Social Innovation In User Experience: Tiles, Channels, Streams

Microsoft has gotten a lot of people excited with the radical break that Windows Phone 7 represents. Behind the user experience shift is the simple realization that phones aren’t really small computers. Especially computers from the ’90s, with folders, files, and a desktop. See my recent post, Why Closed Works: Moving Past Steampunk Thinking About The Future Of Computing, which suggests why iPad and other new OS approaches are potentially liberating for us, despite the yowling from techies.

Windows Phone 7 represents a similar departure — a break with the notions of what users should have in their heads when fooling with a phone.

- Peter Sayer, Microsoft CEO unveils Windows Phone 7

“Phones looked like PCs, but a phone is not a PC, it’s smaller, more personal,” said Joe Belfiore, vice president for Windows Phone.

To make the interface more personal, Microsoft is counting on a checkerboard of customizable “live tiles” that can update automatically with information from the phone or the Internet.

Some of the tiles will update automatically to show frequent contacts or local information, while others can be customized manually. The tiles will be grouped into themed “hubs,” for example a page of contacts called “people” or a page of photos called “pictures”.

It seems that we are starting to see some commonalities in these new operating environments, like iPad, Windows Phone 7, and Litl, to name three interesting examples.

iPad will be based on the iPhone operating environment, which is extremely minimal: it offers up single applications, and not much else. These apps are generally fairly minimal: it seems that at least in the first release iPhone apps will generally be running in a ‘double pixels’ mode, although Apple has said it will provide tools to allow iPhone apps to be rejiggered to run natively.

The point is that users will not need a Mac OS X kind of experience to read a book, listen to music, or watch a movie. The user’s experience will be shaped by the sorts of media being accessed, rather than a general purpose programming world.

This is also what seems to be at work with Windows Phone 7: they have thrown away the general purpose file/folder/desktop environment so familiar to programmers, and moved ahead to an environment designed around information streaming to the device or to the user.

Here we see the adoption of ‘tiles’ — rectangular information objects that access streams or stores of information when touched. These ‘tiles’ will replace the notion of running apps, or opening files, or initiating a connection to the web through a browser, although it seems like we are going to be stuck with the browser metaphor for some time.

The deepest shift at work in these new environments is a transition to information flows away from information stores.

We will come to perceive what is going on as we touch these Windows 7 tiles, or open Litl channels, is that we are connecting to a stream of information, more like a TV channel than opening a file or browsing to a website.

And I believe that the streaming metaphor when coupled with the social dimension of tools like Facebook and Twitter, or new social elements of these new platforms themselves, will change how we think about them and how we use them.

My sense is that more designers — like the folks at Litl, the innovative ‘internet computer for the home’ — are looking to television and streaming media services as a starting point for redesign of user experience.

I recently got a loaner from Litl, and while I was impressed with much of the philosophy of the user experience, I was dissatisfied with the experience overall.

In particular, I had hoped that there would be a social experience tightly integrated into the radically different OS they had devised, something as innovative as the ‘ring’ controller they developed as part of the scrolling controls on the hardware. But that side of the equation was stuck back at email. If I see something cool in one of the channels on my Litl I would like to be able to simply pass it along to those following me in a hypothetical Litl network. Or else they could have tightly integrated to something like Twitter.

Yes, I can use Litl to look up a recipe, and position the device on the kitchen counter in it’s easel mode to make it a handy appliance. But it’s just a browser window to Epicurious, and not connecting me to a network of other cooks.

This is perhaps an example of a general rule: as innovators attempt to break out of the user experience ruts of today’s operating systems, they will get hung up on those irreducible elements of the existing world order that have to be connected. Like browsers, and email. These will hold us back, even in circumstances where radical changes are being attempted.

I beleive that Litl is a bellwether of things to come, as is Windows 7 Phone OS, and the iPad.

In all cases, the designers have drastically minimized what users are able to do for the sake of a simpler and more usable model of use.

But I think it is a mistake to not make these devices more obviously social, where streaming of information to and from other people becomes the primary mode of operation, and not something demoted to something in email, or in other applications. I expect to see someone release a social OS in the near term, where our connections to others are directly supported in the operating environment, not just within social applications.

