What's Global Moxie?
Global Moxie specializes in mobile design strategy and user experience for a multiscreen world. We offer consulting services, training, and product-invention workshops to help creative organizations build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites. We're based in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more.
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Observations, hypotheses, predictions and experiments with design, technology and the humdrum details of daily life.
Karen McGrane and I are taking a European road trip. We’re leaving the backpacks at home, though, and instead bringing mountains of mobile know-how.
We’re teaming up to give full-day workshops in three cities—Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Barcelona. Karen McGrane, as you no doubt already know, is a whip-smart (and hilarious) content strategist and internet genius. She’s also author of Content Strategy for Mobile, a forthcoming book from A Book Apart. She’ll be delivering the goods on how to navigate content strategy in a multichannel world, while I’ll focus on crafting finger-friendly touchscreen interfaces.
It’s a heckuva one-two punch. Actually, scratch that. IT'S A FRICKIN' MOBILE KNOWLEDGE EXPLOSION.
You can register and get more details here: “Small Screens, Big Changes: A Full-Day Mobile Workshop with Josh Clark and Karen McGrane.” But before you head over, here’s the quick gist:
Mobile represents a massive shift in how users interact with content and interfaces. Are you ready? Spend a whole day learning how to make the most of mobile.
Designing for Touch. The morning session with Josh Clark presents nitty-gritty “rule of thumb” design techniques that together form a framework for crafting finger-friendly interface metaphors, affordances, and gestures for a new generation of mobile apps that inform and delight.
Content Strategy for Mobile. The afternoon session with Karen McGrane explores the challenges and constraints of presenting content in mobile interfaces and contexts. Desktop websites have gotten cluttered with useless information that doesn’t meet user needs. Mobile offers an opportunity to re-prioritize messages, rewrite jargon, and remove outdated information. You’ll learn how to use mobile as a wedge to create a better experience for ALL users.
Three Cities
The workshops run from 10am to 6pm each day, with lunch included.
Extra Bonus Talks!
Whether or not you attend the workshop, you’re invited to join Karen and me for a free mobile salon. The evening before the workshop in each city, we’ll each give a talk while we ply you with delicious and intoxicating liquids. Details and venues are coming soon. Watch the workshop website, or follow along on Twitter.
Hope to see you in Amsterdam, Barcelona, or Hamburg!
Jakob Nielsen's dubious guidelines for mobile websites got a rise out of me this week. After conducting usability tests on hundreds of websites, his advice included these guidelines, all of which made me shudder:
- Build a separate website for mobile
- Cut features to eliminate things that are not core to the mobile use case
- For removed content and features, link to the desktop site
I don't doubt his research, but I do doubt its assumptions and conclusions. The notion that mobile should be a lite version of the "real" and complete desktop website is a popular one, but wow is it problematic. It makes a host of assumptions about what the mobile use case is that I find to be out of step with how smartphones are actually used.
So when .Net magazine sent me a note to ask me my thoughts about his recommendations, a quick email response turned into an email essay. The editors asked if they could publish my email as its own opinion piece, which they published under the uncomfortably provocative title, "Jakob Nielsen is wrong on mobile." An excerpt:
Nielsen is confusing device context with user intent. All that we can really know about mobile users is that they’re on a small screen, and we can’t divine user intent from that. Just because I’m on a small screen doesn’t mean I’m interested in less content or want to do less.
Stripping out content from a mobile website is like a book author stripping out chapters from a paperback just because it’s smaller. We use our phones for everything now; there’s no such thing as “this is mobile content, and this is not.”
Read the rest of my thoughts and concerns here.
For what it's worth, I do wholeheartedly agree with one of his recommendations, which is to defer secondary information to secondary pages. The web has made us skittish about extra clicks or taps, thanks to network latency. But in many cases, crafty caching, and pre-fetching reduce that problem so that there's no latency between taps. Instead, you organizing screens for a single idea or action works well. Tap quality, in other words, is more important than tap quantity.
