Speaking of portable music players, I’ve always been curious about why they don’t use audio more in the UI. They are intrinsically audio devices, after all. The only other output mode of an iPod is its display and that is useless when your eyes are on something else (like that mattress on the road, look out!).
With the iPod Shuffle the point is moot because the device is mute. There is no display at all, so you must navigate across and within songs by trial-and-error. Playlists are precluded from the device because there is no good way to navigate them. This makes it hard to use the same Shuffle for different situations. If you don’t have one, believe me, stepping through tracks on a Shuffle is a real pain.
The design to steal is for the music player to use the headphones to give you information to tell you information and enhance its usability. What might the iPod whisper into your ear?
a “rising” sound effect for next track and corresponding “falling” sound for previous track
better yet: verbal announcement of the track number as you skip forward and back: “Track four. (press forward) Five. (press forward) Six. (press back) Five.” This would help you know where you are on the disorienting Shuffle.
bips for every 10 seconds you are fast forwarding, because it’s really hard to know where you are without looking when fast forwarding a digital player
Better yet: verbal feedback to how far you are fast forwarding or rewinding in rising increments as you hold the button down: “(blah blah) bip (blah blah) bip (blah blah) ten seconds, twenty seconds, forty seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds”
For shuffles, pre-render text-to-speech of the tracks on the desktop before syncing to the device. The device would declare the names of the songs as you skip around: “Alicia Keys track three superwoman. (forward) four: no one. (forward) five: Like You’ll Never See Me Again.”
To bring badly needed playlists to the shuffle: “(press Up button) Playlist one: running mix. (press next) two: ted talks (press select) Track eight: Jeff Hawkins (track then plays)”
(I deliberately omitted sound effects for changes of volume level, which would interfere with enjoying the audio.)
Music players (including cellphones) have direct line to the user’s ear. Why not make use of that for useful UI information?
—–
(Readers: Does the Zune or any other music player reinforce the user interface with sounds?)
You know that feeling we all have these days? That boy, things sure are different than a few years ago? Where we can type a few keystrokes, get a recommended restaurant, its location on the map, directions to it, a photo of its storefront?
All from a beautiful little phone?
For free?
In 2007 we take this for granted, and consider the pre-Google Maps world of 2004 to be the olden days. (The pre-Facebook, pre-blog, pre-e-commerce days are already ancient history.)
Is that wonderment of rapid change just a now feeling? Will it fade as we take for granted the innovations that have changed our lives so much over so few years?
The answer is no, we won’t lose that feeling of wonderment over new things, because there is no end in sight to them. Innovations will continue to arrive at our doorstep in brown cardboard boxes at a faster and faster pace.
2007 will feel like the olden days even sooner than 2004 did. It’s the nature of the accelerating returns of technology. This much is obvious after watching Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 seminal, mind-blowing talk on the idea.
The concept is that every generation of technology makes the subsequent generation faster and cheaper. Moore’s Law (which predicts the doubling of computing power every 18 months or so) is one example. So is the evolution of life on the planet. And the extension of life into technology. And the inevitable future integration of technology into life. And, for that matter, life made out of technology.
Imagine, if you can, the same accelerating curve in medicine, energy and machine intelligence, leading to some unimaginable technological singularity. If you have trouble, let Kurtzweil do it for you.
You can watch an abridged 20 minute TED video (Feb 2005) of his talk. But I recommend you immerse yourself in the 90 minute Long Now talk. The Ogg Vorbis audio version* is loud and clear; skip the first 5 minutes of announcements. (The quality of the video and MP3 versions is bad.)
—– [*The iPod is not smart enough to play Ogg Vorbis files, but you can convert the Ogg file to MP3 using Audacity or other tools.]
Dedicated buttons for expressing your pleasure with the current song, or lack thereof
Music is so easy to come by these days. We should be in sonic bliss, right? But we aren’t, because so much of what we have on our music players is, well, crap. Our shuffled music is a mix of stuff we love and stuff we don’t. Not so pleasant.
So our goals is not just to get piles of music, it’s to have piles of music that we love to listen to. We want our music collection to have a high signal-to-noise ratio.
The iPod has a clever function to let you rank a song you hear. If a bad song comes on, you can rank it as one star and delete it from you collection when you get back to your computer.
The trouble is, it’s way too much trouble to do this. On a typical iPods it’s a multistep, multi-sensory operation: 1. Unlock the buttons 2. press the select button repeatedly while watching the device until you are in the rating mode (not the volume mode, not the progress bar mode, not the album cover mode) 3. turn the clickwheel while watching the screen to get the right number of stars 4. Click select to confirm 5. re-lock your buttons. Then, later, you need to do the cleanup chore: return to iTunes, search for your one-star songs and destroy them.
Not only is this a lot of work, it’s also completely non-viable if you are driving, running, or doing anything else that occupies your eyes or attention. The net result is you don’t. You must endure the bad music until the next time you are able to take a few hours out to hone your music collection, which is to say, forever.
Here’s the design to steal for a modern music device: real, tactile, mode-less Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down buttons on the surface of the music player. (Not the typical Apple non-button button.) (Thank you Pandora for that inspiration). Pressing the thumbs affects the song’s star rating, and thus their likelihood of it being selected by the elven DJ within the machine.
