Reading through a business article today, this quote stood out for me “some of the analysts were loudly wondering just when Mr. Balsillie and his co-CEO, Mike Lazaridis, would step aside and hand the reins to someone else.” Now I’m not a business person, but I do work with various tablet devices as part of my job. As one of the developers out there to receive a “free” PlayBook, here’s my critique on what went wrong.
When I received my PlayBook I couldn’t help but notice the glaringly bad looking green loading circle. Why in the world does it look like someone cropped out a poor resolution gif and animated it? Also, why doesn’t it match the feel of any of the other components? Already, one point against RIM. Next up, poor user experience. As I’m trying too add someone to my chat the keyboard slides up for me to enter their name, as it slides away it shows a button under the text field which I assume is the submit or done button. Boy was I wrong, that’s the CANCEL button, the next button is for some reason up in the top left corner in a completely different section of the screen. This goes against all intuition on how to navigate a device. Then again, should I be surprised? RIM’s traditional software is one of the most unintuitive things I’ve ever seen.
What I don’t understand is why RIM farmed out core pieces of its PlayBook software to various developers. When your main competition is Apple, a company known for having a strong focus on design and user experience, why in the world would you not hire an inside team to make sure everything was done consistently, properly, and with a high level of polish? Users aren’t engineers! They don’t care what the device has inside of it if they can’t use it. If RIM’s decision to parcel out software development of their core PlayBook applications was for cost reasons, they would have been much better off cutting their CEO’s and CFO’s salaries a tad and invested wisely in an in house team. Though RIM’s products seems innovative and great in the late 90s, they can’t claim the same now when they are faced with a sea of competition that actually pays attention to the user.
