Applied Design Group

Everything in the Cloud …

Posted in Inspiration, Latest, Thoughts - August 8, 2010 - tim

So there’s been plenty of talk about cloud computing over the years, but that talk has typically focused on corporate and/or siloed use (e.g. music). The utility of cloud computing / storage has always been pretty self-evident to me, especially when the web hit and we first starting seeing successful apps (like salesforce.com) and not so successful experiments (like Groove from now MSFT exec Ray Ozzie who’s had all of his creativity sucked out of him in Redmond).

But what about casual users? Lot’s of talk about the (I think inevitable) transition from “owned” libraries of music (LP’s, then cassettes, then CD’s, then “soft” files on iPods and iTunes) to uber libraries of music in the cloud: basically the transition from licensing discrete assets forever, to “renting” access to universal libraries. Rhapsody first introduced this idea, to moderate but not overwhelming success. Spotify in Europe (and elsewhere) is looking interesting and getting great takeup.

Part and parcel to the slow takeup by consumers in cloud-based products is I’m sure the fundamental concept of “ownership” – this is “my” stuff because it’s right here, I bought it, mine forever.  But along with “ownership” comes the big problem of storage and “maintenance”.  All of a sudden, given Moore’s Law, increasing media resolution (and file size), and lowering prices of consumer electronic devices, storage, backup and security are becoming a real hassle.

Ask your typical consumer about their backup strategies for their music, photos, movies, etc. (their digital assets) and you will more often than not get a blank stare.  For folks with large libraries of assets (I manage currently about 30,000 photos in Aperture alone), the first time a hard drive fails and all of that data goes “poof”, those folks will have faced a tough reality.  What you own you must maintain.

However, what you rent, you don’t necessarily have to worry about.  And that concept is going to trump the fundamental concept of “ownership”  very very soon.  And there are some great new products that are starting move me into rent vs. own in a big way. (more…)

Knee Pad Computing

Posted in Inspiration, Latest, Thoughts - March 31, 2010 - tim

Maybe it’s just me, but in watching Apple’s predictably beautiful new video guided tours of the iPad I got completely distracted by knees.

Do I have a knee fetish?

But they’re everywhere.  As I watched one video after another (there are about a dozen) it was like “ok, here comes the knee shot …”.  By the fourth video I couldn’t even follow the story it got so self-conscious.

When the “laptop” came out it was pretty cool.  You could kick back on the couch and set the thing in your lap and we all thought how cool we were.  But you could also just as easily set it on a flat surface, tilt the screen just right, and work just as easily: keyboard flat, screen up.

But with the iPad – and the whole tablet thing in general – we’re entering new territory from a usability perspective.  There’s been lots of discussion about how the iPad should/will be used, whether it needs a “kickstand”, how to type.  Ad nauseum.

But really.  Click through the pictures above: they’re all pulled from the videos.  The “ok, now I have to find something to prop my feet on” awkwardness pops up in all but two of the videos by my reckoning (and even then you have the “what do I prop this thing against on the table” awkwardness, mixed in with the “ok, now I have to lay it down to type then prop it back up” awkwardness).

Look, let’s be clear.  I’m obviously going to buy one of these things like everyone else (although I usually wait for v2, which was a good idea with the iPhone), but it’s going to be interesting to see – starting this Saturday – how we all “lean back” together.

It’s the lean back revolution.

(Maybe this allegorically speaks to our standing as the great American aggressive inventive lean-forward busy society: are we “retiring”?)

Who makes ottoman’s and coffee tables?  I’m buying stock.

Velcro pants?

We have to learn another one?

Posted in Latest, News, Thoughts - February 21, 2010 - tim

Moore’s Law brings many blessings.

No one can say that the scarily consistent improvements in computing power – processor speed, storage density, screen resolution, etc. – don’t result in general improved user experiences over time.  But for the folks who make a living (or hobby) of crafting the so-called Human-Computer Interface, keeping up with what is possible, and arguably necessary, is tough.

And it’s about to get tougher.

Dimension 1- From Audible to Visible

I could argue that the first real UI “breakthrough” goes as far back as writing itself  - clay tablets or maybe more realistically the Gutenberg press.  Getting any form of consistent communication on any form of “media” was the first big 1.5 dimension challenge.  But in the context of those of us who deal with user interfaces in the interactive / computer world it really started with the screen (or terminal as we called them back then).

