Gadgets, Google, Mobile Ads and iSlate: 2010 Predictions in User Experience

It seems no matter where I have turned over the past few weeks, I’ve caught someone’s analysis of the past year/decade, or someone’s predictions for what’s to come. It’s a lot like the popular choose your own adventure books, but the options are always “Look back” or “Look ahead.” Be it best movies of the decade, inventions that have changed our lives, or how China will engage in the global community, it’s wall-to-wall reflection or forecast out there.

 

So as not to be left out of the discussion, and because I tend to be forward-looking at heart, I assemble here my own Top 10 Predictions for 2010 in the world of user experience.

 

 

I think the safest thing to predict is (drum roll, please): Apple (News - Alert) will release a new tablet computer! Time and time again, we’re hearing many rumors about this little device. Apple is leaking a lot of information, or at least I think they are, and people start speculating about this new device. With its wildly successful Kindle, Amazon paved the way into the tablet market. I heard that this past Christmas, electronic books outsold printed books for the first time thanks to the Kindle. That’s really a sign of the kind of consumer excitement we’ll be seeing in the tablet market, and I think people will jump all over Apple’s tablet when it comes.

 

That said, I do predict that tablet adoption will not match the frantic pace of iPod or iPhone adoption. The idea of putting 1,000 songs in your pocket, or your Internet-enabled phone in your pocket, is one thing. A tablet doesn’t fit in your pocket, so it won’t have quite the cache with early adopters.

 

Another related prediction: Verizon (News - Alert) will be the service provider for Apple’s tablet. I have nothing to support this beyond wishful thinking.

 

As happened with the iPhone, Apple’s tablet will bring about a bold new way of interacting with the screen. The traditional keyboard, the mouse and even the stylus will continue to give way to actual finger gestures. The iPhone made this happen. Now we’re seeing more signs of touch in products like Apple’s new mouse. It allows for much more interaction on the mouse itself rather than the need to actually drag the mouse around. Trackpads on new laptops are also incorporating more finger zoom and scroll features, and some others are doing this as well.

 

A designer at ABC really turned me on to using a stylus and tablet years ago. He told me that anything else is like designing or painting with a bar of soap. It’s downright awkward. The pen-like stylus is an improvement perhaps. But we have 10 fingers, hopefully. In 2010, we’ll have more opportunity to use them all in intuitive ways to drive interaction with the screen, and that will be a big change in user experience.

 

 

While smartphones have taken off and tablets are coming, I think we haven’t even begun to see what can happen in the mobile market. Forrester and Pew (News - Alert) are both showing impressive growth in this area. In his piece “America Unwired,” John Horrigan, associate director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, surveyed the number of U.S. adults who had accessed the Internet via a mobile device such as a cell phone or other hand held device. He found that between December 2007 and July 2009, that number had swelled from 24 percent to 32 percent.

 

That’s pretty impressive growth over an 18-month period. It shows that we are changing how we communicate each day and how we access information each day. And that trend is not going to slow down. I like to credit much of this change to Apple’s iPhone. But other products that are actually pretty useful are coming to market and will drive the acceleration of this trend. Droid, for example, seems very interesting in terms of how people interact with the device, and I’m envious of Droid owners because their phone network actually works.

 

In science fiction, it was 2001 when the HAL 9000 computer could not only recognize specific voices and spoken commands, it could converse, read lips, play chess and strategically ignore commands as well. Sorry, Dave.

 

In science reality, it was approximately 2001 when I started my own experiment with voice recognition software. I bought this revolutionary program called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I spent hours talking to this program with my Bobby Brown headset in a vain effort to train it to recognize my voice. It didn’t work. Not at all.

 

Now it’s 2010, and while it seems many devices are great at ignoring our voice commands, I think the speech recognition odyssey is finally about to begin. One hopeful sign: the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Diction app just launched for the iPhone. It’s free, and it actually works. Even without the Bobby Brown headset, when you talk into this program, it gets your voice instantly.

 

Trends beyond the coolness factor are pushing the advancement of speech-driven user interaction, most notably safety. More and more applications are offering voice commands, and more and more consumers are requesting them as more and more jurisdictions crack down on use of mobile devices when you are actually mobile. From hands-free phones to GPS devices, we want devices that we can safely and legally use while driving.

 

 

I picked up one of these Lilliputian laptops for my wife, and she loves it. And what’s not to love? Netbooks are irresistibly cute, cheap, fairly reliable, and, at about two pounds, they are very, very portable. They are apparently taking off with the college crowd, and will probably become the choice for people who want little more than to check their email and surf the web. It’s rumored that Google (News - Alert) will launch their own netbook, and I think if that happens, the price point for these devices will fall even lower. That’s my prediction. So therefore it’s going to happen.

 

 

This prediction is a little more out there, but I’m seeing widgets everywhere in 2010.

 

Widgets are the technological equivalent of bacon bits. People seem to think you can’t go wrong by tossing them on anything and everything. Also, I think people just like saying the word “widget.”

