Another thing that I noticed at the Accessibility conference we were at a few weeks ago was the prevalence of single function devices. There are still a fair number of products being distributed in what I’d consider the classic model of software, user installs on a general purpose machine and configures options and makes decisions (some reasonable, some baffling — do you have a 32 bit or 64 bit machine?).
WordQ is software to help people for whom writing is difficult, and it’s not hard to configure or manage by conventional standards, but my first thought was to give it to my 5 and 6 year old nieces to learn how to type and spell. When I see a Word 2007 screen with ribbons, toolbars, status bars, windows and options, it doesn’t phase me one iota, but I think what I really want is a single button that launches a simple screen with nothing more than a list of titles and a place to type.
Historically, I think that it takes a while to convince people that a product is so great that they need to buy one. Whereas the bar to purchasing a piece of software is lower — while today lots of people know they want to have a dedicated game playing machine (or a few) when the original NES came out it needed to be marketed as a multiuse system that also happened to play games.
From what I’ve seen of the iPad, this is 90% of the allure. It baffles me that so many people I know are still living in I-have-to-install-drivers-and-configure-things land. I like to think I know what I’m doing but I don’t always know if I’m on a 64 bit or a 32 bit machine (and you get asked during installs — tell me that can’t be detected).
Web apps are great for single purpose tools, the doodle in the corner comes from Steve Hanov’s Zwibbler doodling tool (which works in Firefox and Chrome, no promises on IE), which I found out about on LinkedIn (another sort of single purpose tool).
