Bill Gates promotes configurators
Anyone who believes that front-end usability has a crucial part to play in making configurators and mass customization work ought to be pleased that none other than Bill Gates ushered in 2008 with an endorsement of similar principles in his last keynote speech at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show on January 6th. For anyone who missed out on the full speech here come some quotes (full version available on the MSN press-site):
Bill Gates: “[Something] that people underestimate the most, I would say, is the power of natural user interface. The first digital decade was largely driven by the keyboard and the mouse. Just in the last two years we've started to see the emergence of other modes of interaction. Touch on the Windows PC, touch on the iPhone, the Surface device that we're talking about. We started to see speech, - the Tellme capability - built into the phone [...]where you get to talk and interact with your media or your phone capabilities.”
“The reaction to those natural interface implementations has been very dramatic. People are very interested in a simpler way of navigating the information. So the pen, with ink, touch, visual recognition, all of these come together with the other elements to create very new experiences. Gestures so that you can get things done, sitting in front of the TV set. […]”
“Even areas where we haven't thought about software empowerment, like the retail experience: walking in and picking a product you want to customize, or home automation is finally, I think, simple enough that we can bring it forward with natural user interface. […]”
Obviously, everyone familiar with the configurators featured on this site knows that people have been thinking about software empowered retail experiences for many years now, before touch-technology became available. Pioneering on-site retail customization was practiced by consumer brands such as Levi’s, Dell and Proctor & Gamble, as well by million of ice-cream shops worldwide. But in terms of publicity, it certainly doesn’t hurt to see Microsoft wake up to the idea as well. What better news for the mass customization movement than having Bill Gates publicly demonstrate a Microsoft snowboard configurator in Las Vegas:
Bill Gates: “Say I’ve got to buy a snowboard. And so I’m in a snowboard store, and what they've got for me is a Microsoft Surface. And that's going to let me customize the board, let my personality show through. […] It recognizes objects, it recognizes multiple fingers. It's very, very rich. So I can take this board and say, okay, that looks good, I really want to see what I can do to the top and the bottom, and it's just plain right now, so let's design my own. I can take some boards that other people have done and thought was good, pick one of those and bring that down, put that pattern on my top, and that's the old free ride, looks good.”
“Now let me select some of these decals, I'll take that snowflake, if I want color I just say, okay, this is a color wheel, slide around, that looks good. Now, you know, I don't know what size I want, but let me move it on here so I can see how it looks, put it right there, perfect. So that side has probably got enough on it. Let me go to the other side and actually put a signature, so when I'm in the air and people are down below me, they'll know what's up there. I'll take that and size that, and put it over here on the bottom of my board. There we go. I've got something that looks pretty good. In fact, let me finish by putting some bindings on here, so I know exactly what that's going to look like.”
“And I think that's a good looking snowboard. But really, before I actually buy it, would like to show it to my friends. So I simply put my phone down, that gets recognized, and I get the choice of either just putting on the phone, or putting it up on the Internet […] It goes up and now it's going to access it, come back and do more work on it. So it's been a fun, simple retail experience. I didn't need to learn anything to be able to use that application.”
Again, what makes all this so interesting is to see how mass customization and configurators are making headway as an inevitable consequence of increasingly intuitive, omnipotent and omnipresent user interfaces. Indeed, as in our minds, hearts and hands we are becoming accustomed to living our lives in the digital sphere and manipulating information with ever-greater facility, it’s only natural that we should come to think of consumer and business products the same way: flexible, creative and, obviously, custom-made.
P.S: Two snowboard configurators featured in the configurator Database that were already online and operational pre-Las Vegas: