successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically.
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.
The above are quotes from Welcome to the Future Nauseous which discusses the idea of the manufactured-normalcy field. Because the manufactured normalcy field minimizes behaviour change in users, it means that the future arrives along a least-cognitive-effort path.
This is enabled through an extensive use of metaphor and analogies, “the internet has pages” to allow users to use complicated tools. The survival of a good product depends on not just its effectiveness, but the ability for it to be integrated into the field. A marketer must be able to educate an average joe on the technology to sell it to them.
This is what made Apple’s Mac so genius. The visual interface lends itself to far more mental models, approximate abstractions and metaphors for wide-scale adoption.
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