Here’s the fun part: Pressing and holding the Thumbs-down button banishes the song from your ears permanently (after a second confirmation press). No further interaction needed. You can do it while running or driving or conversing. It’s gone from your portable player and after syncing, it’s gone from your desktop.
This gets even more interesting with subscription music services fed to portable music players, which let you listen to as much as you want as long as you keep paying. The system feeds you songs you might like. You gong the songs you hate by pressing and holding the thumbs-down button. The next song begins right away. The banished song is kept on a do-not-play list forevermore.
Music subscription services sometimes let you capture and keep songs you like. With this design you would do the opposite: press and hold the Thumbs Up button to keep the song locally for access anytime.
Thumbs Up/Down buttons should also appear on your home audio remote control, for the same reasons.
There are a couple of other bonus ideas to steal. Now that rating information is facilitated, the information can be shared:
with artists and advertisers, so they know whom to reward for appreciated songs
with your friends, so you can see who likes what (if you are into that sort of thing)
with the whole world, to do your part in sorting through the gobs of indy music being produced. Later, those elven DJs in the machine can feed you the best indy music as rated by the collective.
Very quickly, the signal:noise ratio of your music collection would go up, increasing our enjoyment of music and minimizing the hassle of managing it. Which is nice, because life is too short to listen to bad music.
Apple already got AT&T to do the work to support visual voicemail. This is a good thing for users, since it’s much faster to be able to use one’s eyes to navigate interfaces than only one’s ears.
But why must voicemail be accessible only from your cellphone? Users already have a web login for their cellphone accounts. Why not allow users to access voicemail through a web interface? Then you could skim the messages, type text message responses from the browser or even initiate a callback from the far more efficient UI of your computer. (The callback would call your cellphone then the other party’s.)
While we’re at it, why not have an IMAP connector to your voicemail? You could then process voice messages as you process your email. The only difference is when you open the email message there would be a voice attachment to play. Since it’s using the glorious magic of IMAP, messages you read or delete are kept in sync with the server and your mobile phone, so your phone doesn’t nag you with a message you already processed. (Office VoIP PBX phone systems have permitted these scenarios for years, and they are great.)
Today, if you want to commission one mobile phone, you must decommission another.
Why must this be so? Cellphones are so cheap. Why can’t we have multiple active phones tied to the same number? A call to one would be a call to all of them.
Then you could have:
one powerful PDA/communicator/GPS smartphone like the iPhone as your main device
a tiny mini-cellphone/MP3 player to take running — an “iPhone Shuffle” (today I leave my phone behind)
a backup cellphone to grab when you are rushing out the door, when you misplace or lose one
a hands-free cellphone integrated into your car. No cables, no bluetooth coupling, no charging
a cellphone built into your laptop computer. Your computer would “ring” when someone called. You could process voicemail visually from your desktop. It would provide data, voice and video call connectivity when WiFi wasn’t available.
a couple of docked home cellphones that replace your existing land-line
Readers: We in the USA are mobile phone laggards. Does this capability exist anywhere in the world yet?
We’re so lucky. We have cellphones and GPS, cheap high speed Internet, free shipping and Wiis. I’m grateful, I really am. The progress has been astounding.
But there are some perennial UI issues in everyday products that year after year never seem to get fixed. Every year I expect someone will finally do something but year after year ticks by and nothing happens. Perhaps if I wish real hard out loud here on StealThisIdea some of these these problems will finally be resolved.
Here is my wishlist for 2008:
Awesome speech recognition on Mac
Speech recognition works and it’s here to stay. It is one of the few remaining advantages that Windows has over the Mac. Unfortunately the Mac has been second-class citizen for years. It’s only worth using the best speech recognition system available, and that system is Dragon NaturallySpeaking, available for Windows only. Apple, buy Nuance, willya?
[1/27/08 It's working already! Within days of writing a draft of this article, MacSpeech announced they have ported the Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine to the Mac with a product called Dictate! I can't wait. I currently use NaturallySpeaking on WinXP within Parallels on a MacBook Pro, channeling input to the Mac side of my Mac using TightVNC on the Windows side and Vine Server 2.2 on the Mac side. It works really well, and I depend on it. But it's memory-intensive and cumbersome. A Mac-native solution will be most welcome.]
Put a real second mouse button on Macs
In the mid-80s, I used a three button mouse on Sun workstations. It was a scourge of usability. There was no standardization of which button should do what. The user was left to flounder, learning and relearning button definitions across applications.
In that climate, it was refreshing for Apple to pronounce, “let there be but one button.” One button, no ambiguity. If you wanted a second action you could double click. Advanced users could Option-click or Shift-click. (Or Shift-Option-click. Usable indeed!)
Later, Microsoft introduced a second button, But they were careful to declare a clear and unwavering mandate: “Let there be a second mouse button, and let it be used only for contextual menus.” It has been an unqualified success. Every app uses it. Even your proverbial mom knows how to right-click to get options on things. Even on the Mac, support for second mouse button is ingrained in every serious app.
Apple seems to agree: Mac OS X, the iLife and iWork apps fully support the second mouse button.
