It’s always made me crazy that phone experiences aren’t better integrated with the desktop. On the desktop you have the space to manipulate large data sets and UI elements very easily and quickly.
There have been feeble, wretched attempts made by Nokia and Sony. I’m disappointed with the integration Apple has offered so far with the iPhone via iTunes. It’s extremely limited and frustrating. The new Mobile Me interface seems promising, but I’m not holding my breath that it’s what I want.
In the video below, Google demos the type of customisation that I’m looking for. At about 3:30 they show how you to customise the phone experience through a desktop interface. Just drag-and-drop content and UI widgets to your phone. Finally somebody has done it right!
Common Craft has come up with a way of explaining some fairly complex technical concepts using raw stick figure drawings, cut out bits of paper and Mr. Hand. They do quite a good job explaining things in a clear, engaging way.
The lo-fi approach is brilliant, but the reason it’s really effective is the way they contextualize the technology using ordinary, day-to-day scenarios of interpersonal relationships.
After seeing my talk somebody pointed me to this video: “The Science and Art of User Experience at Google”. It’s a presentation by Jen Fitzpatrick, manager of the user experience team at Google, talking about their interaction design process. She shares some really interesting examples of how they collect user feedback, particularly how they track usage patterns and monitor support queries.
A usability note on the actual video file: it contains a caption overlay, which is really useful, but it would be much more useful if that text was available to read/search/copy!
When I tried mapping across the two islands of New Zealand it also took into account the ferry crossing. Customising it is amazing. Drag and drop simplicity. Right-click context menu. Scroll wheel zooming, with crosshair centering. It’s another piece of mind blowing design from Google.
When I worked on newzealand.com the biggest user request was always more maps, maps, maps. Wisely, Tourism NZ invested a lot of money into building better maps. They could have never predicted (and certainly never relied on) Google developing technology like this. Now it seems like they should be integrating Google maps into newzealand.com, with photos, videos, and driving routes, rather than continuing to use their proprietary system. Of course, they can still take advantage of the database and technology they’ve built, while leveraging Google’s incredible technology and global reach.
Of course, I can only imagine how useful this is on the iPhone. Could some lucky iPhone owner tell me how it really is (cough Wayne cough)? When we were coming up with blue-sky ideas for newzealand.com mobile and mapping were always the big dream. It’s getting much closer to becoming reality, yet it’s still frustratingly out of reach. Especially considering the price of mobile data.
It was pretty easy to predict video billboards the day that LCD screens became available. Being able to get movie times from a movie billboard (note: not a concept I saw in the Surface demos) is something I’ve been waiting for, for a long time. This “vision†of “surface computingâ€, to me, seems like a very limited, one-trick gimmick. I think paper thin screens will be far more useful and ubiquitous. I seriously doubt that surface computing – in the sense of a dedicated table - will ever go mainstream. Some underlying concepts are likely to persist – ie, some types of gestural interactions, device synching, but those aspects of Surface are no any way revolutionary or unique to this product.
My reaction to Streetside
It’s stunning. Incredible implementation. Absolutely gobsmacking. I was able to look in the doorway (and window) of my old apartment in San Francisco!!
I went down the street where my old office was and I didn’t recognize it since I haven’t been there in 5 years and things have changed. Very trippy.
And it just works. Click around a few times and you know how to use it in all its glory. Yet, it’s quite sophisticated. Amazon did some streetside mapping that was kind of cool, but Google’s implementation is absolutely jaw dropping. The shear scale of data, the elegant game-like interaction, the speed, the depth, the dynamic contextual layers.
I worship Google.
The only thing I wonder about is the usefulness – whether it’s really worth the effort. It’s an extremely cool experience, I can see a few practical uses, lots of impractical uses, but compared to Gmail or even just street maps, I’m not sure there’s such a big pay off beyond bragging rights and cool factor.
However, combine it with a mobile phone and GPS – then I could see it being extremely powerful. Combine Streetside with Microsoft’s dynamic 3D stitching – then I could take a picture with my camera phone and in realtime it gets posted to Google and it’s a form of personal memory mapping and user generated real time mapping. Google could pinpoint where I was, when I was there, and even show me the photo. If, years later, I meet somebody who was at the same place at the same time then we could see how our paths literally crossed. Of course, there’s all the geo-tagging opportunities (this restaurant was rated by your friend Joe last week, there were 3 late night muggings in this alley in the past week).
Internet advertising works best when anyone can produce a simple ad. This was first shown with Doubleclick ceding ad prominence to Google and now it will be shown in internet video with blip.tv’s new DIY ad program.
It doesn’t appear to be as advanced as what I proposed - bidding for ad placement, different ads served to different users, with green screened product placement ala in-game ads. However, that will emerge. Count on it.
Our holiday up north was perfect. In addition to all the other fun things we did, we also managed to squeeze in some fishing, sailing and snorkeling in the Bay of Islands. It truly is paradise up that way (except this week).
On the drive back, Hadley and the kids dropped me off at Kiwi Foo Camp in the delightful town of Warkworth. It was a bit of a shock going straight from holiday to the non-stop uber geek fest shop talk marathon.
Getting the low down on Firefox 3 (scroll down to items 3.5 and 3.6). Lots of goodness in the works, but most importantly is the offline caching for web apps. I think it strongly supports my prediction that in 2007 the browser is more important than the OS.
Seeing the OLPC in the flesh. It’s the type of device that makes you wish you were a kid again. Nevertheless, I’m still highly dubious about the UI. As Che noted, “That’s what you get when you have Flash designers create an OS”.
Most of all, meeting and spending time chatting with some super smart, super nice people. Old friends and new friends alike.
Oh yeah…being able to show Xero was thrilling and scary. Fortunately, the response was awesome! Foo represents a very tough crowd. Seeing their excitement over Xero makes me really proud. I wish more people showed their projects. I happen to know quite a few people who have some very interesting developments in the works that didn’t get shared. Foo Camp seems like a great place to get extremely valuable feedback.
When Foo ended I caught a ride in Rod’sMaserati down to Auckland to join up with the family. They were staying at the Quest Ponsonby, which I highly recommend - great accomodations in an ideal location. We even ate real Northern California quality burritos at Taqueria (I’m wiping saliva off the keyboard as I write). It was actually quite strange being in Auckland, almost like being in another country. It caused me to question the much bandied slogan “nothing beats Wellington on a nice day”.
Having said that, it was nice to come home to such an easy going city on such a beautiful day.
As I write, I’m in the exquisite Northland region of NZ (in Oakura Bay to be precise). It’s been ideal in every way. Swimming, kayaking, bbq-ing, reading and sleeping. It’s warm here day and night, and there’s no wind. It’s really been making us question why people (us included) live in Wellington.
At the holiday house I perused the book shelf and noticed The Google Story. I tend to have a strong aversion to business books. However, I’ve really been enjoying it. It’s a good piece of storytelling. The thing that’s sticking out for me is how Larry and Sergey have always had the tenacity to do things their way, along with the perseverance to execute first and foremost. Ultimately, it’s really about having the conviction to relentlessly pursue what you believe is best and have fun doing it.
At the UP event, I noted that several of my predicted future platforms could easily be generated out of NZ. Foo Camp is coming up this weekend and I’m really hoping to see strong evidence of that same type of tenacity, conviction, guts, plus the ambition to build something big and important and useful from this beautiful country, something that the world needs and NZ can deliver. Peter Jackson did that for the film industry. Who will do it for ICT?
