UXURE

Only 10% of Americans Say They Would Wear Google Glass

2013-05-15T15:29:00.000-04:00

Google Glass may be the most hyped piece of technology in years, but according to a new study, only one in 10 American smartphone owners would wear the high-tech specs regularly.

Social awkwardness was the top reason why people said they would steer clear of Google's smart and web-connected glasses, a new report, called Google Glass Adoption Forecast, has revealed.

Conducted by BiTE interactive, which surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults, 45% of respondents said they wouldn't wear Google Glass because of its awkward aesthetic or because the device seemed irritating.

SEE ALSO: Facial Recognition Comes to Google Glass
Even if it were priced low enough — much lower than the $1,500 it is going for now during its beta period — about 38% of respondents said they still wouldn't wear it.

Not everyone is against Glass. About 44% of those who would wear the gadget cited taking pictures as its most compelling feature, while 39% said they would want to make phone calls with it and 37% want to use it to record video.

"Google Glass represents a profound social barrier for the average consumer," Joseph Farrell, EVP of operations at BiTE interactive, told Mashable. "At best, they see a Glass user as someone who prioritizes information access over a personal connection with others."

"At worst, they fear social sleights of hand: researching topics, recording video or Googling a person in mid-conversation," he continued. "Overall, what Glass offers is combination of high social rejection with features the average person simply doesn't value over their current smartphone."

Do you agree that Google Glass is socially invasive? Would you wear it? Let us know in the comments.

BY SAMANTHA MURPHY on Mashable
Image via Mashable, Nina Frazier

Google Earth Update Introduces Street View and New User Interface

2013-05-09T08:34:00.000-04:00

Google Earth, Google’s other mapping application, received a solid update this afternoon to version 7.1.1. After the update, you will be able to drop all of the way down into Street View, use improved directions (better visuals) and search (quicker), and navigate the app more easily thanks to a slideout navigation menu from the left side.

I have to admit that it has been years since I played around with Google Earth. I don’t know if it’s from this update or what, but it has come a long way. It always used to be so clunky and irrelevant, however, I could see myself diving into some Earthy details from time to time now that it works this well.

The changelog:

Google Maps Street View: With Street View, you can explore the world at street level.
Improved directions/search: Updated directions let you can visualize transit, walk, bike and drive directions in 3D while update search result list will let you browse search results quickly.
Improved interface: Easily browse and enable different layers through use of new left hand pane

Source Droide Life

Apple's virtual input tool patent could bring next-level UI interactivity to OS X - Apple Insider

2013-04-25T14:58:00.001-04:00

An Apple patent granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday describes a system in which a "virtual input," such as a trackpad, is recreated onscreen with various interactive objects, allowing users to quickly navigate programs and documents.

Source: USPTO

Apple's U.S. Patent No. 8,427,438 for "Virtual input tools" is a simple, yet effective tweak to the current user interfaces offered in modern computer operating systems. Unlike a traditional UI, which translates data from an input device and maps it to the movements of a cursor, the patent outlines a system that allows for more direct interactivity.

The patent first calls for a virtual representation of a physical input device, such as the multitouch trackpad found in Apple's MacBook Pro, to be displayed onscreen. Mapped to the coordinates of the virtual trackpad are the corresponding coordinates of the actual device, which in some embodiments are in proportion to the digital version. Presented within the virtual trackpad's boundaries are various interactive elements that can be directly selected and manipulated without searching for a cursor as they are represented in direct relation to the physical device. According to the patent, interactive objects can be application windows, directories and open media files, among others.

From the patent summary:
A virtual representation of an input device can be a two-dimensional area that increases an amount of data (e.g., virtual representations of objects) that can be presented at a particular time, thereby improving the user's experience.

By implementing this method, the entirety of a trackpad's surface can be effectively utilized to navigate a corresponding virtual environment. As noted in the patent language, a user can also use multitouch gestures, like one-finger tap-and-hold, to further enhance the system.


	Illustration of virtual trackpad.

Six engines drive the virtual system: an identification engine that detects input on the physical device; a render engine that draws the virtual interface tools and/or content; a mapping engine to correlate physical coordinates with virtual coordinates; a preference engine to customize the virtual device; an interactivity engine that processes user interactions and dictates how they are translated onscreen; and a presentation engine that creates interactive object representations on the virtual device.

Perhaps most important of the six, and the most helpful in explaining the patent, is the interactivity engine. In some embodiments, the engine will receive a signal that a user has touched or tapped a certain area of the trackpad. From this information, the area which was touched is mapped to the virtual trackpad, and the interactive object associated with that space is activated.


	Selecting the top left object highlights the asset.

In another example, a multitouch gesture such as a swipe is recognized. The associated object on the virtual device is manipulated according to a predefined set of rules, which could be the rendering of an interface window in the quadrant selected. Multitouch gestures can also be used to control the size and operation of the virtual display. For example, a four-finger swipe can minimize the virtual view, while another input can enlarge the interface.

Finally, a control object can be utilized and integrated into the virtual trackpad to deactivate or exit out of the UI. This mechanism can also be used in conjunction with other areas of the virtual tool. For example, a user can manipulate interactive content without making permanent changes if their finger is in continuous contact with the control object. Once a user's finger is lifted off this area, interaction is canceled.

Source: Apple Insider By Mikey Campbell

Control object (318) highlighted.

As with many Apple patents, it is unclear if the virtual input device will make its way to a consumer product, but with a push toward multitouch input, the technology could be a useful stopgap if the company decides to create a laptop with a touchscreen display.

Apple's virtual tool patent was first filed for in 2009 and credits John O. Louch as its inventor.

The world’s most accurate 3-D motion-control technology has joined forces with the world’s largest technology company.

2013-04-16T11:54:00.000-04:00

Leap Motion announced a collaboration with HP to bring their 3-D motion control to some HP devices. This relationship will start with the Leap Motion Controller being bundled with select HP products and evolve to unique HP devices embedded with Leap Motion’s technology.

The greatest challenge facing any new technology is reaching beyond early adopters and tech enthusiasts to embrace the wider public.

While developers Companies are creating software for the Leap Motion Controller, Leap Motion is working to ensure that these apps will have the audience they need.

The collaboration with HP represents a major step towards Leap Motion vision for the future – bringing 3-D motion-control technology to the world.

Embedding this technology into other devices has always been an important part of that vision. With HP’s history of innovation and global consumer audience, Leap Motion is confident that they will be able to introduce Leap Motion technology to that broader public. More importantly, they'll be able to introduce these apps to more people than ever before.

A whole new world of possibilities has been unlocked. Airspace™, the Leap Motion app store, will come pre-loaded on all Leap Motion-enabled HP devices. Inside Airspace, HP users will discover a wide range of software.

This new software generation can introduce them to the magic of 3-D motion control

I, for One, Welcome Our Google Glass-Wearing Cyborg Overlords

2013-03-19T08:02:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed the Google Glass backlash is well underway. Once we were thrilled by the promise of the eye-level connected screen and camera technology; once we poked satirical fun at it. But no more. Now, it seems, we've reached the stage of being threatened by it.

One dive bar in Seattle banned customers from wearing Glass; given that no consumers and few developers have their hands on the tech yet, and Google HQ is 700 miles to the south, this was a little like your local doctor's office banning human cloning. Still, the bar got plenty of media attention; no doubt other establishments have taken note.

An online campaign called "Stop the Cyborgs" is offering Google Glass ban signs for free download, as well as stickers and T-shirts. And of course the snarky commentariat is out in force, declaring that anyone who would dare wear the device to be a "glasshole" or worse.

All in all, it's an uncomfortable time to proclaim what Eddie Izzard dubbed "technojoy" about the prospect of a whole new category of gadget.

Heaven forbid that here, in the 2010s, jetpack-less and flying car-free, we might actually gain an item of personal gear that looks the teensiest bit futuristic.

But fear not, fellow cyborg-lovers. This fear of a Glass planet is not really anything new. It's an impulse that crops up throughout history, a storm that is just as likely to blow itself out as its predecessors — only much faster.

We've Been Here Before

There's no need to reach back to the ultraviolent Luddites to explain what's going on here. Nobody is proposing that we smash all headsets or that Glass is the work of the devil. No, this is more akin to the puzzlement, laughter and reactionary response to any new style that stands out in public, from long hair and bell bottoms to the wearing of a Sony Walkman.

Strange as it seems now, it was once a courageous act to wear headphones in public. First came the single earpiece for AM radios, then the stereo headset. Both helped drown out the loud tut-tutting from observers who saw them as unnecessary sense augmentation.

Owning a PC in the early 1980s meant you ran the risk of being dubbed a computer yourself, as dumb as that sounds. I remember using one of the first color Apple laptops, the Powerbook 5300, in a Manhattan cafe in 1996; over at the next table, a group of hipsters started derisively humming the theme from Mission Impossible, in which the then-futuristic laptop featured.

Want to bet how many of them are using Macbooks in cafes today?

In 2003, I boarded a Lufthansa flight with an iPod — which so befuddled the stewardess with its lack of an on-off switch that she had to take it to the cockpit and confer with the captain. These days, the only noticeable thing about an iPod is how outmoded it is.

And if you're still not convinced that Glass or something like it will one day be the norm, consider the most obnoxious addition to daily life in the last two decades: the cellphone.

If we can get used to people walking down the street raising their voices into a handheld device, or a small glob of plastic in their ears, we will certainly get used to people wearing glasses with a strange little attachment on one side.

When it comes to the invasiveness of technology, Glass is far less cyborg-like than a Bluetooth-enabled device you stick in your ear canal — and we passed the point where that blended into everyday life about a decade ago.

Smile, You're On Google Glass

So what about the main complaint of the Stop the Cyborgs campaign: Glass' ability to record video?

Again, we've been here before. Video-recording smartphones were enormously controversial in the early 2000s. Privacy advocates would wring their hands about how tiny and unobtrusive the cameras were, and how you couldn't tell if they were recording or not. There wasn't even a red light! For a while, major clubs and music venues would demand you turn them in at the door.

Then they became ubiquitous. Once we all had them, suddenly, nobody cared.

What can you do with Google Glass, privacy-wise, that you can't do with a smartphone? Record someone without their knowledge? Okay, let's say you're some evil privacy-invading creep standing at a bus stop, and you want to record the person next to you just for the hell of it. You don't need to be so obvious as to hold the phone in your hand. Hit record and put the device in your breast pocket, stuffed with a handkerchief so the camera pokes out the top. Keep your torso towards your target, but look away. Spy mission complete.

Now imagine doing the same thing with Google Glass. Immediately, you're faced with one major problem: you have to maintain constant eye contact with your target. Creep alert! And you can't issue the voice command to start recording, so you'll have to do some pretty obvious swiping of the side-mounted touchpad. You may want to move your eyes to the side, but the lure of that screen hovering in your vision will be too strong.

All in all, you're going to have more tells than a shifty Vegas gambler.

Ultimately, as with the camera-bearing devices we all carry in our pockets, it's all about trust. Trust that the majority of society is basically decent. Trust that you and everyone around you is watching out for each other, and that millions of years of evolution have given us an instinct for suspicious behavior that no amount of technology can mask.

Besides, here's one thing we've learned thus far from a smartphone-filled society: it's much more interesting to enter our own private world than to invade the privacy of each others'.

Image courtesy Google

Source Mashable

MIT ‘cheetah’ robot rivals running animals in efficiency

2013-03-08T14:39:00.000-05:00

Assistant Professor Sangbae Kim works on the 70-pound 'cheetah' robot designed at MIT.PHOTO: M. SCOTT BRAUER

A 70-pound “cheetah” robot designed by MIT researchers may soon outpace its animal counterparts in running efficiency: In treadmill tests, the researchers have found that the robot — about the size and weight of an actual cheetah — wastes very little energy as it trots continuously for up to an hour and a half at 5 mph. The key to the robot’s streamlined stride: lightweight electric motors, set into its shoulders, that produce high torque with very little heat wasted.

The motors can be programmed to quickly adjust the robot’s leg stiffness and damping ratio — or cushioning — in response to outside forces such as a push, or a change in terrain. The researchers will present the efficiency results and design principles for their electric motor at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May.

Sangbae Kim, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, says achieving energy-efficiency in legged robots has proven extremely difficult. Robots such as Boston Dynamic’s “Big Dog” carry heavy gasoline engines and hydraulic transmissions, while other electrically powered robots require large battery packs, gears, force sensors and springs to coordinate the joints in a robot’s leg. All this weighty machinery can add up to significant wasted energy, particularly when a robot’s legs need to make frequent contact with the ground in order to trot or gallop.

“In order to send a robot to find people or perform emergency tasks, like in the Fukushima disaster, you want it to be autonomous,” Kim says. “If it could run for more than two hours and search a large field, that would be useful. But one of the reasons why people think it’s impossible to make an electric robot that does this is because efficiencies have been pretty bad.”

