Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

A comment about reviews of the iPad from Oliver Kofoed at Hacker News struck a chord -

Maybe it’s just me, but I was hoping for deeper insight into how the device feels in day-to-day usage, not just a list of features that i might as well have read on Apples info pages.

Stuff like: how the device feels to sit with for longer periods of time, is it more natural to type with one finger or both thumbs when sitting, can i read while lying down… All the stuff that isn’t just “it has this amount of ram, you can view videos and the web on it and….”

He does have a point. We have gravitated towards reviews that are more suited to robots and computer parsers.

Experiences are not described in most Reviews 

Take eReader reviews – Whatever reading related devices we talk about there are some common experiences that are completely missed out.

1. What does reading feel like?  
2. What’s it like reading it for 3-4 hours?  
3. Do your hands or fingers get tired after using it for a couple of hours?
4. How long you can hold it in one hand?
5. Can it be used with one hand (for the period you can get away holding it)?
6. What is it like in sunlight?
7. At what brightness (or time of day) does the visibility start fading away?
8. What’s the process of taking notes? How does it feel?
9. How long does it take to search through the book store? Does it feel fun? Easy?

Reviews are always focused on how large the screen is (as opposed to how easy it is to read from), whether there’s a touchscreen (as opposed to what using the touchscreen feels like), and how many books there are (as opposed to the book buying experience).

Is this a Left Brain vs Right Brain thing?

Perhaps most reviewers (and for that matter most tech companies) are left brain dominated to the point that they are totally focused on having the best features and the most memory and the most options – so that they can logically argue that their product is the best.

When you hit main-stream customers they care more about how the device feels and how they feel about it and their experiences. For them something that is easy to use, something that doesn’t make them feel stupid, and something they feel good about owning probably means a lot more than any technical specification.

As an example, you might have one device and have different people choose completely different things as ‘the best feature’ -

1. A tech reviewer might think the fast processor is the best feature. For him, the 2.25 ghz is the killer feature and he writes that down expecting everyone else to understand the beauty of that number. A lay person can’t understand this – they only understand things like photos open quickly, the browser is fast, and it boots up in 3 seconds.
2. An end-user might be in love with being able to scroll through his contact list with just a finger. The tech person may or may not appreciate this and a tech reviewer will definitely not write that ‘the feeling of zipping through all my contacts with just my thumb was immaculate’. For the tech person it’s capacitive touch screen with multi-touch scrolling.

It’s a pretty huge shift – going from technical specifications to actual experiences.

Bullet Points Vs A Chain of Experiences

This is how the tech person is thinking of the device -

1. 6″ screen. 
2. Electrophoretic display with 16 shades of gray.  
3. Lithium Polymer Battery with life of 16,000 page views. 

That would be confusing even to most technical people – normal users are simply overwhelmed.

Electrophoretic display with a Lithium Polymer battery - Is that for reading books or for invading Mars?

Here’s what the normal user’s user experience is registering as -

The packaging says Once upon a Time - that’s cool … It’s thinner than I thought … the screen is black and white, clearer than I thought … It feels so light and there are buttons for left-handed reading …

Oh, it saved my place in the book … what does this do? what just happened? … so that’s how they put notes … those keys felt tiny … bookmarks are easy to do, they should have had a dedicated key.

It’s simply all these experiences strung together. It’s the book opening experience and the page turning experience and how dictionary look-ups are done and it’s a journey of a million little experiences (to be precise - a few dozen experiences repeated in endlessly varying patterns).

Update: 37 Signals have a post that is very relevant.

Reviews need to start telling readers what they will experience and what they will feel

Here are the things reviews almost always miss out -

1. The amazement the first time you get a book wirelessly in 45 seconds.  
2. The frustration when you hit a wrong key on the keyboard.
3. The feeling of forgetting everything and disappearing into the book. 
4. Being at the grocery store and realizing you can shop for books on the Kindle.
5. Sitting at the dentist’s office and having 3 people asking about the Kindle and being impressed by it.
6. Annoying things like typos and missing covers.
7. The worry when you drop it by mistake and the joy when you realize it magically survived (or the pain of $180 to get a replacement).

No one ever looks back at their car and thinks – there were 6 bolts holding each wheel and there were 27 wires taking directions to the computer and the gas tank could hold 11.7 gallons exactly.

They remember the road trips and the friends and lovers who shared the journey and the shared moments and accidents and near misses. Most of all they remember how it felt to drive free and the wind in their hair and the joy of the road and all the little pleasures and annoyances along the way.

It’s the same with ereaders – we’ll remember the books and reading way too late into the night. We’ll remember fighting for who gets to read and finding a new favorite and all the little things we liked and even our pet peeves.

No one cares what the speed of the processor is or how much memory there is – until and unless it affects their experience and reduces their enjoyment of the device. Instead of describing the journey most reviews are focused on describing the car that we’ll be driving. Well, it’s time to start describing what the journey will be like and how it will feel.

Filed under: reviews Tagged: | ideal review, truth about reviews