The only thing missing is an actual second button on Apple mice and laptop trackpads. It’s as if Steve Jobs himself is petulantly holding out on his 20-year-old pronouncement out of sheer stubbornness. The only Apple-branded bone we’ve been tossed is an invisible, barely functioning fake second mouse button on the Mighty Mouse that requires that you lift your fingers off the left part of the mouse in order for it to register a right button click.
A third-party mouse with a proper second button therefore remains a required purchase with any Mac. Laptop users are still out of luck. It is a point of confusion and an ongoing barrier for Windows users who would otherwise switch to the mac.
Apple is a well-known button hata and we hope it gets over it in 2008.
[1/27/08 The signs on this one are not good; Apple looks like it's going to use multitouch trackpad gestures to get around having to desecrate its laptops with a second physical button. Maybe that will work, but I'm skeptical, based on bad experience with gestures on Powerbooks]
Put a real, physical keyboard on the iPhone
We are evolved to sense things by touch, not just by sight. Tactile, haptic user interfaces make use of that faculty.
On-screen keyboards require much more user attention than physical keyboard. The user must look not just at the text field but at the keyboard. The user cannot trust that a keypress will be interpreted correctly like a real button and must therefore verify what has been entered. It’s a “type->verify->proceed” mental loop instead of a more efficient “type->proceed” loop you use when you can unequivocally trust that a key press gave you what you expected. Finally, keyboards with real buttons you can feel are easier, faster, and more gratifying to use. Apple, please get over the buttonphobia. Stop trying to be clever with the workarounds and put a proper keyboard on the next iPhone.
Put physical playback and volume controls on music devices
There are very few universally-applicable UI principles. Almost all have contingencies and caveats. The only safe answer you can give to a general UI questions is, “It Depends.”
But there is a solid, generally applicable principle that you could teach a monkey: identify and streamline the most common and frequent tasks.
My first Sony Walkman cassette player got this right in 1979: I could adjust the volume and pause the music instantly, without looking, without changing modes, without unlocking anything, without even removing it from a belt clip. Yet most iPods are horribly modal. Turning down the volume on my current iPod requires pulling it out of the pocket, unlocking it, looking at it, turning the click wheel, locking it again and putting it back in my pocket. As I have pointed out, this makes the iPod touch flawed as a music player. So please, Apple, in 2008, put the volume and playback controls physical, pressable buttons that you can feel.
Stop the bouncing
On the Mac, icons of applications which require your attention bounce. And bounce. And bounce. Even if you’re in the middle of something else. They clamor for your attention like a needy child. Instead, icons should bounce once or twice and then stop. If they still require your attention, they may step forward from the dock, peeking out a little bit until a moment befitting the user.
Cars should stop self-destructing
How many products can you name, that you rely on for your life that self-destruct when the user makes a minor error? This is what happens when you accidently walk away from most cars with the dome light or headlights on. The car will dutifully shine that light all night long until your battery is dead and the car is no longer operable, leaving you stranded.
In 2008, at this point in human history, all cars should be smart enough to know never to allow the battery level to get below what is needed to start and recharge itself. This should be a national safety requirement.
Allow graphics to be copied and pasted into web forms; allow files to be dragged in
Blogging apps, SaaS apps like Google Docs, any webform requring a photo: all of these require that you provide files. Unfortunately you cannot interact with a web browser as you can with regular apps and the desktop. You cannot copy and paste images one application into a web app. And you cannot drag one or a dozen files from the desktop into an upload area. Users must contend with a cumbersome file open dialog, and do so repeatedly to upload multiple files. These facilities are needed now to upload images in many web apps, and they will be needed for evermore in RIAs and SaaS apps.
Cell phone service with the clarity of VoIP and the low latency of landlines
Cell phone service sucks. It has always sucked and so we take for granted its suckitude. But it doesn’t have to suck. There are two key problems: latency and audio quality. Latency is the delay from when you say something to when your friend hears it. You can get a sense of how bad it is by having both parties clap on the count of three. Latency affects cellphone service and VoIP and makes for awkward conversations. Either you work out a telegraphic protocol with clear, unnatural pauses to clear the air, or you talk over one another clumsily. Latency doesn’t have to suck so badly: it is negligible on old fashioned landline service, so it should be possible with cellphone communications.
The other problem is audio quality of phone calls. You don’t know what you are missing until you participate in a VoIP call with headphones on. The other person sounds like they are right next to you. Puhs, buhs and duhs are clearly distinguishable, as are v’s and f’s. It’s wonderful. This is also a mere matter of bandwidth and should be solvable, not just for mobile phones but for landline phones as well.
How many more years must pass before we have clear, instant, reliable voice communications? I hereby wish for someone to do something about it in 2008. We have HDTV; the time is ripe for HD phone service.
Bring back OpenDoc
OpenDoc was killed ten years ago, but the idea of mixing and matching components of applications has always made sense. I want to be able to put an OmniGraffle chart in a Pages document or a Numbers table in Stone Create. PenPoint did it pretty well in 1991, Microsoft botched it (with OLE), integrated apps like ClarisWorks approximated it, and some ISVs have been pushing the ball forward with LinkBack. But it is still not yet a robust, well supported standard. In 2008 I wish a proper standard and a workable cross-platform technology would emerge for embedding components of apps in other apps.
