Think Tank

Nike+ and minus

As envisioned, the Nike+ ecology consists of several physical products—a biotelemetric transponder, any of a range of Nike sneakers compatible with it, and an iPod nano—and an online environment where the results of one's uploaded runs are subjected to a variety of mappings, visualizations and pseudo-statistical analyses. (The desktop iTunes application mediates the flow of data between device and website.)

On the surface, Nike+ is replete with thoughtful details. For example, the voice of Lance Armstrong congratulates you every time your run time exceeds the previous personal best. But it rapidly becomes apparent that all the smoothness in the Nike+ experience comes at a cost, that it really clicks only if you and everything about the way you use the system conform fairly narrowly to an imaginary ideal.

These insightful comments come from Nokia's Chris Heathcote:

“Designing for one person creates tight end-to-end services. But few companies control the complete end-to-end, and in fact, customers (people!) are wary – it’s normally an excuse to bleed more money out of people more regularly (“we can sell a product and a subscription!”) and to lock people in (how do you get your data our of Nike+?).”

The narrow confines of Nike+ constrain the use of the system. Of all the available models of iPod, only the nano works with Nike+. Given that other models come equipped with the appropriate connector, there's no obvious justification for this decision. Nike+ also feels unnecessarily over-optimized for a single kind of runner, and a single kind of run (as Heathcote puts it: “I can see the persona on the flipchart now”). There's nothing in the system's technical capabilities that prevents it being of utility to walkers, for example. They may not necessarily be as sexysweaty as the users featured on the Nike+ site, but would surely appreciate being able to take advantage of its pedometer and calorie-tracking features. Why exclude them literally by design?

Perhaps the deepest question facing the Nike+ online experience is that of the t dimension: time. Manufacturers like Sony and Nike who rely heavily on complicated, Adobe® Flash®-driven experience sites for their products often find the sites hard to maintain or update over the long term.

By contrast, of course, for a great many of its adherents, running is a lifelong activity. Where will they turn in three years if Nike decides there's no longer any percentage in supporting Nike+, or if the latest release of iTunes fails to mediate smoothly between device and site? Will they be forced into a cycle of multiple upgrades and compatibility hurdles, or, still worse, find themselves in a technological cul de sac? The more the desired brand experience relies on a concatenation of closed systems from different manufacturers, each of which is subject to revision (to say nothing of a realignment of corporate priorities), the less likely it is to survive.

As Heathcote suggests, many of these problems could be obviated by opening up the Nike+ platform, allowing people to swap in shoes and other components of their choosing, or even to build custom mashups of their own with the data it generates. This is, admittedly, not likely to be terribly appealing advice from the point of view of those stakeholders committed to a heavily branded experience. From this perspective, it's an offering of Nike and Apple: why on earth should they design it so shoes or music players from other manufacturers work equally well?

But if the choice is between an over-control that will predictably result in an eventual breakdown and flexibility that admits other players but also affords more satisfying long-term outcomes, which would you rather have your brand associated with? In the final analysis, about all that can be said about end-to-end control of a multi-touchpoint customer interaction is that it results in a seamless experience...for a while.

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