Anita sits on the ground in Beijing. The late afternoon sunlight in Diaoyutai Ginko Avenue park makes the trees around her glow as if from within. A hundred or more gingko trees stand in two straight rows. Their thin round trunks rise two stories without branching then fan out to create dreamlike yellow-orange archways with their neighbors. The gingko tree promenade stretches from horizon to horizon. Its leafy nimbus contrasts the bland, styleless buildings nearby. The November air is crisp and restless. Alongside the promenade cyclists and scooter riders race down Maolinju West Street with quilted mittens on their hands and blankets tied across their laps. Last week an early rainstorm drew leaves from the trees and reminded the city that colder weather is creeping down the mountainsides to take up winter residence. Yet despite the chill the sky is blue and cloudless. This is rare for Beijing and has enticed her people outside to enjoy a lucky day at Autumn's end.

The people of Beijing stroll and stand in small groups beneath the gingko trees. Fashionably dressed teenage girls strike youthful, optimistic poses and photograph each other with mobile phones. After a few moments they huddle to give brutal critiques of the photos and try again.  A love-drowned couple kisses passionately beside a tree, oblivious to everyone around them. Elders walk small white and brown windblown dogs wrapped in canine jackets of auspicious green, silver, and blue. The gingko leaves lie flat and still on the ground. They are the color of blanched corn and luminescent in the fading light- delicate and lovely. When Anita moves they make the sound of brooms sweeping summer into memory.

Anita is wearing a grey jacket buttoned tightly around her. Her hair is short and dark and cups her face like hands holding water. She is still for a moment then looks upward- smiles a broad, mischievous smile. She scoops her hands into the gingko leaves and grabs two handfuls. The leaves sigh and crackle. She counts breathlessly to the small crowd around her: "1...2...3!" When she says "3" she throws her arms above her head and fills the air about her with a flurry of gingko leaves. From within the flurry she smiles and smiles and her laughter spreads to our band of travelers. She makes "Victory!" fingers and we try to photograph her as the leaves shimmer and surrender to the wind.

Anita reviews our photos which are blurry and mis-timed. She laughs. "Again!" she says. Her enthusiasm draws us in- we release the branches of our solemnity and begin scooping up leaves and photographing each other again and again trying to capture the perfect picture of our selves surrounded by flying gingko leaves. Where a few moments ago we were grown women and men, now we are as loud as school children, as serious as teenage girls, and without embarrassment as we sit and then lie on the ground to take photos. We make Victory fingers, funny faces, make face fists, give thumbs ups, strike video game poses. Passers by stop to photograph us. Inspired, they too throw leaves and photograph each other. Then we all throw leaves and photograph ourselves. We are strangers turned friends on a lucky day. When we rise, laughter and leaves hide in the women's hair.

A young couple, dark haired and smiling walks by at a toddler's pace with their one and a half year old daughter. They are both bent at the waist as mother and father each hold one of their daughter's hands. They are dressed in quiet style- browns, greys and blacks- with scarves and hats and boots. In local fashion the man wears artful square, black-rimmed glasses and carries his wife's purse. Their daughter is wearing a pink quilted jacket with pink pom-poms, a green and black scarf, and a polka-dot hood. Her clothing is so thick she looks like a stylish fire hydrant. She swings from side to side from her parents' hands- an Autumn leaf not quite ready to leave its branch. She is watching the leaves intently as she walks. She watches us with great puzzlement. Her parents try to entice her to throw leaves herself, but she is doubtful. After a gentle moment we are all demonstrating and providing encouragement- new uncles and aunts to this unsteady leaf. Her face is serious and round, pink-cheeked and willing at last to believe that if her parents say it is so then it is important to learn to throw leaves. Her attempts are charming and potent but do not make her smile.

Watching this daughter of Beijing learn to play, watching us rediscover playfulness, seeing how seamlessly we become a part of each other's afternoon, I am reminded of how good it is to laugh. How rarely I surrender to silliness. The feeling is the color of a gingko leaf. I resolve never to forget the yellow of this day despite a half-certainty even as I make the promise that its color will soon fade.

