Category: real time web

A Little Bit Louder Now…

Published March 7, 2010 by cgerrish

We move from one metaphor to its opposite, swinging like the bob on a pendulum. As our daily activities start throwing off streams of data, and we aggregate the data of others into composite parallel streams for our consumption— we look across the great divide and gaze at the old metaphor of files, folders, explorer/finder and the desktop. We hop back and forth between the metaphors, juggling streams and file folders. Wondering at what point will we leap across the chasm— and be mostly here in the stream, instead of mostly there on the desktop.

Personal computing is largely a matter of time and where the user spends it. Using applications to manipulate files located in folders has dominated our computing experience for a long while. Perhaps it was the steady stream of emails filling up our inboxes that provided the bridge to the stream of tweets flowing through our selective view of the consolidated lifestream. The metaphor of a desktop, folders and files gave us a handle for managing digital things inside the world of personal computing. A user might have a messy desktop or clean one. One could use up energy keeping things organized, putting them away in the proper folder— or allow them to become messy and spend energy finding things amidst the chaos.

The Desktop, folder, file model corresponds to the outline. Other words we might use to describe this kind of formation include hierarchy, name space or tree structure. The problem with things is that they don’t seem to know where they belong. They don’t take the initiative, always have to be told what to do. But, as long as the numbers stay small— not too many files or folders; not too many streams, or too much velocity, we can manage on either side of chasm. However, to stay small in this context means to exclude possibility. And once the numbers get large, the amount of energy required to keep things organized in outlines exceeds the value derived from the organization.

As David Weinberger points out in his book Everything is Miscellaneous, search transformed the value of the outline as a system of organization. Once everything has been indexed, sorted and ranked by algorithm, the findability of a thing doesn’t depend on its place in a hierarchy of categorization. This was a transition from organization based on the metaphor of extension in physical space to the random access metaphor of computational space.

Moving from Space to Time is another kind of transition. David Gelernter is one of the few who has spent time thinking about organization based on time and stream. Why should we have to give names to digital files or assign them to folders? Can’t things just take the initiative?

Once we shift the axis of organization from Space to Time, we begin to think about how we could relate to dynamic flows of information. We glance again at outlines, files and folder systems. The numbers are too big, if we look a the problem through that lens we’re inevitably lead to the view that there’s information overload. Clay Shirky rebuts that claim, and calls it filter failure. But a filter is only one of the tools we’re missing. The spatial metaphor can’t even give us the basic steps to dance to the music of time. We need a different starting point. Gelernter, in his essay “Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously” improvises on a theme:

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

18. Nearly all flowing, changing information on the Internet will move through streams. You will be able to gather and blend together all the streams that interest you. Streams of world news or news about your friends, streams that describe prices or auctions or new findings in any field, or traffic, weather, markets — they will all be gathered and blended into one stream. Then your own personal lifestream will be added. The result is your mainstream: different from all others; a fast-moving river of all the digital information you care about.

19. You can turn a knob and slow down your mainstream: less-important stream-elements will flow past invisibly and won’t distract you, but will remain in the stream and appear when you search for them. You can rewind your lifestream and review the past. If an important-looking document or message sails past and you have no time to deal with it now, you can copy the document or message into the future (copy it to “this evening at 10,” say); when the future arrives, the document appears again. You can turn a different knob to make your fast-flowing stream spread out into several slower streams, if you have space enough on your screen to watch them all. And you can gather those separate streams back together whenever you like.

So, what does the toolset look like? Filters are a part of it. We’ll want to filter the stream based on keywords, selected social circles, location, time period, velocity of flow, media type of hyperlinked citation, authority of a person in particular slice and more. The results of a filtered stream will look like the surfacing of particular elements of the stream and the backgrounding of others. Stream splicing is a pre-requisite of filtering, blending together a bunch of streams doesn’t result in information overload if you have the right tools at your command. You’ll be able to filter and pause; go to super slo-motion; fast foward and even loop a section, manage public and private streams in the same workspace, mix recorded on-demand tracks with live real-time feeds and add in your own commentary in a live chat running alongside.

Music may provide the most developed set of metaphors to think this new landscape through. Here’s Thelonius Monk stream splicing:

Here’s Michael Tilson Thomas blending streams, pulling themes to the surface, modulating the information as it flows past:

The blends and modulations can be sophisticated and complex or rough and full of energy. Some lads from Liverpool get a little bit louder now:

When Gelernter describes the process of searching for ‘snow’ in the composite stream, he gets to the difference between search and track. Search was built on the ability to spider the corpus of web pages and links, build an index, and provide ranked results in response to queries. Track is a tool to help us manage and explore the real-time stream. The days of the world wide web conceived as a static set of hyperlinked pages are coming to an end. The file is a finished product, the stream is always unfinished. Gelernter describes the emergent new cyberstructure:

13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The “velocity of information” is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today’s typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it’s not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure.