So, yeah, feel free to reprioritize content for different devices, but don't start cutting content and features willy-nilly. Mobile isn't a lesser platform than desktop; it's just one of many platforms among equals.
Update: .Net posted Jakob Nielsen's response to the criticism, and I'm afraid my mind isn't eased. His counsel — "If users do want the longer and more complex information, they are always able to click through to the full site" — feels more like an admission of defeat than a content strategy. Also, his suggestion that user experience can be separated from technical implementation worries me. More than ever, UX designers have to have a sophisticated notion of the possibilities and drawbacks of various technical approaches in order to properly craft a stunning experience.
“Designing for context” is a popular phrase these days, and it makes me a little antsy. Designers often conflate device context with user context—or worse, with user intent. “This is mobile, so they’ll never want to do that.” ”This is mobile, so it’s aimed only at users on the go.” Friends, this is hooey.
I shared a few thoughts about this on Twitter last night, and Scott Klein helpfully gathered them into a single view at Storify. For what it’s worth, I thought I’d post ‘em here, too:
The good folks at O’Reilly interviewed me this week about how new technologies change how we should think about interface design as both consumers and designers. It's a long interview, but here's a quick excerpt:
It's a really exciting time for interaction design because so many new technologies are becoming mature and affordable. Touch got there a few years ago. Speech is just now arriving. Computer vision with face recognition and gesture recognition like Kinect are coming along. So, we have all these areas where computers are learning to understand our particularly human forms of communication.
In the past, we had to learn to act and think like the machine. At the command line, we had to write in the computer's language, not our own. The desktop graphical user interface was a big step forward in making things more humane through visuals, but it was still oriented around how computers saw the world, not humans. When you consider the additions of touch, speech, facial expression, and physical gesture, you have nearly the whole range of human (and humane) communication tools. As computers learn the subtleties of those expressions, our interfaces can become more human and more intuitive, too.
Touchscreens are leading this charge for now, but touch isn't appropriate in every context. Speech is obviously great for the car, for walking, for any context where you need your eyes elsewhere. We're going to see interfaces that use these different modes of communication in context-appropriate combinations. But that means we have to start thinking hard about how our content works in all these different contexts. So many are struggling just to figure out how to make the content adapt to a smaller screen. How about how your content sounds when spoken? How about when it can be touched, or how it should respond to physical gestures or facial expressions? There's lots of work ahead.
And hey, if this stuff interests you and you happen to be in Austin for SXSW this week, I'm giving a talk about the future of touch-based interfaces on Friday. In particular, I'm focusing on how you can use gestures to create experiences that are more fun, more intuitive, and more efficient. At least as important, the talk will explore how to make gestures easy to discover, too:
Teaching Touch: Tapworthy Touchscreen Design
Friday, March 9, 3:30–4:30pm
Ballroom A, Austin Convention Center
Discover the rules of thumb for finger-friendly design. Touch gestures are sweeping away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices—and even from the next version of Windows. Find out why those familiar desktop widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn to craft touchscreen interfaces that effortlessly teach users new gesture vocabularies.
The challenge: gestures are invisible, without the visual cues offered by buttons and menus. As your touchscreen app sheds buttons, how do people figure out how to use the damn thing? Learn to lead your audience by the hand (and fingers) with practical techniques that make invisible gestures obvious. Designer Josh Clark (author of O'Reilly books "Tapworthy" and "Best iPhone Apps") mines a variety of surprising sources for interface inspiration and design patterns. Along the way, discover the subtle power of animation, why you should be playing lots more video games, and why a toddler is your best beta tester.
See you there!
As everyone in the world knows by now, Apple bumped the iPad's screen to retina-display density, quadrupling the number of pixels to a whopping 3.1 million. That's fantastic news for iPad owners—the display will be gorgeous—but it also means more headaches for designers and a potential blight on your bandwidth bill and download speed.