Anita, when she is not throwing gingko leaves into the air and inspiring visitors to her city to behave like children, is a user experience professional. In her daily work she seeks to examine the way things are and to imagine the way they could be. She improves the world one screen, one product, one process at a time. Today she and other Beijing chapter members are representing the User Experience Professionals' Association's China Chapter by showing guests of the ninth annual User Friendly conference the sights of Beijing. Her flock, now happily plucking gingko leaves from jacket pockets and brushing dust from trousers, is a multinational group of designers and researchers from countries as near to China as Singapore and Taiwan, as far away as the United States. We have spent the day as tourists, hearing Anita and her friends share local legends, facts, and stories of historical wonder and sadness.  Here at the end of a long day of walking we are playful as we rarely are, as open as the sky.

We are not often silly. The work we do is serious. Ian from Taiwan, when he is not dancing Gangnam style with conference volunteers, is working to understand how eye-care clinics work, taking a holistic view of how people enter into and journey through his country's medical system. From the medical forms, to the waiting areas, to the ways patients interact with their physicians, Ian will, through observation and creativity find quiet and powerful ways to improve the lives of countless patients and make nurses' work easier. Amy from the United States works to perfect educational software used throughout the world to simulate materials construction and utilize complex mathematics for structural engineering. Another traveler is a professor teaching applied physics and conducts research that informs aircraft design. For my part I am helping regional hospitals help their patients to make better personal health decisions. This week we have compared notes, weighed techniques, shared successes and challenges.

Anita, when her hair is not full of leaves, is representative of usability experience designers in China. She is young, energetic, and brings both skill and a playfulness to her work. Designers attending the User Friendly conference are young as "UX" is young in China. They strive to help their companies accept the value of user centered design. To communicate it's value and its promise. Many work for corporations, many more are students finishing their undergraduate or graduate work. A large proportion of the gathering have Masters degrees and PhDs. Yet as they are learning, the difference between academic theory and business practice can be as stark as a winter wind blowing down from the mountains.

Watching China's UX future this past week as they listened to keynote speakers, interacted between sessions, and explored new skills in workshops, the Westerners frequently remarked on how young these designers and researchers are. So young! And yet, so powerful! Full of energy and passion for enhancing the future of business, healthcare, and commerce, and with so many years ahead of them to make their mark. They are eager to learn what has come before them so that they may make greater change and discover on their own the magic connecting interfaces, people, gingko leaves, and the world.

At the end of a full, serious week and a long, inspiring day Anita and I strike silly poses together along Diaoyutai Ginko Avenue. Me with my two phrases of Chinese and her with little English but a gift for pantomime, laughing with colleagues from as many countries as there are leaves on the wind. I can't help but wonder at the path that led me here. At all the amazing new people I've met. In the future I will encounter other UX professionals from other countries. They will be studying new problems, solving old problems, and envisioning new and more inspiring solutions. And when the opportunities arise, now in more corners of the world, in more areas of expertise, I know to whom I can turn to to seek guidance, ask questions, see how others solve design problems and share ideas.

This week we have connected East to West, North to South and learned that in our professional lives the paths we walk are much the same.  The challenges we face are shared worldwide. This magnifies our power. Yet we also learned that we are different in our lives, the stories we tell, how we see the world. This makes us children at heart and unites us as a family.

As the sun sets on Beijing, and the rising wind urges us back indoors, I am thankful that when I began my career I happened upon this path, this organization, never knowing it would lead me to this gingko colored, leaf-strewn, windblown day in Beijing. You may find UXPA also, or you may find- or make- another group to engage you, educate you, and most of all connect you. And when you do, may your present inspire your future with a handful of gingko leaves and laughter.

Just a little ways into the future Cassie buys a pair of Google Glasses. At first they feel slightly imbalanced, as if their hummingbird weight were tilting her head incrementally to the side so she begins to drift in that direction when she walks. The age-old adage about the impossibility of crossing a desert on foot- slight imbalances between the muscles of each leg inexorably draw you off course until hours later you are leagues from where you intended to go. Cassie wonders if wearing the glasses will veer her off course ending up- who knows where?

Cassie is like everyone around her- surrounded by smart products: GPS-fed teapots that fire up when her bus rounds the corner to drop her off, heat and light sensors that watch her tirelessly and accommodate her needs like a legion of Renaissance attendants waiting on a thankless queen. Outside the home she waves at faucets, expects toilets to flush themselves, thinks any space without Wi-Fi is a waste. She leaves rivulets of data in her wake, soundless and unseen. Data flows from her fingertips, pools in her footsteps, radiates from the thermostatic changes she brings upon entering a room, creates deluges when she purchases or conducts online searches. She is the source of her own personal Nile, the deltas of herself fluctuating to unseasonal rhythms she has difficulty predicting as her data confludes on its way to the Big Data Sea.