14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.

Your connection to the item in a stream is open ended— the flow is open, or it is closed. If it is open, there’ll be a next item, and one after that. All these items are unfinished, they need response, routing, to be ignored, or decorated with gestures. We find ourselves in the in-between moment between the photograph and the motion picture. Our tools are at the level of the zoetrope, the praxinoscope, or the magic lantern. But once we start thinking in terms of Time instead of Space, the world looks very different.

At this moment of transition, we now have the tools to analyze our direction. Are we building tools for the static hierarchical namespace of the world wide web, or building tools for the real-time stream of the Network? If we look at Salesforce’s introduction of Chatter, Google’s introduction of Buzz, the expansions of Facebook and Twitter, FourSquare and GoWalla, the augmentation capabilities of Kynetx— we can see a shift in orientation from Space to Time. And while we might expect the leap across the chasm to require the bravery of the early adopter, I think we’ll be surprised at how natural most people find living in the stream of time to be.

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Antagonyms, Social Circles and Chattering about VRM

Published February 19, 2010 by cgerrish

Throwing all the pieces out on the table, we connect the dots to make pictures. It’s a child’s game, creating figures out what look like a random set of numbered points. We tend to visualize the network of our social graph as a series of connected points. The pictures that emerge from those connections tell a story about our lives and experiences.

One of the interesting things about random sets of dots is that we tend to group them based on proximity, similarity, closure and continuation. We project pictures on to the dots, and once we see a particular picture, sometimes it’s hard to realize that someone might put the same set of dots together into something entirely different. It could even be an image that has the exact opposite meaning as the picture we see.

There are a couple of words used to describe a word that can mean the opposite of itself. Here are some examples of Antagonyms (or Contranyms):

Overlook: to pay attention to, to inspect (“We had time to overlook the contract.”) vs. to ignore

Oversight: Watchful and responsible care vs. An omission or error due to carelessness

It’s the context that tilts the meaning of the word this way or that.

When you think about the set of people you may be connected to within a large company, you can overlay several kinds of connections. A person may be a colleague, they might be in the same division, have the same pay grade, be part of a project, be a friend, or even a relative. In fact, we make a virtue out of the idea that the people we work with could also be our friends. Many companies like to talk about their employees as being like a family.

Google tested their Buzz product inside the walls of their company. No doubt it was used for work, play and a whole range of unforeseen kinds of communication. After a while all those modes of communication began to blend together. The boundaries between them broke down. Just as email and IM are used for personal and business purposes, Buzz would naturally be used in the same way. From a business perspective, the dots were connected into a powerful image of collaboration and efficiency. Twitter/FriendFeed clearly worked great as an enterprise application.

The personal, public and business realms are overlapping images that can be mapped to the same set of dots. However, it’s the exclusive disjunction of these sets that defines the boundaries. In some cases, the boundaries need to be strong and impenetrable. These are the cases Google didn’t consider carefully enough in their launch scenario. Other times a co-worker becomes a friend, or someone you went to school with becomes a colleague. Or maybe you just decided to start following your company’s CEO on Twitter. The context of the interaction tilts the meaning of the connection. There’s not a bright line separating our private, public and business lives that can be applied as a definitive rule.

Google launched Buzz as a consumer product, but tested it as an enterprise product. Although they plan to quickly integrate it into their office application suite. But like all messaging tools it will have a public and a private mode. It will address and contain personal, public and business conversation threads. And by flowing data from a user’s social circle and the real-time flow of Buzz (effectively a ping server) into their search algorithm, results pages can be personalized by social graph in real time.

Meanwhile, SalesForce.com introduces Chatter to the enterprise and rolls it out at no extra charge to all employees on the internal network. And while it will start inside the enterprise, Chatter will quickly expand to the boundaries and begin to cross over. From a business perspective, it’ll be used to turbo-charge collaboration and create real-time communication for project teams and business units. But very quickly you’ll see friends sending messages to each other about meeting up for lunch, and a public-personal communications channel will be opened within the enterprise. And the circles will connect and widen from there.