Make it impossible to leave an ATM without your card and your cash.
My Washington Mutual ATM seems designed to want you to leave your card behind: after it gives you your money, but before it gives you your card, it throws up a full screen ad for several seconds. You’ve got your money, the message it’s sending you is that your transaction is over. You start walking away, and if you’re lucky, you realize that you don’t yet have your card. I saved myself several times but one day it happened to me and I left without my card. When I returned to the bank later the teller told me that this happens several times a week.
It’s not terribly difficult UI design problem, and it’s amazing that it persists after twenty years of ATMs. The solution is to withhold all three items, card, cash and receipt, until all three are ready, and spit them all out at once. The best design I saw was years ago in Tokyo, where the three slots where together and you could grab all elements at once. Please, everyone who works at a bank: in 2008, make it impossible to leave without your card.
That concludes my top 10 UI wish list for 2008. Let’s check in again next year to see what has been fixed.
[Readers: if you know anyone involved with any of these products, please send them a link to this article. It's: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/2008-ui-wishes]
[Cross-posted from Kpao!]
Years ago, my friend Ania Moniuszko started a company making reusable shopping bags to help combat the waste of disposable bags. She designed them herself and calls them MyOwnBag, as in: “Paper or plastic?” / “Thanks, I have MyOwnBag.”
MyOwnBags come in many fabrics and colors
Ania designed a bag that she would want to use:
strong enough to carry a heavy load of groceries
light and compactable so it could be squished into its own little pouch and kept in a woman’s purse whenever she needed it
large capacity so that multiple bags are not needed on a small shopping trip
versatile, so it could be used not just for groceries but for yoga, gym, beach, clothes shopping, changes of clothes
fashionable, to look good while being eco. They come in many fabrics and do not have huge gaudy phrases trumpeting the owner’s environmental sensitivity
washable, so the bag can withstand grocery detritus and can be used for a long time without looking dirty and ratty
Ania created her reusable bags years before they became commonplace and way before progressive municipalities like San Francisco started banning plastic bags. Now there are dozens of players in the game. Amazingly, the MyOwnBag product vision has held up well against the flood of competitors:
Grocery stores sell canvas bags that look like stiff green shopping bags. Pretty good for reducing waste but you cannot keep it in your purse at the ready.
Many companies sell $5 nylon bags that fold into nothing. They are commendable for making something that can be carried around, and cheap enough that anyone could buy them. But they are typically over-branded and look like garbage bags when freed from their sac. You wouldn’t be seen with it for other trips around town.
Hermès, Louis Vuitton and others have designer grocery bags for fashionistas willingtopay $500 - $1700.
Various gym, yoga or beach bags are optimized for their stated purpose but are not meant for groceries
Here is what this comparison looks like in a needs table, which includes the original comparison points, paper and plastic bags (3 is better; 0 is worse):
Needs table comparing various types of shopping bags
The needs analysis clarifies the differentiation among these competitors. For each customer need along the top you can see which solution does a good job of solving it. You can compare any two solutions and immediately see the important differences between them and which niche each has carved out.
From this chart you can see that MyOwnBag is the only reusable shopping bag that squishes down to a little pouch, and is useful for for things other than grocery shopping, and is chic and may be worn proudly around town, without costing $500.
There is one other need which MyOwnBag solves excellently: your need to find a unique gift for your chic, environmentally-sensitive friend, for about $40 to $60.
Here is the first product I have seen that embodies the future envisioned at the dawn of the Web era. An unobtrusive, wireless, sub-$200 Internet terminal with no specific purpose.
The Chumby Internet device, about $195 shipped.
That no-specific-purpose part partitions people who hear about the Chumby. Some see it as its greatest weakness, others see it as its greatest strength. I’m in the latter camp. I think the potential and relevance of this class of device is enormous. Here are some scenarios:
Alarms of every stripe: It’s time to wake up. It’s time to sell Google. It’s time to move the car for street cleaning. My checking balance is getting low; better transfer some funds. Oh my, something big exploded somewhere. Oops, we left the garage door open. Looks like a storm is brewing. Uh-oh, traffic is bad on 101. Oooh, Tahoe got a huge dump of snow. Oh! Was that an earthquake? How big, and how far? Hurry! Wii’s are available! Shh! Stay low! There is someone at the front door and he’s carrying a clipboard!
Ambient awareness: What time is it? How many minutes before my next appointment? Ah, my web traffic is growing nicely, and I even made $0.42 this week with Adsense. Cool, there’s the updated status of a bunch of my Facebook friends. It’s Friday night and three of my friends have no plans; maybe I will call them. Hmmm, it’s only foggy in my neighborhood of San Francisco, not everywhere How does it look in St. Catherine’s Street in Montreal? Does the baby look ok with the nanny? We’ve been using a lot of energy this month. Philip’s birthday is in a few days.
Control: Time to put the house lights, climate and security in bed-time mode / away for the evening mode / away for vacation mode. Time to put on ambient jazz or groove or drone or classical or acoustic chick rock or energetic rock throughout the house to suit the current mood. Tell the DVR to record Heroes and Earl.