So buying the Glasses seemed a natural thing. Not that Cassie is planning on crossing any deserts in the near future. Just navigating Boston and graduate school is complicated enough. (In the depths of her third year of thesis research she's not sure which is worse.) So deserts, no, but desserts on the other hand, now there's a challenge.

Not that the glasses could help her there. Cassie's nurse practitioner refers to her as someone who "struggles with her weight." Cassie accepts this, but sees it differently. Her weight is a constant companion. It draws her attention like a hyperactive teen when she least wants it- standing in the press of commuters on the train, slipping into a narrow theater seat only to find herself not so much siting on the chair but wearing it like a girdle. It raises its voice when she takes even short flights of stairs, limits her life destinations to places with close parking. It's not so much that she struggles, it's more like she just can't break up with this bastard body following her around getting between her and the world. What chance would a pair of glasses stand against all that weight?

The first time Cassie walks augmented through Boston with Glasses on it's to pick up a latte and bran muffin from the local patisserie. She walks past the bricked brownstones and byways of this sneaker-casual city she and is thrilled to see it come to font-astic life. Trees sprout name tags, buildings espouse histories, stores grow elaborate whorls of supposed infatuation, the path home blinks in discrete green footsteps for her to follow, sweatshirted passersby become armored warriors, part of a game she apparently has a free invitation to but can't seem to uninstall.

The visual intrusiveness overlaying her life creates a giddy kind of disequilibrium. The real world but better. Mostly. Two weeks later this intertextuality has become part of her life vocabulary in the way that smartphones became auxiliary extensions of her memory when they evolved from “cell” to “smart.” Her mind freed to do . . . whatever it is minds do when not weighed down with trivia. Yet while she begins to rely on the ability not to commit to memory the names of seldom-met people the glasses recognize for her, the glasses nonetheless begin to feel like a one-trick pony. Another interface through which she can– literally– see the world. But with labels. And ads. She can't wear the glasses all the time of course. Trundling around the house getting readouts on your potted plants can only hold one's fascination for so long. In Cassie's case it was about two months until she stopped wearing the Glasses full time. Now she puts them on to slip until the digital zone, much like she used to slip under a laptop and settle into the couch for a long snuggle with the Internet while watching TV.

She dons them around the house when she wants to get into the cleaning and cognition zone: mainlining flash cards and grad course material as she scrubs the house clean. For some reason the combination of cramping physical labor– scrubbing corners and crannies heretofore undiscovered, razing colonies of dust creatures in the strange moonscapes of her bathroom– helps her digest grad school arcana like nothing she had tried before. Her apartment has never been cleaner, her roommates happier, or her grades higher. Some digi-wit blogger dubbed the act of donning the glasses for focused multitasking "cog-walking."

Yet despite bi-weekly house scrubbing cog-walks, her weight fails to recede beyond a certain unimpressive tidal flux. So when she learned of the SugaR sensor, a software enhancement for her Google Glasses she was intrigued. By itself it is a delicious novelty: a Terminator-like screen readout in front of her eyes when she looks at food. It delineates calories, ingredients, sugar levels, and in those rare moments when she visits foreign lands, warnings about ingredients that might cause her gastrointestinal distress. Her own personal augmented caloric reality. Reading its output quickly becomes a habit, then an annoyance, and finally something she considers getting rid of. It's work to turn food text into life-choices and her decisions end up cautionary tales more often than not.

A visit to her doctor confirms that her natural nurture of her love for food has resulted in a diabetes diagnosis. Her doctor, a card-carrying member of the digerati, suggests Cassie try pairing the Glasses with an application called SoFree. Frustrated with herself, biology, and the general unfairness of things Cassie gives it a try.

She fills out a SoFree survey that asks hr to identify her goals, motivations, favorite foods, times to bear down and times to break the dietary rules. SoFree promises to track, filter, and make culinary connections. It asks her to identify her moods, discretely, over the next two weeks, noting the tidal flux of Cassie’s intake, cross referenced with myriad other factors: where she’s eating, the weather, her workload, the approach and departure of professional deadlines and milestones, her needs for culinary stimulation, reward, and asceticism. It begins to see patterns in the sweets, saltys, and synchronicity in Cassie’s behavior, even if Cassie herself can’t see it alone. What SoFree helps Cassie see are the foods she views through visual overlays that provide suggestions for pairings and omissions based not on inflexible dietary guidelines, but what she's been eating lately weighed against medical and nutritional professionals’ best advice. SoFree can also interface with her electronic healthcare record, take into account her physician's recommendations, pull in exercise data from a ring she wears when working out, and promises to guide her softly, flexibly, into the realm of healthy eating. (And to send up a social media or direct-to-physician flare in the event of emotional meltdowns or diabetic trouble.)

