What makes a piece of technology useful?
The only metric that matters for technology to be deemed useful is if you use it.
If a phone is 2x faster than another, is it more useful? The obvious answer is yes. If it’s faster we can do more with it, or do the same with it in less time. This frees up time, and makes the experience more enjoyable.
Now, let’s say you want to quickly open a note so you can write down something you want to buy when shopping later. What if the slower phone took 1 minute to open a note. On the faster phone it’ll take 30 seconds, much faster! But, would you use the faster phone to take the note just because it’s faster?
If it takes 30 seconds to write a note, you’ll probably opt for a pen and paper, despite the fact phone notes can live in the cloud, can contain images, and so on. In that moment, you’re looking for something near instant. 30 seconds is much better objectively, but subjectively there’s no change in behaviour. You still won’t use it.
It hasn’t crossed the usefulness threshold. Usefulness only increases linearly (or otherwise) after the usefulness threshold is crossed. Only once we’ve crossed the usefulness threshold does a 2x speed increase improve our experience.
How is this knowledge useful?
We want to be able to identify where we can inject some small objective value (e.g. time, money, resources), and gain out-sized returns in usefulness.
We want to identify areas where there’s an arrangement of technology near the usefulness threshold.
What can you invest a small amount of time in in the short term to become useful enough to continue using long into the future?
Is there something you can purchase that makes some task you know you should do, convenient enough that you will actually do it?
Naturally, what we attribute as valuable is our own personal choice. These questions have different answers for different people. We can’t be given the answers, but we can improve our mental model of what “useful” actually means to make better decisions about the technology we use and may use.