Decoration: Ah there are photos showing what I was doing every year this month for as long as I have been collecting digital pictures.
Communication: Receive a video voicemail. Press a couple of buttons and record a voice message to your spouse.
On-demand radio: Listen to the latest NPR news broadcast in the bathroom, when you are shaving.
One could go on. I could imagine several Chumby’s around the house as views and controllers being fed by the same model. (Our mobile phones would take part, too.)
One piece apparently missing on the platform is a coherent infrastructure for pulling together alarms, ambient awareness, control, and tools. From what I can tell, the first batch of applets will be disjointed, inconsistent, mostly useless. The signal-to-noise ratio of useful vs. demo applets is too low, as happened with Palm apps and desktop widgets.
But with the Chumby, the technology and price point have arrived. The only thing in the way of most of these scenarios is a mere matter of design and code.
The competitors are clustered, copying one another, slowly drifting to where the customer is. Don’t add yourself to the fray. By the time you catch up, they will be elsewhere.
Instead, do a better job at figuring out where customers really are, and chase them instead.
Download a printable PDF of this graphic to post in the hallway.
the thing that continues to amaze me is that smart people at successful companies still form weak visions based on features, assumptions and the competition, not on customer needs. [..] Executives ask the question “How are we going to beat [most successful competitor]?” Features are added just to put a check mark on the box. And when you ask why, nobody can say the true reason any of these things are a good idea. [..] all the effort spent ultimately amounts to nothing.
One era’s flop is often another era’s success. The typical excuse given for failure is something vague like, “the market wasn’t ready for it” or “the product was ahead of its time.” I dislike these phrases, as they shrug off our responsibility to predict what customers will accept, and they shift the blame to the vagaries of customer behavior and psychology.
Yes, sometimes it’s true that mainstream users need plenty of role models around them before they’ll consider a new technology. It took some convincing to get people to try out the first microwaves, the mobile phones and the Internet itself.
But just as often, the early attempts at a product simply fail to meet the needs at a realistic price.
For example, it shouldn’t have been a stretch for Honeywell to realize that a kitchen computer that cost $10,000 in 1969 dollars, that required the housewife to take a two week course to learn to program the device, using toggle-switch input and binary light output, might not do well. Despite its integrated cutting board.
A more recent attempt at a kitchen computer was a quick flame-out by 3Com called the Audrey in 2000. But that was before widespread broadband and WiFi, before large, cheap LCD panels and many other enabling technologies. For its price, it too was not about to earn its keep.
We now we have enabling technologies lined up to make a device plausible: cheap computers, thin LCDs, fast Internet connectivity, WiFi. Is the time right to make place for a computer in the kitchen? There is anecdotal evidence of the demand: no fewer than three of my friends remodeling kitchens are designing a place for a kitchen computer. Lead users often portend larger trends (see von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation).
The need is apparently there, the technological ingredients are in place. There is no external barrier, so now we await a major manufacturer to introduce a well-designed device to establish the category. (Waits like this are hard to predict. They could be short, or they could take several years.)
Users can, of course, get by very nicely with a laptop in a cubby, and many do. But for high-end remodels that won’t do. So here are some specs that we can compare against future offerings. These specs describe a relatively full-feature devices for big, fancy kitchen. They would be pared down for lower-end products.
Key scenarios for a kitchen computer
General lightweight web surfing
Family information appliance
Following a recipe while cooking
Possible homework & surfing station
Audio controller, for background music and talk while doing kitchen activities
Decorative element, as a digital photo frame
Features of a kitchen computer
Attractiveness, since it’s part of the décor. Designed for a kitchen, not an office.
Different finish options to match with different décors. People remodeling choose from hundreds of tiles and paint colors and one style does not fit all.
Touch screen for most common tasks.
Wireless keyboard and mouse, normally stored, can be pulled out for more serious use.
Resilient to spills, oils, greasy fingers. Durable for kid usage.
Unobtrusive, since there is enough clutter in the kitchen.
Only a thin display is outwardly visible. The main unit is concealed within cabinetry, along with cabling.
Display takes up no precious counter space. It is mounted on an arm and, when not in use, folds under a cabinet or rotates flush against the wall. In use while cooking it hinges out. When used for homework or sit-down surfing, it lowers to a work surface.
The main unit (if there is one, apart from the display) is small like the Mac Mini to minimize consumption of precious cabinet volume.
Speakers are built into the display to further reduce footprint.
Quiet, fanless operation. Does not contribute to the background noise.
Central control - Display can completely control the device including powering it on. There is never a need to dig into the cabinets to fuss with the device.
Media playback, particularly music.
Hidden main unit includes amp for speakers and speaker output.
Remote control to control playback while across the room or in adjoining room.
If IR is used for remote control, the display includes the IR receiver, to allow for line-of-sight.
Display matches ambient light in room. When the room is dark, the display turns itself off.
Always on, or instant on. As an appliance it must have instant availability.
Low power consumption since it’s always on.
Special Software
The kitchen computer should be a standard, full-function personal computer for when it is needed for homework or general usage. For key tasks it should revert to a minimal, streamlined appliance mode with highly tailored apps that don’t require the keyboard or mouse.