When Cassie peers into the fridge unaugmented she sees nothing but temptation, a slippery highway traversed at high speed without brakes or guardrails. With SoFree and SugaR activated she sees menus, calories, consequences. She quickly becomes a believer. She begins to learn what constitutes healthy pairings (carbs AND proteins are a particular surprise) and finds that “healthy diet” doesn’t mean “nothing fun” but rather a chemical calculus that can be learned, and in the learning leave her fulfilled, if not always full. So on the glasses go when she dives into the fridge, off they come when she emerges. (Removing them and being her unaugmented self again brings a kind of cognitive vulnerability, like waking up in soft pajamas.) Her refrigerator becomes over time a green zone instead of ground zero in the War on Calories.

What SoFree brings to the dining table, she finds, is twofold: filters to help her weigh her intake against the rhythms of her soul. The way she sees it, if her email program can warn her before ingesting a potentially lethal message, why can't the same mechanism be applied to her eating? Where the SugaR sensor identifies caloric realities and broad threats, this new SoFree app tracks what she eats, watches what she likes, computes the seemingly incalculable food options around her into a clarity of calories. What has she eaten today? Yesterday? How near or far is she from her goals? Which ingredients in the grocery store will combine to make her more of herself by having less of herself? SoFree surprises her as well with text and MMS reminders to eat, of all things, when the rhythms of health suggest it. (She’s now keeping veggie sticks and almonds in her desk drawer at work.) Who could have imagined?

This is not just a dumb smart tool spouting lists of figures (like the glasses). SoFree is a thoughtful companion helping her safeguard the one figure that matters most- hers. By blending what is before her, helping her weigh her options against her weight, she becomes the arbiter, informed by the machine but free to decide, empowered to live. She instructs it to present her with “reward moments” once a month, vary big protein-rich breakfasts with modest lunches throughout the week, help her find energy during the day when she needs it most, find relaxation when she doesn’t, and recommend substitutes that only rarely detract from the meals she eats. SoFree knows all this by tiptoeing (with permission) through her day planner, her email calendar, a hundred other open-source apps Cassie uses to keep the ship of herself on course. SoFree dishes up quick, often funny, mood check-ins during the day and gives her up to the minute “readouts” she can view online and use to tweak her preferences even while SoFree tweaks her right back with friendly but firm facts and fun, crowd-sourced images that inspire her focus. She takes to varying her grad school flashcards with nutrition facts while she cleans house, literally and metaphorically, brushing away old habits and misconceptions.

Cassie is surprised to learn firsthand that a diet of whole grains, natural sugars, vegetables, clear broths (eaten before a meal reducing her overall intake) has her feeling on the whole, balanced, informed and in control to such a degree that fried, fatty foods now taste alien, leaden, unwelcome, in her newly swept self. Yet hurdles remain.

That summer SoFree and Cassie met their greatest challenge: travel and a wedding buffet. Cassie flew a thousand miles to her college roommate's wedding. Disrupted of schedule, limited in eating choices, SoFree and SugaR helped her compromise by scanning the available airport eatery menus, highlighting components of a unlisted meal she never would have thought or taken the time to build, ensuring she raced through the food court's temptation alley largely unbruised. Victory: Stage 1! Scanning the wedding feast (a shoal of sirens calling her to shore amid a maelstrom of memories, social conventions and the urge to throw caution to the wind) SoFree falls back on her pre-determined filters, her predefined compromises (“let me indulge at special events, but only so much”). She eats perhaps a bit unwisely, but better than she otherwise would have, and Cassie avoids, as a single woman of a certain age, the urge to salve mixed feelings with calories. Mostly.

