http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,60770,00.html
A design guru opines on the importance of the 'wow' factor, the viscerial reaction we get when we see someone using an Apple 17" widescreen portable. His position: the look and feel, and concomitant pleasure a techological object gives is as an important a design criterion as actual function. Clearly, this bit of advice applies to IT, particularly program design.
And yet, I wonder: what makes me go "wow" about my main home system is not the case, which is boring beige to the featureless max, but the fact that it contains a 10,000 rpm SCSI RAID array, which gives new meaning to disk speed.
And what slows my hand with something like the highly lucious APPLE G5 with 23" Cinema display, which has the 'wow' factor in spades, is a little matter of some $6K. For that, I can have a higher-performing Athlon 64 FX box with a much more capable graphics card, a bigscreen display, and lots of money left over to buy cigars. It may not look like much, but I don't think I really care.
In the case of much modern technology, my response is not "wow" but "what?!?!", although I must admit I am weakening when it comes to keychain USB storage peripherals, which appear ever-more indispensible to me.
Posted by jho at October 23, 2003 10:44 AM