Here are a couple more Contranyms:

clip (attach to) – clip (cut off from)

cleave (to cut apart) – cleave (to seal together)

Salesforce.com calls itself the leader in Customer Relationship Management and Cloud Computing. Chatter may just be the communication medium that ultimately contains both CRM and its opposite number, VRM. Vendor Relationship Management is a reaction to the data toolsets belonging to the enterprise and not to the individual customer.

In a narrow sense, VRM is the reciprocal — the customer side — of CRM (or Customer Relationship Management). VRM tools provide customers with the means to bear their side of the relationship burden. They relieve CRM of the perceived need to “capture,” “acquire,” “lock in,” “manage,” and otherwise employ the language and thinking of slave-owners when dealing with customers. With VRM operating on the customer’s side, CRM systems will no longer be alone in trying to improve the ways companies relate to customers. Customers will be also be involved, as fully empowered participants, rather than as captive followers.

If you were to think about what kind of infrastructure you’d want to run VRM on, Salesforce.com would be ideal. To run the mirror image of CRM, you need the same set of services and scale. The individual Chatter account could be the doorway to a set of VRM services. I can already see developers using the Force.com platform to populate a VRM app store.

Some corporations will attempt to maximize the business value of each individual worker, stripping out all the extraneous human factors. Chinese walls will be erected to keep the outside from the inside, the personal from the business, and the public from the private. But when you put messaging and communications tools into the hands of people they will find ways to talk to each other— about work, life, play, the project, and the joke they just heard at the water cooler.

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Intuition and The UX of Physics Engines, Both Literal and Imaginary

Published February 16, 2010 by cgerrish

The transition from a store and retrieve computing experience to that of a real-time stream is still rippling through all aspects of our human-computer relationship. At the point of interaction, we’ve moved through punch cards, command lines and graphic user interfaces. We’ve coalesced around the Apple Human Interface Guidelines for installed software, and then splintered in a thousand directions for web-based software. The conservative impulse of the usability movement caused a brief fascination with the plain vanilla HTML 1.0 UI. The advent of vector-animation engines (Flash, then Silverlight) and then Ajax and dynamic HTML (javascript + CSS) exploded the interaction surface into a thousand variations. Taking a cue from 3-D first-person immersion games, the iPhone (and iPad) imported the physics of our every day mechanical interfaces and settled on the metaphor of “reality” for the multi-touch screen interaction surface.

Of course, when we speak of physics, it’s from a very specific perspective. We’re looking at the how the physical world experienced by human beings on the third stone from the Sun. Here we don’t discover physics, but rather we produce a physics by way of a physics engine.

A physics engine is a computer program that simulates physics models, using variables such as mass, velocity, friction, and wind resistance. It can simulate and predict effects under different conditions that would approximate what happens in real life or in a fantasy world. Its main uses are in scientific simulation and in video games.

As a designer of interaction surfaces, I often hear the request for an “intuitive user interface.” Most businesses would like there to be a zero learning curve for their online products. In practice what this means is creating a pastiche of popular interface elements from other web sites. The economics of the “intuitive interface” means this practice is generally replicated with the result of a bland set of interaction models becoming the norm. And once the blessing of “best practice” is bestowed, interaction becomes a modular commodity to be snapped into place on a layout grid. Conformity to the best practice becomes the highest virtue.

Arbitrary interaction metaphors have to be learned. If they’ve been learned elsewhere, so much the better. To the extent that it exists, the user’s intuition is based on previous experiences with the arbitrary symbols of an interaction system. Intuition isn’t magical, it works from a foundation of experience.

With the advent of the iPhone, we’ve slowly been exposed to a new method of bringing intuition into play. The interaction system is simply aligned with the physics and mechanics of the real world. Apple’s human interface guidelines for the iPhone and iPad do exactly this. A simple example is Apple’s design for a personal calendar on the iPad. It looks like a physical personal calendar. The books, look and work like physical books. It’s as though non-euclidean geometry were the norm, and suddenly someone discovered euclidean geometry.

By using the physics and mechanics of the real world as a symbolic interaction framework, a user’s intuition can be put to use immediately. Deep experience with the arbitrary symbolic systems of human-computer interaction isn’t required to be successful. If a user can depend on her everyday experience with objects in the world as the context for interaction; and have an expectation about how the physics of direct manipulation through multi-touch will work, then you have the foundation for an intuitive user interface.