Kim adds that part of the challenge in powering running machines with electric motors is that such robots require a flexible response upon impact, and high power, torque and efficiency — characteristics that have historically been difficult to achieve with electric motors.

Watch more videos from the Biomimetic Robotics Lab on YouTube.

To understand how an electrically powered system might waste little energy while running, the researchers first looked at general sources of energy loss in running robots. They found that most wasted energy comes from three sources: heat given off by a motor; energy dissipated through mechanical transmission, such as losses to friction through multiple gear trains; and inefficient control, such as energy lost through a heavy-footed step, as opposed to a smoother and more gentle gait.

The group then came up with design principles to minimize such energy waste. To combat heat loss from motors, the group proposed a high-torque-density motor — a motor that produces a significant amount of torque at a given weight and heat production. The team analyzed the relationship between motor size and torque, and designed custom motors that exceed the torque performance of commercially available electric motors.

The team found that such high-torque motors require fewer gears — a characteristic that would improve efficiency even more, as there would be less machinery through which energy could dissipate. Many researchers have used springs and dampers in series with motors to protect the robot from forceful impacts during locomotion, but it’s difficult to control a spring’s stiffness and damping ratio — which can be a problem if a robot has to traverse disparate surfaces, such as asphalt and sand.

“With our system, we can make our robotic leg behave like a spring or damper without having physical springs, dampers or force sensors,” Kim says.

Kim is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.PHOTO: M. SCOTT BRAUER

In addition to heat given off by a motor, the group found that another major source of energy loss comes from the force of impact as a robot’s leg hits the ground. Such forces can be strong enough to shake a machine and potentially cause damage. Engineers need to use dampers, or shock absorbers, to minimize shaking and stabilize such systems. But Kim says such dampers act to dissipate energy each time a leg meets the ground.

In contrast, the cheetah-bot’s electric motors capture this energy, feeding it back to the system to further power the robot.

“The majority of impact energy goes back to the battery because the damping is created by custom-designed electric control of the motor,” Kim says. “[The motor] regenerates energy that would have been lost.”

Kim adds that mounting motors and gears at the hip joint would also reduce energy loss by minimizing leg inertia: Some legged robots are designed with motors and gearboxes at each joint along a leg, which can be cumbersome and can lose more energy at every impact. With Kim’s design, 85 percent of the weight of the leg is concentrated at the hip joint, keeping the rest of the leg relatively lightweight.

The researchers also attached strips of Kevlar to connect sections of the robot’s legs, simulating the structure of tendons along a bone. The Kevlar strengthens the leg with little additional weight, and further reduces the leg’s inertia. The group also constructed a flexible spine out of rings of polyurethane rubber, sandwiched between vertebra-like segments. Kim hypothesizes that the spine moves along with the rear legs, and can store elastic energy while galloping.

To test the efficiency of the robot, the researchers ran it on a treadmill at a steady 5-mph clip. They measured the voltage and current of the battery, as well as that from each motor. They calculated the robot’s efficiency of locomotion — also known as cost of transport — and found that it was more efficient than robotic competitors such as Big Dog and Honda’s two-legged robot, ASIMO.

After digging through the literature on animal locomotion, the researchers plotted the cost of transport of various running, flying and swimming animals. They found that, not surprisingly, fliers were more efficient than runners, although swimmers were the most efficient movers. The cheetah robot, according to Kim’s calculations, falls around the efficiency range of humans, cheetahs and hunting dogs.

Currently the team is assembling a set of new motors, designed by Jeffrey Lang, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT. Kim expects that once the group outfits the robot with improved motors, the cheetah robot will be able to gallop at speeds of up to 35 mph, with an efficiency that rivals even fliers. The researchers are convinced that this approach can exceed biological muscle in many aspects, including power, torque and responsiveness.

“There are so many ways to design, and each legged robot has a different system,” Kim says. “If you design the motor properly, it’s more powerful, simpler robotics.”

Ron Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, says that simple springs can work well in small robots running on smooth terrain. But for rougher, more unpredictable terrain, he says the energy-recovery system of the MIT cheetah has big advantages.

“The cheetah robot has really pushed the technology in efficient motor design, low-loss transmissions, and low-inertia legs,” says Fearing, who did not contribute to the research. “By combining these with the regenerative motor drive system, so that mechanical energy from the leg can recharge the battery, that in my opinion has made a huge difference in efficiency, [and] an important step forward in making efficient, electrically driven running robots.”

In addition to Kim and Lang, the paper’s co-authors include Sangok Seok, Albert Wang, Meng Yee Chuah and David Otten, all of MIT.

This research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program.

GM bringing Wi-Fi On Four Wheels

2013-02-26T08:04:00.000-05:00

Owners of several Chevrolet models can transform their vehicle into a rolling Wi-Fi hot spot with Chevrolet Wi-Fi by Autonet Mobile. This dealer-installed system enables full Internet access inside the vehicle – and up to a 150 feet radius around the vehicle – with a laptop or mobile Wi-Fi device.

“Chevrolet Wi-Fi by Autonet Mobile enhances commuting, family vacations and work,” says Chris Rauser, Chevrolet Accessories Manager. “It benefits active families on the go, as well as professionals who need immediate information at remote job sites. Its uses are almost endless.”

Autonet Mobile is the world’s first Internet service provider designed exclusively for vehicles. As a GM Officially Licensed Product, Chevrolet Wi-Fi by Autonet Mobile is certified to work with the following new Chevrolet models:

Equinox
Traverse
Silverado
Tahoe
Suburban
Avalanche
Express

Chevrolet Wi-Fi reflects the trend of increased Internet access on the go. According to JiWire’s Mobile Audience Insights Report, eight percent of all public Wi-Fi users log-in while traveling on subways (three percent) and ferries or cruise ships (five percent).

In addition, JiWire reports that total public Wi-Fi users jumped 18 percent in just seven months, from December 2008 to June 2009.

Chevrolet Wi-Fi is designed for use by passengers, or by the driver when the vehicle is parked. The system requires no special software and achieves speeds up to 1.5 mbps. It uses TRU Technology to maintain Internet connections over the 3G network while the vehicle is in motion, allowing uninterrupted streaming of videos and more.For families, Chevrolet Wi-Fi allows kids and teens to research homework topics on the ride home, connect to friends on social sites, and stream videos on long drives. The internet connection can support several devices at once, enabling multiple passengers to use the connection for their separate devices.

When it comes to worksite use, the Wi-Fi connection offers immediate access to everything the Web offers to make the job quicker and easier, from access to online ordering sites, municipal sites with permit and building code information and more. And when used with a laptop computer, the information comes in a larger, easier to navigate format than the small displays of cell phones.
Source

New technology set to change physically impaired users experience of museum

2013-02-11T09:27:00.001-05:00

A revolutionary, fully interactive visual arts instalment is set to change how mobility impaired visitors experience museum attractions.

The real time tour, designed at Nottingham Trent University for the Galleries of Justice Museum, differs from traditional methods of video tours and virtual maps as the user guides the system themselves, in this case allowing them to experience the same visit as those who have continued the tour to the lower levels of the gaol.

Working with 3D gaming technologies the permanent installation provides the user with oral histories as well as a true depiction of the space, sounds and textures of the rooms, which they control through an assisted joystick.

Deborah Tuck and Roma Patel, lecturers from Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art & Design, were commissioned to research and design the system so that the museum could improve access. The new technology utilises their body of research that focuses on the application of film and theatre principles and techniques for digital storytelling.

Deborah Tuck, lecturer in visual communications, said: “The design and age of the building meant that a lift could not be incorporated for the lower levels, so Roma, myself and students on the BA Visual Arts and BA Narrative and Interactive Arts courses received funding from the Galleries of Justice Museum to create an alternative that would progress from traditional substitutes, so that it could fully engross the audience and run alongside the original tour.”

Gary Holmes, general manager at Galleries of Justice Museum, added: “The project was a fantastic opportunity for the Galleries of Justice Museum to enhance the experience it is able to present to visitors with physical disabilities.

“Before the ‘Virtual Tour’ was launched, visitors who were dependent on mobility aids would miss three crucial and exciting areas of the Crime and Punishment tour. However, by working closely with staff and students at Nottingham Trent University’s department of Narrative and Interactive arts we were able to produce a virtual tour of these areas to allow the visitor to engage fully with the sights and sounds of the old County Gaol.”

Source Creative Boom

How the mobile revolution is challenging open source user interfaces

2013-01-17T07:25:00.002-05:00

In the past couple of years, a powerful paradigm shift has occurred in user experience (UX) design. UX designers used to focus on desktop users but now, mobile devices and mobile users are at the center of attention. The evidence for the importance of this paradigm shift is stifling: Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2014, mobile users will exceed desktop users. Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt says that "if you don’t have a mobile strategy, you don’t have a future strategy."

Most importantly, this shift is not exclusive to consumer software or proprietary software; enterprise and OSS vendors have now begun creating their user interfaces with a mobile approach in mind, too. The mobile revolution has shown users how a simple experience can be much more satisfying than complex and crowded interfaces. Reduced screen space forces designers to focus on what’s really at stake for the user, which in turn leads to UIs that are increasingly decomposed to their bare essentials and therefore much simpler to use. And simplicity leads to more effective usage, higher productivity and lower training and support costs.

The mobile revolution is all-encompassing, and it has put quality UX design in the spotlight. Every digital business - be it open source or not - needs to face this challenge. “Creating mobile user experiences that delight users forces us to rethink a lot of what we have taken for granted so far with desktop design”, says UX strategist Lyndon Cerejo. He’s right: the mobile revolution requires a huge amount of re-thinking from UX designers. A good starting point for that process is an evaluation of changed user expectations.

Understanding new user expectations

The mobile revolution has had many consequences, but the one most relevant to good UX design is how users’ expectations are changing. After all, it is these projected expectations that guide the professional UX designer’s strategy. What are those changed expectations? Let’s take a look:

Mobile users want a seamless, minimally disruptive user experience that is enjoyable, not painful and cumbersome.
Mobile users want to use their software on touch-based devices the same way they use it on the desktop. What works on the desktop has to work as well, if not better, on a mobile device.
Apps have turned mobile users into multi-taskers. Apps split different tasks into manageable portions and allow users to work on various tasks in parallel, while keeping a clear focus.
Mobile users want to be aware of, and kept up-to-date with, all that’s happening in their environment, at all times.
Mobile users want to customize and personalize their devices to reflect their own needs and personalities.

If you have a smartphone or tablet, you’re probably aware of these already. For instance, you’ve certainly personalised your device, and you’re probably used to encountering highly usable interfaces.

Open source software and mobile-inspired UX design

Those expectations are directly responsible for mobile trends and new design principles. There are a number of OSS projects that have taken up those expectations and that have designed mobile-inspired user interfaces. Here are two examples:

Ubuntu’s Unity desktop is reminiscent of interfaces we know from the mobile world, and consciously so. “Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen...While the interface for each form factor is shaped appropriately, Unity’s core elements are arranged in exactly the way we need to create coherence across all of those devices”, says Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Ubuntu’s Heads-Up Display (HUD), Dash and app launcher help users be even more productive by being able to access app functionality from the keyboard, while on-screen notifications and indicators provide real-time information on the system. Speed, convenience and real-time information: three key principles of Unity’s design that have been reinforced by mobile trends.
Plasma Active is an open source project to produce a touch-oriented interface for “all types of tablets, smartphones and touch computing devices such as settop boxes, smart TVs, home automation or in-vehicle infotainment”. Plasma Active has taken the mobile user’s new expectations and transformed them directly into their UI. The navigation is intuitive (all the more important on smaller screens), highly customizable and adaptable to the user’s tasks and needs. “Activities” are used to group apps, widgets and contacts that contextually belong together, while widgets help users accomplish specific tasks or retrieve focused information. Users can personalize and tailor activities to their needs by adding files, apps and even websites to them.

These are just two examples of how open source products are changing with the times, by leveraging the trends in mobile UX design and the corresponding changes in user expectations to produce innovative new interfaces.

Magnolia CMS 5.0: The first mobile-inspired CMS

After exploring mobile trends and how they affect open source UX design, let’s look at how Magnolia, a Java-based and open-source Content Management System (CMS) tackled those challenges. At Magnolia (full disclosure: I’m the CEO), we take those new user expectations and the trends that go with them very seriously. In 2010, realizing the need to create a fresh and smooth user experience to support all the new features planned for Magnolia 5, we hired a dedicated UX designer, Andreas Weder, and charged him with the vision for creating a truly new user experience for the browser-based Web interface of Magnolia CMS.

The result of our hard work, Magnolia 5, is scheduled to be released in Spring 2013. We demonstrated it for the first time at our fall conference in September 2012, and recently released the Alpha 1 preview along with a screencast.

Design goals

Andreas and his team developed designs and ideas for Magnolia 5 that are heavily inspired and influenced by metaphors and interfaces from the mobile world and that bring related concepts to our browser-based interface. They strove to make Magnolia’s new user experience as intuitive and enjoyable as using apps on a smartphone. Their primary design goal was to ensure that ease of use and customization were features that should not be restricted to a tablet or smartphone. In sum, we envisage a CMS as simple and flexible as a smartphone.

