More Questions Than Answers Over Series 7

Too many question right now about Windows Mobile Series 7 for me to have an opinion. The Home Screen looks really interesting, very good creative direction to create a sense of unity of information, especially compared to the mess of widgets we usually see on other customizable Home Screens. Still, the rest of the shell seems to rely on a lot of scrolling of a small window over a large landscape of User Interface actions, perhaps even too large. Some people are very good at geographical wayfinding, at remembering where something out of view is in a spatial relationship to what is in view, some are not, and this Zunerrific interface really depends on it.

But my real questions are: is this really a totally new kernel? One without years of testing in the field in other phones or microwave ovens or Mars rovers? Will any phone based on this be able to take a call without resetting, something Microsoft has traditionally never gotten rock-solid right? What is the 3d party programming API and SDK here; considering Microsoft claims to have thrown everything in Windows Mobile away, is it not .NET?

Will any manufacturer beyond HTC and unknown Chinese shops commit to it, considering no software customizations are allowed, and the hardware is specified? Will any operator, under these circumstances? Basically, is this software so compelling Microsoft can pull an Apple, dictating to operators what the experience will be, while not even supplying the hardware themselves? That would be interesting.

Everyone seems to be so impressed by the demo hardware it is almost like Microsoft borrowed Jobs' Reality Distortion Field and the questions around it seem muted. But as hard as making a beautiful experience is on a device, that is not the hardest part of making a wonderful product. The hardest part is making the beautiful experience work, and keeping it beautiful once it has to go out into the world of people who want to play with and change it.

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We Do Actual UX Work For A Reason, You Know

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So, why do we in the UX business interview users, distill their experiences to make user archetypes (personas) and stories about what they'd like to do with the system (scenarios) so that we can write good flows of screens (journeys)? We do this so that we have some assurance that our system will actually fulfill real people's needs.

Let me give an example of where a major web store did not do the research. Seems Amazon UK now has a store for lighting, to buy lightbulbs and all. Why would anyone want to do that when there's a supermarket or hardware store or small grocer on every corner here? Might it be that users will turn to web mail-order for lighting products not sold in shops?

What are these product then? Supermarkets carry energy efficient bulbs, but mostly only the cheapest ones available, which give an awful green hue to skin. I know people, including me, want better choices; I once changed the whole character of a bathroom from scary clinical to lovely just by replacing the fluorescent tube bulb the builder had used, which was, of course, the cheapest and coldest hue available, to a warmer hued one. Cost almost nothing. Impact was instant and big.

So what do I want to know when I mail order a light bulb? What kind of light it gives. There are actual standards for that, that allow consumers to make an informed choice, they are Color Temperature (is the white light warmer or colder) and the Color Rendering Index (how do colors illuminated by that light look compared to sunlight). While the indices are still subject to debate and change by lighting afficionados, light bulb manufacturers know these values for every bulb; these are very specific characteristics that they try to get just right so they have lighting for every environment and occasion available to designers. Lighting manufacturers produce stacks of brochures to warn and educate users about the variety of hues of lamps.

Now I am trying to find an energy saving light bulb of a specific size to fit a specific lamp that I would like to have not throw some ugly green-tinged light. And Amazon UK will happily try to sell me one, with prices ranging from £1.50 up to £50 (the latter is for LED bulbs that will last 20 years). Try to sell me one, that is, without telling me with plain, known, manufacturer-calibrated numbers, what kind of light it gives off. It's like trying to sell me clothes without even telling me the size or color. Sure, when you get the shirt you ordered home sometimes the green is sage to you and not verdigris like the page said, and XL is quite the variable these days, but at least those basic descriptions of an item were on the page. The CT and CRI values for bulbs are actually far better measured than clothing manufacturers name their colors.

It's bad enough I can't filter by fitting type, or indeed filter by these color values. But not even telling me at all, and leaving this up to the sellers to put in the text description, most of which, of course, call everything 'warm white'? Somebody here did not consider what users would want to use their actual site for.

iPadding

And what can I add to discussions of the Apple iPad? I thought not much, but after discussing the product with Genius Mike, I am now very confused about discussions I have not been seeing. It is difficult to bet against Apple because they have won so hugely in the past -- and who wants to be the one quoted when the next iPod turns out not to be lame? -- but do remember that Apple also released the G4 Cube to very tepid sales, and some strange iPod accessory boombox you probably can't even remember right now.

