Editor’s note: Ezra Gottheil is principal analyst at Technology Business Research.
HAMPTON, N.H. – The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is both the flagship of the Samsung fleet and the regimental flag for Samsung’s strategy of making its smartphones the choice for pocketable enterprise productivity. The Note 8 excels at both roles.
As a smartphone, it is superb. It has a huge, beautiful screen; a great camera; strong processing and graphics power; and a headphone jack and is water and dust resistance. The features that make it a productivity tool, like high security, the stylus pen, app pairing and edge menus, also contribute to its appeal as a straight smartphone.
TBR believes a worker with a Note 8 can use it as a productivity tool, and that the unit’s differentiating features, especially the stylus pen, allow it to contribute more to worker productivity than a high-end smartphone without these features, including top-of-the-line iPhones. The challenge facing Samsung, and any other smartphone vendor going after the commercial market, is demonstrating not just the ability of the device to handle productivity tasks but also the increased productivity of people using the device. We believe this requires task design and training.
The potential payoff is considerable. While PCs are more portable and quicker-starting than ever, the smartphone is simply available in more situations than a PC or tablet. If, under those circumstances, a person performs a business task that would otherwise be deferred or neglected, then having a productive smartphone is a winner. It doesn’t take many of these situations to justify the additional cost of providing a smartphone.
The challenge is to get people to change the way they do things now. This is the constant burden of technical end-user products, and the challenge increases as our devices become more powerful and flexible. Typically, once someone has learned or invented a way to perform a task, then that is the way the person will do it indefinitely. This makes sense; people have jobs to do, and inventing new ways to do the job is usually low on the priority list.
This kind of training and task design is not easy. It is easy to identify and communicate the basics of using a device, or application, but it is hard to determine what kinds of nonbasic tasks are common. It is easier if the company has standard apps and/or standard procedures. In any case, most users will benefit if employers and/or vendors create easy, accessible and entertaining training materials on how these devices can help get things done. We believe gamification techniques can contribute to this effort.
The challenge and opportunity of using training and task design to increase productivity, and thereby buyer and user satisfaction, is not confined to Samsung or to smartphone vendors. PC, tablet and software vendors face the same situation. If it can help people be more productive with its new smartphone, Samsung will open a large potential market and show other vendors how it’s done.
(C) TBR
