Amazon’s Fire Phone May Be Too Magical for Its Own Good

Jeff Bezos announces the new Amazon Fire phone. Tim Moynihan/WIRED

After several years of rumors, Amazon finally announced the launch of its very own smartphone, the Fire Phone, and responses from the tech community were almost immediately polarized. To Amazon’s credit, the device sports some impressive features, most notably its 3-D-like Dynamic Display, which allows navigation by tilting the device, and its Firefly app that can visually identify millions of products and link the user with information or a purchasing platform. But when tech pundits ask, “Are these more than just gimmicks?” it may not be the right question. The real danger to the Fire Phone is that Amazon has launched it with the same mistake most every mobile device company makes: they’ve fallen too deeply in love with the idea of delightful interactions.

In a landscape dominated by Apple, Samsung, Google, and other purveyors of magic and delight, this might sound like an odd concern. Of course people like being surprised and charmed by the capabilities of their devices. But even if a potential “gimmick” like Dynamic Display turns out to be incredibly useful, it is destined to frustrate and annoy its users, by drawing too much attention to itself. The more useful it turns out to be, in fact, the more frustrating it may become.

The Perils of Delight

Think back a few years to the early releases of Apple’s OS X, with its eye-popping animated transitions and “genie effect” window minimization. We celebrated these details as bringing delight to our digital lives, but the “genie effect” quickly went from charming to exasperating. Apple had dramatically underestimated how often people minimize windows, or that an animation that’s thrilling the first ten times becomes annoying by the eleventh. Later releases removed it as a default setting, and in the upcoming Yosemite OS, it appears to have been scrapped altogether.

Sean Madden

Sean Madden is Executive Managing Director of Client Experience at Ziba Deseign, working to develop new user experiences. Follow him on Twitter @smadden.

By contrast, Apple iOS uses animation to indicate transitional states in a way that’s endured. Press and hold the home button for a few seconds, and the app icons start to “wiggle,” indicating that they can be re-ordered. It’s a detail that’s no quicker or more magical than the “genie effect,” and yet it’s a durable moment of delight, mostly because we experience it a few times a month or less, not multiple times per day. The Wiggle stays and the Genie goes, because Apple eventually learned that frequent actions must be frictionless, and there’s a fine line between magic and frustration.

Apple eventually learned that frequent actions must be frictionless, and there’s a fine line between magic and frustration.

The average smartphone user interacts with his or her mobile device over 100 times per day http://ift.tt/1gwiuPo, and the majority of those interactions fall into just a few categories: opening an app, selecting from a list, bringing up a keyboard, and so on. If each of them is imbued with too much visual whiz-bang, using your phone becomes the digital equivalent of eating birthday cake for every meal. The ideal balance is one that Apple, Samsung, and Google have all zeroed in on after much trial and error: confine the “magic” to occasional interactions and celebrated results, and get the obstacles out of the way for frequently used ones with clear goals. On rare occasions, like the rubber-band effect that refreshes your Twitter feed, an interaction can be both effortless and a little magical, but only if it’s obvious that the latter doesn’t interfere with the former.

Sean Madden

Despite being one of the world’s savviest companies in terms of customer service, online interaction and delivery logistics, Amazon stumbled into this same trap with Dynamic Display and Firefly. Both features show tremendous potential, but are too elaborate for anything but occasional use; the swarm of glowing lights that Firefly uses to show it’s capturing a product or string of text, for example, will get old fast once you start using it several times a day. Amazon’s choice of terminology further confirms its pro-delight bias: the side window that pops up next to a running app to give you additional information (like song lyrics) is called the “delighter.”

The Lie of Vivid Memory

The reason we keep stumbling like this stems from our tendency to overvalue what we vividly remember. Ask a devoted iPhone user what she loves about her device, and she’ll probably point out a moment of delight, like the way you “dive” into some apps when they start up, or the aforementioned Wiggle effect. These are not the interactions that truly lead to a good overall user experience, though. They’re 5, maybe 10 percent of it. The balance consists of the thousands of mundane things that have been done to improve visual order, predict user behavior and otherwise remove whatever stands between you and your end goal. In addition, we may love moments of magic too much because they used to be so hard to achieve. In the early days of graphical UI, animation was reserved for unusual events because the processing cost was too high for anything else. Now that we can, though, doesn’t mean that we should.

The biggest challenge of modern UI design is knowing when to stop. We have the ability to make every single moment sparkle and dance, so the new task is learning to restrain ourselves, and it’s hard. Most of a good user experience is forgotten, because well-designed often means forgettable: you can’t remember 100 delightful interactions a day, nor would you want to. The current leaders in mobile computing have already learned this through hard-won experience. Amazon will figure it out eventually too, if it doesn’t charm its users to death first.