Design implementation

Building on these goals, Andreas and his team came up with some innovative ideas. The key design concept was that Magnolia 5 should be “driven by touch”: Andreas aimed to be as close as possible to the mobile world while designing. He tested and improved his mock-ups on a tablet first. Decisively enough, he finished the UI for the tablet first, too, before adapting it for the desktop.

Throughout the whole process, mobile users and their expectations were what Andreas was focusing on. Knowing those changed user expectations was paramount to designing the new user interface for Magnolia 5. The result is clear: Magnolia 5 on iPad has a stunning, native feel to it.

Other key ideas of the Magnolia 5 UX include:

Apps: Magnolia 5 introduces Apps to reduce the complexity involved in CMS publishing workflows. Magnolia’s apps will be similar to the ones found on Apple and Android mobile devices. This new approach is designed to help content authors focus on closely-related tasks, by providing them with all related and necessary functionality in a single App.
Pulse: Pulse gives content authors and teams real-time information about content changes, warnings, and statistics. Every time a user goes back to Pulse, he or she will realize at a glance what has happened to the elements being worked on. If there is a problem or something that needs a quick solution, the user can react to the issue directly within Pulse.
Favorites: Favorites allows authors to improve their efficiency by adding custom shortcuts to frequently-used actions, as well as bookmarking sites they need to edit often.
Improved Navigation: The Magnolia 5 Apps screen serves as a central hub for all the tasks an author can do with Magnolia. The user can switch between Apps using the Apps screen, keyboard shortcuts or even a swipe gesture if using Magnolia on a tablet. There is also an action bar, that shows all actions that can be called on the currently selected item. These navigational features reduce the learning curve for new users and make it easier to perform common tasks.

Many of these elements are visible in the following screenshot of the new Magnolia 5.0 UI, running on an iPad (you can see more examples here).

Design collaboration

An important lesson that the mobile revolution taught us is the importance of collaboration and participation - something that the OSS community has naturally always understood. Throughout the UX design process, getting feedback and buy-in from customers, partners and users is critical to arriving at a result that is satisfactory to all. That’s why at Magnolia, we started communicating information about the new release and its revolutionary GUI very early, despite it not being production ready. These are the main channels we used:

Open documentation
Employee blogs
Our dedicated UX blog
Our community website

Conclusion

The paradigm shift from desktop to mobile has put UX design in the spotlight, because the mobile revolution has shown users and designers that a quality UX can be done in a much simpler and more effective way. Nowadays, mobile users expect a flawless interface that caters to their needs and gives them a seamless and intuitive experience. Open source projects have increasingly recognised these trends in recent years and acted on them by releasing mobile-inspired UIs. Magnolia 5 (to be released in 2013) is a prime example of this trend: driven by touch, its Apps, Pulse and Favorites epitomize everything a user expects of an open source CMS in the mobile age.

Source: opensource.com

Innovations that will change our lives in the next five years

2012-12-19T03:37:00.000-05:00

We think of the five senses as exclusive to living things

Processing sights and sounds requires eyes, ears and, most important, a brain—right?

But what if your hardware shared your senses?

In the era of cognitive computing, systems learn instead of passively relying on programming. As a result, emerging technologies will continue to push the boundaries of human limitations to enhance and augment our senses with machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced speech recognition and more. No need to call for Superman when we have real super senses at hand.

This year IBM presents The 5 in 5 in five sensory categories, through innovations that will touch our lives and see us into the future.

Touch: You will be able to touch through your phone

In the 1970s, when a telephone company encouraged us to "reach out and touch someone," it had no idea that a few decades later that could be more than a metaphor. Infrared and haptic technologies will enable a smart phone's touchscreen technology and vibration capabilities to simulate the physical sensation of touching something. So you could experience the silkiness of that catalog's Egyptian cotton sheets instead of just relying on some copywriter to convince you.

Sight: A pixel will be worth a thousand words

Recognition systems can pinpoint a face in a crowd. In the future, computer vision might save a life by analyzing patterns to make sense of visuals in the context of big data. In industries as varied as healthcare, retail and agriculture, a system could gather information and detect anomalies specific to the task—such as spotting a tiny area of diseased tissue in an MRI and applying it to the patient's medical history for faster, more accurate diagnosis and treatment.

Hearing: Computers will hear what matters

Before the tree fell in the forest, did anyone hear it? Sensors that pick up sound patterns and frequency changes will be able to predict weakness in a bridge before it buckles, the deeper meaning of your baby's cry or, yes, a tree breaking down internally before it falls. By analyzing verbal traits and including multi-sensory information, machine hearing and speech recognition could even be sensitive enough to advance dialogue across languages and cultures.

Taste: Digital taste buds will help you eat smarter

The challenge of providing food—whether it's for impoverished populations, people on restricted diets or picky kids—is in finding a way to meet both nutritional needs and personal preferences. In the works: a way to compute "perfect" meals using an algorithmic recipe of favorite flavors and optimal nutrition. No more need for substitute foods when you can have a personalized menu that satisfies both the calorie count and the palate.

Smell: Computers will have a sense of smell

When you call a friend to say how you're doing, your phone will know on the full story. Soon, sensors will detect and distinguish odors: a chemical, a biomarker, even molecules in the breath that affect personal health. The same smell technology, combined with deep learning systems, could troubleshoot operating-room hygiene, crops' soil conditions or a city's sanitation system before the human nose knows there's a problem.

Learn more ...

How to Interweave Design with Product Development?

2012-12-05T11:17:00.001-05:00

Good user experience design is magnetic. You start using a product, and everything just feels so easy to do. You continue using it and realize there are smaller thoughtful touches for you to discover along the way – maybe, you accidentally double tapped the space bar of your touch phone and realized that it inserted a ‘.’ and added a space. That’s just what you wanted to do, but it made using the keyboard feel easier.

Good design has a huge bearing on how you feel about a product. But if you are starting to build your product, how do you get there? And importantly, how do you reduce friction in getting left-brain dominated development work with right-brain led design? Let’s walk through a typical process.

Different aspects of design

Design in India is largely seen as interior design or web design. Many of us, if asked, will point out some of these tasks that designers do – design a web page, create/change an icon, make a ppt look good, change color schemes, etc.

But there’s more.

Here are some other design capabilities that you are likely to use in your development and design:

Interaction design: how users interact with your product, what different contexts are, what buttons do, etc.
Information architecture: a model or concept of various data elements organized to solve task flows
Visual design: the look and feel of the product (this is what most folks think of when you say design!)
Usability testing: closed-door or in-situ testing of design, prototype or near-final software with target consumer base to understand reactions and suggest modifications.

You may have different designers work on these aspects or the same designer handle multiple roles. Here’s a typical journey of working with design.

Design interactions in product development

Some typical phases while working through your app are:

- Ideation/sketches

As discussed earlier, a great way to start planning a product is to spend time with the designer to discuss what you want done. You could start with the marketing headline for your product, so that it is a key focus through the design process.

This is usually the abstract phase where you could put together ideas/sketches, either on paper, a whiteboard or using tools like Balsamiq, Omnigraffle, Adobe Illustrator or any wireframe generator.

Some topics you could discuss during ideation are:

First time use and experience
Return usage and experience
Focus areas for your product
Entry points for users on repeat usage
Low friction tasks you want the users to complete easily (eg: quickly scan news headline or status repeat.)
Sharable elements and options
Task hierarchies and flow

During ideation, do not start vetting ideas based on feasibility. Generate as many ideas and concepts first so that you have a rich base of experiences to choose from.

It is fine to not have rich UI elements in this phase. What’s important is to get overall model of content and interactions right, and then work on visuals.

- Design proposal

Once you have a sketch that addresses elements of your core value proposition, get a complete design proposal.

A design proposal is like a master blueprint that outlines major use cases of your product, proposed visual design and high level user journey flows.

Typically, a design proposal covers major task flows for your product and gives an idea of the visual constructs your product would use.

- Feasibility analysis

The design proposal also serves as a discussion board with your technical and marketing teams.

The technical team can use the design proposal to comment on feasibility, backend required to support the solution, estimates of work required, APIs required from 3rd parties (eg: map view), etc.

It also helps the marketing teams to visualize how the solution would look and bring in a consumer point of view.

And of course, the design proposal will help product management/founders to see if the solution aligns with the core value proposition.

At this stage, there may be multiple concerns from teams – the solution implementation requires 3rd party APIs that come with a license cost – the visual design is not conducive for first time users – the overall product design seems complicated to use, etc.

This is a good point in your development to catch these concerns, and modify the design.

You can also get estimates from the technical teams on development/testing timelines and resource requirements. Depending on these, you may decide to defer some of the cooler designs to a 2.0 product, if timing is critical.

- Prototypes

Prototyping is a great way to get early feedback.

The idea of prototypes is to have different mock-ups of the design proposal that you could play around with to see how it feels. Usually, you could choose dummy data for the prototypes that corresponds with your live data.

Prototypes can also be used for quick consumer reactions, to see how consumers react to your product design.

A key advantage of prototypes over a static design proposal is the ability to walk through user flows to see if there’s something that’s not intuitive.

- Finalize product/design roadmap

Once your teams are aligned on the design proposal, you can vet the design against the product roadmap and finalize the priority order of feature implementation.

This helps your designer plan their activities as per your implementation roadmap, so that they can start drawing out detailed specifications, work on logos and graphics, etc.

You may want to detail/break-up user stories into smaller chunks for implementation/design teams to handle.

The end outcome of this stage is a clear product roadmap with details on different development phases and what design needs to deliver.

- Specification of design

The specification stage is when user flows and visual design are detailed out for development.

The design specifications could also contain flow diagrams, corner cases, etc. (eg: what happens if user enters Wi-Fi zone and then leaves)

If you follow the method of creating user stories for your product development, you could pick user stories for the design team to flesh out and development team to work on.

- Usability testing

During development, you are likely to come across cases that are difficult to agree on the approach without observation.

You could collect use cases that you are uncertain about, and get a usability testing conducted.

Usability testing is a well-evolved discipline in the design world, more than just showing the design to a few people and getting their opinion on it.

Usability tests are typically conducted by a moderator with a section of the target audience, and check for generics like how users react to the design, how much of learning does the design encourage, where do users need a helping hand to figure out how to proceed, what is their reaction to specific use cases, etc.

- Final lockdown

In almost all product development processes that I have seen, there is a huge temptation to keep refining the product or the design to make it better. Once the development process is nearing completion, the designer gets to actually see how the product experience will be, and it’s likely that s/he will see loose ends (and hopefully only loose ends!).

Judging if a product or design is ‘good enough’ is a tough job. The best way to resolve this is to have either a single arbiter who can take a business decision, or get the founders and designer together to talk through.

Designers usually push for improving the user experience, while sales and business are keen on time-to-launch.

One way to finalize decisions is to have a clear-cut lockdown date prior to launch, and vet proposed changes with development to see if they can be completed in time.

If you’re building mobile software, it’s good to have a final design document at this time that corresponds to your release.

- Marketing collateral

The last stage of the process is usually getting the marketing collateral ready. The final design document is a source for screenshots and any other collateral you may need to publicize your product.

A fantastic depiction of the design process in action is the Government Digital Services design principles by the UK government. This was an overarching design process to fine-tune digital delivery of government services in UK.

Are there other aspects you would like to discuss? Let us know in comments or @shrinathv.

Source

Designing Life-Changing Solutions

2012-11-28T09:17:00.000-05:00

The boundaries between design and psychology are progressively blurring. With designers increasingly facing high stakes challenges and more psychologists jumping off the academic pedestal to get their hands dirty with real people in real contexts, the two disciplines are more intertwined than ever before.

About a decade ago, the job of the designer was making the path from A to B as easy and streamlined as possible. During this “usability” golden age, the main focus was to remove any type of cognitive friction along a predefined path to a predefined goal. Anyone interested in buying a book online, for example, only needed to know where they were in the process and what steps were necessary to ensure the right product was delivered to the right address. Other key elements of the experience, such as where the need for the book originated or how reading the book would enrich a person’s life, were given little to no consideration.

Today’s landscape is quite different. Designing highly usable products and services to help people buy books online is still significant but designers also have the chance to influence people’s lives and decisions on a much deeper level.

The spread of widely available technology, such as sensors, smartphones, and high-speed mobile networks, puts us on top of a mountain of data and allows designers to tackle problems in ways that were unimaginable even a few years ago. By making sense of this abundance of data, designers are able to create life-changing products and services that help people achieve goals and objectives in relevant, meaningful, and actionable ways. This ability moves design beyond the “A to B” scenario to embrace whole new solutions in which the starting point is known but the destination and the path to get there cannot be precisely defined upfront. Clear goals with clear paths have broadened, becoming as vague as “taking good care of yourself,” “living a healthy lifestyle,” or “managing your personal finances.”