In bandwidth terms, pixels are heavy, and four times the pixels means four times the image size for bitmap images, give or take. If you want to take advantage of this gorgeous screen, every image you push down the wire is about to put on a ton of weight. That has implications in lots of places.
Trouble for magazine publishers
For utterly understandable business and workflow reasons, a vast number of publishers have adopted platforms like Woodwing and Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite.1 Trouble is, these tools publish images of pages, not actual text-and-image layouts. They're giant bitmaps.
These big bundles of pixels already make for mammoth file sizes for individual issues, and downloads can take a long time. (Apple's Newsstand does its best to make this invisible by downloading issues in the background for you.) For publishers who want to take advantage of the new iPad display—that is, all of them—they're gonna see these already giant files quadruple in size. As David Sleight wrote this morning:
Now apply the volumetric increase in pixels that’s upon us, and it’s easy to see why the size of an average iPad magazine issue is about to go through the roof. Very roughly speaking, a single page of text built this way and saved using light JPG compression weighs in at around 150-350kB. At the new Retina dimensions these same app platforms will generate pages on the order of 2MB. That’s per page.
This isn’t just a question of the bandwidth these apps will devour while downloading issues, it’s also a question of whether or not a user can actually store these things anywhere. The screen volume may have quadrupled, but the new iPad still ships with the same three memory options: 16, 32, and 64GB. As I noted on Twitter, the growth rate of the potential payload size just outgrew the growth rate of device storage exponentially.
This is obviously untenable, and publishers either have to start thinking (and fast) about new tools and workflows, or toolmakers need to start thinking about generating these app magazines in leaner formats. A recent briefing from Condé Nast hinted that Adobe is starting to move to HTML5 layouts for its tools. That would be good news for file sizes and would almost certainly benefit the reading experience, too. Readers would finally be able to select text, copy it, resize it, and so on.
But that still won't get us completely out of the woods. Web technologies like HTML5 are going to have issues to manage with a retina-display iPad, too.
Trouble for responsive designers
Building just one website for all devices and platforms should be the ideal for every webslinger, the starting point for every project. Ask yourself: can we create just one base set of HTML and then use responsive design and progressive enhancement to gracefully adapt that HTML to any screen? (This one-web approach isn't always practical, and as always, it depends on the project.)
As an industry, we're still learning the right way to do responsive design, and one of the big sticking points is how to cope with images. While it's easy enough to make the browser resize a big image to fit a tiny display, bandwidth concerns suggest we shouldn't send that big file to devices that can't use the extra pixels. The new iPad only magnifies this problem. Sending a full-screen iPad image (1536x2048) to an iPod Touch browser (320x480) is overkill to the tune of 25 times the file size. Over a wireless connection, that's gonna smart.
This isn't a new problem. Folks at the forefront of mobile web design have been wrestling with this responsive-image problem for the past year. How do we nudge the server to send a properly sized image instead of sending a giant one-size-fits-all file?
We don't have a good answer yet. Jason Grigsby has outlined a slew of techniques (and more and more), none of them perfect, and Matt "Wilto" Marquis suggests a way forward by extending HTML itself. Whatever the ultimate solution, though, that means image editors will have to start adding more and more cut sizes to their server-side arsenal. And yep, that means:
Trouble for content creators
I recently did some work for a magazine website. Over the years, their various image contexts had sprawled so that they were doing as many as ten different crops and sizes for any one photo. Thumbnail images, gallery images, primary and secondary article images, you get the idea. Lots of image sizes to accommodate various layouts. This had all evolved in a single-platform environment—the desktop—and didn't even begin to contemplate the varied screen resolutions of the desknot devices of recent years.
Here's the kicker: for all those image sizes, almost all were too small for mobile. You heard me right. Max image dimensions of 600x600 have, until recently, been plenty big for a website. On the desktop, that's pleasingly large, even for a magnified view. But that won't even fill the screen of a retina-display iPhone. The physical dimensions of the latest phones might be small, but the screen resolutions of some desknots are much higher than the desktop. Cut sizes have to adapt to match those resolutions.
