Craig Fitzpatrick just put up a great blog post about how our expectations of technology products have evolved over time, following a series of stages that's in many ways similar (or at least analogous) to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Maslow's hierarchy tries to explain the behaviour of individuals when confronted with various degrees of deprivation. For technology products however, Craig's model attempts to explain how our behaviour as a society changes when we're presented with various degrees of abundance (in this context, "abundance" means functionality and/or usability that's better than the previous generation of products).
I would suggest one refinement to this model, which is that society's expectations are reset every time a radically new technology is introduced, then move up the pyramid as that technology matures. I suspect Craig was thinking about Web apps when he developed this model, and was making the point that our collective expectations of Web apps are now significantly higher than they were even a year ago (i.e., we're pretty high in the pyramid now and moving up fast).
This is a really important point, and one that I've been living for the past year or so. As a technology consumer, I finally dumped Yahoo! Calendar because they weren't keeping pace with Google Calendar, and bought an iPhone. When I started using both of these technologies, I could literally feel my expectations jump up significantly. Last week, a friend showed me how wonderful the Web browsing experience was on his Nokia N95, and seeing him using arrow keys to move around a page was enough to make me want to hurl -even though that was just fine to me a month ago. And don't even show me Yahoo calendar now... how did I ever use that thing?
When started developing the first version of ChoiceBot (which can still be seen on www.choicebot.com for the next 2 weeks or so), it was at the second-highest level in Craig's pyramid. By the time we actually released it, it was at the second-lowest level because everything had gone AJAX-y and broadband in the intervening time, and people's expectations had jumped. So, for the last 8 months, we've done nothing but bring up to the second-highes level, and even possibly the highest level of people's current expectations. And wow, it's a lot of work.
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