This creates the opportunity for designers to work together with psychologists, as well as other subject matter experts, to better define how these broad challenges can be translated into meaningful products and services that are able to become true life companions. It is an ambitious goal and our experience at frog suggests that, in order to achieve it, we need to help people to frame the purpose, to find commitment, and to forge resolution over time.

Frame the Purpose

In the 1980s, glucose meters were among the first consumer medical devices introduced to the market. These devices allowed diabetic people to conveniently self-measure their blood glucose level and adjust their insulin shots accordingly. It was a huge step forward in diabetes management, relieving many diabetics from a good number of the chores that filled their daily routine. On the other hand, this revolutionary tool didn’t change the focus of a diabetic person’s life. No matter how usable and well-designed the glucose meter was, managing diabetes still meant keeping blood glucose fluctuations in range while being prepared to face emergencies such as hypos and hypers.

In the past few years, things have rapidly changed and diabetes management is experiencing another revolution. Companies like Medtronic and Cellnovo are introducing new ecosystems of products and services that approach diabetes management from a more holistic perspective. By including fundamental information, such as food intake, physical activity, and personal notes, this new generation of devices shifts the overall focus from a single number (the blood glucose value) to the person as a whole (“I need to take good care of myself.” ) As a result, diabetics gain a much higher degree of control over their condition.

Find Commitment

In September 2010, five colleagues from frog’s Milan studio decided it was time to start running after a way-too-relaxed summer. Rather solely hoping that their willpower would be stronger than the inevitable pain, they decided to set up a private challenge on the popular Nike+ platform. All of a sudden, what was a vague and undefined goal (“Let’s get back in shape.”) became a clear objective with a defined deadline (running the longest aggregated distance over the next 30 days.) This was enough to get people started. Social pressure took care of the rest. During the entire duration of the challenge, teasing between competitors about their respective performances was a common practice in the workplace as people exhausted themselves on a daily basis to avoid slipping down to the bottom of the chart.

The outcome of this private experiment was outstanding. Although no prize was up for grabs, aside from the “glory” of being the best runner in the studio, each of the five participants ran an aggregated distance of more than 100km at the end of the 30 days. Not bad for a bunch of sedentary designers trying to reduce their waistline.

Rather than requiring people to become athletes overnight, Nike+ helped my frog colleagues, along with millions of people around the world, find commitment by setting reasonable goals, focusing on the objectives at hand, celebrating new achievements, and staying motivated while approaching their long term purpose.

Commitment doesn’t necessarily grow from a deliberate choice and subsequent willpower. The environment around us and the objects we interact with often influence the way we behave without us even noticing it. A breakthrough experiment conducted in a suburban Chicago movie theatre, and described in Brian Wansink’s book Mindless Eating, illustrates this influence.

After purchasing a ticket for Mel Gibson’s new action movie, Payback, every moviegoer received a soft drink and either a medium-size or a large-size bucket of popcorn. The popcorn in both bucket sizes was stale, having been popped five days earlier. The buckets were also large enough to ensure nobody could finish them. The experiment’s goal was to see if people would eat the stale popcorn and whether there was a correlation between the quantities eaten and bucket size. After the movie, participants were asked to return their buckets so they could be weighed and to fill out a form with a few questions. The researchers discovered that the participants not only ate the stale popcorn, but those with the bigger bucket ate 53% more. When asked if the size of the bucket influenced on the quantity of popcorn eaten, participants replied with statements like "I'm pretty good at knowing when I'm full” or “that wouldn’t happen to me.”

When designing to help people find a commitment for change, we should always seek to understand whether it’s a motivation issue or an environment issue and be ready to design accordingly.

Forge Resolution Over Time

Did I mention what happened after the frog Milan running challenge ended? In a matter of weeks, the magic was over and all of the challengers quickly became accustomed to the comfort of their sofas again.

To be a real life-changer, a design should be effective not only in the short term but also in the middle to long run, even when this means years or decades. In fact, the risk that the effectiveness of a product or a service goes away with the initial excitement is extremely high and it’s up to us, designers and psychologists, to take the right countermeasures.

Take Mint.com, for instance. The popular personal financial management service not only allows its users to set their financial goals, but it explicitly encourages the use of automatic deposits on dedicated accounts that are difficult to withdraw money and linked to each goal. By doing so, Mint.com creates an environment that, on one side, supports users’ initial decisions and makes them extremely easy to pursue – thanks to automatic deposits – and, on the other side, makes it harder to turn back on a decision – no cards or checks to spend the money beforehand. This way, the likeliness that a goal is reached is radically increased, even after the initial motivation fades away.

In the stale popcorn example, we saw how the design of certain items we interact with may influence our behavior without raising our awareness and motivation. But how can we make sure this behavior change will be sustainable over time?

On January 10^th 2005, the Italian government introduced a smoking ban in all of the public spaces, throwing millions of smokers literally out in the cold with their guilty pleasures. During the following 5 months, the Ministry of Health promoted a series of initiatives to raise the awareness around the ban and the risks of secondhand smoke, especially for children or pregnant women. At the same time a network of anti-smoking support centers expanded throughout the country in order to properly support those who were willing to quit.
To the surprise of the many skeptics, the ban not only was widely respected with little or no enforcement by public authorities but, over the course of the years, lead to an overall reduction of the number of smokers across the country and to a significant reduction of heart attacks among the population. By increasing people’s awareness after a hard ban and supporting the choice of those who were willing to quit, the Italian government managed to change the behavior and the habits of millions of people almost overnight and to properly sustain it over time.

By designing products and services that frame the purpose, find commitment, and forge resolution over time we have the unprecedented chance to help people not only mechanically change their behavior in the long-term but to also bring meaning and order to their life on a wide scale, shaping what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a “unified flow experience.”

When this is accomplished, people feel in control of their lives and reach a state of harmony and happiness, whether they are managing a chronic disease such as diabetes, conducting a healthier lifestyle with no smoke and more exercise, or saving for retirement. Adding meaning to people’s lives and making them happier is one of the most exciting challenges we, as designers and psychologists, have in front of us and it’s up to us to turn it into an opportunity for the good.

Image Credit (from top): 1, 2, 3

Giorgio Baresi is a principal designer based in frog's Milan studio.

Source

Why the iPad Mini Is a Disruptive Technology

2012-11-21T07:20:00.003-05:00

Now that the iPad Mini has been out for a while and many of us at Creative Strategies have been testing them, it is becoming clear to us that this 7.9” form factor (or most 7” inch models) will become the most important tablets for consumers in the future.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but the main one is that these tablets are light, thin and, in the iPad Mini’s case, deliver a best in breed tablet experience. Also, these smaller tablets will always be cheaper than larger tablets because the bill of material (BOM) cost for smaller versions will always be less than the bigger models.

As I have personally used the iPad Mini for some time now, I have begun to see my usage patterns with tablets change significantly. Before the iPad Mini, the tablet I used the most was the full-size iPad. Although I also used my 7-inch Kindle Fire HD often for reading and media consumption, the iPad was my real go-to tablet device. And it became even more important to me once I added the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover to it: It’s now used for content consumption as well as productivity.

However, there is an 80/20 rule that is becoming an important metric when it comes to tablets and PCs. It turns out most consumers can do about 80% of the most common tasks they do with a PC on a tablet, and any other key tasks, such as media management, large spreadsheets, music and video servers, and the like are designated to the computer. But once I started using the iPad Mini, I found that it became my go-to device because of its lightweight, small size and literal duplication of everything I have on the iPad.

There is an interesting twist to this. When my only tablet was my iPad, I defaulted to my laptop for heavy lifting tasks. But once I started using the iPad Mini, I found myself defaulting to the 9.7” iPad with its keyboard as my main productivity device. I found that in this case, a 90/10 rule kicked in. I spent 90% of my time on these tablets and only about 10% on my laptop.

Now I realize that this may not be a broad trend, but we are hearing the same type of feedback in our early consumer interviews. Although fresh and not fully completed research, many people who have an iPad Mini are sharing similar stories. Almost all that we talked to told us that the role of the laptop has diminished for them significantly since they got the iPad, and were now using the iPad Mini more frequently than their larger iPads.

When I asked them if they were interested in buying a new Windows PC or laptop, their comments were pretty consistent. They said that if the PC were only used 10-20% of the time, they would most likely just extend the life of their PCs or laptops instead of buying new ones. And if they did buy a new PC or laptop, it would be the cheapest they could find. They could no longer justify a more expensive and powerful version if it mostly sat at home and was used infrequently for more data- or media-intensive apps.

I suspect that this scenario with consumers may play out a lot more in the future, and at the very least, their tablets do handle the majority of their daily digital needs. I believe that a PC as we know it today will continue to lose its primary role in the home given its lack of use more often than not.

If this trend does play itself out as I have suggested, the impact on the traditional PC market could be very disruptive within two to three years. As consumers buy inexpensive small tablets that will only get better in performance, screen clarity and apps, the use of these tablets will supersede their PC use, and demand for PCs and laptops could decrease significantly.

While PCs and laptops will never go away, they may soon play a different role for consumers than they have in the past. And if tablets increase their role as the dominant devices consumers use to access the majority of their digital needs, then the impact on PC demand has to be affected down the road. In fact, some key industry insiders call this the “PC Cliff,” suggesting that we could see a time in the not-too-distant future where demand for PCs falls by a steep amount, giving way to tablets as the major growth segment of the PC industry.

Interestingly, there could be a silver lining for traditional PC vendors if they innovate quickly. In my comments above, I mentioned that the iPad Mini has now become my go-to tablet while the original iPad with the Logitech keyboard is now my cross over device handling consumption and productivity. And my use of my laptop has declined as a result of this. But for me, the iPad with a keyboard has become kind of a laptop replacement. It is touch based, lighter than any laptop I could ever own, has an average 10-hour battery life, is instant-on and runs most of the apps I need, as well as giving me a very rich web browsing experience.

But my iPad with keyboard is really what we in the industry call a hybrid. It’s a touch-based tablet tied to a detachable keyboard. Microsoft’s Surface falls into this category as does HP’s Envy X2 – which HP calls it a convertible. The nomenclature for this seems to be ever changing but we define a convertible as a tablet/keyboard combo that does not detach, while a hybrid is a tablet with a detachable keyboard.

The interest in the hybrids, as we define them, is high, especially in enterprise. However, the demand for Windows RT-based hybrids like the Surface is somewhat muted since it does not have backward compatibility with existing Windows software. Instead, the hybrids we are seeing great interest in, both with consumers and business users, are Windows 8 devices that use an x86 chip and have full backwards compatibility with existing Windows software, like HP’s Envy X2 Convertible. But if the scenario I suggest plays out, it will be these hybrids that drive some of the “laptop” sales in the future, while demand for more traditional laptops could wane.

I believe that the iPad Mini and smaller tablets will be even more disruptive to the traditional PC market than the full-size iPad has been to date. We can envision a time soon where a user has a 7” tablet that is used mostly for content consumption, email and web browsing, and a hybrid to pick up any productivity slack they may have. The bottom line is, the more consumers use tablets of either size, the more they realize that the laptop or PC in the home is overkill, and decide to either just keep the one they have longer or buy the cheapest PC they can for any extra computing needs they may have that a tablet can’t do.

There is another scenario that could play out that is not as drastic as a PC cliff. This is where people decide they want the best tablet they can buy as well as the best laptop, no matter its price. However, even if that does happen, the amount of premium laptops sold compared to cheap PCs will be small. Still, a premium PC or laptop has solid margins, while laptops under $499 have small margins.

I believe that some type of PC cliff could happen, and if so, it could change the fortunes of the traditional PC vendors considerably. We don’t ever expect the PC to go completely away, but its role in a family or even in business could change in ways we don’t even understand at this early stage of the tablet market. However, the more research we do on this subject, the more we see the writing on the wall. We think that the PC industry is going to suffer a major adjustment in the next two to three years.

Bajarin is the president of Creative Strategies Inc., a technology industry analysis and market-intelligence firm in Silicon Valley. He contributes to Big Picture, an opinion column that appears every Monday on TIME Tech. (source)

Skeuomorphism is (finally) dead: So what is Apple’s next design move?

2012-11-08T15:17:00.003-05:00

Many designers say Apple’s once polished software has lost its luster. Olof Schybergson, CEO of design firm Fjord, believes Scott Forstall’s departure could spark a new era of software innovation for the company and define Tim Cook’s tenure.

Much has been said already about the departure of Scott Forstall at Apple. The politics of it aside, with a refreshed executive leadership in place, CEO Tim Cook now has the opportunity to usher in a new era of discovery and transformational design at Apple. It’s an exciting and possibly defining prospect, but the question remains: If Apple’s current software design style needs an upgrade, where could newly installed design head Jony Ive and his team take it? Ive is clearly an extremely talented and passionate design leader, but his background is in hardware. Will his abilities scale to successfully lead all of Apple’s software design too?

