Category: hci

Apple’s UX Strategy: I Want To Hold Your Hand

Published June 15, 2010 by cgerrish

A few thoughts about the iPhone 4 and why technology does or doesn’t catch on. I’ve yet to hold one in my hand, but like everyone else I’ve got opinions. The typical gadget review takes the device’s feature list and compares using technical measures to other devices deemed competitive. Using this methodology, it would be fairly simple to dismiss the iPhone as introducing no new features. The other lines of attack involve dropped calls on the AT&T network and the App Store approval process. For some people these two items trump any feature or user experience.

Google talks about their mission as organizing the world’s information. When I think of Apple’s mission, at least their mission for the last five years or so, it revolves around getting closer to the user in real time. The technology they build flows from that principle.

I’d like to focus on just two new iPhone 4 features. The first is the new display, here’s John Gruber’s description:

It’s mentioned briefly in Apple’s promotional video about the design of the iPhone 4, but they’re using a new production process that effectively fuses the LCD and touchscreen — there is no longer any air between the two. One result of this is that the iPhone 4 should be impervious to this dust-under-the-glass issue. More importantly, though, is that it looks better. The effect is that the pixels appear to be painted on the surface of the phone; instead of looking at pixels under glass, it’s like looking at pixels on glass. Combined with the incredibly high pixel density, the overall effect is like “live print�?.

The phrase that jumped out at me was “the pixels appear to be painted on the surface of the phone; instead of looking at pixels under glass.” While it seems like a small distance, a minor detail, it’s of the utmost importance. It’s the difference between touching something and touching the glass that stands in front of something. Putting the user physically in touch with the interaction surface is a major breakthrough in the emotional value of the user experience. Of course the engineering that made this kind of display is important, but it’s the design decision to get the device ever closer to the user that drove the creation of the technology. Touch creates an emotional relationship with the device, and that makes it more than just a telephone.

In a 2007 interview at the D5 conference, Steve Jobs said:

And, you know, I think of most things in life as either a Bob Dylan or a Beatles song, but there’s that one line in that one Beatles song, “you and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

You could say that Apple’s strategy is encapsulated in the Beatles song: I Want To Hold Your Hand.

The lines that describe the feeling Jobs wants the iPhone and iPad to create are:

And when I touch you i feel happy, inside
It´s such a feeling
That my love
I can’t hide
I can’t hide
I can’t hide

The other new feature is FaceTime. Since the launch of the iPhone 3GS it’s been possible to shoot a video of something and then email it to someone, or post it to a network location that friends and family could access. Other phones had this same capability. That’s a real nice feature in an asynchronous sort of way. One of the problems with it is it has too many steps and it doesn’t work the way telephones work. Except when things are highly dysfunctional, we don’t send each other recorded audio messages to be retrieved later at a convenient time. We want to talk in real time. FaceTime allows talk + visuals in real time.

FaceTime uses phone numbers as the identity layer and works over WiFi with iPhone 4 devices only. That makes it perfectly clear under what circumstances these kind of video calls will work. Device model and kind of connectivity are only things a user needs to know. These constraints sound very limiting, but they dispel any ambiguity around the question of whether the user will be able to get video calls to work or not.

We often look to the network effect to explain the success of a product or a new platform. Has the product reached critical mass, where by virtue of its size and connectedness it continues to expand because new users gain immediate value from its scale. The network must absolutely be in place, but as we look at this window into our new virtual world, the question is: does the product put us in touch, in high definition, in real time? The more FaceTime calls that are made, the more FaceTime calls will be made. But the system will provide full value at the point when a few family members can talk to each other. Critical mass occurs at two.

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Human Factors: Zero, One, Infinity

Published May 31, 2010 by cgerrish

Software is often designed with three “numbers” in mind: zero, one and infinity. In this case, infinity tends to mean that a value can be any number. There’s no reason to put random or artificial limits on what a number might be. This idea that any number might do is at the bottom of what some people call information overload. For instance, we can very easily build a User Managed Access (UMA) system with infinite reach and granularity. Facebook, while trying to respond to a broad set of use cases, produced an access control / authorization system that answered these use cases with a complex control panel. Facebook users largely ignored it, choosing instead to wait until something smaller and more usable came along.

Allow none of foo, one of foo, or any number of foo.

Privacy is another way of saying access control or authorization. We tend to think about privacy as personal information that is unconnected, kept in a vault that we control. When information escapes across these boundaries without our knowledge, we call this a data breach. This model of thinking is suitable for secrets that are physically encoded on paper or the surface of some other physical object. Drama is injected into this model when a message is converted to a secret code and transmitted. The other dramatic model is played out in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, where a secret is committed to human memory.

