1.3 Growing Up: Moving from Technology-Centered to Human-Centered Products

In the early years of computers or better to say computer systems, factors which users appreciate and determined value of system differed significantly. That time the only important aspect of system was to be proven sufficiently great regardless of cost & clumsiness.

Changing & improving capabilities of technology has made significant impact on people's expectation from systems. At the beginning, people used to buy technology for the sake of technology, they had single device for every single function, these people are known as early adopters. At that stage the only important factors were quantitative factors and other factors such as ease of use, productivity, usability etc were always neglected.

When technology becomes mature, we take it for granted. We no longer seek same factors in evaluating their values. for example in early ages of computing, the most important thing was to ensure that computers are working and are reliable, now a days no longer people seek these characteristic since they all work reliably most of the times, now it's important to have same product with same features & performance for less price.

As the computers become more mature, some aspects are taken for granted such as performance, functionality and reliability which were the subject of interest of early adopters who had high technological skills but new computer users are paying more attention to cost, ease of use, physical attractiveness and prestige. So as technology becomes mature it moves to background i.e. technological aspect of product loses importance and on the other hand things such as emotion becomes more important to developers to make the system a real consumer-product. When first a technology is introduced, only people who are high-tech will buy and use product who only care about technological aspect but when the product reaches to a point where it satisfies performance and technological aspect new consumer enter the market and use the technology who take the previously mentioned criteria for granted and with different expectations.

One big problem here is that satisfying these two kinds of consumers requires completely different approach – paradoxical approach!

If a product wants to be successful, the company needs to focus on three aspects;

• Technology: to meet performance, functionality and other technological aspect of product. It's the technology that makes things happen - without proper technology non of these things can happen. The Xerox Star & Apple Lisa are two example that didn't have proper technology although they met some other criteria.
  

• User experience: to meet and satisfy user and their expectation of the system. There might be some conflicts with marketing; marketing tend to focus on customer but UE tend to focus on users of the system.
  

• Marketing: to remain in the market with reasonable price. Marketing needs to understand who are customers, what are their expectations, why they buy the product and how much they are willing to pay. One thing that companies need to distinguish is the difference between customer(a person who pays and buys the system but not necessarily uses it) and user (people who touch the system and use the system). People buy product based on perception but the reality so it's very critical to place the product in the right place in the market