Since the early days of Apple, their approachable design made digital software and interfaces accessible and usable, to the extent that even a child could use them. But their innovation since the launch of the first iPad has either been incremental (for example iOS or the iPad Mini) or flawed (for example Siri and Apple Maps). Their software design has also remained stale with many contending that a refresh is overdue. Arguably, Apple is now playing defense, giving competitors like Microsoft and Google space to innovate and set trends in interface design across devices and platforms.

Steve Jobs was—notoriously, to many members of the design community—a fan of skeuomorphism, a style that relies on real-world metaphors and textures in digital interfaces. Fake leather, wood, paper and glass became commonplace in Apple applications, in addition to real-world metaphors like bookshelves, paper shredders, and even casinos. While skeuomorphism might have been beneficial in the early days of computing in helping less-tech-savvy types navigate a user interface, it now feels out of place in a world where most people are using a host of digital interfaces throughout the day, and where younger people have never even experienced physical rolodexes, paper shredders or giant desk calendars. From a design perspective, when used excessively skeuomorphism is at best out-dated, at worst confusing and tasteless. More importantly though it feels at extreme odds with Apple’s hardware, which is designed with sophistication and constraint. So where might Apple’s designs go?

Looking at competitors like Microsoft, its new Windows UI style, across operating systems, is at the direct opposite end of the spectrum from skeuomorphism. It’s a modernist Swiss style, where all excessive embellishments are removed. The life in the experience comes from content and transitions, not from visual UI ornaments.

The wildly successful Android OS lands somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, between skeuomorphism and the new minimalist Windows style. While visually Android is not leading the way (and here I include all of the Android licensees), there are now several interaction patterns and solutions that are better designed and more advanced than what iOS offers.

Microsoft has claimed the minimalist corner, and a radical Apple departure from their current UI style could be confusing to existing users, and would also admit defeat (which is not a very Apple-like trait as well). Apple has long had a human-centered design focus, and has gone further than most to make technology accessible to everyone. Apple’s challenge then is formidable: To retain the focus on simplicity, accessibility and ease-of-use, while at the same time refreshing their UI style and introducing design consistency across their increasingly wide range of software and services. It’s a tall order, and will need investment, focus and talent.

The most transformative devices today are ingenious pieces of software wrapped in desirable hardware. The Nike+ FuelBand or the self-learning Nest thermostat are examples of new software products that are wrapped in well-designed hardware. Apple has long been the master at this, but competitors are encroaching on their territory. Microsoft has gone against its hardware suppliers in creating its own showpiece for Surface—a move it had to make to ensure that the hardware maximized the potential of the software. But creating this combo is not easy, and Apple will have to work hard to stay on top. Various pieces of Apple software on a range of different devices connect to incredibly advanced services and algorithms in the cloud. Orchestrating this, and presenting the services to people in a way that’s easy and delightful to use, is very challenging. Not many companies do it well and consistently (which is why the relative failure of the complex Siri and Apple Maps services weren’t a big surprise for some).

With iOS, Apple showed the world how the graphical touch paradigm should work. Modern touch interfaces are now characterized by responsive, fluid and direct interaction, while tapping, swiping and pinching have become dominant gestures. Apple led the way in making touch interaction mainstream. Looking ahead, interactions will move beyond the screen into thin air, and both input and output will increasingly use voice. Apple now has an opportunity to once again lead the way and design the dominant interactions for what comes next in computing.

The wearables category will need great design to go mainstream, and Apple’s entry in the race could be inspiring. A radically redesigned iOS would be very interesting, and a confident Apple entry into “control point” services like search or commerce would be fascinating. If Cook and Ive are able to succeed with a bold investment in a service play, they will not only create immense value for Apple, but also demonstrate that they can pull off their own innovations, rather than just incremental changes to what Steve Jobs envisioned.

Om Malik’s recent piece here about the change-up at Apple highlighted an increasingly schedule-driven release culture under Tim Cook’s leadership. This might indeed become a challenge for software innovation. If the question “when do we ship” ever becomes more important than “what do we ship,” true innovation, risk-taking, and design excellence become hard.

A radical refresh of iOS, a category-defining entry into wearables, or a confident push into services like search or commerce could spell the real making of Tim Cook. Right now the jury is still out. For us designers, Jony Ive now has the chance to upgrade his status from mere legendary design Lord to design demigod. I hope he takes it.

BY Olof Schybergson, Fjord - Source

Olof Schybergson is CEO and Co-Founder at the service design consultancy, Fjord. (Twitter: @fjord.)

UI image courtesy of Apple
Apple image courtesy of Shutterstock.

What do you think about the Skeuomorphism?

2012-11-08T12:49:00.000-05:00

Share your opinion on the Apple user experience (Skeuomorphism) and see the results from the UX community.

Click on the right side in the home page

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Share your opinion and see the results

Philips hue app-controlled lightbulbs debut exclusively at Apple stores

2012-10-31T01:22:00.001-04:00

Dubbed "the world's smartest LED bulb," the new Philips hue is an iOS application-controlled lightbulb that will be available only in Apple retail stores.

Apple's stores will begin carrying the hue on Tuesday, priced at $199 for a starter pack with three bulbs of 600 lumen and a hue bridge to connect the bulbs to a home network.

Each bob offers all shades of white and a variety of color, and they use 80 percent less power than a traditional light bulb while providing the equivalent of a 500 watt bulb. A huge introduction pack can expand to up to 50 individual bulbs, and each bulb is priced at $59.

With an iOS application, hue allows users to remotely control their home lighting, and personalize settings such as timers. Philips also says that its bulbs are upgradeable and future-proof, as more features can be downloaded in the future.

hue - Master Video from Philips Color Kinetics on Vimeo.

The hue app also features what Philips has called "LightRecipes," which are four pre-programmed lighting settings based on the company's research regarding the biological effects that lighting has on the body. The scenarios adjust bulbs to the optimum shade and brightness of white light to help users relax, read, concentrate or energize.

Other features of Philips hue, according to the company, are:

Save your favorite light scenes for each room or time of day and recall them in an instant
Use any photo on your phone as a color palette to paint your room with light and bring your memories back to life
Tune white light from warm candlelight to vibrant, cool white light
Create ambience or complement your decor with the colors of the rainbow
Control and monitor your lights remotely when not at home for security and peace of mind
Set timers to help manage your daily routine
Let light wake you up refreshed or help your loved ones fall asleep

"Philips hue is a game-changer in lighting – a completely new way to experience and interact with light," said Jeroen de Waal, head of marketing and strategy at Philips Lighting. "In the way phones, media and entertainment have been revolutionized by digital technology, now we can also personalize light and enjoy limitless applications.

"Philips continues to redefine the possibilities of LED technology, and hue pushes the boundaries even more, not only in offering great light quality, but in how lighting can be digitized and integrated with our world to further simplify and enhance our lives."

The hue marks yet another home automation device being pushed by Apple in its retail stores. The iPhone maker already carries the Next learning thermostat, which also connects to iPhones via a free application, and aims to reduce users' power bills.

By Apple Insider Staff

9 Reasons Why Companies Will Ignore Windows 8

2012-10-26T08:00:00.000-04:00

8 goes on sale to the public tomorrow. But a good many of Microsoft's most important customers will greet the news with a yawn.
Businesses won't buy Windows 8 right away. Maybe never.

Market research firm Gartner says that 90% of companies globally have no plans to deploy Windows 8 in a big way, and probably won't until at least 2014.

If Windows 8 is another flop like Vista, they may opt to skip it altogether and stick with .

There's a lot of reasons for this.

1. Windows 8 would require every PC user to be retrained. has changed nearly everything about how users interact with computers with Windows 8. It hasn't made even the simple stuff easy to figure out—like how to open and close files and see which apps you have open. Calls would flood help desks.

2. Windows 8 doesn't have a lot of great new features for the enterprise. Microsoft really geared Windows 8 for consumers. The list of new features for enterprise users is thin and not enough to make them want retrain employees.

3. Windows 8 can't natively run older Windows apps. Corporations own billions of dollars worth of older Windows software that they use to run their businesses. Any program that runs in Windows 7 can run on Windows 8, but only in "Desktop Mode." Desktop mode is essentially a clunky, harder-to-use version of Windows 7 with missing features like the "Start" button. Why upgrade to Windows 8 and retrain your users, only to have your apps run in a less-functional version of Windows 7?

4. Very few enterprise software programs have been rewritten to run as Windows 8 apps. If there were important apps that were only available for Windows 8, that might drive companies to upgrade. But there aren't. Enterprise software makers aren't going to take that on until Windows 8 is a hit.

5. Windows 8 is REALLY awkward on older PCs. If a machine doesn't have a touchscreen—and most Windows 7 machines do not—then users are forced to do all the touchscreen controls with a mouse. It's awkward. Businesses that want to use Windows 8 should buy new touchscreen PCs. Companies tend to refresh their PCs on three-to-five year cycles, not just because a new operating system becomes available.

6. Many companies have only recently upgraded to Windows 7. It will be two to five years before they'll want to refresh their PCs again.

7. Corporations will want to wait for bug fixes. Even if a companies wants Windows 8, few of them will upgrade before the first "service pack," which typically comes a year after the original release. A service pack fixes all the bugs and performance issues found with new software.

8. Companies can "downgrade" to older versions of Windows. Businesses which sign deals with Microsoft can still easily get a new PC and install Windows 7 on it. Microsoft gets paid the same.

9. New technologies allow them to run virtual, cloud-based Windows machines. Companies don't even need to install software on desktop PCs anymore. They can deliver a complete Windows desktop as an app through the cloud. Many users have begun to bring their own devices to work and more companies are planning to deliver work applications this way, with no care about the operating system on the user's PC.

There will still be corporations that buy some Windows 8 PCs, particularly for road warriors who need tablets. But a massive upgrade to Windows 8 by corporate America? Not going to happen anytime soon.

The iPad Mini is for Cars

2012-10-25T11:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Apple launched the iPad mini. Apple events in the fall of 2012 may no longer command the social anticipation of only a few years ago, but they remain flash points for technology reporting. This release brought on more than its share of speculation that the mini is simply an overdue acknowledgement that Amazon got something right with Kindle, and that Apple has quietly slipped into following mode. Some pundits have seized on the angle that Apple’s new tablet appeared to contradict Job’s famous trashing of the 7″ form factor. But in all of the hullabaloo one observation seems to be missing. That is, a tablet of this size is tailor-made for inclusion into the dashboard of your car.

Nothing dates a car like its electronics. And nothing is more tragic that the UX of pretty much every single in-car navigation and music system. The luxury car segment can do Corinthian leather and wood grain appointments like no industry on earth. They can build a magnificent driving machine that powers through rain and snow like it was a sunny day in LA. But ask them to do a screen-based app and you get something that looks like it was designed on a TRS-80.

I didn’t renew the trial SiriusXM in my 4Runner because I couldn’t stand its programming compared with what I could stream from my iPhone using Bluetooth. Every time I rent a car I use my phone-based Navigon app over any provided GPS because my app is just better. I’m hooked on Waze despite how few people use it up here in Vancouver (you should sign up—the more people who use it, the better the traffic data is). The apps on my phone are always up-to-date and I replace the hardware every couple of years for the latest model (which is good enough for me; after all, it’s only a phone).

All cars need is a standard, lockable frame where you can plug in the device of your choice, plus a standardized connector. Then let free market competition and innovation prevail over Apps. Tomorrow’s gear heads aren’t going to be like the hot rodders of my Dad’s generation or the tuner kids of a decade ago. They are going to be geeks with Apps using APIs.

That’s what the iPad mini is for.

Source

It's a Hard-Knock Life, so Far, for Microsoft Surface

2012-10-25T10:00:00.000-04:00

Microsoft's new Surface tablet hasn't even officially arrived yet, but early reviewers are decrying its lack of apps as a major stumbling block to success. Is that a real problem for a brand new device running a brand new OS? Or is Microsoft being kicked around a bit just because it's Microsoft? "Apple could have 10 apps and it could be seen as successful," noted iSuppli analyst Rhoda Alexander.

Microsoft's new Surface RT tablet won't officially go on sale until Friday, and the early reviews have praised the design and even the interface, but some critics have taken aim at a slow operating system and, notably, the shortage of applications.

Microsoft's Surface RT

Is it even fair to cry foul over a brand new device with a brand new operating system arriving light on apps? Possibly, since the market, dominated by Apple's iPads and devices running Google's Android, is filled with seemingly infinite permutations of "an app for that."

"I don't think users are expecting thousands of apps, but the primary competitors -- Apple and Android -- have extensive app universes," said Rhoda Alexander, senior manager for monitors and tablets at IHS iSuppli. "In an ideal world, you'd be measured as a newbie, and have time to grow your apps -- but the reality is that you come into the world and you're measured against the competition."

Even so, should reviewers really have expected a plethora of apps on day one?

