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Category: interaction design

Terminal Imagination: Doug Engelbart and Human/Computer Interface

Published March 11, 2008 by cgerrish

John Markoff’s article in the Sunday Times about PicLens Software from Cool Iris is a nice preview of the evolution of the human-computer interface. I like Doug Engelbart as much as the next guy, but you’d think we could move beyond 1968, the icon, the mouse and the window. Multi-touch, Surface, Coverflow and PicLens point the way toward other methods of navigating through collections of objects.

The point of interest for me is that PicLens was written for the web, not the desktop. And not the web of the browser window, but a space outside of that comfortable frame. Once the web becomes the primary environment for innovation in human/computer interaction, the function of the desktop changes. Even the metaphor of a “desktop” starts to make less sense.

There are many examples of terminal imaginations, visions so strong and so complete they leave no oxygen for followers. Shakespeare, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett left no room for others. (See Bloom’s Ruin the Sacred Truths) Engelbart’s vision has dominated a generation.

As the network is extended to more devices and more locations, historically this has meant a return to cruder interaction models. The introduction and success of the iPhone may have broken the pattern, it actually expands the available modes of interaction over the desktop. We are at the edge of an expansion of our interaction models; it’s generational, and digital natives will have to carry the torch.

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Preserving the random with coarse-grained filters in Twitter

Published February 23, 2008 by cgerrish

One of the frustrations people have with Twitter is its simplicity. Twitter is an authoring environment for hypertext limited to 140 characters and a method of publishing and subscribing to an almost unlimited combination of social graphs. It achieves some complexity through its API, which allows it to be mashed up with other applications. In this sense it adheres to David Weinberger’s idea of “small pieces loosely joined.”

Twitter’s simplicity means the barrier to getting started is very low, register an identity, type 140 characters and click “update.” Understanding the value of Twitter doesn’t come until later. Non-users and new users can’t actually experience Twitter. The public timeline is there as an example, but to generalize and form opinions based on this evidence would lead one solidly in the wrong direction. The public timeline could potentially be decoded, but it’s a task very similar to spending time with Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Anna Livia Plurabelle and dream logic of Finnegan’s Wake. Or as James Joyce put it: Here comes everybody.

Veteran users of Twitter experience something very different from the public timeline. And it’s those regular users who begin to long for more controls, more features to help them refine their Twitter experience. Generally this is expressed through a desire to configure and define groups within the larger pools of the followed and the followers. By concisely defining groups a Twitter user could get exactly what she wanted.

But getting “exactly what you want” is exactly what you don’t want. Fine grained controls and filters are generally used to focus on common interests and concerns. The result is pre-defining the message flow you receive, creating an echo chamber. Random and negative feedback have an important role the health and stability of any dynamic organic system. When Twitter only brings you what you expect, it loses its value.

Twitter will grow new features, all applications do. But what if, rather than think in terms of precision, exactness and clarity; we thought of coarseness, randomness and ambiguity. What kind of coarse grained filters would preserve the random in a users Twitter stream? The seed for this rumination was inspired by a conversation on @Newsgang Live about squelch as metaphor for filtering Twitter streams. Imagine filtering the stream based on frequency of tweets, or location of tweets. By tuning into quadrants of the Twitterverse with coarse-grained filters new voices could be discovered. So often we think in terms of signal versus noise, but when we think of noise perhaps we should take a lesson, and listen with the zen ears of John Cage.

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Design Thinking: Zeldman to Buxton to Gillmor

Published January 16, 2008 by cgerrish

This thread of thought bounced from Zeldman to Buxton to Gillmor.

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote a post about how Apple should hire itself out to fix the awful state of user interface in a number of devices. My immediate reaction was that there’s no reason that good UI should be unique to Apple. Jobs and Ive just start at a different point than most manufacturers. The question really comes down to where the power lies with regard to design thinking in an organization, and at what level design decisions are made (or not made). At Apple the answer is very clear.

This lead me to a lecture by Bill Buxton at Stanford’s HCI program. I wasn’t able to attend in person, but a video of Buxton’s lecture is available through iTunes University. Buxton’s lecture provides the link between industrial design and software interface design– the interface is now part of the form factor. Buxton has been hired to change the design culture of Microsoft. That’s a tall order, but I give them credit for bringing Buxton on board. His ideas about understanding the transitions between states, and the journey from sketching to prototype are very important.

Steve Gillmor chronicles the transition of software applications from the hard drive to the cache / cloud. His latest prediction is that Silverlight will become the rich internet application runtime of choice for the new MacBook Air and the iPhone. Clearly it won’t be Flash or Java. The Ajax apps are already there, but more richness is always better. If Microsoft plays it right, they could find a path into their next incarnation. MS Office may be dead, but Ray Ozzie’s Live Office is yet to be born.

The reason that no phone or computer manufacturer can compete with Apple is they don’t understand what design thinking is or why it’s important to their organization. Phones are designed by a set of pipes, the telecommunications network makes the design decisions. Computer and software interface design is still dominated by the hardware, it’s designed back to front. Until the value of design is understood, and the hardware stops designing the software, Apple will have no competition. It’s all about the ratio of features to features used. Apple leads the field by a mile.

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Air: The Difference between Broadcast and Servers

Published January 15, 2008 by cgerrish

We can connect to servers wirelessly, and that’s a kind of air. But when we broadcast over the air, it’s entirely different. When broadcasting content over the air, you don’t care how many receivers are taking in the signal. When listening with a web server, the number of requests for content matter a lot.  A good example is what happened to Twitter or many of the blogs during Steve Jobs’s MacWorld keynote. Twitter went down, and many of the blogs covering the event were slow or unreachable. It’s the finite and the infinite, a fundamental difference in the way communications channels scale.

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