 Close up of Droid x "Eagle Eye" ad from Google / Verizon  Snapshot from Apple "Haircut" ad for Facetime |
The ads for Droid phones and iPhones are like windows into the design souls of the teams behind them. If you watch TV, its hard to miss the ads, but if you haven’t seen them, they are embedded at the end of this post.
The iPhone / Facetime ads are totally about the user’s experience. They are shown to you as if you were the person holding the phone. This makes you part of the ad. Talk about “an immersive experience”… The ads are so good at communicating their message that don’t refer to the product (except for the end credits). The are all about communicating the experience that their customers have. This reflects the design philosophy behind the iPhone, where the experience rules. The ads are also funny and / or tug at your heart strings, which doesn’t do the product any harm.
The Google / Verizon Droid ads are different. They focus on product features, like the “1 GHz Snapdragon processor.” They tell you you can’t handle the speed. They tell you that the technology is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, that your eyes won’t be able to keep up, though you’d be able to find your human friends if you had any.
My initial reaction was that the Apple ads were brilliant and that the Droid ads were geeky. The Apple ads reflect the very best of user centered design and are completely focused on expressing the user’s experience. The Droid ads refer to arcane details about the phone that are seem relevant to the experience. But there is more to it than that.
The Apple ads are aimed at people who don’t care about the underlying technology, but just want it to work. That probably describes 90% or more of iPhone customers. The ads show them an experience they could have. The “There is an App for that” iPhone ad series was similar: it talked about what users could use their iPhone for. iPad ads are the same as well. All this points to a consistent philosophy of getting things to just work for the user.
If the world was made up only of people who wanted things to just work, all smartphone buyers would buy an iPhone, and the phone wars would stop. But the very healthy sales of Android phones tell a different story. There are a whole set of folks who do care about speed, and processors, and features, and Droid phones suit them perfectly. I suspect they find the canned experience of an iPhone stifling. Its much easier to tinker with a Droid than with an iPhone, and that appeals to many folks. When I was in Taiwan earlier this year, a kid said to me that his HTC phone was better than my iPhone. I’m sure that in many ways it is.
The point is that the technical features of the Droid phones are part of the experience. Some people like to drive sports cars knowing that their car is capable of speeds they will never use. (And I won’t get started on SUVs…) My wife will tell you that I buy tools which can do many things that I’ll never do. Just like that, some folks will buy Droid phones because of what they are capable of. They like the freedom to customize what is in their phones, and like the possibilities their phone enables.
As designers we need to keep in mind what drives users. Some are very happy with Apple like simplicity, some want the features. The other thing that designers need to be true to is the organization’s design philosophy. The product (and the ads) should reflect the design philosophy, just like the Droid and the iPhone reflect the philosophies of the companies they come from.