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Category: interaction design

Until Now, Your Phone’s UI Has Been Designed by a Pipe

Published January 10, 2008 by cgerrish

iPhone

Nice article on Wired about the creation of the iPhone. The significance of Apple’s phone is that it changed the relationship between the pipe and the end user interface (the phone). Phones were disposable, a loss leader, the pipe was the thing. It was all about the wires. But the reality is that feature upon feature was piled on to an awful user interface. When you look at the ratio of features to features used, there was no real value there. An unused, or worse an unusable, feature is a negative when calculating value. And it’s not that you didn’t want to surf the web on your phone, it just wasn’t any fun.

This is not a Pipe 

The big pile of unusable features that were crammed into your phone were designed by a pipe. The iPhone has changed that, the ratio of features to features used? Almost 1:1, and the world of web-based apps is just beginning. This is definitely not a pipe.

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Yahoo: This is Your Brain on Music

Published January 9, 2008 by cgerrish

This new MP3 player from Yahoo is a beautiful thing. It’s early yet, but this is the kind widget that will bring Yahoo back into the center of things. Arrington says they have some big plans for music, and music is a great place to start. And it all goes back to this blog post by Ian Rogers with the memorable quote: “Inconvenience doesn’t scale.”The player is written as unobtrusive javascript, so it’s simple to add to a page. It recognizes MP3 links and layers itself over the layout. I need to play with it a little more, but it looks like a very well thought out implementation.The reason to focus on music? Music changed Apple Computer to Apple. It introduced millions of users to Apple software and Macintosh. If Yahoo can get some things right with music, it will go a long way. To understand the elemental force of music, read “This is Your Brain on Music.” 

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Scoble Erased: If only there were some kind of data Bank

Published January 5, 2008 by cgerrish

Robert Scoble complains about being erased. Or rather the data and content that he put on Facebook ceased to exist to the extend that he no longer had access to or control over it. We can talk all we want about how our attention data, social graph, personal data and created content is ours and we should have absolute and continuous access to it; in addition, we should be able to move it and leverage it in other contexts. This ignores the economics of the capture and storing of that data. The cost is not zero. If it were we could do it for ourselves.

And that I suppose is the point. We trade that data for a service, value traded for value. If Scoble doesn’t want to be erased, why not record a copy of everything he puts into a commercial website? He could keep it on a local hard drive or a network storage service. Or perhaps in some kind of gesture bank, where he could trade its value for goods and services.

Scoble needs to remember that it’s not really his, unless he invests in making it his.

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The End of the Mechanical Keyboard: KVM begins its Transformation

Published January 4, 2008 by cgerrish

There have been a couple of stories about this recent Apple patent filing on a new keyboard. It’s great to see some innovation on such a basic input device. The keyboard has been static for much too long. Most folks are pointing to Art Lebedev’s Optimus Maximus keyboard as a source. The demo is quite impressive. Apple is in a unique position to make some progress in this area, just as they were able to move the ball on the innovations developed at Xerox Parc. This is the beginning of the end of the mechanical keyboard. Once the keyboard becomes software and the screen becomes multi-touch, a whole new era of human-computer interaction is enabled. KVM begins its historic transformation.

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