To accommodate the iPhone and iPad, the magazine created a new cut size, up to 768x1024. But now they'll have to consider adding at least another cut size, perhaps several. Some of this work can be automated, sure, but in many cases, adding new sizes means adding new crops, and that's necessarily manual editorial work. So the growing variety and size of screen resolutions means more work, more disk space, more database management.
Trouble for iOS designers
And finally, of course, we've got more work for iOS designers. As they did for iPhone 4 and 4S, designers will have to generate yet more image sizes for icons, app graphics, and so on. The already large list of icon sizes for a universal app has just grown. Louie Mantia kindly shared a Photoshop template cheatsheet to help you keep track of your icon efforts.
Don't be glum: this is awesome
Look, this is hard work. We have tons of devices to support, and we have to create designs and assets that not only fit their new screens, but also fit the new interaction models of each. Our job is getting harder, and this is only the beginning of it.
But man, it's in the service of something really incredible. The proliferation of devices is all in the service of creating technologies that adapt to our specific contexts. Beautiful tablet screens, speech interfaces, gestural interactions—all of these things are going to tax us as designers and content creators. But wow, such creative opportunities! As both a user and a designer, I for one welcome my new 3.1-million-pixel overlord.
- Woodwing and Digital Publishing Suite tools are essentially plugins for Adobe InDesign. They let you convert print issues into reasonably interactive iPad editions. That lets publishers use the same essential designs, workflow, and staff to sling print content onto the iPad platform. The process has tons of disadvantages from a UX perspective, but I'm sympathetic to the decision to use them. These tools represent a transitional stage that allowed publishers get on the iPad (relatively) quickly and (relatively) cheaply. The next phase is about figuring out how to create experiences that feel more native to tablets, or whatever platform publishers choose to target. First-generation tools like Woodwing and Digital Publishing Suite are a necessary evil. ↩
I’m teaching workshops in several cities in the coming months, and I invite you to join me for a roll-up-your-sleeves day of mobile design. These things tend to sell out quickly, so book your ticket sooner than later.
Although many of these workshops are part of a conference, most allow you to enroll separately in the workshop without conference attendance. If you care about mobile design, you're welcome to join a workshop, no matter what the the topic of the larger conference. (If you’re not in the health-care industry, for example, you’re welcome to attend my workshop at Health Care Experience Design without signing up for the whole ride.)
Here’s the schedule so far, and descriptions of the workshops follow below:
March 21, 2012: Tapworthy iPad Design
New Orleans: IA Summit
Register for the workshop
March 27, 2012: Designing for Touch
Boston: Health Care Experience Design conference
Register for the workshop
April 18, 2012: Designing for Touch
Orlando: Breaking Development conference
Register for the workshop
April 20, 2012: Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps
McLean, Virginia: MoDevUX
Register for the workshop
April 27, 2012: Designing for Touch
Dublin, Ireland: Úll conference
Register for the workshop
April 30, 2012: Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps
Las Vegas: Future Insights conference
Register for the workshop
May 14, 2012: Designing for Touch
London: Future of Web Design
Register for the workshop
Tapworthy iPad Design
Discover the practical techniques and fresh perspective required to design exceptional apps on Apple’s groundbreaking tablet. From first concept to polished pixel, learn to create an iPad app that delights. In this full-day workshop, we’ll explore the context, ergonomics, visual design, and brand-new interaction models that make designing for iPad at once so challenging and so promising.
Who it’s for
This workshop isn’t (only) for geeks. The workshop’s interdisciplinary approach is appropriate for everyone involved in the iPad design process: designers, programmers, managers, marketers, clients. The workshop takes a hands-on approach to intermediate and advanced design concepts but requires no specific technical know-how. Experienced designers and newcomers alike will uncover the shifts in mindset and technique required to craft a great iPad app.
