Alex reader, how good intention translate into a bad idea

[update: B&N announced their e-reader. It is a dual screen like Alex but they did improve the UX a little. Most if not all of what follows still stands.]

Well I am sorry for the engineers and designer who worked on Alex but that is the way I fell. In case you have not seen photos of Alex, an epaper reader to compete with the Kindle, it has two screens one of top of the other. The top one is pretty much the same size and characteristics of the Kindle and the bottom one is a LCD of sort. Frankly the technical details are irrelevant. The problem is the UX (user experience).

Why is Alex's design wrong:

• people in the western civilization read horizontally. Stacking information vertically goes against the grain of how people consume information. If you need to teach people how to consume information via your device... you may have a problem, a big one in fact.
  
• our vision is wired to continually move the eyes in a span motion. Overall the brain tends to focus on one area (i.e.: the paragraph you are reading) while still capturing cues from what goes around you. Introduce two potential main attention grabbers and you just gave yourself a headache. This is, sadly, the main principle behind web based advertisement, how many of you enjoy being distracted by an animated ad while you are reading the news? Well that is exactly what Alex can do. Oops. So the brain will try to focus on one of the panels actively trying to ignore the other. Not exactly the relaxing experience of reading a book.
• the UX model e-readers replace is a book. If you think about it carefully, that is hard enough, there is no need to get creative adding more features. A book is easy to access, share, browse and it is fault tolerant. Drop it on a concrete floor, pick it up and keep reading. Try any of the above with an electronic device and you will see why I said it is hard to replace a book. Amazon was smart about that and they realized that they should tackle the problem one feature at the time. That is why Kindle is successful, they replicated one of the aspects of a book (reading from paper) while still lacking others. But users forgave them and bought the device en masse. For lacking others I am referring to, for example, browsing a book or browsing your own library is much more complex in Kindle than with physical books but people deal with it because a Kindle weight less than carrying around your library. So what's wrong with Alex? Books have one page per sheet, not two. The interaction with a page does not changes from top to bottom, a page is a page. Ditto for Kindle. Alex is introducing split features, the top and the bottom screen are capable of doing different things and that has nothing to do with the experience of reading a book, browsing a magazine or consulting a manual. All experiences that I am sure Alex will try to replace. See my point at the very beginning on having to teach consumers how to use your device...
  
• manufacturing costs: two screens means more inventory, more electronics, more assembly costs etc. You better have a really good reason to introduce a competing product that costs more to manufacture.
• simplicity: consider the following, Kindle has one screen, a keyboard and a bunch of buttons. Alex has two screens, a touchscreen keyboard (or so I hope) and a bunch of buttons. That is, now you need to learn how to use this thing, for example, how to navigate between screens. Sound unnecessarily complicated, because it is.
  

Wait a minute, what if Alex is a disruptive innovation?
Well, I am sure it is possible that I am missing something here but my point is that there is a better way to build a device that is aimed to replace printed media and that can surpasses the Kindle. That is, a tablet pc with touchscreen controls a la iPhone. One screen, one interaction model very close to paper, no new mental model required. If anything I think B&N will help Apple take over this market if they ever decide to introduce the rumored iTable or iPad or whatever they will decide to call it. In fact Amazon and B&N may very well be solving the pricing problem for them (see previous post here). More in a moment.

So why hasn't anyone done it right?
hold on a minute, someone has done it partially right, Kindle is a good starting point. Why is it not better? Because the technology is not quite there yet, we are close but not close enough. The main problems are:

• refresh rate vs. power consumption of the screen, namely paper like display Vs. your favorite flavor of LCD
  
• color vs. BW (see above)
• weight vs. battery life
• and last but not least, positioning and revenue model

The last one is a show stopper for many players. Before we go there, notice that Alex is a compromise on all of the above, instead of solving the problem, they doubled the solution. Good idea? You decide.

Back to the business model. Think Sony, they were the first to introduce a capable e-reader and yet they are now trailing behind Amazon. The latter outsold them because they own the content and they waited for the convergence of technologies needed to build a better user experience (paper like display, affordable 3G and small lightweight batteries). More importantly, Amazon created an ecosystem in which Kindle makes sense. They learned from iTunes and applied that lesson to books. But if you are Acme inc. and you manufacture devices and you have no access to thousands of e-books, you do not have a business model hence you do not have a product.

Now B&N does have access to the content but their attempt to one up the Kindle look ill advised because of the factors I highlighted above. Not to mention that eventually e-readers will have to take it one step further and replace notepads. And that is a whole other ballgame with a whole other set of technical and financial challenges that Alex just made harder to tackle.

Google Wave

It looks like Google is going in the right direction at least at the conceptual level. A dear friend of mine who works there sent me an invitation as it was released so I had a chance to play with it for a few minutes.
In a nutshell, they are giving us (the users) a new communication tool that is somewhat of an hybrid between a simplified Google doc, a chat room and an email. While I see the benefit of using it to collaborate in the most strict sense of the term, I am a bit disappointed. I was hoping for a slightly different approach focused more on the business end. The focus seems to be on social activities and we all know we do not need another social network to worry about.
What I like about it
it is reasonably simple, you start a wave (a context container that can handle multimedia) and start dragging and dropping people in. You can use it to manage the invite to a party as much as a project brainstorming. Not bad, well done.
What I do not like about it
every body can do anything to any content. While that sounds terrific on paper, in reality it poisons the very spirit of collaboration since only two outcomes are possible:

1. everybody will edit everybody's else content without a common path (note I did not say without a common goal, this is a tool problem not a vision problem). This is otherwise known as chaos :-)
2. nobody touches anything and nothing happens. If people are not engaged in whatever it is that the "wave" represents, they have very little motivation to do anything and a lot of motivation not to. Why? Google Wave *can* easily be mistaken for another social network and people will ask themselves how is this different from Facebook, Evite, MySpace etc.

I am hoping that my first impression is wrong and that I will discover more value. The reader should notice that I purposefully omitted the part where you and all the people you want to interact with all have to be registered users. Take a moment here to let it sink in.

It is easy to argue that this small *detail* will hinder adoption until the case for it becomes clear to everybody. Right now I expect that non Gmail users will resist signing up thinking, somewhat correctly, that they do not need to deal with yet another account. Sigh.