Personal information encoded in electronic communications systems on the Network is always already outside of your personal control. This idea of vaults and breaching boundaries is a metaphor imported from a alien landscape. When we talk about privacy in the context of the Network, it’s more a matter of knowing who or what has access to your personal information; who or what can authorize access to your personal information; and how this leg is connected to the rest of the Network. Of course, one need only Google oneself, or take advantage of any of the numerous identity search engines to see how much of the cat is already out of the bag.

The question arises, how much control do we want over our electronic personal information residing on the Network? Each day we throw off streams of data as we watch cable television, buy things with credit cards, use our discount cards at the grocery, transfer money from one account to another, use Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. The appliances in our homes have unique electrical energy-use signatures that can be recorded as we turn on the blender, the toaster or the lights in the hallway.

In some sense, we might be attempting to recreate a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system that correlates all data that can be linked to our identity. Can you imagine managing the access controls for all these streams of data? It would be rather like having to consciously manage all the biological systems of our body. A single person probably couldn’t manage the task, we’d need to bring on a staff to take care of all the millions of details.

Total Information Awareness would be achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social network analysis, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant. This information would then be analyzed to look for suspicious activities, connections between individuals, and “threats”. Additionally, the program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras, and other methods.

Here we need to begin thinking about human numbers, rather than abstract numbers. When we talk about human factors in a human-computer interaction, generally we’re wondering how flexible humans might be in adapting to the requirements of a computer system. The reason for this is that humans are more flexible and adapt much more quickly than computers. Tracing the adaptation of computers to humans shows that computers haven’t really made much progress.

Think about how humans process the visual information entering our system through our eyes. We ignore a very high percentage of it. We have to or we would be completely unable to focus on the tasks of survival. When you think about the things we can truly focus our attention on at any one time, they’re fewer than the fingers on one hand. We don’t want total consciousness of the ocean of data in which we swim. Much like the Total Information Awareness system, we really only care about threats and opportunities. And the reality, as Jeff Jonas notes, is that while we can record and store boundless amounts of data— we have very little ability to make sense of it.

Man continues to chase the notion that systems should be capable of digesting daunting volumes of data and making sufficient sense of this data such that novel, specific, and accurate insight can be derived without direct human involvement. While there are many major breakthroughs in computation and storage, advances in sensemaking systems have not enjoyed the same significant gains.

When we admire simplicity in design, we enjoy finding a set of interactions with a human scale. We see an elegant proportion between the conscious and the unconscious elements of a system. The unconscious aspects of the system only surface at the right moment, in the right context. A newly surfaced aspect displaces another item to keep the size of focus roughly the same. Jeff Jonas advocates designing systems that engage in perpetual analytics, always observing the context to understand what’s changed, the unconscious cloud is always changing to reflect the possibilities of the conscious context.

We’re starting to see the beginnings of this model emerge in location-aware devices like the iPhone and iPad. Mobile computing applications are constantly asking about location context in order to find relevant information streams. Generally, an app provides a focused context in which to orchestrate unconscious clouds of data. It’s this balance between the conscious and the unconscious that will define the new era of applications. We’ll be drawn to applications and platforms, that are built with human dimensions— that mimic, in their structure, the way the human mind works.

Our lives are filled with infinities, but we can only live them because they are hidden.

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Reflections On The Shape I’m In

Published April 2, 2010 by cgerrish

The idea of a ‘MirrorWorld’ is very powerful metaphorically. It’s as though the vital and valuable parts of our world are taking root in the Network and creating— not a shadow existence, but a reflection of the shape of our lives. The personal computer has been the portal through which we viewed this reflection. It’s also been the tool we used to build this reflecting pond.

It occurred to me that the iPad is responding to the evolving shape of the Network. We think of augmented reality as something written on top of the base field of the reality around us. The Network, in the sense that it reflects our lived world, is already an augmentation of reality. The portal to that real-time reflection looks more and more like an iPad, and less and less like a personal computer. Perhaps we’re in an in-between state— we don’t yet know the shape we’re in.

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Unfolding the Fabric of the Transaction Surface

Published March 22, 2010 by cgerrish

The transposition of the metaphor of spatial relationships to the realm of computing gave us purchase, a foothold, on things and how they might be organized. Our personal computers were envisioned as very large file cabinets. The size of the cabinet was proportional to the size of the hard drive attached to the CPU. As the primary connection for storage systems moved to remote network-attached systems, the cabinet has grown to an enormous size, but the organizational metaphor remains unchanged.

While capacities seem almost limitless in the “consumer” computing space, in the enterprise there are limits everywhere. The corporate enterprise’s limitation on the size of these file drawers has resulted in the phenomena of email jail. A stream of email is constantly coming in to your mail reader, but the size of your mailbox is finite. Once the box is full, the stream is shut off until you create space in your mailbox by deleting a sufficient number of messages.