"The apps question is an interesting one with regard to Surface," said Chris Silva, industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. "Since the OS is new -- and on the tablet side, on a whole new form factor -- there's no way for the apps to have been developed and tested in advance of the devices' launch to seed the marketplace."

Level Playing Surface

It also seems as though reviewers are putting Microsoft in the spotlight in a way that Apple usually isn't cast. Is there a bias against Microsoft in this case?

"Apple could have 10 apps and it could be seen as successful, as it is a new category," Alexander told TechNewsWorld.

The irony is that this is market with well-stocked competitors that had time to build up their respective libraries of apps -- a great many of which remain obscure, she noted.

"Most users don't tap into anywhere near the number of apps," said Alexander. "They use the most helpful -- the most popular."

So why is Microsoft being taken to task? It could just be that the company is expanding in a new direction. When a new, untested player comes into the market, it faces greater scrutiny.

"Microsoft has been trying to expand for quite a while and with little success," telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan told TechNewsWorld. "Think of the struggle they've had with their wireless phones. The Microsoft tablet has both strengths and weaknesses, and that is a challenge."

Apples and Surfaces

It should also be remembered that Apple entered the tablet arena without having to prove that it could develop a strong app community. That was something it had already done. Focusing on the paucity of apps for the Surface seems to be setting the bar rather high.

"The comparison to Apple is not a one-for-one comparison, as Apple's initial spate of iPad apps were simply iPhone/iPod apps that had been converted to the larger form factor," said Silva.

"The experience was not ideal, as most of these apps simply stretched the phone app to the tablet resolution," he told TechNewsWorld.

"Because most apps were compatible with the tablet at launch and available on the App Store, Apple did not receive too much pressure on lacking an ecosystem," he added. "Somewhat counterintuitively, the pressure was put on the brands and companies whose apps were not yet tablet-ready -- like Facebook."

Judging the Product

It's somewhat ironic that from a hardware point of view, the Surface is getting favorable reviews, but some critics don't see it as a compelling device out of the box. The fact that it runs a different version of Windows 8, which is already notably different from Windows 7, seems to be another point of contention.

Microsoft's Surface tablet comes with an integrated Kickstand and optional Touch Cover. To use Surface as a tablet, flip the Kickstand closed and it disappears into the casing.

On the other hand, "the Surface tablet is a remarkable piece of hardware that enables consumers to add devices and customize in ways Apple never has," said Josh Crandall of Netpop Research.

"The Windows RT software will require some work to get used to, and that will turn some users off," he told TechNewsWorld.

"The decision to use Windows RT and not Windows 8 is a bit of a mystery, since Windows 8 is designed for touchscreens and tablets," commented Altimeter's Silva. "The result fragments the development community and user experience. By not initially focusing on one target platform and expanding from success into other platforms, Microsoft is doubling down on the massive bet it is already undertaking with the Windows 8 launch."

That could cause confusion with consumers, who may stick with the devil they know.

"The bar isn't set higher for Microsoft, but when you consider a tablet, the consumer isn't buying just a piece of hardware, they are buying an experience," said iSuppli's Alexander. "The hardware, the operating system and the apps are all part of the ecosystem, and that is part of the experience. It is an mix of those ingredients that adds up to the total universe."

By Peter SuciuTechNewsWorld

Apple, VMware Work To Make iWorks Work in View?

2012-10-24T22:37:00.002-04:00

This is not a joke: A CRN report claims that Apple and VMware are working together on delivering the iWorks suite of productivity tools using VMware View. While it could be good news for VMware View and VMware in general, as they can ride the rails of the Apple crazy train, if this rumor is ever confirmed, it couldd be catastrophic for Apple. Brian Madden blogs about it with a bunch of bullet points, all of which I agree with. Still, I can't resist the urge to offer you my thoughts.

First thought is, why do you need VMware View? If you are trying to deliver iWorks to Windows devices (I assume that's the plan; otherwise, what's the point?), then why do you need View? Just for the broker piece? For Horizon? For the client side? Apple could throw a group of developers dedicated to this and it bring up and running in no time. Heck, build Horizon-type functionality into your App Store. ThinApp is of no use to you, Profile Manager does not apply -- so, what do you need View for? If anything Apple should be working with Teradici to OEM PCoIP if they deem that as the remote protocol of choice. Build that into your MAC OS X infrastructure and you can deliver a remote user experience.

The other concern is that Apple has built its reputation on providing users with the best user experience, on a sexier, flashier, trendier product that you want to carry. Those Apple devices are a fashion statement. Is Apple convinced that using a remote protocol to deliver iWorks into the enterprise is the right way of combat Microsoft in the enterprise?

Apple may own the consumer market (for now), but let there be no doubt: Microsoft owns the enterprise. Let's compare the strategies. Microsoft is building an Office version for iOS to improve the user experience natively on the most popular consumer devices in the world. In essence, Microsoft is taking a page out of the Apple book. So, why is Apple trying to combat Microsoft in the enterprise by not building native version of its products to run on Windows?

Now, lets' assume the future is SaaS and mobile applications. Even then, why is Apple not building iWorks as a SaaS offering or a mobile application suite for Windows? Apple, if you do build it as a SaaS offering, please try and make it better than the Google, offering which hasn't really even moved the needle when it comes to enterprise productivity. Sure, Google had some successes with educational institutions, non-profits and some SMBs, but overall, how much did it carve out of Microsoft's enterprise marketshare?

And one other thing: Why is Apple building iWorks on a platform that essentially exists for legacy applications/legacy IT? If we are assuming the world is moving towards mobile apps and SaaS, then VDI is a technology for managing legacy desktops and applications and delivering them more effectively. I can define it differently by saying VDI is a bridge between what we need today and what we will be using tomorrow. And at some point in time, the need for VDI will seize -- albeit, not any time soon -- but it will, so why is Apple building a new enterprise suite for a new platform and delivering it using the wrong mechanism?

If Apple thinks that people have been "wowed" by seeing a Windows desktop on an iPad and it is concluding that if it delivers a Mac OS X desktop to a Windows device that it will "wow" users just as much, Apple is being shortsighted. The Windows desktop on an iPad is cool for a few minutes, but that's it. Besides, given how ugly PCs are, seeing a Windows desktop on a gorgeous form factor offers lots of wow, so I just want my PC to look cool. I like Windows, but Apple computers look awesome. If Apple thinks that this could be a way for them to deliver its software to an open x86 platform without needing to change anything, then that is also a bad strategy with a bad user experience.

I have long maintained that Apple makes innovative and sexy fashion statement products. I own practically all of them: my laptop, phone, MP3 player, Apple TV... you name it, I've got it. But when I want to do real work and not showing off the product, I jump into the Office Suite. So, if Apple wants to win me over in the enterprise space, give me an office alternative that is easier to use, that is not so bulky with features, that is format-compatible and fun to use and I will consider it as long as the user experience is better.

If Apple is serious about getting into the enterprise, it needs to come up with a better strategy. My recommendation to Apple for now is to stick with the consumer. I do wonder how you will continue to maintain your stock price without constantly innovating at the hardware level and, frankly, after viewing this week's keynote introducing the iPad Mini, all I have to say is that creating different sizes of the same product is not innovation. Also, the new iMac impressive from a technology perspective, but it looks like a giant iPad (it's still impressive that it packs all these components into that form factor).

So, my million dollar question: What are you going to do with iMac in three years? You can't go any thinner, so unless you are working on a holographic computer, making the display bigger won't cut it.

by Elias Khnaser on virtualizationreview

What Comes After the Touch Screen?

2012-10-15T21:32:00.003-04:00

Gesture control, devices that recognize different people, and tricks to make a screen feel as if it has physical buttons could be coming to your gadgets.

Finger moves: A Microsoft research project, called Digits, makes gestural commands mobile.

In a few short years, the technologies found in today's mobile devices—touch screens, gyroscopes, and voice-control software, to name a few—have radically transformed how we access computers. To glimpse what new ideas might have a similar impact in the next few years, you need only to have walked into the Marriott Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this week. There, researchers from around the world demonstrated new ideas for computer interaction at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology . Many were focused on taking mobile devices in directions that today feel strange and new but could before long be as normal as swiping the screen of an iPhone or Android device.

"We see new hardware, like devices activated by tongue movement or muscle-flexing, or prototypes that build on technology we already have in our hands, like Kinect, Wii, or the sensors built into existing phones," said Rob Miller , a professor at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the chair of the conference.

One of the most eye-catching, and potentially promising, ideas that was on show makes it possible to perform complex tasks with a flick of the wrist or a snap of the fingers.

The interface, called Digits, created by David Kim , a U.K. researcher at both Microsoft Research and Newcastle University, is worn around the wrist and consists of a motion sensor and an infrared light source and camera. Like a portable version of Microsoft's motion-sensing device for the Xbox Kinect, Digits can follow arm and finger movements with enough accuracy to replicate them on screen or allow control of a complex computer game. "We envision a smaller device that could be worn like a watch that allows users to communicate with their surroundings and personal computing devices with simple hand gestures," said Kim (watch a video of Digits in action ).

Projects like Kim's could be a glimpse into the future of mobile computing. After all, prior to the iPhone's launch, multi-touch interfaces were found only at this kind of event. Researchers believe that mobile computers are still being held back by the limitations of existing control methods, without which they could become even more powerful.

"We have an increasing desire and need to access and work with our computing devices anywhere and everywhere we are," Kim said. "Productive input and interaction on mobile devices is, however, still challenging due to the trade-offs we have to make regarding a device's form factor and input capacity."

The advance of mobile technology has also given researchers easy ways to experiment. Several groups at the conference showed off modifications of existing mobile interfaces designed to give them new capabilities.

Hong Tan , a professor at Purdue University currently working at Microsoft Research Asia, demonstrated a way to add the feel of buttons and other physical controls to a touch screen: vibrating piezoelectric actuators installed on the side of a normal screen generate friction at the point of contact with a finger. The design, dubbed SlickFeel, can make an ordinary sheet of glass feel as if it has physical buttons or even a physical slider with varying levels of resistance. Such haptic feedback could help users find the right control on compact devices like smartphones, or enable the use of a touch screen without looking at it, for example while driving.

Who's that? A touch screen that recognizes different people's fingers, developed
by Chris Harrison and colleagues at Disney Research. Credit: Chris Harrison

In another effort to make more of the touch screen, Chris Harrison of Disney Research presented a way for devices to recognize the swipes and presses of particular people. His interface, a capacitive touch screen with a resistance sensor attached, identifies the unique "impedance profile" of a person's body through his or her fingers. Users need to hold a finger to the device for few seconds the first time they use it, after which subsequent presses are attributed to them. That could allow apps to do things like track modifications to a document made by different people as a tablet is handed around a table (see a video of the screen ). "It's similar to the technology that is already in smartphones," said Harrison. "There are lots of implications for gaming—no more split screens—and for collaborative applications."

The motion and touch sensors in current phones were another target for experimentation.Mayank Goel , a PhD student the University of Washington, and colleagues, modified the software on an Android phone to automatically determine in which hand a person is holding it. The software figures this out by monitoring the angle at which the device is tilted, as revealed by its motion sensor, and the precise shape of pressure on its touch screen. Goel says this can allow a keyboard to automatically adjust to whether a person is using the left or right hand, an adjustment that cut typos by 30 percent in his experiments.

Touchy feely: A malleable interface made by Sean Follmer and colleagues at MIT's Media Lab.

Credit: Sean Follmer

Other prototypes on display were less obviously connected with the gadgets in your pocket today. One was a malleable interface that can be shaped somewhat the way clay can, developed by a team at MIT's Media Lab. Sean Follmer , a PhD student in the lab of ProfessorHiroshi Ishii , demonstrated several versions, including a translucent bendable touch screen laid flat on a table. This was made from a plastic material containing glass beads and oil, with a projector and a 3-D sensor positioned below. Pinches and twists made to the pliable screen changed the colors displayed on it, which were also shown on a 3-D model of the material on a computer screen nearby.

It's hard to imagine such an interface in your pocket. However, Desney Tan , a who manages Microsoft's Computational User Experiences group in Redmond, Washington, and the company's Human-Computer Interaction group in Beijing, China, believes that being able to choose from multiple modes of interaction will be an important part of the future of computing. "We will stop thinking about mobile devices, and instead focus on mobile computing," said Tan, who was winner of Technology Review's 35 Innovators under 35 Award in 2011. "As I see it, no one input or output modality will dominate quite in the same way as visual display and mouse and keyboard has so far."

Source

Tablet App Quality Checklist

2012-10-10T00:09:00.000-04:00

Before you publish an app on Google Play, it's important to make sure that the app meets the basic expectations of tablet users through compelling features and an intuitive, well-designed UI.

Tablets are a growing part of the Android installed base that offers new opportunities for user engagement and monetization. If your app is targeting tablet users, this document helps you focus on key aspects of quality, feature set, and UI that can have a significant impact on the app's success. Each focus area is given as checklist item, with each one comprising several smaller tasks or best practices.