She can trade tonight's cake for tomorrow's cereal but when her hand reaches for substances that would compromise her diabetic treatment she has given the software permission to display The Dress. The slim, breezy, thigh length pot of golden summer freedom at the end of exercise's rainbow. Too much food off the meal plan and up comes The Dress, shimmering in her vision to remind her that life is a long climb, not a quick slide. Should that fail SoFree will let her go, passively noting her hands reaching out and acquiring unsanctioned food. But after more digressions up comes The Bathing Suit. If against all reason The Bathing Suit fails, SoFree is authorized to unleash the nuclear deterrent of foodstuff ingesting: a photo of herself taken from waist height, spilling out of a pair of jeans. It's not about shaming, or cowing her, but rather helping her remember what she truly wants and keep the promises she makes herself.

And after the wedding, for the days that follow, these tools will weave menus for her from available foodstuffs, erasing her event indulgences bit by bit- a suggestion to skip a bag of potato chips here, a gruel thin lunch there, less dessert down the line. SoFree draws deeply from the Big Data sea, including her caregivers' algorithms for success, social media support from relatives, words of encouragement, photos of exotic hikes to be taken, the journal entries she has written to document the days when staying on the path exhilarates (a bulwark against the days when walking the straight and narrow chafes and blisters). Victory: Stage 2! She arrives home if not refreshed, unbowed by distance and caloric intake.

This is the now of the future- augmentation bending the world to her will. And of course, tattling on her. SoFree sends a weekly summary of her regimen adherence directly to her electronic health record, creates report cards for her yoga teacher and her mother. It also posts social media updates to help her extended family applaud her successes and rally to her when her resolve flags.

New millennium healthcare success means the empowerment to be responsible for one’s self in the many life moments that outweigh the few where she interfaces with healthcare providers. Support for healthy living that accommodates rather than dictates, illuminating the math and helping her face the aftermath of inevitable compromise. It's not about harnessing the Big Data Sea to make situational adjustment (lights going on and off when she comes home) but for technology to be the Better Angel on her shoulder guiding her to success.

Now Cassie is crossing the desserts and ending up where she wants to be. A destination she couldn’t have imagined finding alone: losing weight and gaining resolve. The smart dumb glasses and the smart smart apps are a powerful combo. A one- (augmented reality overlays) two- (Big Data dipping algorithmic interpretation) three- (personal filtering and customization) punch that for Cassie just might make her a knockout.

Reading Discussion Questions

1. The author posits a near future where "smart" connected products realize their potential when they are paired with targeted software that data-mines individuals' preferences, open source health records, life goals, and continual tracking of human activity to help make behavioral changes. In effect "the next step" is not augmenting reality, but making it useful. Do you agree? Why or why not?
2. Does Cassie's available technology make her happy? Should it?
3. Is this author sucking up to Google for an advance pair of glasses or what? Did Cassie lose weight? Does it matter?
4. Could you substitute the Google Glasses, fictional SugR sensor and SoFree application in the story with different technologies? Why? Which ones?
5. What is the difference between state awareness and behavior modification? Is this an appropriate role for technology?
6. Is Cassie giving up control to SoFree? Why or why not?

Imagine the release of new and updated products as a parade. We gather around the marketplace watching companies advertise their latest output- some products destined for immortality, most destined for far less. Each company strides past the crowds with regal bearing as we scrutinize them in a usability exercise I call: “Emperor Spotting.”
 
In the “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” two clever but lazy tailors convince an Emperor that the clothes they’ve made for him have magic properties. Anyone unworthy won’t be able to see them, the unscrupulous tailors claim, when in fact, there are no clothes at all. The Emperor, fearing he will reveal himself as unworthy by admitting he can’t see the non-existent clothes, parades in the buff through the city streets before his entire kingdom. From the onlookers a small child points a finger and shouts “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!”
 
The child’s cry breaks the spell and the populace is freed from fear (contradicting the Emperor openly), confusion (“Is there something going on here that I’m not comprehending?”), speaking (“I just saw the Emperor’s junk and have a desperate need to blog about it”) and slavish adherence to advisors (“Those tailors were either crazy or mean!”).
 
Companies who produce sub-par products can exhibit an Emperor-like blindness to how awry the development process has gone. They put too much faith in their tailors and stride regally forward to market despite the winds chilling their backsides and the blush rising to their cheeks. Spotting an “Emperor” – a company resolutely promoting a product so badly designed, so naked and so fixedly unaware of its flaws– makes us feel like the Child in the story.