It may have been Gmail that introduced the idea that nothing needs to be deleted ever. The stream of mail comes in: we look at it, ignore it, act on it, search for it, view it in threads— but we don’t need to manage the number of messages in a mailbox of limited dimensions. A stream flows into a larger river and then into the ocean. The world of social media has given us a variety of new streams with which to work. Oddly, none of them have the basic toolset that the Gmail stream offered right out of the gate.

As we begin to think about how to work with streams, we flip from metaphors of spatial organization to temporal schemes. The stream doesn’t empty into an ocean, but rather always remains an event embedded in the stream of time. The control set we seek comes from the world of digital audio/video. Jump to a point in the time line, fast forward, rewind, zoom in, give me the alternate audio channel, jump to a live real-time view. Largely, the metaphors we use in these thought experiments have been checked out from the library of physics. We move from space to time, but perhaps we really move to the space-time continuum. It’s here that the term fabric is introduced to describe the medium within which we swim.

At this point I’d to change the focus slightly and look at the fabric of the transaction surface of the Network. While cash money is generally acceptable at every transaction point in our daily lives, the Network doesn’t have an analog. Credit/Debit cards and PayPal seem to be the primary transaction networks through which goods can be purchased or money can change hands. If you were to imagine the set of points in physical and Network space where electronic monetary transactions are possible, you’d have a map with a rather sparse distribution.

While money itself is an abstraction of commodity, in its physical form, as bills and coins, it has not been able to make the leap from our lived physical world to our lived Network world. Cash almost defines the quality of fungibility. And while digital bits can be re-arranged to represent seemingly any form within computational space, there is no digital representation of cash that maintains its fungibility.

The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the material for the expression of their values, or to represent their values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively equal, and quantitatively comparable. It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money.

It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realized human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time.

-Karl Marx, Capital

Bank of America’s Keep The Change program introduced an interesting innovation into the transaction point. While it’s been lauded for its use of behavioral economics theory in spurring its customers to save more, the program’s technical implementation suggests some interesting possibilities. In general, this program has expanded the fabric of the transaction surface for routing funds to savings by giving every purchase point the ability to apply a portion of the transaction total to a designated savings account. The number of nodes on this private network through which savings can occur is radically expanded.

While currently Keep The Change limits the funds routed through this method to the difference between the purchase price and the next whole dollar, there’s no reason that any amount couldn’t be routed through this same channel. Just as we can now use ATM/Debit cards to withdraw cash along with a purchase, this program already has the primitives in place to allow deposits anywhere a card is accepted. The limitation on this model is that transactions can only occur at official nodes of the private network.

The App Store application on the iPhone has had a similar effect in expanding the fabric of the transaction surface. Historically software was purchased in shrink-wrapped boxes from a retail store or via catalog mail order. Software delivered over the wire to the desktop expanded the transaction surface tremendously. The iPhone App Store radically expands the surface, it delivers software and completes transactions wirelessly to any location with signal. Two friends meet over coffee at a local cafe. They discuss their favorite new apps. While they talk, each purchases and downloads the new apps that tickled their fancy. And an “App” might be a game, a word processor, a social media client, a news media client, a book, a song, a musical instrument, a video of a baseball game or an application that let’s them broadcast live video and audio commentary from their table in the cafe.

Jack Dorsey’s new venture Square has the potential to build on the iPhone’s platform. While the App Store has defined the model for delivering digital goods and services, and is now being widely copied, Square potentially turns every iPhone into a node on the private credit card payment network. As a purchaser, it provides enhanced identity artifacts, and as a seller it simplifies access to the private electronic payment routing system. And while the specified accounts may start with credit cards, there’s no reason that regular bank or brokerage accounts, telecom accounts, cable television, or bandwidth accounts couldn’t be endpoints in the future. There’s a real potential for another radical expansion of the transaction surface.

Each of these innovations reduces the amount of friction on the transaction surface. The obstacles between the desire and the object of desire are removed. By activating the iPhone/iPod Touch as both a product delivery/consumption channel and a node on the electronic payment routing system, the fabric of the transaction surface gains 78 million new nodes. The small screen that you carry with you replaces the fixed screen wired to a specific location. And as this surface unfolds into the world around us, more and more transactions will be routed via electronic message. This stream of data has been largely represented as a transaction log, an audit trail. Services like Square will allow the attachment of a micro-message and photo/audio/video file to each side of the transaction and ultimately the ability to route an item to the private side of your stream management client. Need the receipt, the warranty, the assembly instructions, the nearest service center? It’s all there, in your lifestream.

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