Update on Monday, February 15, 2010 at 1:55PM by Stowe Boyd

From the Microsoft Windows 7 Phone press release:

Windows Phone 7 Series creates an unrivaled set of integrated experiences on a phone through Windows Phone hubs. Hubs bring together related content from the Web, applications and services into a single view to simplify common tasks. Windows Phone 7 Series includes six hubs built on specific themes reflecting activities that matter most to people:

People. This hub delivers an engaging social experience by bringing together relevant content based on the person, including his or her live feeds from social networks and photos. It also provides a central place from which to post updates to Facebook and Windows Live in one step.

Sounds like the ‘people hub’ is a step in the direction I was alluding to.

15 February 2010 7 Permalink

Doing That Crazy Hand Jive: Gesture And The Future Of User Experience

The technology industry is going retro — moving away from remote controls, mice and joysticks to something that arrives without batteries, wires or a user manual.

It’s called a hand.

In the coming months, the likes of Microsoft, Hitachi and major PC makers will begin selling devices that will allow people to flip channels on the TV or move documents on a computer monitor with simple hand gestures. The technology, one of the most significant changes to human-device interfaces since the mouse appeared next to computers in the early 1980s, was being shown in private sessions during the immense Consumer Electronics Show here last week. Past attempts at similar technology have proved clunky and disappointing. In contrast, the latest crop of gesture-powered devices arrives with a refreshing surprise: they actually work.

[…]

Just as Microsoft’s gaming system hits the market, so should TVs
from Hitachi in Japan that will let people turn on their screens, scan
through channels and change the volume on their sets with simple hand
motions. Laptops and other computers should also arrive later this year
with built-in cameras that can pick up similar gestures. Such
technology could make today’s touch-screen tools obsolete as people use
gestures to control, for instance, the playback or fast-forward of a
DVD.

To bring these gesture functions to life, device makers
needed to conquer what amounts to one of computer science’s grand
challenges. Electronics had to see the world around them in fine detail
through tiny digital cameras. Such a task meant giving a TV, for
example, a way to identify people sitting on a couch and to recognize a
certain hand wave as a command and not a scratching of the nose.

Little
things like the sun, room lights and people’s annoying habit of doing
the unexpected stood as just some of the obstacles companies had to
overcome.

GestureTek, with offices in Silicon Valley and
Ottawa, has spent a quarter-century trying to perfect its technology
and has enjoyed some success. It helps TV weather people, museums and
hotels create huge interactive displays.

This past work,
however, has relied on limited, standard cameras that perceive the
world in two dimensions. The major breakthrough with the latest gesture
technology comes through the use of cameras that see the world in three
dimensions, adding that crucial layer of depth perception that helps a
computer or TV recognize when someone tilts their hand forward or nods
their head.

via Ashee Vance, www.nytimes.com

This advance is one of several that will form the basis of an entirely new experience for computing.

Gestural UI, or ‘hand jive’ as I call it, once deployed as a built in aspect of future computers, like touchpads and mouses are today, will set the stage for a rethink about user experience.

First we will see hand jive as a way to manipulate the gears of now-tradition windowed UIs: pulling down a menu in an app, moving windows around, dragging a file to the trash.

In the future, we’ll have real Minority Report stuff, without the enormous touch screens: we’ll also see the emergence of augmented reality goggles — Terminator goggles — where we can toggle back and forth between 100% computer screen sorts of display to 100% augmented reality. And the goggles — as an integrated part of the computing device — will be watching our hands for commands, and watching the world for reality to augment.

The combination of these trends will make computing primarily mobile: we’ll have an iPhone sized device we carry all the time, which will be a phone and a PC. We will be free of LCD screens — in general — courtesy of our goggles, and free of keyboards, courtesy of hand jive. A keyboard can be imaged on any flat surface by the goggles, and we can type without a physical keyboard because the gestural system is watching our fingers in 3D. And of course, a lot of things could be done without typing, especially once kids start using sign language and voice to communicate with computers. (I say kids because that’s who start first.)

The other parts of this tectonic shift in UX will include the end of the document-centric folder/file/desktop metaphor, where information in managed in documents, based on old school filing cabinets. I believe that innovation like the Litl OS, which has shifted to a TV-influenced UI of channels, treating information as something that flows and not something static, sitting in a document.

And of course, the social web will be the foundation of future computing, as opposed to a document-centric world in which people are an afterthought.

How To Hand Jive

via Ehow

12 January 2010 Permalink