So what am I not seeing? How about this: a look back at the überpad Apple released before. It's software was a magical experience of integration, of simplicity, of looking over the user's shoulder to read a scrawl like "Lunch with Bob tomorrow" and have it ask if you want to enter that into your calendar, and which Bob did you mean, and set all the smart defaults for this meeting, something mail readers and smartphones still can't do, even though we desperately need it to manage all the snippets and appointments and alarms that come into our lives. Now that is real magic, magic that keeps being delightful and surprising, not just the magic veneer from having a good credit card system behind the scenes in place for your app store. That is old hat by now, what we call 'hygiene', the basic functionality you have to have to not turn users off.

The line of Newton MessagePads actually was a user experience complete with thought out gestures and almost no modes, very focused on not being 'computing' but being a simple scribble block sketch pad that magically Just Did The Right Thing. And it bombed painfully because it was just a pain to enter any data that the pad could do this right thing on. Considering there was no ubiquitous wireless connectivity at the time, the data did all have to come from the user's writing or typing. It couldn't even handle syncing with the desktop very well. Although the last one in the product line could have an external keyboard added, I even bought one.

How is this relevant? Much as this new iPad will get its data over wireless networks from other computers in nice formats computers easily understand, the part where the user adds their bit is actually, well, really uncomfortable. The iPhone and iPod Touch are mediocre typing experiences with their lack of tactile feedback and tiny keys, but at least the size keeps people from thinking they need to be able touch type with it, and writing a book or even a letter is still considered a remarkable feat. Yet using that soft keyboard seems exactly what Steve Jobs expects us to do on the iPad because right now it is, well, bigger. Not more tactile feedback, not having a more giving surface, just bigger.

How? It's back is curved, does it even lay flat? Nobody mentions. When I am on the sofa, do I have to put it on my lap and hunch over it? On my airplane table tray, where again my screen is not at a a good angle for viewing? I suspect that since I actually do not touch-type (22 years of computing and I can't touch-type, for reals) I may have an easier time since I hunt and peck. But considering the big reveal about the reveal was a productivity suite with word processor, somewhere there's a question, that Apple has tried to deal with before, ending in disaster and cancellation of all the Newtons, that seems to be answered by Apple with "Just type on a pane of glass, it'll work out."

(Meanwhile, since bluetooth keyboards are possible, what will really happen is that we will see 3d party cases with an extra battery and a keyboard to slip a the iPad into.
It will allow the iPad to be a laptop when you need it, and a tablet when you don't. See here an example of the IdeaPad U1 Lenovo showed at CES a month ago and plans to release this summer.)

Other questions: when will I be able to listen to my Internet radio and do my word processing on my awkward keyboard? Well, 'they' say this capability, multi-tasking of apps, is coming in the next revision of the OS underlying all of Apple's Touch products, but a week ago I was being told it would be there for the pad itself. It is not. And what I learned studying interaction was that on small screens users like being focused on one thing, on not having many interruptions; one of the hardest things designing smartphone UIs is how to let the user know an SMS came in while they are doing something else without being disruptive. But on a big screen? Users love lots of little things happening, to be able to pick and choose what to focus on now, and, especially when they are young, to have multiple data streams to follow in their peripheral vision while they work. One app at a time on a big screen -- and how boring this big screen is in an age when we smartphone come with insane resolutions and laptops engineered to be super cheap can be switched to show text reflectively and smooth like it was printed on paper -- is just going to disappoint. A communications machine this is not. Unless this multi-tasking revision gets slipped in before the iPad goes on sale.

No, seriously, does this thing lie flat? I keep wondering. And wondering what there is here that an Android-based pad couldn't deliver as well, and probably cheaper, in 3 months of engineering, with multi-tasking having been built in and thought out since day one of Android's release. Heavy lock in with services like book and magazine and newspaper publishers, I guess. Apple will try to lock those up for their device only. Still, this thing looks like a boombox to me.

App Stores Are Not A Blessing

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Everything is getting an app store. Not just one for every phone manufacturer, but now there's one for digital pens, and bluetooth headsets. Televisions and Blu-ray discs players are updating their own firmware over the Internet, and glorified clock-radios are made to download new capabilities.

We are going to a situation where every piece of electronics can be customized post-sale. Which is going to have two unfortunate consequences:

1. Devices are going to be even unfriendlier to use, because the out-of-box experience will be given short thrift with the idea of 'the user will fix it'. In a rush to be first and cheapest, product developers often do not spend a lot of time testing and thinking and testing and thinking about how to make the easiest product with the best default settings. Now that product managers will be able to say "the user will fix it with an after-market download developers will make, so ship it now", the design cycle will be even more under pressure, and it will show in clunky products that require mandatory downloads -- and cash -- to be enjoyable. No being delighted from the moment you unpack it. Already, I have been told, users have to wait an extra half hour in between hooking up their Sony PS3 and getting to play because of firmware updates needing to be downloaded and installed. This will get worse.
   