Although the checklist tasks below are numbered for convenience, you can handle them in any order and address them to the extent that you feel is right for your app. In the interest of delivering the best possible product to your customers, follow the checklist recommendations to the greatest extent possible.

As you move through the checklist, you'll find links to support resources that can help you address the topics raised in each task.

1. Test for Core App Quality

The first step in delivering a great tablet app experience is making sure that it meets the core app quality criteria for all of the devices and form factors that the app is targeting. For complete information, see the Core App Quality Checklist.

To assess the quality of your app on tablets — both for core app quality and tablet app quality — you need to set up a suitable hardware or emulator environment for testing. For more information, see Setting Up a Test Environment.

2. Optimize your layouts for larger screens

Android makes it easy to develop an app that runs well on a wide range of device screen sizes and form factors. This broad compatibility works in your favor, since it helps you design a single app that you can distribute widely to all of your targeted devices. However, to give your users the best possible experience on each screen configuration — in particular on tablets — you need to optimize your layouts and other UI components for each targeted screen configuration. On tablets, optimizing your UI lets you take full advantage of the additional screen available, such as to offer new features, present new content, or enhance the experience in other ways to deepen user engagement.

If you developed your app for handsets and now want to distribute it to tablets, you can start by making minor adjustments to your layouts, fonts, and spacing. In some cases — such as for 7-inch tablets or for a game with large canvas — these adjustments may be all you need to make your app look great. In other cases, such as for larger tablets, you can redesign parts of your UI to replace "stretched UI" with an efficient multipane UI, easier navigation, and additional content.

Get rid of "stretched" UI:
On tablets, single-pane layouts lead to awkward
whitespace and excessive line lengths.
Use padding to reduce the width of UI elements
and consider using multi-pane layouts.

Here are some suggestions:

Provide custom layouts as needed for large and xlarge screens. You can also provide layouts that are loaded based on the screen's shortest dimension or the minimum available width and height.
At a minimum, customize dimensions such as font sizes, margins, spacing for larger screens, to improve use of space and content legibility.
Adjust positioning of UI controls so that they are easily accessible to users when holding a tablet, such as toward the sides when in landscape orientation.
Padding of UI elements should normally be larger on tablets than on handsets. A 48dp rhythm (and a 16dp grid) is recommended.
Adequately pad text content so that it is not aligned directly along screen edges. Use a minimum 16dp padding around content near screen edges.

In particular, make sure that your layouts do not appear "stretched" across the screen:

Lines of text should not be excessively long — optimize for a maximum 100 characters per line, with best results between 50 and 75.
ListViews and menus should not use the full screen width.
Use padding to manage the widths of onscreen elements or switch to a multi-pane UI for tablets (see next section).

3. Take advantage of extra screen area available on tablets

Multi-pane layouts result in

a better visual balance on tablet

screens, while offering more utility

and legibility.

Multi-pane layouts result in a better visual balance on tablet screens, while offering more utility and legibility.

Tablet screens provide significantly more screen real estate to your app, especially when in landscape orientation. In particular, 10-inch tablets offer a greatly expanded area, but even 7-inch tablets give you more space for displaying content and engaging users.

As you consider the UI of your app when running on tablets, make sure that it is taking full advantage of extra screen area available on tablets. Here are some suggestions:

Compound views combine several single views from a handset UI (above)
into a richer, more efficient UI for tablets (below).

Look for opportunities to include additional content or use an alternative treatment of existing content.
Use multi-pane layouts on tablet screens to combine single views into a compound view. This lets you use the additional screen area more efficiently and makes it easier for users to navigate your app.
Plan how you want the panels of your compound views to reorganize when screen orientation changes.
Compound views combine several single views from a handset UI above
While a single screen is implemented as an Activity subclass, consider implementing individual content panels as Fragment subclasses. This lets you maximize code reuse across different form factors and across screens that share content.
Decide on which screen sizes you'll use a multi-pane UI, then provide the different layouts in the appropriate screen size buckets (such as large/xlarge) or minimum screen widths (such as sw600dp/sw720).

4. Use Icons and other assets that are designed for tablet screens

So that your app looks its best, make sure to use icons and other bitmap assets that are created specifically for the densities used by tablet screens. Specifically, you should create sets of alternative bitmap drawables for each density in the range commonly supported by tablets.

Other points to consider:

Icons in the action bar, notifications, and launcher should be designed according to the icon design guidelines and have the same physical size on tablets as on phones.
Use density-specific resource qualifiers to ensure that the proper set of alternative resources gets loaded.

5. Adjust font sizes and touch targets for tablet screens

To make sure your app is easy to use on tablets, take some time to adjust the font sizes and touch targets in your tablet UI, for all of the screen configurations you are targeting. You can adjust font sizes through styleable attributes or dimension resources, and you can adjust touch targets through layouts and bitmap drawables, as discussed above.

Here are some considerations:

Text should not be excessively large or small on tablet screen sizes and densities. Make sure that labels are sized appropriately for the UI elements they correspond to, and ensure that there are no improper line breaks in labels, titles, and other elements.
The recommended touch-target size for onscreen elements is 48dp (32dp minimum) — some adjustments may be needed in your tablet UI. Read Metrics and Grids to learn about implementation strategies to help most of your users. To meet the accessibility needs of certain users, it may be appropriate to use larger touch targets.
When possible, for smaller icons, expand the touchable area to more than 48dp using TouchDelegate or just centering the icon within the transparent button.

6. Adjust sizes of home screen widgets for tablet screens

If your app includes a home screen widget, here are a few points to consider to ensure a great user experience on tablet screens:

Make sure that the widget's default height and width are set appropriately for tablet screens, as well as the minimum and maximum resize height and width.
The widget should be resizable to 420dp or more, to span 5 or more home screen rows (if this is a vertical or square widget) or columns (if this is a horizontal or square widget).
Make sure that 9-patch images render correctly.
Use default system margins.
Set the app's targetSdkVersion to 14 or higher, if possible.

7. Offer the app's full feature set to tablet users

Let your tablet users experience the best features of your app. Here are some recommendations:

Design your app to offer at least the same set of features on tablets as it does on handsets.
In exceptional cases, your app might omit or replace certain features on tablets if they are not supported by the hardware or use-case of most tablets. For example:

If the handset uses telephony features but telephony is not available on the current tablet, you can omit or replace the related functionality.
Many tablets have a GPS sensor, but most users would not normally carry their tablets while running. If your phone app provides functionality to let the user record a GPS track of their runs while carrying their phones, the app would not need to provide that functionality on tablets because the use-case is not compelling.

If you will omit a feature or capability from your tablet UI, make sure that it is not accessible to users or that it offers “graceful degradation” to a replacement feature (also see the section below on hardware features).

8. Don’t require hardware features that might not be available on tablets

Handsets and tablets typically offer slightly different hardware support for sensors, camera, telephony, and other features. For example, many tablets are available in a "Wi-Fi" configuration that does not include telephony support.

To ensure that you can deliver a single APK broadly across the your full customer base, make sure that your app does not have built-in requirements for hardware features that aren't commonly available on tablets.

Your app's manifest should not include <uses-feature> elements for hardware features or capabilities that might not be available on tablets, except when they are declared with the android:required=”false” attribute. For example, your app should not require features such as:

android.hardware.telephony
android.hardware.camera (refers to back camera), or
android.hardware.camera.front

Similarly, your app manifest should not include any <permission> elements that imply feature requirements that might not be appropriate for tablets, except when accompanied by a corresponding <uses-feature> element declared with the android:required=”false” attribute.

In all cases, the app must function normally when the hardware features it uses are not available and should offer “graceful degradation” and alternative functionality where appropriate. For example, if GPS is not supported on the device, your app could let the user set their location manually. The app should do run-time checking for the hardware capability that it needs and handle as needed.

9. Declare support for tablet screen configurations

To ensure that you can distribute your app to a broad range of tablets, declare all the screen sizes that your app supports in its manifest:

Declare a <supports-screens> element with appropriate attributes, as needed.
If the app declares a <compatible-screens> element in the manifest, the element must include attributes that specify all of the size and density combinations for tablet screens that the app supports. Note that, if possible, you should avoid using this element in your app.

10. Follow best practices for publishing in Google Play

Publish your app as a single APK for all screen sizes (handsets and tablets), with a single Google Play listing:

Easier for users to find your app from search, browsing, or promotions
Easier for users to restore your app automatically if they get a new device.
Your ratings and download stats are consolidated across all devices.
Publishing a tablet app in a second listing can dilute ratings for your brand.

If necessary, you can alternatively choose to deliver your app using Multiple APK Support, although in most cases using a single APK to reach all devices is strongly recommended.
Highlight your app’s tablet capabilities in the product details page:

Add at least one screenshot taken while the app is running on a tablet. It's recommended that you add one screenshot of landscape orientation and one of portrait orientation, if possible. These screenshots make it clear to users that your app is designed for tablets and highlight all the effort you've put into designing a great tablet app experience.
Mention tablet support in the app description.
Include information about tablet support in the app's release notes and update information.
In your app's promo video, add shots of your app running on a tablet.

Make sure you are distributing to tablet devices. Check the app's Supported Devices list in the Developer Console to make sure your app is not filtered from tablet devices that you want to target.
Let tablet users know about your app! Plan a marketing or advertising campaign that highlights the use of your app on tablets.

Setting Up a Test Environment for Tablets

To assess the quality of your app on tablets — both for core app quality and tablet app quality — you need to set up a suitable hardware or emulator environment for testing.

The ideal test environment would include a small number of actual hardware devices that represent key form factors and hardware/software combinations currently available to consumers. It's not necessary to test on every device that's on the market — rather, you should focus on a small number of representative devices, even using one or two devices per form factor. The table below provides an overview of devices you could use for testing.

If you are not able to obtain actual hardware devices for testing, you should set up emulated devices (AVDs) to represent the most common form factors and hardware/software combinations. See the table below for suggestions on the emulator configurations to use.

To go beyond basic testing, you can add more devices, more form factors, or new hardware/software combinations to your test environment. For example, you could include mid-size tablets, tablets with more or fewer hardware/software features, and so on. You can also increase the number or complexity of tests and quality criteria.

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Let me guess: You sleep with your iPad, don’t you?

2012-10-01T09:34:00.001-04:00

A new Pew study finds that most news junkies turn to tablets late at night and early in the morning.

Chances are good that the warm glowing warming glow of an iPad screen is one of the last things you see before you fall asleep or one of the first things you reach for when you wake up.

A study released today by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds most news junkies who own tablets use them before 8 a.m. and in the after-work hours. The explosive growth in mobile devices isn’t just changing where we access the news — waiting in line for coffee, sitting on the train, walking down the street — but how much news we consume and when we get it.

For many, more devices means more news, according to the study. Pew found 43 percent of tablet owners say they are getting more news now than they were before they got the device, and 31 percent say they’re adding new sources into their information diet.

The analysis is based on an August survey of 9,513 adults, 21 percent of whom reported owning a tablet and 41 percent of whom reported owning a smartphone. (Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults now own a tablet, and more than half of U.S. adults have smartphones.) From the report:

People who get news on their devices multiple times per day, on either the smartphone or tablet, tend to turn to more sources, get news from new sources, read in-depth news articles, watch news videos, and send and receive news through email or social networks. Tablet news consumers who get news more than one time during the day are also twice as likely as those who get news once a day to have paid for news on their tablet.

Most tablet users reported using the device daily for an average of almost two hours. Just over a third of tablet owners reported using the device for news on a daily basis, with news consumption as the second-most popular daily activity on the device, after checking email.

While news remains popular on tablets and smartphones, the widening markets for the devices has driven down news consumption habits slightly. Similarly, fewer people, as a percentage, reported paying for the news on mobile devices in 2012 compared with last year. Pew chalks that up to the broadening population of tablet owners — and not necessarily a decline in willingness to buy the news.

Tablets are designed to be portable, but Pew found most people — 85 percent — are still using them mostly from home. Pew’s findings also reinforce the idea that tablets are an after-work “lean back” experience for most users. Evening remains the most popular time of day for people to turn to their tablets.

Among those who get the news multiple times per day, 66 percent use their tablets between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. And while tablet owners reported scanning headlines on their devices, they’re also turning to them for longer reads — and more so than they do on smartphones. Some news organizations have already built editorial schedules around these habits. (Earlier this year, Brazil’s O Globo newspaper debuted a tablet-only evening magazine that comes out weekdays at 6 p.m.)

The preferred times for checking news on smartphones were more varied. About a quarter of smartphone users check the news first thing in the morning, and 30 percent do so before noon. Only about 18 percent of smartphone users turned to their phones for news in the evening, and even fewer — just 7 percent — late at night.

Most tablet and smartphone users are still relying more on mobile browsers than on news apps, by a ratio of more than 2:1. Pew says that over the last year, tablet news users moved more toward browsers and away from apps — although, again, this could be because of the broadening of tablet users rather than an explicit decline in app preference. (Those who prefer apps tend to be more engaged with the news, Pew found.)

