The first Apple Presentation on the new Apple Campus unveiling the companys new products suffered a bad moment on it’s keynote item and its main feature, but contrary to the initial reports, Face ID on the device didn’t fail. More importantly (to me) – the way the initial flub was handled on stage was a moment of honor.
The big announcement at the 2017 Apple event was the iPhone X (pronounced “ten”, not the letter “X”), which is an iPhone 8 that doesn’t have a fingerprint scanner and instead has a borderless screen and a face-scanner that will let you unlock your phone by looking at it. Apple headed off concerns about this technology in the announcement itself, assuring the public that the scanner will still work with hats, sunglasses, and facial modifications (like if you grow a beard). In what appears to be a nod to the news stories about people fooling iPhone fingerprint scans with high resolution photos, Apple also assured that their face ID technology has been tested against masks and molds of your face (so a Donald Trump halloween costume won’t be able to unlock the Presidential iPhone X, in other words).
This all led up to an unfortunate moment in the presentation when it came time for the world to see the feature work in real life for the first time, and the first attempt didn’t work, forcing the presenter on stage to have to use the backup iPhone.
Right away, news stories came pouring in that “face recognition failed” in the first demo attempt – which was what appeared to happen when the announcement was made that unlocking the phone is as easy as looking at it, and instead of a magical unlocking of the device, the keypad login page was what was thrown up on the giant screen.
I felt bad for Craig Federighi, the presenter on stage who handled what no doubt must have been a terrifying situation just fine and the phone actually worked exactly as designed as it turns out. The failure was in the phones setup, not in the facial recognition feature. The reason the “Enter Passcode” screen came on when Federighi performed his look-to-unlock move was reportedly that others who are not Federighi had their face scanned by the phone during rehearsals for the presentation – thus counting those scans in the iPhones memory as attempted logins by faces other than the phones owner – and what happens to any iPhone after repeated failed attempts to unlock by body part (which up until now has been by fingerprint)? – The device forces you to log in with the keypad.
So all that sucks for Federighi and Apple because it’s a brand new feature, the first time it’s even announced, it’s big debut to the world, announced in the presentation script with the instruction of “Unlocking it is as easy as looking at it and swiping up” and then doing precisely not-that. That’s the most awkward part of showcasing technology whether it’s to your friends showing them something cool only to have an app fail or whether you’re alone in a room and ask my phone a question by saying “Hey Siri” only to be met with silence because the “Hey Siri” feature doesn’t work when the device is in low battery mode. This effect on stage in front of a thousand people and on the worlds stage streaming live in front of millions can make a guy pee a little. But Federighi was a case study in how to handle such a situation:
HE STAYED CALM & CARRIED ON
When something unexpected in any kind of performance happens, the instinct is to stop performing. You can’t. “The show must go on” is a cliche for a reason. Stopping things to bring attention to the problem that is road-blocking you is an impulse because it feels safer because you are sharing the burden of the roadblock with the collective instead of shouldering the entirety of that pressure in ways that are likely to make you, instead of the situation look bad – but you still must resist. Imagine that roadblock analogy is literal and your’e leading a group in a tour bus the vision of the road is such so that all eyes are on you but only you can clearly see the road ahead – and the bus stops because of a literal roadblock. As you start to feel the pressure of the eyes that are on you, you might want to give a “wuuuh-ohhh, whats goin on?” response to signal to everyone that you’re the cause, something unplanned is happening, but it will be okay because you’re guiding them through it. This would make *you* feel better in that moment, but would make the company you’re working for look bad. Instead of commenting and stopping your presentation – you should smoothly keep your tone the same as you check with the driver and what is ahead and react accordingly, whether that is a calm statement about a half hour delay or a reassurance that you’ll only be stopped for just a minute – making your REAL reassurance not through your words but through your tone as you carry on, carry on, carry-TF-on.
Federighi did exactly this. His script said that looking at the phone is as easy as unlocking it and the phone didn’t unlock, so without any big “WUH OHH! HOOOOLD ON JUST A SECOND… UHHHHH” showstopping nervousness, he simply flipped the phone back down away from his face real quick to press the sleep button, filling the dead audio space with “and, you know…” so that the final presentation would have been barely a hiccup as he says “Unlocking the phone is as easy as looking at it [presented with keypad] – and, you know [awakens the phone and Face-ID scans again] – you’re logged right in.
Unfortunately, it failed a second time.
HE DIDN’T MAKE AN “OOPS” FACE
The natural reaction to an unexpected error or roadblock in your actions while in front of an audience is broadcast this physically with a facial expression that signals “wups” to your audience. The reason for this is that it relieves the pressure in that moment that to you feels like an eternity where you appear incompetent and your brain wants to cut that snake off at the head before that look of incompetence spreads and dooms your entire presentation and you as a person extenuating from that experience. In the same way that saying “uh” and “um” is a verbal crutch to fill dead space while you collect the components you need to articulate your next line of actual speech – making an “oops” face signals to those watching that you are alert and handling this bumpy moment and carrying on through it.
This is soOOOooOooOoo important to have been avoided in this Apple presentation. The “I Love Lucy” style “wuh-oh!” face would have been the main image and preview icon for every story covering this flub – and there were a lot of those – which would have been a PR disaster for Apple.
Notable examples of this:
President George W. Bush after cutting short a Q&A for a quick exit, realizes he is trying to open a locked door:
Presidential Candidate John McCain realizing he went the wrong direction exiting the stage at the end of the 3rd 2008 Debate:
Federighi should be awarded a special acknowledgement within the company for this step alone. Again – the impulse to do a cartoony facial reaction is automatic, so it’s a commendable self-awareness and poise that controls stoicism in the face of a goof-up in front of an audience.
HE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING DAMNING
While the initial reports savaged Apple for the mishap and continued to be unflattering even after the information trickled in on exactly what went wrong – there is no embarrassing quote to headline the reports. No “oh crap” or “wuh-oh” or “listen folks, not everyone’s perfect!” or anything that – yes – would have patched over the awkward spotlight of intensity on Federighi’s shoulders, but immediately and forever after would have been a marketing scar on the company he was repping that would live in the ages forever.
A TEACHABLE MOMENT…
Everything Federighi did was the opposite of this clip of Windows 98 crashing in a similar live demo presentation which went viral in the dial-up-internet days of the late 90s that I still remember vividly and knew I would easily find on YouTube today (which, sure enough, it wasn’t hard to track down).
The reaction of the other guy in the Windows clip though is everything lacking in the Apple failure – while Windows dude audibly, physically, and verbally (*and understandably, I might add) leaned into the embarrassing nature of the situation as a way to diffuse it and while sheepishly grinning, pantomimed his way out of the awkwardness – Federighi calmly carried through his situation with no “uuuh”s or verbal acknowledgements of there being a big problem.
In a terribly difficult scenario, he did all the right moves that made him and the company he was representing look the best it possibly could, and he should be commended and emulated.
Take note!