   
2. The future is going to be even buggier. Making a product modifiable means creating programming interfaces and machines that can execute programs. A closed system is bounded, it can theoretically be exhaustively tested for all circumstances and button-presses. An open system has no such predictability, really, and is mostly debugged through years of feedback from users and developers running programs trying the combinations of programming calls in all kind of different and unexpected ways.

My Discrete Mathematics lecturer in college used to say there was a Law Of Conservation of Misery: the short-cut trick you used to cleverly shorten the steps in one part of a proof only meant you had to spend more time and sweat on other parts, always. I think this Law also goes for buggyness in systems: yes, some manufacturers are working harder to really entice consumers with well thought-out experiences, but the rest of our electronics will be designed to shoot themselves in the foot even more, and take our time and sanity down with them as collateral damage.

Reflection

Image by FJ!! via Flickr

I left Amsterdam in 1995, after getting my degree in Computer Science there. I was back in the Netherlands to visit family for the holidays, and did also spend some time in Amsterdam. Since I have spent so little time there in the last 15 years, my memory of the city is frozen, and, where great leaps have happened in society most, the contrast between then and now is very acute for me. Like in personal technology.

My memories are of sitting in a dark room of computer terminals in the University, closed for the winter break and thus without heating, seeing my own breath as I was trying to get my social fix (Usenet, at the time), typing with gloves on. I carried a map in my backpack because after two years I was still getting lost, and my Walkman kept eating my tapes I was tired of anyway, and lord knows if meeting up for dinner with a friend would actually happen.

Yeah, things are a little different now. My phone shows me where I am (if I want to spend the money on foreign data roaming), the texts keep me abreast of where everyone is, I have so much music with me on my iPod Touch I do not know what to play, there's always a little game to play, and the moment I walk into an open WiFi range (like the Stadsschouburg on Leidseplein) I catch up with Tweets, Status updates, and blogs. I barely used the laptop at all, actually, the little black slab took care of most casual communications. And yes, I actually like this situation much, much better. It is not just me: over Christmas my 15 year old nephews realized there really was a time people had to make do without their "GSMs", and it consisted mostly of expensive dumb beepers, difficult key combinations to forward your land-line phone to another land-line phone, and calling often to let people know where you are only to get answering machines. They were unable to wrap their heads around it.

I was struck during my stay by one technology music experience that had stayed the same: the simplest way to have a continuous consistent stream of music following you from room to room to car to workplace is still radio. Sure, radio itself has changed, with digital broadcasts and more functions and clearer stations and almost every radio being made now having presets. But the basic model is still the same as it ever was: tune the radio, get the broadcast on that specific frequency. It works the same on every radio the user will encounter anywhere, guaranteeing a seamless experience: walk into the room, tune, hear the sound stream where you left off.

Sure there are multi-room audio systems available, like Sonos, ready to stream your library into every room you have wired up with it. I have used it, it is fun, it works great, and when you walk out of the door of your house it is gone. Unless you use the other alternative, using your digital player with headphones, but even that will not pick up where the Sonos player left off when you close the front door, the same way radio does when you switch it off in the kitchen and switch the radio on to the same station in the car, to then continue to listen in the gym.

You still can't just make your own audio stream transfer seamlessly from your pocket to your stereo system to your car to someone else's stereo system even if they give you permission. Broadcast radio still does that best. Same goes actually for almost all data streams coming to us; I can't simply redirect the mobile phone call I am getting to come from my computer or the desk conference system so I can get a better hands-free experience, I can't switch the call to use the car's sound-system when I am in someone else's car so everyone can listen in. There are experiments and early systems to do it with video streams, but it mainly involves looking at the content of your Digital Video Recorder at home over the net.

It's already considered a major breakthrough when you can see the contents of one computer on another computer or TV in your own home on your own network, and it is still too complicated to set up. I think this is where I want the future to go: anywhere I go I want to be able to switch something on, make a simple gesture like tuning to a station or hitting a preset, and get whatever data stream I was experiencing on the ambient equipment. Or maybe even have that be automatic in my own home: take the headphones off when I walk in and have the stereo take over exactly where I left off.

Since what I wish for often does end up being made (a place to upload my pictures from my phone, a website to share videos, a platform to distribute writing) I am putting this out there: what I want from the future is to be able to carry any datastream with me and be able to flick it to other devices, better suited to the current location, to pick up where I left off, seamlessly. I know there have been trials and tests -- one of the more interesting ones being a system developed in the early 2000s by an MIT spin-off that let you read an article on a mobile phone and then insert it into your car so the car radio would start reading it to you from the page you were on -- but it needs to be more pervasive. I want the future that doesn't require juggling of gizmos and devices, and I want it soon.