Look Ma, No Hands!
Photo SourceThe launch of the Facebook Ray-Ban Stories eyewear is a more-than-significant development in the wearables and voiceUX universe. Will it make a long-awaited dent in the smart eyewear consumer space? What new user behavior changes might this product drive? Let’s dig in.
First off, check out a product video to get a glimpse of its main features.
Now, this would seem the most obvious, in-your-face fact in the world, but it still took a while for anyone to really get it - ...
… eyewear is a fashion business
We are talking fashion proper, not fast fashion or technology made ‘stylish’. Fashion, a profession hyper-focussed on sensual impact, can seem superficial to the technology industry. But fashion as a consumer sensibility goes deep beyond looks, and captures really the opposite of the superficial - timelessness, resilience and performance.
For instance, this is not fashion
Photo: Snap Spectacles (Source)And neither is this
Photo: Amazon Echo Frames (Source)People don’t care for incremental advances in technology if it is clothed in unwearable fashion design. And eyewear is the hotspot of personal fashion for many. Snap’s Spectacles have not raised many a brow, as it is a product that forgets that it is first eyewear, then technology.
Amazon has a different problem. Amazon’s brand ethos of price-sensitive, fast, plenty, and generic is not compatible with fashion’s unspoken ethos of price-desensitive, timeless, custom, and exclusive.
Fashion is an end-to-end experience that has everything to do with each cadence in the customer journey. The purchase experience is a cornerstone in that journey. Amazon’s e-commerce experience does not embody fashion. So, no matter how well-crafted a product itself is, the Amazon purchase experience always pushes against, not in tandem with, it. This has left Amazon in a peculiar position where their core brand and primary sales channel gets in the way of delivering world-beating fashion experiences. See how GOAT does it.
Leveraging the Aesthetic-Usability Effect
Snap’s Spectacles and Amazon’s Echo Frames face another itchy problem: they amplify, not reconcile, the apparent tension between functionality and aesthetics. This is an age-old tussle in which the engineering-first mindset advocates a form-follows-function approach. Engineering typically cajoles the user from a lofty position, saying: “You get all this cool technology doing the awesome work for you, why don’t you just eat up the sub-optimal form that it comes with?”
But humans can’t engage in that conversation. We don’t perceive or react to the world that way. Humans, for instance, are hugely influenced by the Aesthetic Usability Effect, where attractive things simply seem to work better. This is why just washing your car seems to make for a better ride, an entirely subjective change in performance which has nothing to do with improving the machine’s engineering. Interestingly, the aesthetic attributes of a product register on humans as sensual signals of its inherent quality.
Bar Apple and Tesla, few have built digital brands deeply entrenched in to this psychological tendency. Ray-Ban Stories demonstrates that Facebook gets it too now. It suggests that Facebook are open to taking the best route open to them from their current position when it comes to an eyewear play. By collaborating with Ray-Ban, one of eyewear’s most iconic and universally loved brands, Facebook have demonstrated that it is best to focus on what they do best - put the social tech into a fashion product, and let the fashion designers do what they do best.
So far so good. But there is a larger reason to be very excited about Stories. This combination of fashion and social tech may represent a real point of departure in shaping the digital consumer universe of tomorrow. This is a big deal. Let’s consider the current state of VUX (Voice User Experience) adoption in personal computing.
Voice Interfaces are struggling to get deep adoption .. and screens may be the reason why
Deep adoption is what I like to think a product has when it becomes the primary interface for the user, their default, their automatic go-to in a context. Interfaces that enjoy deep adoption have reached that magical juncture where they deliver increasing value to users from decreasing user effort. The screen-based smartphone has earned our deep adoption. We use the smartphone impulsively, with little or no thought. It has become habitual in its usefulness.
Non-primary interfaces, such as Voice User Interfaces, are non-primary because the user still needs to think actively about using them and while using them. They engage what is called the brain’s executive function.
For example, this is what Siri usage can often look like on even the latest and greatest iOS. Mainstream users - focussed on outcomes, convenience and speed as they are - will not put effort into figuring out how to give Siri access to Contacts via Settings. All they will recognise in this moment is that Siri cannot access their contacts, and they will default to the way they have always got this task done.
Thankfully, the smartphone and the smartwatch are screen-based devices. It takes only a heartbeat and a few taps of the finger for the user to circumvent Siri from being deeply adopted. And so the screen itself may be the reason that the benefits of voice UX never see deep adoption by users.