What you’ll learn
The workshop will equip you to ask the right questions (and find the right answers) to make aesthetic, technical, and usability decisions that will make your apps a pleasure to use. You’ll learn:
- The key elements of the tablet mindset and what your audience expects of your app
- What’s different vs phone or desktop interfaces
- The ergonomic demands of designing for tablets
- Managing metaphor: the opportunities and missteps of realism in interfaces
- How to work with gestures
- The new opportunities of multitouch interaction
- How to help people explore interfaces without buttons, menus or other traditional interface “chrome”
Designing for Touch
Handheld apps that work by touch require you to design not only how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand. This workshop explores the ergonomic challenges and interface opportunities for designing mobile touchscreen apps. Learn how fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their head and require you to leave behind familiar design patterns. The workshop presents nitty-gritty “rule of thumb” design techniques that together form a framework for crafting finger-friendly interface metaphors, affordances, and gestures for a new generation of mobile apps that inform and delight.
Who it’s for
This is an intermediate to advanced workshop aimed at designers, developers, and information architects making the transition from desktop to touchscreen apps for mobile and tablet devices.
What will you learn?
- Discover the ergonomic demands of designing for touch.
- Find out how the iPad’s form and size create unique design considerations.
- Devise interface metaphors that invite touch.
- Design gesture interactions, and learn techniques to help people discover unfamiliar gestures on their own.
- Learn why buttons are a hack and how to design interfaces without traditional UI controls.
- Train in gesture jiujitsu, the dark art of using awkward gestures for defensive design.
- Explore the psychology behind screen rotation and the opportunities and pitfalls it creates.
Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps
From first concept to polished pixel, learn to create mobile apps and websites that delight. The workshop explores the practical principles of mobile and touchscreen design, teaching you to “think mobile” by planning and creating interfaces in tune with the psychology and ergonomics of an audience on the go. You’ll learn to conceive and refine an app’s interface and user experience in tune with the needs of a mobile audience… and their fingers and thumbs.
What will you learn?
- The expectations of a mobile audience
- The ergonomic demands of designing for touch
- Strategies for crafting your app’s visual identity
- How to work with gestures
- Unique considerations for designing for the iPad
- Techniques for creating sensational app icons
I’ve had the pleasure of sharing my ideas about mobile experience design with a bunch of fascinating people lately, either at conferences or one-on-one. Here’s a quick roundup of what I’ve been talking about and where you can find the traces of those conversations:
Buttons Are a Hack / Teaching Touch
Touch is leading us to a future with less and less chrome, possibly even none at all, as gestures replace familiar buttons, menus, and tabs. This presentation addressed why beloved buttons are weak replacements for manipulating content directly. I shared some practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. But hang on; if there are no visible controls, how do users figure out how to use the darn thing? I explained how to teach users new interfaces and gesture vocabularies by making it effortless to discover invisible gestures. I discussed the power of animation, the examples of game design, and techniques to build native and web apps according to the new rules of touchscreen design.
- Luke Wroblewski posted his notes from this talk at An Event Apart in Atlanta, as did Evan Mullins.
- PDF of the presentation slides from this talk at Web 2.0 Expo, with accompanying notes of my comments
- Archive of the virtual seminar I gave for UIE to discuss these ideas ($149)
Seven Deadly Mobile Myths
Updated April 17, 2012. The mythical mobile user who’s always distracted and in a rush doesn’t always, or even usually, exist. Yet too often we design for that context, creating mobile apps and websites as lite versions of desktop counterparts. Instead, mobile apps should almost always do MORE than their desktop counterparts. In this talk, I explain the difficult craft of designing simple interfaces for complex mobile apps, sharing techniques for future-friendly mobile efforts and, along the way, debunking seven stubborn mobile myths.
