit upon it, not Apple. You can say "Give us tabs!", but when someone independent has mocked up a prototype and then Apple implements it, all sorts of weird things can happen.

This is beyond finding a bug, and not just limited to a corporation like Apple. Those who are submitting screenplays and such take note -- unless they're coming through official channels, those manilla envelopes will stay unopened for fear that if they hit upon the idea independently, some day you can come along and say "That's just like my screenplay that I sent in 5 years ago!" and sue the hell out of them. At least that's what I've been told.

In a system Apple controls, they can basically make you sign away all rights to the ideas you contribute, which they can then choose to incorporate. In a system that is independent, this isn't completely the case. You could theoretically have everything submitted falling under the BSD license, but I'd have to wonder if it wouldn't be more complex than that.

The downside of having it be a system that Apple controls is the dirty-laundry aspect, something that people brought up more than once in my inbox. As mentioned, Apple has a disturbing habit of kicking their dirt laundry under the bed, and it would kind of defeat the purpose of the system in the first place.

When it comes down to it, I do think this is an area where Apple should be leading and not following, but I do see where there are things that have to be taken into account, and that it's not as simple as registering blogs.apple.com and throwing their bug and feature database online.

However, if Microsoft can make inroads to becoming more transparent, I'm pretty sure there's no reason Apple, a much smaller, more nimble, and arguably innovative company, should be becoming more opaque.

As Apple's development windows become larger, and more app development is rolled into the OS as a whole, they need to engage their users and bring them into the process, not shut them out.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    February 18, 2005, at 05:08 PM