Related: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
I feel there’s a point to be made, somewhere in here.
Or something.
Pageonce Bills by Pageonce, Inc.
Pageonce Bills is an app that claims it is “the best way to manage your bills.” Your billing statements are pushed to your iPhone so that “you never miss a bill again.”
Sounds handy, right? Certainly. It’s quite popular in the App Store, garnering four stars and more than 14,000 ratings.
So, Pageonce, if your app is so great, and if it’s finally going to help me get my stupid sloppy self in order, why they hell does your example screenshot show a $201 bill from Comcast that is already three days late? What the hell happened to your “due date reminders” and your “advanced alerts and push notification system”?
It’s the subtle things that matter; how your application constructs its ideal user. And in this horseshit screenshot of your app, upon which I project my own anticipated usage, you have told me that even with the help of your app I am still going to miss my payments.
We’re talking behavior change, here, and that shit is hard. But what the shit, Pageonce? If this is indeed the “best way” to manage my bills, if indeed I will “never miss a bill again”, then how in the hell did your example user miss their Comcast bill? Am I missing the usage of a subtly brilliant persona, here?
Hot damn, this is cool. An engineer at Apple uses LEGOS to rebuild the Antikythera Mechanism, a Greek computing device from more than 2,000 years ago that could accurately predict eclipses and the like.
While studying embodied interactions for over a year I became modestly obsessed with physical computing mechanisms, and this guy was always at the top of my radar. No information I found about it was particularly transparent about how or why it works, so this remediation in oh-so-familiar LEGOS is a fusion of lifeworlds that I totally dig.