Sure, back when we fired up the screechy old 300 baud modems the text was crawling across two-dimensional space (the x-y space of the screen), but from a UI perspective the text moved from one point (top left) to another (bottom right).

This was all fine and good, and I (and many others) spent many late nights trolling strange BBS’s (long before the Internet) with our nose pressed to the screen watching the “crawl”.  We certainly considered at the time that it would be cool (and probably inevitable) that the screen would become “addressable” and thus 2-dimensional, but it was hard to see at the time what that would actually bring us.

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Allison’s Book

Posted in Featured Projects, Latest, Thoughts, Tim Portfolio - January 19, 2010 - tim

With the impending release of something book or tablet-like from Apple (next week) I thought it would be interesting to pull the following story from the archives.

Allison’s Book was the first story in a trilogy (never completed) describing the use of new consumer electronic devices in the near future (long past now). This was written I think around 1991-92 and describes events in the distant technological wilds of 1998. Suffice to say, it’s now 2010 and we’re still not there. Keep in mind, this was written just shortly after the Apple Newton appeared and long before things like iCal (2002), the consumer Internet, browsers, the iPod, desktop / mobile synchronization, home networks, etc. were in play.

It would be pretty funny if the name I used for Allison’s Book – the iBook – did in fact turn out to be the case. Gruber likes it.

It is the year 1998.

School is starting in another week and Allison has, like the other tenth graders at her school, appeared to collect her textbooks for the year. She’s on her bike. That’s no problem because her textbooks – everything she will need for the year, including all referenced texts, workbooks, and quizzes – are given to her on a small disk that costs her about $20. She fills out the check provided by her mother, drops the disk in her small school bag over her shoulder – where it will be carried with her the entire year – and heads back home to peruse the year’s texts.

Allison’s new school disk can be read by either her desktop computer in her room, or her portable electronic book she was provided with by her school her first year there. The day is nice so she heads for the front porch swing with the portable. This machine can be held in the hand or propped in the lap much like any book. It runs on rechargeable batteries charged by the holder on her desk in her room. The iBook ¹, as the kids so fondly refer to it, has two screens, both color and both as easy to read as the books still on the shelves in her parents house – easier in fact, because the screen adjusts its backlighting automatically for the ambient light, even in a dark room or bright sunlight.
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Success Breeds Complexity

Posted in Latest, News, Thoughts - - tim

I’m usually not one for predictions, but I’m going to go out on a limb here regarding Apple’s much fretted over announcement next week and make a bet.

Gartner says that downloads (not sales) of iPhone apps topped 3 billion recently. I’d like to know the distribution curve of active apps per phone (net of apps tried and then deleted) because if others out there are like me the original methods for managing apps have not kept up with the complexity of now having dozens of current apps.

The last major iPhone OS upgrade brought us the ability to search and shuffle apps around screens via the iTunes interface, but both seem like a patch and far short of Apple’s usual attention to detail. Given that new rumors have significant upgrades to iLife as well as a potential OS 4 for the phone, my bet is (I hope) that they have put some serious effort against application management both on the phone and via iTunes.

I don’t have a jailbroken phone, but there are a number of third party hacks which play with concepts of folders and other forms of familiar organization. The phone obviously has a file system hierarchy (it is OS X at heart) but it is not exposed. Just as OS X finder windows have four modes for viewing the file system (icons – basically the iPhone interface – list, columns and coverflow) then it seems like Apple could devise selectable alternate views of the file system and allow users to organize not only their application content but even their data content a little more flexibly. If the default view remained as it is now, and the ability to switch to more flexible modes was subtle, then I don’t think this would freak out those who don’t want complexity surfaced too much.

Apple has obviously noticed this issue, and they certainly don’t want to be the bottleneck in their own app sales / distribution ecosystem, so I’m betting we see changes here, and I hope they’re fairly dramatic, but with a simple opt-in for those with dozens – or soon hundreds – of apps.