Family calendar/coordination center visible at a glance, with alarms and reminders.[Has anyone cracked this critical user need yet?]
Digital photo frame when idle.
Automatic, smart photo syncing with other photo libraries devices in the house. You don’t have to do any management for the images to remain fresh.
“Best of” photos from prior years appear automatically.
They match the current season, so you don’t get inappropriate winter wonderland pictures in July.
Music controller
User can stream music from other servers in the house or from Internet radio
Can be controlled by the display, either with physical buttons or a touch-driven on-screen UI.
Recipe software? This is maybe. Recipes demand flexibility and resilience, something paper excels at. But if a simplified touch-screen UI were to be layered on an outstanding cooking site like Epicurious we would have something. Also: recipe videos on demand is a killer kitchen app, since it’s so much easier to see cooking techniques demonstrated.
Standard info appliance stuff to check out while scarfing down your cereal: Weather forecast so you know what to wear. Traffic so you know what to expect during the commute. Top news & sports items so you are up to speed on what’s going on. RSS feeds from the school. Buttons to most-used websites. Number of waiting email or voicemail messages.
Quick & dirty email checker. Quickly skim & read email messages & compose short replies, even canned replies, without having to pull out the keyboard & mouse. For full-on email answering mode, pull out the keyboard or switch to your main PC.
Family message center? This is another maybe. It’s a traditional scenario envisioned for a kitchen computer. But introducing yet another messaging medium could be a stretch, given how inundated we already are with messaging solutions. If it were to happen, here’s a viable way: Mom presses a “record” button on the display and speaks a message for Junior. The audio is stored on a server, and a link to it is sent via email or text message to Junior, who can retrieve it on a PC or cellphone. A bright button appears on the kitchen appliance for Junior, until he retrieves the message from any means.
Videophone — no longer a futuristic scenario, especially for Mac users. Dad can see that Jane, who is away at college, is available for videochat. This is simply a different wrapper around iChat, still by far the best-of-breed for video calls.
Integration with other home automation: distributed audio, lighting & climate control, alarm system. [Home automation is another field that is under-developed for the times, in need of an Apple-esque kick in the butt.]
With computers once again at a plateau, new outlets tend to emerge. We should expect to see a trickle of kitchen computers come to market. If they are designed around the usage scenarios they will be a welcome addition to the kitchen, not just gratuitous technology.
I had trouble with the BART (San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit) mobile phone user interface for checking out schedules, so I sent them the following email.
The improvements are just good old-fashioned information design and matching the solution to the situation. I thought I’d share it here since it shows a bit of design thinking.
BART, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system
May I make a couple of suggestions as a product design consultant about improving to the usefulness and usability of the QuickPlanner?
This goes for both the web and mobile versions of the QuickPlanner.
Have a notion of “today” and let the user bookmark routes results page. For example a common route I take is from 24th & Mission to Lake Merrit. 80% of the time I am planning this for today. But every time I want to check the BART schedule I have to interact with the pop-ups. This is cumbersome and slow, especially on a mobile phone.
Here are details.
On the QuickPlanner form page, provide a radio choice for “today” vs. “another day”.
Default the choice to “today”. (On the regular web version of the QuickPlanner you could hide or disable the date & time controls until the user chooses “Another day”)
When “today” is selected, on the results page show all the remaining trains for that route today, no matter what the date is.
This page is bookmarkable and always brings up the schedule for the rest of today, no matter what day it is. Most of the time this is all the user will ever need.
This would greatly reduces the amount of steps needed. The user no longer has to operate two long drop-downs, doesn’t have to review the date and time and press submit.
On the results page, make it easy to skim the results by boldfacing key information and factoring out redundant information.
- For a direct journey with no transfers the results would reflect today’s date, the start and destination stations just once, at the top of the results page (rather than with each hit) and the fee.
- To make it easier for the user to zero in on the key information, make the operative information boldface Each result might start with the boldface header: “Depart 11:19 am Arrive 11:40 am”. Under that are the details of the journey and whether “Bikes are allowed” or “Bikes NOT allowed” (to make it stand out a bit more, but not too much).
- For journeys involving transfers, the cyclist only needs to know once whether the entire journey allows bikes. (We save clutter and reduce errors by saying it once for the journey and not for each train.)
At the bottom of the results page, put a note in suggesting: “We suggest you bookmark this page for faster access”. This line would only makes sense when the user has chosen “today” since specific dates would not be very useful to bookmark.
The notion of “today” would be common-sense enough to go over midnight barriers. If it’s 11:30 pm, the user wants to see trains past midnight, not strictly today.
Rather than paging after a handful of results. I suggest erring on the side of longer pages with more results. It’s slow to initiate and transfer data on a mobile phone; faster to just get it in one fell swoop and scroll through a longer listing.
An instant bookmark to today’s schedule is handy, but sometimes the user does need to look ahead. At the top of the results page next to the date there is a “change” link. This goes to the QuickPlanner page. The start and end stations are pre-set, saving the user the chore.
Have you ever lined up a set of browser tabs of pages to want to read, but before you got to them, had to close your browser? Or, have you wanted to close the browser to free up resources but hesitated because it would close the tabs you lined up? It’s annoying that there is no way to restore that content so you can pick it up later.
