My 15 Minutes with Google Glass

I recently got my hands on a Google Glass, thanks to intrepid Glass Explorer and fellow ETer Jeff Rohrs, and wanted to share some of my impressions as well, plus a cross-channel marketing takeaway.

First, this is clearly a beta product. Google Glass is not market-ready. The form factor is clumsy and the navigation is non-intuitive, limited and frustrating. It takes a combination of voice and hand and head movements to fully operate it; navigation can be hijacked by other voices nearby; and the using Glass can make you look pretty ridiculous—Exhibit A: This photo of me.

Second, the apps that it launched with are almost all a horrible fit for the device. Twitter, email, Google searches and other text-based applications are almost entirely unusable on Glass, which is very text-unfriendly. It’s really only suited to legibly displaying maybe 20 characters at a time max, and the sweet spot is probably less than 10 letters, numbers or symbols. By the same order of magnitude that desktop information has to be condensed down to be smartphone-friendly, smartphone information has to be condensed down to be Glass-friendly. Actually, make that two order of magnitudes. 

My rather frustrating experience with Glass got me thinking about how critical it is to match the message to the channel. The explosion in the number of internet-connected devices that are capable of reading emails—and in particular, the growth of smartphones—is currently driving frenzied interest in responsive design. Getting your emails and landing pages to look good and function well on desktops and smartphones is huge. The next step will be tailoring the content of the messages to the device, recognizing that if a subscriber is reading your email on their smartphone then that in and of itself tells you something about what they might respond to. Time of day, location and other information can increase that targeting further. 

My Email Insider column last week (It Should Never Have Been Social Vs. Email) was all about responding to consumers’ channel expectations and tailoring messages to the mindset consumers are in when using a particular channel. This same logic applies to Glass, where many of the initial apps seem oblivious to the channel’s constraints and strengths. 

Of course, Google will figure out how to fix many of these issues. They and app-makers will figure out what works best on this micro-screen—which probably has its most exciting possibilities in B2B markets rather than in the consumer sphere. Google will refine the navigation and app-makers will learn to keep navigation super simple. And most definitely the form factor will improve. In a few years, Glass will probably look like your average thick-framed pair of glasses, which will intensify the privacy concerns already swirling around it. 

Wearable computers are the clear next step in the chain, along with internet-connected appliances and other “things.” It’s awesome that Google is taking the lead here and I learned a ton with just my 15 minutes with Glass. Exciting times ahead for sure.