Software engineers call it “user experience”, the phrase that describes the way human beings interact with computers. Unfortunately this “user experience” is often not the most “human” of experiences, as it seems designed more for engineers than regular people.

Now the iPad comes along and human beings are learning something new about how we can experience a computer screen.  And maybe it is something quite old as well.

Recently I had lunch with a friend of mine who developed several applications for the iPad before its launch. When she started work on these applications she went through a month long period where she was working around the clock on this new device with no time for anything else.

Once she was finished she was happy to have some down time so she could read a book on her favorite device, the Kindle.  Much to her surprise, she found herself getting angry that she had to press buttons to interact with the screen—when all she wanted was a screen that would respond to her touch.

Last week I was in a store owned by a large consumer electronics manufacturer, (not Apple).  On display they have a frame for showing digital photographs, a beautiful device that can sit on your shelf at home.  One of the store associates told me that they have had to replace the screen twice in the past month.  Why?

Because people keep touching the screen, waiting for it to respond, but alas, it is not a touch screen device, so it does not do anything.  They poke it so hard and so relentlessly the glass screen finally cracks.

And then there is Babe Ruth and Michelangelo who had no computer screens to touch but understood something very fundamental about human communication.

In the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, Babe Ruth was at bat and pointed to center field.  On the next pitch he hit a home run.  He could have yelled to the crowd, “I am going to hit a home run”. But all he had to do was point and the crowd knew what he meant. The gesture carried all the meaning he intended.

John Paul Stevens, our soon to be retired Supreme Court Justice, saw it with his own eyes as a 12 year old attending the game with his father.  He understood what Babe Ruth “said” with his hand.

Between 1508 and 1512 Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, at the commission of Pope Julius ll.  Nine scenes from the Book of Genesis are depicted on the ceiling, the best known of them, The Creation of Adam.  This central panel shows God reaching out with his index finger to give life to Adam, who reaches up his index finger to God.

Millions of tourists go through the Sistine Chapel each year and see what Michelangelo created.  On the one hand, they see the most godlike gesture depicted and simultaneously on the other, the most human gesture as well.

In all these disparate examples; the anger with buttons, the broken screen, the gesture to center field, the touching of God and man, we see a reference—indeed a pointing to something buried in our evolutionary past.

Before spoken language, before written language, before art, before technology, our evolutionary ancestors pointed to create and exchange meaning–to communicate with each other.   That evolutionary past is still embedded deep within the structure of our brains.

This ability to create meaning with our hands through the simple act of pointing is a central part of what makes us human.  With that gesture we join the physical part of ourselves with the mental part of ourselves.

Apple has properly recognized that these two different “selves” are in fact made for each other and indeed, really not separate at all.

By doing so, they have created a “user experience” that is actually “human”.

This is the central reason why people respond so enthusiastically to the iPad.

The Apple engineers have taken the most sophisticated technology humans currently create and married it to the most primitive part of our nature.

Or put it another way.

Apple simply figured out what Babe Ruth and Michelangelo knew all along.

consumer electronics, digital tools, experiences, innovation, internet, technology, user experience

Isn’t it curious in this age where more moving images get created and distributed digitally that there is this group of people who still call themselves “filmmakers”?  It seems a term that is so archaic, so analogue, so yesterday’s news. But is it any of these?

I think filmmakers look for three opportunities that truly define them as filmmakers.

They are:

1.  The ability to tell a visual story from beginning to end, without any interruption, as a complete, continuous experience.  This is what separates them from people who create stories for TV as most TV series are produced with commercial interruptions or different viewings (episodes) in mind.

2.  The chance to have an audience gather in a theater and watch this visual story together, as a shared experience in time and space.  In the course of a film’s distribution it may be seen in a lot of different settings, public or private, but the filmmaker is making the film with this key audience in mind.  This is the primary target of all his/her imaginings.

3.  The opportunity to see his/her film with an audience.  Filmmakers want to physically experience the film with an audience. The filmmaker wants to see if they laugh or cry when he/she intended, if the audience got the point–to see if their film really succeeded at reaching another human being.  As every filmmaker knows who has done this–a genuinely scary moment.

So each of these opportunities really goes to the heart of what is most essential about calling yourself a filmmaker.

Think of them as a set of principles about the relationship between the creator of a film and the audience for which it is intended.

And here is what is most surprising as we move from the analogue past to the digital future.

These opportunities are not disappearing into the analogue past.

In fact, they are just beginning to open up.

consumers, digital tools, experiences, filmmakers, internet, media

When a technology company launches a new product, be it a device, a piece of software or a web based service they always talk about the features enabled by this new product.  They generate a list where all kinds of goodies are displayed that are supposed to wow the consumer.

What they  believe is that the features sell themselves–that is why they built the product and that is why the product is so great.

In fact, consumers are not interested (nor have they ever been) in features.  They are interested in experiences.  This is what technology companies need to realize–they really are in the business of creating experiences.

For example, when I worked for Nokia, Apple released the iPhone.  Every friend of mine who bought one was eager to tell me about it.  I would always ask them–how do you get on the internet?  They always said, almost without exception, “I do not know, I just do.”.  And they loved that experience.

On a Nokia smart phone, getting on the internet was possible, but you had to know how to do it and it was not easy.  Of course, Nokia phones had a lot of great features–they would tell you all about them in their ads.

On the iPhone, there may be a lot of features– they power the experiences–but you do not have to know about them to get to where you want.

Nokia creates features.

Apple creates experiences.

Smart companies create experiences.

consumers, experiences, features, innovation, products, smart companies, technology