CD-ROM multi-media experiences, moving to immersion-oriented electronic games and virtual worlds like Second Life have started us down this path, but the emergence of the World Wide Web deferred the development of this model in the application space. Of course, there’s a sense in which this isn’t what we’ve come to know as web site design at all. Once you eliminate the keyboard, mouse and documents as the primary modes of interaction, and substitute direct manipulation via multi-touch things change rapidly. The base metaphor of real life spawns an unlimited variety of possible interaction metaphors. And unlike arbitrary interaction systems, diversity doesn’t damage the user’s intuitions about how things work. Creativity is returned to the design of interaction surfaces.

Tightly integrated software and hardware designs, initially from Apple, but now from Microsoft and Google as well, are laying out a new canvas for the Network. The primary development platforms on the software side are iPhone OS, Android, Webkit, Silverlight and Flash. We won’t compare these runtimes based on whether they’re ‘open’ or ‘closed’ – but rather based on the speed and flexibility of their physics engines. To what degree are these platforms able to map real life in real time to a symbolic interaction surface? To what extent do I have a sense of mass, friction, momentum, velocity and resistance when I touch them? Do I have the sense that the artifacts on the other side of the glass are blending and interacting with real time as it unfolds all around me? The weakest runtime in the bunch is Webkit (HTML5/H.264), and it’s also the one that ultimately may have the broadest reach. HTML5 was partially envisioned as a re-orientation of the web page from the document to the application. The question is whether it can adapt quickly enough to the new real-time, real world interaction surface. Can it compete at the level of physics, both literal and imaginary?

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The Virtual as Analog: Selectors and the iPad

Published February 10, 2010 by cgerrish

It turns out the virtual is analog. The analog is being atomized, the atoms mapped to bits, and then reassembled on the other side of the glass. It’s probably something like how we imagine teleportation will work. As computer interfaces advance, they are tending to look more like real life. We’ve always connected to the digital through a keyboard, or a cursor control, and set of commands in the form of text or menus. As the iPad continues the roll out of touch screens and multi-touch gestures— this model will radically change. While radical change in computer interface usually means having to learn a whole new set of random abstractions to trigger actions; this change is a radical simplification. The layer of abstraction is no longer random. The physical world is being abstracted into a symbolic layer, a control and interaction surface, to act on the software operating on the other side of the glass. The physics and culture of the natural world provide the context we need to understand how to interact with, and control, the software.

In the light of this new interaction environment, initiatives like Information Cards start to make a lot more sense. In analyzing the problem of internet identity, including the subtopics of authentication, authorization, roles and claims— it became clear that a metaphor was required. Something that would connect to a person’s everyday experience with identity in the real world. The idea of wallets (selectors) and cards seemed like a natural fit. The behaviors an individual would be expected to perform with a selector are analogous to those done every day with the wallet in your back pocket or purse.

The problem with information cards has been that the computing environment hasn’t allowed human-computer interaction at the level of real world analogy. Web site login screens are geared toward keyboards and text fields, not toward accepting cards from a wallet (selector). Now imagine using a selector on an iPad. It looks like a wallet. You can apply whatever surface style that complements your personal style. You’ve filled it with cards— both identity cards and action cards. When you surf to a web site or an application that requires authentication, your selector is activated and provides you with a small selection of cards that can be used for this context. You choose one, slide it out of the selector with your finger and drag it to the appropriate spot on the screen. In the new era of the iPad, that’s an interaction model that makes perfect sense.

In their interaction design guidelines, Apple addresses the issue of metaphors very directly:

When possible, model your application’s objects and actions on objects and actions in the real world. This technique especially helps novice users quickly grasp how your application works

Abstract control of applications is discouraged in favor of direct manipulation:

Direct manipulation means that people feel they are controlling something tangible, not abstract. The benefit of following the principle of direct manipulation is that users more readily understand the results of their actions when they can directly manipulate the objects involved.

Originally selectors were tied to a specific device, and this made them impractical when hopping between multiple devices. However a number of cloud-based selectors have recently emerged to solve this problem. As with all current internet identity solutions, there’s a lot of machinery at work under the covers. But from the user’s perspective, simply selecting a card and tossing it to the software application requesting authentication will radically reduce friction for both the user and the system.

Taking the metaphor a step further, it’s simple to imagine carrying my selector on an iPhone or iPad (or similar device) and using it to replace many of the cards I now carry in my wallet. The authentication event, rather than occurring within a particular device, would occur between devices. The phone becomes a key.

This new interaction environment heralds a radical change in the way we work and play with computers. Authentication, internet identity and information cards are just one example. We could have just as easily examined the human-computer interface of the financial services industry. Portfolio management and analysis, stock trading, and research will all need to be re-imagined in light of radical simplicity of this new world. The random, abstract and symbolic interfaces of computing will start to look quite antique by this time next year.

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