- PDF of the presentation slides from this talk
- Video of this talk from Do It with Drupal:
- Notes by Brad Frost
- Notes by Luke Wroblewski
- Notes by The Next Web from Future of Web Design
Podcasts
I’ve been talking mobile over the podwaves, too. Here’s where you can find those conversations:
- UIE Spoolcast with Jared Spool: Discoverability in Designing for Touch
- UIE Brain Sparks with Adam Churchill: Buttons are a Hack follow-up
- Iterate podcast with mobile geniuses Rene Richards, Seth Clifford and Marc Edwards
- The Web Ahead podcast with UX phenom Jen Simmons
Even more!
I’m slated to do a slew of talks this year, and I hope you’ll come say hello. You can always find my upcoming schedule at Lanyrd for the where and when.
Global Moxie began exactly ten years ago as a one-man show with a single product, a web content management system called Big Medium. It’s painful to bring an end to one’s beginnings, so it’s difficult to make this announcement: development, support, and sales will no longer be offered for Big Medium.
This unfortunately makes official what’s already been the case for some time. The last software update was over three years ago, and as sales ebbed and new opportunities arose, my ability to provide adequate support waned. It’s time to throw in the towel.
What happened?
Big Medium was aimed at web designers who wanted a simple, inexpensive system that could accommodate very flexible designs without requiring much tech know-how. It was a product that was sorely needed in the first years of the century before the explosion of competent open-source CMS’s. At the time, Big Medium seemed promising both commercially and creatively.
Although thousands of websites adopted Big Medium, it never got the scale to make it commercially successful. With Wordpress, Drupal, and many other terrific systems now available to designers, an inexpensive commercial CMS just isn’t viable for me as either a business or a creative pursuit. The future—for Global Moxie, at least—lies elsewhere.
This is hard. I care a great deal about the product and its small but dedicated community. I stuck with Big Medium far longer than good business sense dictates because I love it… along with the community that formed around it. I’m proud of what I built, and proud that so many people still use the software. Thank you all very much. I wish I’d been able to make Big Medium more successful for you.
I know this leaves people who use Big Medium to power their businesses in an awkward spot. I’ll do what I can to make sure that you can continue using it as long as you find it useful.
What now for Big Medium?
In the next few weeks or months, I’ll release one more version of Big Medium with an MIT-style license that allows anyone to use and modify the software for free. The “new” Big Medium will live at a separate website, where the FAQ and forum will continue to exist for reference and community-based assistance.
When will this happen? I don't have a firm date yet. I’ll get this done as soon as I possibly can, but there are a few non-trivial code changes to make this happen—and a new website to be built, too.
In the meantime, licensed users can continue to use the software indefinitely; you may install it on an unlimited number of servers using your current license number. The support forum will remain open here until the transition to the new site. Please feel free to use the forum to pose questions to the community. I may stop by occasionally, but I’m afraid it’s no longer a source of official support.
I’ll continue to use Big Medium to power this site and my own projects, and so I expect that I’ll make occasional improvements to the software for my own needs. When I do that, I’ll update the open-source version to include those changes.
I’ll have more announcements about this when there’s more news to share. For now, if you have any questions about these changes, please email support@globalmoxie.com.
What now for Global Moxie?
Global Moxie is all about the mobile future. And we’re growing. I’m assembling all-star teams to take on ambitious client projects for mobile apps and websites. I’m on the road nonstop these days to meet companies, teach design workshops, and speak at a constant stream of tech conferences. If all goes well, there may even be a pair of new books about mobile design this year.
This is all wildly exciting, with the very disappointing caveat that it no longer leaves any time or resources for Big Medium. Thanks to everyone who supported the genie over the last decade. I’ll miss him—and you—very much.
“Mobile” doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Once upon a time and not so very long ago, “mobile” meant digital experiences for on-the-go phones. Now we use the word for experiences that are neither on-the-go, nor for phones. Mobile isn’t especially mobile anymore: it’s on the couch, or in bed, or stalled out at a three-hour layover. And even the crisp equation mobile=phone started to break down with the arrival of tablets of all shapes and sizes.
