iPad-experienced toddler encounters a magazine: "It doesn't work"
Consumers now and going forward expect a screen to be a touch screen and to respond to voice and gesture. Pad devices and Siri are moving those expectation along quickly. Just behind this are the demands that things be interactive in general and by that means offer the user a personalized experience. A recent video of children playing with iPads points this out: they find when they turn to a print magazine, that the magazine won’t respond to touch—it “doesn’t work”.
For more in this series, see #Consumer4sight
What it means to business – Interactive is the base standard for your systems that consumers encounter, but that’s only the base. On the way to delighting the customer, you will succeed most if those systems are intuitive, respond to touch, voice, or gestures or all three. The broader demand is for user experience design, but that design often critically includes a technology interface. And consumers have high and ever-evolving expectations for those interfaces.
A provocation on all this is the interplay between fear of germs and touch interfaces. Imagine the ideal ATM—you would not need to touch the screen or the buttons a dozen or more times to get your cash.