 

I have a habit of coming home every day and plopping myself in front of the television. I have Verizon Fios, and I recently discovered that Verizon has added widgets that allow me to check sports scores, weather or traffic instantly through my television. It’s basic right now, but they are rolling out more and more of these widgets to my TV. The clunky remote that I have to use to access these widgets is a barrier to use for me, but I think this trend of being able to access, manipulate and integrate data via multiple channels will continue. Xbox, for example, is incorporating tie-ins to social media sites to allow people to update their status directly from Xbox.

 

 

I will not in any way try to deny this: I have been drinking the Kool-Aid from Google and I see their Wave product taking off in 2010. This is going to take some doing on Google’s part, as most people are still asking, “What the heck is this thing?” Google is pitching Wave as an online tool for real-time communications and collaboration. It’s basically IM, email, Wiki messaging and chat rooms rolled into one multimedia workspace, and people are already coming up with some very engaging ways to use this new technology. After the horrific shooting of four police officers in Lakewood, Washington, the Seattle Times used Google Wave as a tool to gather and share public response to the tragedy. The response was amazing and went in many directions that the paper never predicted. At its height, 500 people were riding this Wave, and the workspace included postings of police scanner audio, live video, news on school lockdowns and road closures, and even an interactive manhunt map updated by participants.

 

Wave is only in a “preview” release right now, which means it hasn’t even made it to Beta. And one unfortunate drawback is that you have to develop your own network in order to use it. I gathered lots of friends and colleagues together to try riding a Wave, and one of the first topics was “Giovanni is boring. Discuss.” So there’s room for growth. But as more applications like this Seattle Times experiment help people grasp what Wave makes possible, I see the Wave product gaining enough audience to push the product forward to Beta, maybe beyond, in 2010.

 

 

This prediction I see coming as a result of the explosion in number and variety of portable devices out there. The old standard of designing to a 1024x768 screen is going out the window. And for designers, this explosion of options is sort of like two steps forward, one step back. We all celebrated when we finally went from 256 colors to a million colors. We celebrated again when we jumped from the tiny 800x600 screen to today’s 1024x768 screen. Now we have more than one standard size for design, and it’s kind of a celebration, kind of a headache. Here are just a few numbers:

 

·        Netbooks: 1024x600

·        Smartphone: 320x240

·        iPhone: 320x480

·        Droid: 480x854

 

All of these devices are making the interactive experience richer, but they also make the design process that much more complex. Planning for a full, cross-platform experience rollout will become much more complicated, and I predict that will push us toward more interfaces that automatically resize and recalibrate on different devices. This may be my own little bit of wishful thinking, but remember we are gazing into Calabro’s crystal ball.

 

 

With prediction #9, I’m pushing a little farther out there, but I think we’ll start to see much more interaction with product barcodes made possible by our increasing use of mobile devices. What does that mean? Well, say you’re a mother who just heard about a recall on baby food. You’re in the store, and you don’t remember all the details, so you use your phone to scan the Gerber baby food label and get back an aggregate of information about this product, including whether or not you should buy it.

 

A similar but even more bizarre application of interactivity via our mobile devices is radio frequency identification (RFID). This is what allows you to drive through a tollbooth at 60 miles per hour and still pay the toll. Your car, via what we in the D.C. area call the E.Z. Pass device, is sending out a radio frequency that is picked up by the tollbooth and tells it to debit your account. Now imagine this same RFID technology on your phone. Let’s suspend the thought of what this will do to you medically. I’m not going to think about that because, frankly, it’s depressing. Instead, let’s think about the positive side. Picture setting up an RFID account with Barnes & Noble. When you walk into the mall, the store senses your presence and sends book recommendations and specials based on your buying habits right to your phone. This is advertising of the future that literally pulls you in the door.

 

Are we there yet with either of these technologies? No. That’s why this is a prediction. I definitely see it as the direction we’ll be going, but there are still barriers to adoption. In the case of RFID, cost is prohibitive at the moment, and there are many wonkish things in terms of keeping the signals from getting crossed and other technical complications that will need to be worked out. We’re closer with barcodes. Applications for making this leap are already available, but habits have to be developed still. In the baby food example, the mother who is busy and trying to get through the shopping as quickly as possible and may be distracted by a crying child, may not be eager to pull out her phone and scan barcodes. There’s a data side to the equation, too. All of the available data will need to be structured in a way that makes sense with these devices. Again with the baby food example, if the mother scans the baby food jar, what information comes back? Gerber stock performance? Consumer alerts? Advertised prices at competing stores? It’s a data construction nightmare.

 

But all that said, it will happen in 2010!

 

 

Any time there’s a new device for conveying information, heard responses seem to be

 

A. This is fantastic!

B. How do we put an ad on it?

 

The proliferation of portable devices and the merging of devices offer new ways for advertising to reach us, and new ways for advertisers to measure our response. Initially, metrics will probably be measured traditionally, like number of impressions. But as the devices become more sophisticated and the advertisment that uses them becomes more sophisticated, the means of measuring ad effectiveness will also become more sophisticated. We’ll start to measure how much we are intrigued by an ad and the way we interact with it.

 

Ironically, this breakthrough in understanding of the user experience will come via something that tends to annoy the living heck out of users.

 

Thanks for hanging with me through this look into this unfolding year. I enjoy doing this because while I’m usually expected to be right, nobody is really going to hold me to this list. Right?