This immediately leads to a quick idea to steal: Give the option of saving and restoring all content when the browser is re-opened.
This scenario hints at something larger, an observation that browser makers seem to have missed: The pile of tabs can be thought of as a reading list. What if web browsers let you create reading lists, like music playlists in iTunes, but for web pages? You could drag the current page or a tabs into a reading list to read later, or to save it forever. You might have a reading list for sports, one for humor, one for macrame.
This concept is different from web bookmarks: it is the content that is stored locally, not just the page’s location. The benefits are convenience, speed, permanence and searchability.
You could have multiple reading lists, just as there are multiple play lists in iTunes.
Reading lists are designed for transience. Once a page is read, it is discarded, to keep the focus on unread material. This differs from typical bookmark managers, which typically make you switch to a bookmark management mode to clean up bookmarks.
Sometimes there are pages you want to keep forever as reference or for a historical record. There is no guarantee that the company serving the page will still be in business ten years from now, with the article still available for free and at the same location you bookmarked. The New York Times, for one, expires its articles pretty quickly. The user has the option of storing pages indefinitely, as a permanent archive.
Academic or scientific researchers, reporters and students would use this to collect read articles over time the way a reporter collects boxes of newspaper clippings.
The saved content within reading lists would be indexed and searchable from within the browser, making it easier to recall a useful article from the past.
Reading lists would help with mobility. Before traveling you could load up on readings for future offline browsing on an airplane, or anywhere else the Internet don’t shine. This is better than leaving your browser open with a lot of tabs — a running browser trickles off some CPU load and therefore battery life.
Engadget or SlashDot are examples of pages that have the useful content on the home page. You rarely have to drill in further. While pages in the reading list are normally static, for this scenario, the user might designate a page as automatically refreshed. They would update automatically in the background and thus be instantly available when called upon. Their freshness level would be clearly indicated so you always have a sense of how old the material is. In the airplane scenario, pre-caching would save you from having to remember to load up on content beforehand and to spend frantic packing time doing so.
The latest RSS feeds would be available instantly and automatically, even when offline.
Pre-caching reading lists would be a boon for mobile users. Today’s iPhone, for example, has poor digital bandwidth, making surfing painful. And even the fastest wireless networks aren’t available everywhere, such as in a subway tube or in a different geography. Reading lists would work with mobile devices in a couple of ways. First, reading lists you line up on your desktop would be kept in constant sync with the handheld. Stuff you didn’t have time to read at your desk is therefore available to you on the train or in the waiting room.
Secondly, the mobile device could load up piles of subscribed web pages, RSS feeds and video snippets while charging, so it doesn’t incur a hit to battery life. If the device has WiFi like the iPhone, it could make use of it for faster fill-ups. Then when you have a spare moment, calling up the pre-cached pages would be instantaneous.
This new capability is not much of a technical stretch over what browsers already do. It is already possible in most browsers to save a page locally in the file system. This concept provides a more streamlined and integrated experience for saving, grouping and recalling locally stored pages.
This is one of those ideas that could have been created years ago. The last major innovation in web browsers was tabbed browsing. Hopefully, we will see browser makers incorporate an elegant design of reading lists some time soon.
[If you know someone involved in browser technology, please send them this article!]
[Update 9/7/07: OmniWeb v5 seems to have some of this functionality in a feature they call Workspaces. It seems to have much in common with this idea, but a different bent, more oriented to reconstructing configurations of tabbed window browers.]
Here are some initial reactions to the iPhone touch based on the guided tour. I have not personally tried the device, so please forgive and let me know of any errors!
(By the way, anyone else find the guided tour a bit creepy? Something about the jovial, disembodied face and flailing hands…)
The iPod touch is not highly optimized for playing music. It has poor capacity for a full-size device (8GB) requiring users to spend more time managing music. You cannot access key functions like pause and volume up/down from the outside of the device. The buttons are on a touch-screen, so you cannot just feel for the buttons. You must look at the device to do these fundamental tasks. The device has to be in the right mode for you to pause music or turn the volume down. A music-optimized device would have physical buttons for these topmost tasks on the exterior. The big screen drains battery capacity, so you have to concern yourself with turning on and off the display. The touch-screen is easily pressed by accident, so you have to be concerned with locking and unlocking input. Despite some nice interaction design, this device is not a great conceived-from-scratch music player; it’s the design of a cut-back iPhone.
The iPod touch is also not a great video player, again because of the limited capacity. What a waste of a large, sharp display. Would it have killed Apple to include a flash memory slot?
The consolation is that the iPod touch is only $50 more than the iPod Nano of the same capacity. You get a lot for that 50 bucks. (Who will buy the 8GB nano?)
Is it just me, or is Cover Flow a crappy way to navigate a music collection? The concept seems to be based on the vinyl & CD world of albums, where browsing a collection of music could be done visually. However the modern world of MP3s is largely a world of singles. This results in a stack of album covers, many of which represent one song. It’s pleasant seeing album covers, but flicking album covers back and forth is a pretty poor interaction model for finding music. While Cover Flow demos well, it strikes me as gratuitous eye candy with little user benefit. Such UIs tend not to hold their own over time. I expect that sooner or later a more functional paradigm will be invented for visually navigating music.