So where does the old-school portable news product — print — fit into the mix? Not all of the most plugged-in news consumers have abandoned the medium. A subset of news consumers with multiple devices remain loyal print subscribers. Most people opt for some bundle of digital and print habits, with a quarter of those surveyed saying they’re considering switching out the print component for digital-only.

Consumers who use tablets, smartphones, laptops, and print reported spending the most time getting news on a tablet — 77 minutes — and the least time getting news on a smartphone — 51 minutes. But print only got five minutes more attention than smartphones, with these cross-platform news consumers reporting spending about 56 minutes per day with print news.

Print’s shrinking presence raises a question about how news’ occupation of a physical space affects our relationship to it, especially with regard to magazines. Specifically, are we still going to read back issues when we don’t have a pile of old New Yorkers guilt-tripping us from the bedside table? Here’s how Pew puts it:

If the physical print publication is not stacking up on the nightstand or coffee table — but rather is filling up out of sight inside the digital device, will people ever read back copies? And if not, does that reduce the value of a publication for them? The findings show that even for this expanding population of tablet owners, 28% read back issues, down somewhat from 38% in 2011.

By Adrienne LaFrance from Nieman Journalism Lab

Predicting Customers' (Unedited) Behavior

2012-09-28T08:46:00.000-04:00

Too often when we talk about Big Data, we talk about the inputs — the billions (trillions?) of breadcrumbs collected from Facebook posts, Google searches, GPS data from roving phones, inventory radio-frequency identification (RFIDS), and whatever else.

Those are merely means to an end. The end is this: Big Data provides objective information about people's behavior. Not their beliefs or morals. Not what they would like their behavior to be. Not what they tell the world their behavior is, but rather what it really is, unedited. Scientists can tell an enormous amount about you with this data. Enormously more, actually, than the best survey research, focus group, or doctor's interview — the highly subjective and incomplete tools we rely on today to understand behavior. With Big Data, current limitations on the interpretation of human behavior mostly go away. We can know whether you are the sort of person who will pay back loans. We can see if you're a good leader. We can tell you if you're likely to get diabetes.

Scientists can do all this because Big Data is beginning to expose us to two facts. One, your behavior is largely determined by your social context. And two, behavior is much more predictable than you suspect. Together, these facts mean that all I need to see is some of your behaviors, and I can infer the rest, just by comparing you to the people in your crowd.

Consequently, analysis of Big Data is increasingly about finding connections between people's behavior and outcomes. Ultimately, it will enable us to predict events. For instance, analysis in financial systems is helping us see the behaviors and connections that cause financial bubbles.

Until now, researchers have mostly been trying to understand things like financial bubbles using what is called Complexity Science or Web Science. But these older ways of thinking about Big Data leave the humans out of the equation. What actually matters is how the people are connected together by computers and how, as a whole, they create a financial market, or a government, a company, or any other social structure. They can all be made better with Big Data.

Because it is so important to understand these connections Asu Ozdaglar and I have recently created the MIT Center for Connection Science and Engineering, which spans all of the different MIT departments and schools. It's one of the very first MIT-wide Centers, because people from all sorts of specialties are coming to understand that it is the connections between people that is actually the core problem in making logistics systems work well, in making management systems work efficiently, and in making financial systems stable. Markets are not just about rules or algorithms; they're about people and algorithms together.

Understanding these human-machine systems is what's going to make our future management systems stable and safe. That's the promise of Big Data, to really understand the systems that make our technological society. As you begin to understand them, then you can build better ones — financial systems that don't melt down, governments that don't get mired in inaction, health systems that actually improve health, and so much more.

Getting there won't be without its challenges. In my next blog post, I'll examine many of those obstacles. Still, it's important to first establish that Big Data is people plus algorithms, in that order. The barriers to better societal systems are not about the size or speed of data. They're not about most of the things that people are focusing on when they talk about Big Data. Instead, the challenge is to figure out how to analyze the connections in this deluge of data and come to a new way of building systems based on understanding these connections.

by Alex "Sandy" Pentland

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How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything

2012-09-07T19:28:00.000-04:00

An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps.

Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or "Ground Truth," actually works.

The company opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you're searching has become almost important as what you're searching. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple's iOS.

And for good reason. If Google's mission is to organize all the world's information, the most important challenge -- far larger than indexing the web -- is to take the world's physical information and make it accessible and useful.

"If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online," Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. "Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part."

This is not just a theoretical concern. Mapping systems matter on phones precisely because they are the interface between the offline and online worlds. If you're at all like me, you use mapping more than any other application except for the communications suite (phone, email, social networks, and text messaging).

Google is locked in a battle with the world's largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. Whereas Apple's strengths are in product design, supply chain management, and retail marketing, Google's most obvious realm of competitive advantage is in information. Geo data -- and the apps built to use it -- are where Google can win just by being Google. That didn't matter on previous generations of iPhones because they used Google Maps, but now Apple's created its own service. How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars.

But that would entail actually building a better map.

***

The office where Google has been building the best representation of the world is not a remarkable place. It has all the free food, ping pong, and Google Maps-inspired Christoph Niemann cartoons that you'd expect, but it's still a low-slung office building just off the 101 in Mountain View in the burbs.

I was slated to meet with Gupta and the engineering ringleader on his team, former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who'd spent his 20 percent time working on Google Mars, and Nick Volmar, an "operator" who actually massages map data.

"So you want to make a map," Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. "There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts."

This is what they started out with, the TIGER data from the US Census Bureau (though the base layer could and does come from a variety of sources in different countries).

On first inspection, this data looks great. The roads look like they are all there and you've got the freeways differentiated. This is a good map to the untrained eye. But let's look closer. There are issues where the digital data does not match the physical world. I've circled a few obvious ones below.

And that's just from comparing the map to the satellite imagery. But there are also a variety of other tools at Google's disposal. One is bringing in data from other sources, say the US Geological Survey. But Google's Ground Truthers can also bring another exclusive asset to bear on the maps problem: the Street View cars' tracks and imagery. In keeping with Google's more data is better data mantra, the maps team, largely driven by Street View, is publishing more imagery data every two weeks than Google possessed total in 2006.*

Let's step back a tiny bit to recall with wonderment the idea that a single company decided to drive cars with custom cameras over every road they could access. Google is up to five million miles driven now. Each drive generates two kinds of really useful data for mapping. One is the actual tracks the cars have taken; these are proof-positive that certain routes can be taken. The other are all the photos. And what's significant about the photographs in Street View is that Google can run algorithms that extract the traffic signs and can even paste them onto the deep map within their Atlas tool. So, for a particularly complicated intersection like this one in downtown San Francisco, that could look like this:

Google Street View wasn't built to create maps like this, but the geo team quickly realized that computer vision could get them incredible data for ground truthing their maps. Not to detour too much, but what you see above is just the beginning of how Google is going to use Street View imagery. Think of them as the early web crawlers (remember those?) going out in the world, looking for the words on pages. That's what Street View is doing. One of its first uses is finding street signs (and addresses) so that Google's maps can better understand the logic of human transportation systems. But as computer vision and OCR improve, any word that is visible from a road will become a part of Google's index of the physical world.

Later in the day, Google Maps VP Brian McClendon put it like this: "We can actually organize the world's physical written information if we can OCR it and place it," McClendon said. "We use that to create our maps right now by extracting street names and addresses, but there is a lot more there."

More like what? "We already have what we call 'view codes' for 6 million businesses and 20 million addresses, where we know exactly what we're looking at," McClendon continued. "We're able to use logo matching and find out where are the Kentucky Fried Chicken signs... We're able to identify and make a semantic understanding of all the pixels we've acquired. That's fundamental to what we do."
For now, though, computer vision transforming Street View images directly into geo-understanding remains in the future. The best way to figure out if you can make a left turn at a particular intersection is still to have a person look at a sign -- whether that's a human driving or a human looking at an image generated by a Street View car.
There is an analogy to be made to one of Google's other impressive projects: Google Translate. What looks like machine intelligence is actually only a recombination of human intelligence. Translate relies on massive bodies of text that have been translated into different languages by humans; it then is able to extract words and phrases that match up. The algorithms are not actually that complex, but they work because of the massive amounts of data (i.e. human intelligence) that go into the task on the front end.
Google Maps has executed a similar operation. Humans are coding every bit of the logic of the road onto a representation of the world so that computers can simply duplicate (infinitely, instantly) the judgments that a person already made.
This reality is incarnated in Nick Volmar, the operator who has been showing off Atlas while Weiss-Malik and Gupta explain it. He probably uses twenty-five keyboard shortcuts switching between types of data on the map and he shows the kind of twitchy speed that I associate with long-time designers working with Adobe products or professional Starcraft players. Volmar has clearly spent thousands of hours working with this data. Weiss-Malik told me that it takes hundreds of operators to map a country. (Rumor has it many of these people work in the Bangalore office, out of which Gupta was promoted.)
The sheer amount of human effort that goes into Google's maps is just mind-boggling. Every road that you see slightly askew in the top image has been hand-massaged by a human. The most telling moment for me came when we looked at couple of the several thousand user reports of problems with Google Maps that come in every day. The Geo team tries to address the majority of fixable problems within minutes. One complaint reported that Google did not show a new roundabout that had been built in a rural part of the country. The satellite imagery did not show the change, but a Street View car had recently driven down the street and its tracks showed the new road perfectly.
Volmar began to fix the map, quickly drawing the new road and connecting it to the existing infrastructure. In his haste (and perhaps with the added pressure of three people watching his every move), he did not draw a perfect circle of points. Weiss-Malik and I detoured into another conversation for a couple of minutes. By the time I looked back at the screen, Volmar had redrawn the circle with perfect precision and upgraded a few other things while he was at it. The actions were impressively automatic. This is an operation that promotes perfectionism.
And that's how you get your maps to look this this:

Some details are worth pointing out. In the top center quadrant, trails have been mapped out and coded as places for walking. All the parking lots have been mapped out. All the little roads, say, to the left of the small dirt patch on the right, have also been coded. Several of the actual buildings have been outlined. Down at the bottom left, a road has been marked as a no-go. At each and every intersection, there are arrows that delineate precisely where cars can and cannot turn.

Now imagine doing this for every tile on Google's map in the United States and 30 other countries over the last four years. Every roundabout perfectly circular, every intersection with the correct logic. Every new development. Every one-way street. This is a task of nearly unimaginable scale. This is not something you can put together with a few dozen smart engineers.

I came away convinced that the geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company. The secret to this success isn't, as you might expect, Google's facility with data, but rather its willingness to commit humans to combining and cleaning data about the physical world. Google's map offerings build in the human intelligence on the front end, and that's what allows its computers to tell you the best route from San Francisco to Boston. ***
It's probably better not to think of Google Maps as a thing like a paper map. Geographic information systems are a jump like the abacus to the computer. "I honestly think we're seeing a more profound change, for map-making, than the switch from manuscript to print in the Renaissance," University of London cartographic historian Jerry Brotton told the Sydney Morning Herald. "That was huge. But this is bigger."
The maps we used to keep folded in our glove compartments were a collection of lines and shapes that we overlaid with human intelligence. Now, as we've seen, a map is a collection of lines and shapes with Nick Volmar's (and hundreds of others') intelligence encoded within it.
It's common when we discuss the future of maps to reference the Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map of the entire world. It seems like a ridiculous notion that we would need a complete representation of the world when we already have the world itself. But to take scholar Nathan Jurgenson's conception of augmented reality seriously, we would have to believe that every physical space is, in his words, "interpenetrated" with information. All physical spaces already are also informational spaces. We humans all hold a Borgesian map in our heads of the places we know that we use to navigate and compute physical space. Google's strategy is to bring all our mental maps together and process them into accessible, useful forms.
Their MapMaker product makes that ambition clear. Project managed by Gupta during his time in India, it's the "bottom up" version of Ground Truth. It's a publicly accessible way to edit Google Maps by adding landmarks and data about your piece of the world. It's a way of sucking data out of human brains and onto the Internet. And it's a lot like Google's open competitor, Open Street Map, which has proven it, too, can harness the crowd's intelligence.
As we slip and slide into a world where our augmented reality is increasingly visible to us off and online, Google's geographic data may become its most valuable asset. Not solely because of this data alone, but because location data makes everything else Google does and knows more valuable.
Or as my friend and sci-fi novelist Robin Sloan put it to me, "I maintain that this is Google's core asset. In 50 years, Google will be the self-driving car company (powered by this deep map of the world) and, oh, P.S. they still have a search engine somewhere."
Of course, they will always need one more piece of geographic information to make all this effort worthwhile: You. Where you are, that is. Your location is the current that makes Google's giant geodata machine run. They've built this whole playground as an elaborate lure for you. As good and smart and useful as it is, good luck resisting taking the bait.

* Due to a transcription error, an earlier version of this story stated that Google published 20PB of imagery data every two weeks.

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By Alexis C. Madrigal