Nokia Gives Up Control
The famous parable often ends with the Child’s shout. Rarely do we learn what happens to the Emperor afterwards. But when a top-tier company like Nokia, with a legacy of excellence, deep financial resources and a globally respected outreach gives up its software development to Microsoft, we are given a rare glimpse at the next part of the story. We see the Emperor, with the Child’s voice still echoing in his ears, looking down at his naked form and realizing that self-delusion is a no cloak at all.
 
When Nokia laid down its scepter by giving up on software development for its mobile phones, the company crowned itself a naked Emperor then immediately demoted itself to Cobbler right there in the streets.
 
How could this happen? Critics and chroniclers of Nokia’s decision to give up developing software for its products laud the company as full of leading-edge engineers capable of making durable, effective and popular hardware. However, the two articles below argue that over the years Nokia has been willfully blind to a marketplace enamored less with robust engineering and more with customization, size and shape variations. They ignored a populace tired of confusing interfaces crammed with hard to use “features.” They correctly assessed the size of the American market but vastly underestimated its trendsetting power. Most recently, they misinterpreted the thunderous success of the iPhone as a feat of engineering, not one of user experience design. It is this last– that Nokia thought it was competing on the quality of its hardware, not the usability of its software – that may have led them naked to the streets.

What Nokia Missed
Where Nokia saw the iPhone as a minor step forward from an engineering standpoint, they may have ignored two key aspects of its success:  

Setting aside the runaway success of Apps, it is apparent the iPhone’s cognitive model is designed to facilitate the accomplishment of users’ tasks with ease and efficiency. It’s about making technology accessible, invisible and yes, artful. Apple’s ability to boil feature after feature down to their core essences, reducing the number of keystrokes and button presses required to accomplish key tasks – returning interaction to the most basic of human gestures – made a difference. They put UX first.
 
Unfortunately, replicating that success is rarely a feat of hardware engineering. Competitors who do the same thing they always have but through a touchscreen are missing the mark.
 
How could a company as powerful and brilliant as Nokia, with a generations-long track record of innovation and excellence blunder so thoroughly, so willfully, and for so long? (I am assuming it is a blunder primarily because Nokia said it was by laying down its Software Scepter in the middle of the streets and abdicating an estimated 15 calendar years worth of effort and expense.)
 
The answer to this question may lie in the very wellspring from which the iPhone draws its success: By single-mindedly adhering to the view that what was important about mobile phone use was related directly to its hardware and nothing else, and by becoming mired in programming-centric approaches that led to UI designs, rather than UI designs that led to programming approaches, Nokia sowed the seeds of its own failure.

Blinded By Development
Two interesting recent publications support the hypothesis that Nokia was blinded by its development process and failed to pay adequate attention to creating viable user experiences:
 
In his article What Happened to Nokia?, former Nokia employee Mark Wilcox describes the inner workings of Nokia’s development processes, and outlines how mired the company had become in a technology-first atmosphere that relegated the smartphone UI to the back burner.
 
Wilcox reports:
 
 
If the phrase “design patterns had been reverse engineered from the code” doesn’t send a chill down the back of any usability professional, I don’t know what will. Wilcox is describing the exact antithesis of a user-centered design process where end-user information needs and goals drive technology choices rather than the reverse. Given the widespread global adoption of user centered design research and practice, the proliferation of usability teams within companies (including Nokia) over the last two decades and the wealth of published proof that good UX increases ROI, it’s chilling to see a company so immune to the charms of user-centered design.
 
Drawing on Wilcox’s article, journalist for The Register Andrew Orlowski, furthers Wilcox’s assertions through his own reporting. He writes in his article Why Nokia Failed: ‘Wasted 2,000 man years on UIs that didn’t work’ that:
 
 
From these two articles we see a converging picture of a company familiar with fighting engineering battles, but largely ineffective at understanding what makes an interface simple to use. By letting the former drive the latter in deference to established best practices, and by interpreting the challenge issued by the iPhone as one of components, rather than user experience- these articles assert- Nokia missed the point entirely.
 
These articles are especially worth reading for anyone who has asked, or been asked, the question: What is the Return on Investment of usability? Someone may yet put a price on the estimated “2000 man-years” of wasted effort, the wounding of the Emperor’s pride, and the heartbreak of thousands of disillusioned employees.
 
The moral of this Emperor’s New Clothes tale remains clear: Focus on the user experience first and you are far more likely to succeed. Focus on the technical underpinnings first and you may find yourself strutting down the street in full view of the populace with all the wrong things on display.