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Where the Heck are My Pictures?

The film Blade Runner was a seminal work of the Sci-Fi genre. Set in a bleak Los Angeles of the future, the film portrays much forward-looking technology. Interestingly, a recurring theme is the attachment that several of the main characters hold to their old photographs. Even though police cars can fly and criminals routinely have back-alley eye transplants, people still need their pictures.

The contemporary photography industry has seen a complete technological revolution over the past decade, as both professionals and amateurs have rapidly migrated from film to digital cameras. All those photographs that used to be saved in shoeboxes and albums are now in computer hard drives. While in theory the organizing and viewing of photographs is much more convenient in a digital context, in practice the majority of storage and retrieval methods leave a lot to be desired. The shortcomings of photo management software and hardware are emblematic of a more pervasive problem endemic to the consumer electronics industry. What the hardware manufacturers view as standalone products are in fact components used as a suite of devices that together provide a consumer service.

In the early adopter phase, feature-oriented enthusiasts are eager to snap-up the latest and greatest gizmos. Ownership of the technology itself provides a substantial portion of the value that these users extract from the product. However, as electronic products reach a mainstream audience with a much lower tolerance for complexity, as well as a value system that is focused on the end service, manufacturers have historically been challenged to match products to user needs.

To be fair, the schism between what consumers need and what they buy is also partially attributable to both the purchasers themselves and the sources of advice they use. Shoppers wrap their heads around a certain performance criterion, say the number of megapixels, and then become fierce price comparison shoppers. Magazines and their online counterparts often reinforce this approach by providing uncritical lists of specifications, rather than genuine hands-on product reviews by less then uber-savvy users. The greatest consequence is consumers who are at least frustrated, if not so disillusioned that they reject upgrading because they so fear learning the complexities of a new model. In either case, the reduced value to the consumer results in lost sales to that product category, as well as to its adjuncts. To look at how it should be done, the best practices example for the integrative approach is the iPod.

If ten years ago you had described a portable music product that would, when compared to the portable CD players of the day, cost five times as much, last half as long and provide a lower quality of fidelity, yet grow to be so successful and generate such fierce evangelism that it would influence purchase patterns in numerous product categories, most would have thought you mad. Yet, that is exactly what happened. Various industry observers have attributed that success to the iPod’s sleek design, or the simple interface, or the synergistic iTunes software, or the innovative online download store. In fact, it’s the combination off all these elements, and how they all manage to get out of the way of the music.

Apple product teams get it, that the product is the listening experience itself, and that every element in the system must serve that purpose. A sleek physical design may help move product out of the store, but it’s the intuitive interface and effortless software integration that will keep them using it, buying tracks, praising it to friends, making repeat and gift purchases and therewith generating a sustainable competitive advantage. The fact that iTunes tracks are lower resolution and technically inferior to a CD is an afterthought for all but a small minority of users. Mediocre earbuds and environmental noise won’t even allow most users to tell a difference.

Back on the picture viewing front things are a lot more difficult. Many digital cameras are needlessly complex and yet don’t provide all the features users would most want, such as easy captioning in the field. There are good photo organizing programs, and good photo editing programs, but none that do both extremely well. Most are also overly complicated with many features targeted to the small number of professionals and “pro-sumer” amateurs. At the same time, these programs lack painfully obvious consumer-oriented features, like one-button resizing to email the pictures to friends and relatives.

The viewing of digital photos presents even more of a quandary. The two primary viewing modes in the film realm, photo albums and slide projectors, do not have direct equivalents in the digital realm. Computer monitors do not provide the sit-on-the-couch-and-look-over-grandma’s-shoulder experience of physical albums, while digital projectors and TVs still don’t work well for pictures because the resolution is simply too low. The new and much vaunted 1080p displays provide amazing video quality, but a trick of the brain means that our eyes are much more critical of still images. 1080p is actually only 2 megapixels, which is sadly obvious on a large screen. “Old fashioned” slides are actually equivalent to about 10 megapixels of display resolution and unlikely to see an effective digital replacement for some years.

For the company that is able to take a user-centric, systemic approach to digital photography, the field is largely wide open. The ability of the various devices in the system, (camera, software, computer and display) to work in harmony is the key to success, while pixel count is perhaps the least important criterion for choosing a consumer-oriented camera. Staying in the game of specification one-upsmanship may be the safe bet for the short to mid term, but it will never generate the competitive advantage that true innovation can.

An aspect in which pictures at home may be fundamentally different from music on the go is the use of an interchangeable storage medium, rather than a single, large-capacity drive. Once the idiosyncratic human element is incorporated, a nominally inefficient disc or card may in fact be more productive. Essentially all Sci-Fi films depict the storage of important images on a selectable medium rather than mass-stored. Filmmakers like Steven Spielberg understand what engineers miss, i.e. that it is immediately intuitive to the audience that a home video would be stored on one of several plastic cards with printed labels (Minority Report). Outside of a portable context, the extreme degree of physical information density that is now technologically possible may in fact be less efficient.

There is evidence that consumers, even those born since the advent of the personal computer, may never prefer that a set of pictures to be stored with thousands of others on a hard drive, rather than on a small disc marked “Key West Diving Trip ’98”. A case in point is the Minidisc audio format, which has defied all attempts by its manufacturer, Sony, to kill it off. It survives, at least in part, because it provides people with a modern replacement for the “mixed tape” of cassette yore. Although iPods do have song lists, for many users there is just no substitute for having something that you can hold, label, borrow and loan.

Some designers of consumer electronics probably wish that they could simply engineer out of product operation the most irrational element. Unfortunately for them, that part holds all the credit cards.

Blade Runner was adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? In that book, as with most great Sci-Fi, the future and technology are merely vehicles for new approaches to examine some of the most primary human questions. The book uses the androids’ treasuring of photographs as an allegory for their acquisition of human compassion. In the end, androids designed to kill do nevertheless learn to revere life. Here’s hoping that more consumer electronics product teams can learn to better appreciate human habits and idiosyncrasies.