Now that the iPod has a way of entering text, can you search for songs by typing? Or must you navigate a huge scrolling list? Navigating list of hundreds of items was always a major pain in the click-wheel iPods. (Good riddance, click wheel!)
The iPod touch will make a sweet PDA. It has a calendar app and a contacts app, the two core apps of the classic PalmPilot PDA. iPods have had applets for these functions from the beginning, but they were nearly useless due to the lack of proper input on the iPod. If you think of the iPod touch as a PDA with music and internet surfing, it’s suddenly a much better product.
PIM features of the iPod touch
But boy, could Apple have downplayed the PDA functions any further? It’s subdued in both the UI and the marketing. Calendar and contacts are highly frequent tasks for a PDA. Palm devices have always granted these tasks top-tier status, devoting physical buttons to them. On the iPod touch, these same tasks didn’t even make the cut on the iPod touch’s little dock. (Is this dock configurable?) There is scarcely a mention of these capabilities on Apple’s site, and it didn’t make the demo. [Update 9/11/07 Apparently they could have downplayed the PDA functions further, and may have: by crippling them. The word is that Apple disabled entering new calendar events on the iPod touch. Readers are, rightfully, screaming bloody murder at the prospect. Say it isn't so, Apple!][Update 9/13/07: It is so.][Update 11/26/07: It is not so any longer. Apple added calendar editing back to the iPod touch. Steve Jobs was somehow involved.]
We welcome the era of mobile, WiFi web browsing. When traveling it will save us many pilgrimages to Internet cafés. (Too bad the Palm Foleo got cut. Hopefully they will incubate it further and introduce an inexpensive, light laptop alternative.)
iPod touch is crippled as an Internet device. It has a web browser but no maps or mail or widgets. It’s hard to see a good reason for these to be omitted, other than to protect the iPhone’s thunder. Pity. It’s unlike Apple to hold back on making a product the best it could be.
Doesn’t the YouTube app require an active Internet connection? We’d hope that it would automatically pre-cache subscriptions to YouTube content to have available offline. The service is far less useful if only available when you are within WiFi range.
Connecting to Starbucks for free access to iTunes store? Ho-hum. So much has to line up for this to give benefit to Apple or Starbucks or the user. It seems scarcely worth the investment or complexity. Perhaps if Starbucks threw in a free hour of surfing for buying one of their tracks it could get some traction.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if the iPod touch could connect to any Bluetooth phone and use it to access the Internet? You could have the iPhone goodness without foregoing your tiny, inexpensive cellphone and your carrier of choice. Apple will probably never do this since it would cannibalize iPhone sales and the lucrative monthly contracts.
Despite its beautiful industrial design and truly innovative UI, the iPod touch is, ironically, not very well optimized for media playback. It is derivative of the iPhone, and a transitory product. Greater capacity, and physical, tactile, modeless buttons for controlling volume and playback would vastly improve the product for its stated purpose.
[Update 9/13/07 - We are also hoping that the device will subsume the role of PDA by restoring existing editing functions into its hobbled calendar. Further we hope that it fulfills its mission as mobile Internet device by restoring the Internet capabilities culled from the iPhone.
Most of all, we are hoping Apple does not squander its considerable goodwill by overplaying its hand with such consumer-unfriendly practices.]
Marty points out a troublesome pattern at some companies where there is no single product owner. A “business person” defines the high-level product definition and the product manager writes the requirements.
The problem is that neither person truly owns the product, and more importantly, neither person feels and behaves like they are the one ultimately responsible for the product.
This is true. If the business person is an executive, they may not have the deep, detailed understanding of customers that is essential for defining a product vision.
I do have a quibble to pick with a side point in Marty’s essay. He goes on to say:
Further, this model is based on a flawed view of software that believes that you can define high-level product requirements independent of detailed requirements and especially the user experience.
I respectfully disagree. Not only is it possible to separate the vision (high-level requirements) from the detailed requirements and design, it’s a very good idea.
Most companies obsess about the details too early and too often. They have trouble breaking away and questioning the purpose of the product and its features, and they lose sight of the big picture. When you see products that are perennially mired in incrementalism and features wars, this is what is going on.
The remedy is to treat product vision as a distinct problem to solve. It requires putting aside the product’s details, having faith that they can be worked out later. The first job is to figure out the important needs to solve. Hold those needs sacred. Ignore constraints and precedent, requirements and design. Trust that a great solution will be found. Then, during requirements and design, find it.
Apple seems to demonstrate this mentality over and over. With the iPhone, they figured out that a voice prompts-driven UI for voicemail was terribly inefficient, and that users needed a more streamlined approach. They set about building a UI they call “visual voicemail.” This required changes well outside Apple’s purview, at the mobile phone carrier’s back-end system. By focusing on the “what” and (temporarily) ignoring the “how” they were able to achieve a breakthrough solution.
Inventor Charles Kettering (1876-1958) said, “A problem well-stated is a problem half solved.” Product vision is about stating the problem. Detailed requirements and design come later.
