Design Tech to Seem Like You’re Not Using Tech
For a couple years now I have been patiently anticipating the opening of NFC (near field communication) tags within the iPhone. Apple being Apple, they have withheld the release of this technology for third party developers in order to secure a monopoly while rival Samsung has allowed anyone to play with these tags for years. Reminiscent of the Jobs vs. Woz story that everyone has heard about revolving around the decision to keep the Apple II closed.
Apple uses NFC tags within their newer iPhones to communicate with point of sale systems in stores which they creatively call Apple Pay. Without physically connecting to the POS systems, iPhones have the ability to send and receive information, such as credit card information, with the ease and quickness of simply holding your phone within a few inches of the credit card machine. Samsung phones do the exact same thing and they call it Samsung Pay (brilliant).
But while this technology is intriguing, it is limited to only Apple Pay for the entire community of iPhone owners. A disappointing realization for those of us who see the real potential of this technology in areas other than just making payments. I recently wrote about Moo business cards (a company that makes high quality custom business cards) who is exploring the possibilities of NFC tags by embedding them into their cards allowing users to connect their phones to paper business cards. Pretty awesome and definitely an upgrade to traditional business cards if you ask me.
Another area that could benefit from the use of NFC tags is marketing. Creating interactive flyers, posters and buttons could engage consumers in a whole new way, hopping on the wagon of the connected world. The thing that makes NFC tags really much better than QR tags is that the consumer wouldn’t have to do anything on their side in order to interact with them, simply setting up a function for the tag would prompt the phone to follow the action when it was within the range of a couple inches. Without having to download a QR reader, snapping a photo and then being able to receive the information, NFC tags reduce the amount of steps to the end product, making it seem like the user isn’t even using technology. As a UX designer I see the future of technology becoming more ingrained within our lives but the key to designing successful tech is developing it so well that us humans aren’t aware that we are using it.
This philosophy has only made me crave open NFC tags even more. As an avid music listener, I find it almost unbearable to walk to class, drive or even shower without playing music. A habit that I participate in daily, should be more automatic on the tech side. Every time that I get in my car or hop in the shower I am very aware that I am using my phone to set up a playlist to listen to. But I started thinking, I do this every single day, in the same location, multiple times a day, how much time am I wasting a year pulling out my phone, opening my music, connecting to my speaker and selecting a song, when I could automate all of this.
Up until a few days ago I though the only physical way for me to do this was to set up NFC tags in my car and bathroom and tap my phone against them (I don’t have an Amazon Echo and Siri sucks). However, I discovered a Swedish company called Shortcut Labs that designed a solution to my problem. It’s called the Flic, a physical button that you can place anywhere that connects to your phone via Bluetooth. By simply creating a short command for your phone, you can tell your Flic button to start playing music on your phone through your Bluetooth speaker with the press of just a button. A split seconds time compared to the 30 seconds it now takes me to set up my music manually.
I am excited for the future of the connected home. Fingers crossed Santa comes through this year and I find an Amazon Echo beneath the tree so that I can transform my college apartment into a futuristic smart home. It’s just the beginning but creating a new way for us to interact with technology is going to be important in the very near future.
