Under The Annoyance Curve
While listening to a podcast in the car, I made a phone call. The podcast paused while I made the call and resumed once the call was over. That wasn’t an accident.
Things didn’t magically pause when other things were happening on your phone. For a long time, whatever you were listening to would continue to play and you’d have to rewind to the right spot. It went on for a long time.
Same with calls, same with two programs outputting audio. Rewind also wasn’t reliable and could blow past where you had left off.
However, enough people were annoyed for a long enough period of time that something changed. There was an opportunity for a slight improvement and fewer people fell under the curve of annoyed.
In Apple lore, it’s discussed how Steve Jobs obsessed over boot times. Saving 10 seconds off of the boot time could save 100 people lives over the use of a product they were launching. It’s worth thinking about that as we design our own products. Not only just in terms of the actual time, but the quality or annoyance we generate through our creations.