More and more, when we refer to mobile, what we really mean is “non-traditional computing devices and environments,” a stodgy mouthful that really boils down to not the desktop. Our usage overloads poor mobile to include gizmos like phones, tablets, game consoles, e-readers, even TVs. Let’s give mobile a break. I propose a new catch-all term for our myriad non-desktop screens: desknots.
Desknots are connected devices that present alternative contexts and form factors for non-desktop computing. (The word “desknot” was suggested by Terence Tuhinanshu, many thanks!) But um, who cares, right? Why split hairs over what we call this stuff? Me, I think it’s useful to have a broad term to refer to this entire sweeping class of new personal gadgetry. As our industry slowly gets the hang of responsive design and progressive enhancement, it’s handy to have a term for all the screen contexts we’ve ignored (or that never even existed) over the last two decades of web and software design.
That’s what we’ve adapted the term “mobile” to mean over the last few years. In the beginning, that made sense. Mobile phones were the only other mainstream target for personal software and web interfaces. You had your desktop version and, if you were forward looking, your mobile version. As other mobile-ish platforms came along, we folded those in, too. Kindles, iPads, 7” tablets, all called mobile. As similar interfaces expand to near-future devices for TVs, refrigerators, car dashboards, household windows, bathroom mirrors, and so on, “mobile” will become even more inappropriate and confusing as a term. I’d love to see the meaning of “mobile” reclaimed by devices that are actually mobile (rather than merely portable).
Let’s call the rest of ’em desknots.
A transitional notion
A term like desknot is necessary only because the desktop still holds such a primary place in the mainstream understanding of computing. There’s a damaging assumption that the desktop represents the “real” web, and all these other platforms should just get lite versions of our websites and software, if anything at all. As more and more connected devices arrive in all shapes and sizes, though, it seems clear that our computing experience will be a continuous spectrum of gadgets, our information flowing among them as our context changes throughout the day.
Over time, we’ll understand desknots as having equal standing with the desktop. The desktop will be just one platform among many, on the same footing as the rest. When that happens, I suspect we won’t need a term like desknot, and we can focus instead on the specific characteristics of each platform.
Desknots aren’t (necessarily) mobile. Desknots aren’t (necessarily) wireless. Desknots aren’t (necessarily) personal. Every category of desknot has contexts, form factor, use cases, and usability considerations that are very different from the desktop. It’s useful to have a term that suggests: “hey, it’s not just about the desktop. Remember to do the design thinking for this whole collection of alternative devices.” Those devices began with mobile, but they don’t end there. Our mindset—and our language—has to embrace this sprawling landscape.
The folks at Corning put together a heckuva concept video that peeks into the near future of touchscreen interfaces. I’m not usually a huge fan of concept videos—they tend to veer into science fiction. While I appreciate the creative value of imagining “what if,” concept videos are often slight marketing vehicles for companies who are unlikely ever to deliver.
But this video splits the difference by looking to the very near (and very plausible) future. It also goes the extra mile to spell out what’s already happening, what’s emerging, and to put caveats around what’s more speculative. A lot of this stuff feels right around the corner, though, and it’s pretty marvelous.
I especially appreciate the emphasis on screens embedded in convenient places in our lives, rather than full-blown computers. Mirrors and windows and interactive dashboards that talk to our personal computers (phones and tablets) to build context-appropriate interfaces on nearly any surface.
This closet door is actually a display driven by Amy’s tablet. All this intelligence you see on this display—all these apps—they’re all residing and running on Amy’s tablet. This display spans the entire door. It has its own small-footprint operating system, and it’s smart enough to recognize Amy’s device. And based on proximity and other rules, it knows what to display and in what format.
It’s exciting and, frankly, not so far off. If you think touch-based phones and tablets are stretching interface conventions, just wait until this stuff lands.
This week's tunes