The Coke Machine Network

Posted in Latest, Thoughts - January 16, 2010 - tim

I travel to the South a couple of times a year and since there seem to be far more McDonald’s than Starbucks out in the wilds of Tennessee and Mississippi I have often pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot for their $2.95 / 2 hours Wifi deal – to reconnect to civilization.

Now, McDonald’s is opening up their network – and rapidly – as a free service.

Which is great, and reminded me of the following:

Back in the late nineties I got to know Jeff Dunn, then President of Coca-Cola NA when we were pitching them. We had a couple of discussions about the interactive landscape and at one point he asked me a really great question.

“How many Coca-Cola machines do you think there are in North America?”

“No idea,” I said. (It’s still a hard number to pin down and I still don’t have a good answer.)

“I’m not going to tell you,” Jeff said, “but here’s my question: what would you do with them?”.

And he basically escorted me out with that.

I mulled this over a while. Asked a few other people. No brilliant ideas. So I came up with a simple list of “facts”:

1. There are a lot.
2. They have a “density” that is probably proportionate to population.
3. They are located in a lot of interesting places – including businesses, schools, colleges, public spaces, gas stations.
4. They function as both a vending mechanism, and a branding / advertising mechanism.
5. They occupy physical space – about a meter square footprint, and in many cases the airspace above.
6. They are powered.

About two weeks after I met with Jeff I wrote him a letter with my answer:

Create the Coke Network.

Basically, the idea was this: use the physical container of the basic Coke machine (either retrofit existing machines or proactively fit new machines) to include a Wifi hotspot. For some machines you’d have to hardwire to the net. For others – given the density of Coke machines especially in urban areas – they might be able to wirelessly connect and extend each other.

I still don’t have any idea how many Coke machines there are in North America, or what technical limitations you’d hit to implement something like this, but from a marketing / branding perspective it’s a very tantalizing concept for me. And similar to what Starbucks and McDonald’s have done – but potentially much, much more interesting.

Imagine traveling and sniffing for hotspots on the go. Odds are you would pick up a Coke machine – or a dozen – damn near everywhere. The sign in page would be one big Coke ad / brand impression, and the deals you could cook up (like the Starbucks card) would be endless. Buy a Coke, get 15 minutes of Wifi. Or, to take it way out there, buy a Coke from your web interface and it pops out of the machine. Or, to go crazy / social / wacky, buy a Coke on a random machine and have it pop out (what was the old campaign? “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.”)

A pipe-dream obviously. But this is the kind of technology-meets-branding/advertising that really turns me on. Not more bullshit product placement, or Flash campaigns, or any other old media translated to online nonsense.

Lots of corporations – especially consumer goods – should consider how they could create a “platform” of sorts. But most don’t have a clue, or it’s just too much of a stretch for the product or category. But Coke and the Coke Network? Coke actually has this amazing physical “footprint” that makes even pervasive retailers (like Starbucks) look sparse. If they did something like that I for one would be damned seriously impressed.

Amsterdam Talk

Posted in Latest, Thoughts, Tim Portfolio, Work - January 14, 2010 - tim

A few people have requested copies of the talk I gave last year in Amsterdam, so here it is:

Flush

Posted in Latest, Thoughts - January 13, 2010 - tim

I’m not a big fan of Flash.

One day when I have the time I’ll try to write down all the reasons why. Dispassionately.

In the meantime I was pleased to see my old business partner Joel Hladecek write a veritable tome on a simple app I turned him on to that disabled Flash on websites – and the psychological impact thereof. On him at least (but I agree).

His, as usual, impeccable analysis can be found here.

The app I recommended (which is brilliant) can be found here.

How Hard?

Posted in Latest, Thoughts - - tim

My 8 year old son, for some strange reason, has taken up massage, and practicing on his parents. This is often to try to mollify us for some reason, but it’s not a bad strategy. And his Mom is a complete sucker.

He’s strong for his age (thanks in part to constant sports) and so he’s developed a curious technique that I’ve never seen before but I think it’s interesting. And simple.

Before he does anything he holds out his hand and says “how hard?”.

You, the massagee, then squeeze his hand to indicate the intensity you’d like – hard, or soft.

