Touch the Future
Smashing Magazine published an interesting article on User Experience Of The Future recently, one thing I found particularly interesting is that none of the interfaces shown are in a format that in any way resembles the form factor of current display/interaction devices. All of the interfaces for these devices are huge! The cost of which would be more than a baby Benz. And how tired would your arms get using those “Minority Report” style interfaces?
The closest thing on the market today (in Australia at least) that is using these kinds of technologies is the iPod touch (and the iPhone in the US and parts of Europe). I was pretty sceptical of a touch interface when I first heard about the iPhone (ironically, it is impossible to touch type on the touch screen, as there are no physical buttons) but in the brief time I had to play with one recently, I quickly saw how intuitive it was to use, the way it responded with the simple touch of the finger was quite hypnotic. The fact that you directly interacted with the content on the screen was how this device got to me - there was no buttons or pens to seperate me from what was happening on the screen. I was physically interacting with what was on the screen. There was a direct connection between me and the device.
Nokia are going one step further than a touch interface and are introducing haptic feedback into their new touch screen S60 phones which will give the user physical feedback when you touching the screen - so keys and buttons drawn on the screen will feel like actual keys and buttons.
It is an interesting development, all these touch screen mobile devices. Especially interesting is going to be the effect on the use of mobile devices on the internet - the larger screens of these devices lend themselves far more to browsing the web than traditional mobile screens ever did. Even though a recent Net Applications study on mobile device market share shows that mobile users make up a very small portion of all internet users - more of these kinds of devices are going to find their way into users hands in the future, and as they do, more mobile users will start to come online. And there are a lot of them - currently there are 3.3 billion active mobile accounts worldwide.
If the percentage of mobile internet users is going to grow, it is clear that it is only going to happen when users are given a familiar desktop-like browsing experince on their mobile devices. The figures from the Net Applications study on mobile device market share speak for themselves:
- iPhone 0.09%
- Windows CE (a.k.a. Windows Mobile) 0.06%
The iPhone has been on the market for six months in the US, and already it has eclipsed all the Windows Mobile users that are online today. Windows Mobile devices with Internet Explorer Mobile have been on the market for over ten years, and haven’t been able to get this many people online.
How can one single device get three times as many people online than an existing mobile platform in just six months?
Create an engaging user experience (interactive touch screen), coupled with a familiar interface (a desktop-like web browser) that enables users to view and interact with their favourite websites, just as they do at home, no matter where they are using a device that fits in their pocket. Then make it sexy enough that they will want to show it off to their friends (harnessing the power of word-of-mouth advertising to sell more units) without feeling like a nerd - that’s how.