On to Google. Its VUX has several teething problems, chief amongst them being a fragmented voice brand. Is the product called ‘Google Voice’ or ‘Google Assistant’, or ‘Google Home’? I remember it is called ‘Assistant’ on some (Android?) devices? Why does searching for ‘Google Assistant’ on the iOS App Store point to the ‘Google Home’ app? It is all very confusing, made more so by Google’s difficulty in landing any beachhead in the iOS ecosystem. Having an installed user base isn’t enough. You need frequency and intensity of use doing high-value behaviors via an interface for it to be considered deeply adopted.
Meanwhile, Google and Alexa are are both focussed on becoming the go-to voice interface in the home. As a result, roadblocks and speed bumps are what the user inevitably runs in to within the mobile VUX experience, leaving plenty of opportunity out there for the taking.
Land and expand, but its not going to be easy
A smart eyewear experience is not screen-driven. Ray-Ban Stories hence skips around the complicated mobile turf dominated by iOS and Google. If Stories gets its hands-free element right, it could bridge the first mile to deeper voice-UX adoption. Stories would do well to use a land-and-expand strategy to help users form new VUX-driven personal computing behavior patterns.
Not all control or consumption behaviors in casual computing map well to voice interfaces. For example, a user can easily choose the best photos to share from a set using swipes and taps. Imagine being able to do the same with a voice command: “Facebook, show me the best 3 photos from this evening.” To deliver on that takes a whole other order of technological sophistication.
Stories could start by delivering the first few use cases end-to-end, with no major breaks or disruptions in key user journeys. Which means they would need to keep those journeys short and simple. Indeed, stories does not extol a long list of features. At the moment, the scope of Stories seems to be a hands-free photo / video capture and playback controls device. While Stories does feature a physical content capture trigger button, clearly its goal is to introduce users to the more convenient VUX commands as soon as possible. At least early adopters might quickly skip the tedious click gesture and default to VUX.
Privacy asymmetry is a key barrier for deep adoption of smart eyewear
We live in a world that increasingly cares for and respects privacy, a wonderful development. In smart eyewear use, there is a huge asymmetry in privacy between the wearer and the people around them. The wearer has literally the all-seeing, all-capturing power, while the people around them have virtually none of it. Interestingly, the asymmetry in power is not to the advantage of the wearer. Remember a key motivation for the wearer to use the product is social connection, recognition and the joy of a shared experience. This becomes seriously compromised by the very nature of smart eyewear. The massive downside to the product’s use is social rejection, which is a very big deal for most. Recognising this, Stories comes with a small but important innovation: a front-facing signal light (below) which warms anyone facing the camera that a photo or video is being taken. This is a well-considered feature, something generation Zoom & remote workers will resonate with strongly too. (Note: Snap Spectacles come with a front-facing signal too, but I suspect it is overdone.) Is this enough, though? I can’t tell from where I sit. But it is clear that Facebook is boldly placing design for Privacy at the forefront of the product proposition.
Photo SourceSimilarly, the power switch (below) which turns off the entire device, address the privacy asymmetry problem with a clear binary on-off control.
Facebook has put up an entire microsite dedicated to the privacy dimension of this product.
Photo Source
The companion app to Stories takes privacy seriously and keeps it upfront in the experience. (Image Source).
A new interface is adopted best in a socially consensual setting
Stories demonstrates that a new interface adoption isn’t an outcome of the individual user deciding to use something new - it involves a social dimension requiring a high degree of social consent and participation. In a world increasingly aware of the rise of surveillance capitalism, Facebook stands on a thin line between its murky past and in leading a fairer future. The privacy dimension built into Stories is a decent start over to the right side of that line, but it still does not address the core privacy problem built into Facebook’s business model. Segments of younger markets - precisely those early adopters that Stories is targeting - are increasingly aware of this and not afraid to talk about it. Clearly then, Stories will not be welcomed in all social contexts alike to begin with, but there could be some social circles of those early adopters - friends, schoolmates, colleagues, close family - where the product is liked and in time perhaps loved. In such circles, the user might be able to lay their fears of social rejection to rest for a bit, and focus on full use of the technology. If and only if the product navigates these opportunities with fairness and balance, does it hold the promise of breaking new ground.
Update Oct 24th: With new and ever more serious whistleblower allegations against Facebook emerging all the time, it is becoming increasingly hard to trust ever more pervasive offerings (such as eyewear) from the company.