Almost everything, for me, being a metaphor for design it strikes me what a simple up-front context-setting mechanism this is. I’ve written before about the brilliance of the ATM language selection trick (i.e. “Enter PIN and press enter” in multiple languages – by selecting one, you also select your language without even really knowing it) and this is in that vein – not only does the masseuse get a key instruction from the subject, but there is also an initial contact – a handshake. Subtle but elegant. It also sends a signal to the recipient that they are basically in charge right up front.

How many applications – web, desktop, mobile, etc. – start with any sort of context-setting, power-acknowledging, insta-win like this? That’s the interesting question my kid’s technique raised. In strategy sessions with clients I have often tried to pitch up-front context setting mechanisms, but have often (most of the time in fact) been hit with the “we have to set our context first – who we are, what we do, why they should, etc. This feels a bit like the old broadcast one-way mass messaging mentality we still, as a society increasingly surrounded by peer-to-peer interactive media, lead with. More and more, when a client asks for an interesting messaging approach for a new web site or application or tool, I think first about how we could turn the tables and give the user not so much a first impression, but a first action.

How hard?

My son’s technique is elegant because it accomplishes a couple of things at the same time. And it’s simple. The trick in translating this to a consumer site or app is how to keep it simple (without feeling invasive from a privacy perspective) yet effective (from a response perspective). The best example I can think of in contemporary apps is the common location bug on GPS enabled devices like the iPhone. Touch the icon, set the context. Yeah, you’re giving up your location, but the app (if it’s worth a damn) returns something much more powerful than before.

I haven’t given a talk in 5-6 years that wasn’t at least in part about the power shift from “broadcaster” to “user” (to whit) so the concept of leading an interaction with a context-setting opportunity for the user – before or at least simultaneous with the chest-beating part – is one I like.

I’d be interested to hear about radical examples of this out there. Besides Google

CES in 3 Ideas: Thin, 3D, 3rd World

Posted in Latest, News, Thoughts - - tim

Just back from CES in Vegas. The pundits called this one: it was definitely the year for thin devices (physically) – especially TV’s – and 3D TV in particular. The length manufacturers are going to reduce the Z dimension of television sets is pretty remarkable. When you have a 50″+ set that is only 6.9mm thin (see photo of LG LED Ultra Slim) then you can’t help but think that you could easily flush mount these things in the wall without even cutting into studs.

Everyone’s on the Z-axis reduction plan: televisions, phones, laptops, tablets, etc. Displays were cleverly designed to accommodate everyone taking photos from the side.

The other big predicted story was 3D. I was pretty cool to the idea going into the show, but I was frankly blown away by a few demos. The 3D TV contenders varied wildly, which was surprising: some were breathtaking, while others were just painfully bad. Interestingly the best execution I saw (I think it was LG) used shutterless glasses (i.e. not powered and/or tethered to the unit) – the type of glasses you wear when you see Avatar. After looking at about a dozen of these things I can actually imagine sitting in my living room with glasses on – something I would not have even entertained going into the show. I do worry about what 4 hours of 3D viewing might do to people though – I think I’d have a migraine.

Where this gets really interesting of course is in gaming. Probably the most compelling 3D demo I saw was by Nvidia running a first person shooter on three screens (with tethered shuttered glasses). Running through a jungle shooting guns in 3D is undeniably going to be a big hit. There goes our future. (Try getting your kid into college after 5 years of that …).

Finally, a CES revelation for me personally. I’ve gone to the show a number of years and usually restricted my usually brief visit to the major floors and major brands. This year a co-conspiritor and I found and spent an inordinate amount of time digging into the bizarre edges of the conference – where the 2nd and 3rd world tech providers lurk in their tiny booths hawking —- parts. While the big floor showcase brands are demoing finished consumer products (this is CES) with loud music, ridiculous ploys, demo babes, et. al. the parts guys are talking up the components that make those things magic. Being a build vs. buy kind of guy anyway I found the experience of canvassing component innovation much more interesting than finished product innovation. If anything, the component story – the crazy new things happening at the component level – is a bellweather for what the finished products might be like next year – or even later. (Remember, OLED, enthusiastically promoted this year by Samsung and others in new products, was just a proof of concept in the “parts department” of CES in past years. As was 3D TV.)

A few iPhone photos from the show attached.