Update: Hi, everyone. Because for some reason this entry gets massive spam, and I need to get the admin of this (school-based) server to install the anti-spam plugin for me, I'm disabling comments here. Don't everyone complain all at once.
So my head has been in the land of large stationary LCD screens for a while (meet my new best friends) and not in the land of small mobile devices. But I had a helpful conversation with the mighty Mer, scourge of careless thereminists and mean people, so I have made a bit of time to finally answer Matt’s question from Etech.
Addendum: I fixed all the links now. Sorry about that.
Part I: Portholes and lighthouses
It’s important to note that I’m not really a gadget person. I’m sure there’s all sorts of lovely and exciting stuff out there that I just don’t know about. However, now that I am extremely mobile myself (no landline, no ISP, no permanent address) I’m beginning to get more and more interested.
The problem is that I want my cell phone to be both a porthole and a lighthouse. I want it to show me what’s going on elsewhere in my little social world (a la Upoc) and I want to reveal more of my world to my friends. Location data, photos, sounds — whatever. Thus far, my mobile phone has been a terrible disappointment on both counts.
Part II: There’s no time (and place) like the present
It’s clear that mobile interfaces are going to have to deal better with context — geographic and social. I'm thinking here of Scott's and the Bell Labs systems' attempts to deal with mobility, location-sensing, and privacy preferences. And I’m also thinking of all the ubicomp work on trying to determine “social context” and have devices that automatically respond. [The IDEO Social Mobiles take a different tack by attempting to modify user behavior.
The problem with preferences, as Scott says, is that establishing them ahead of time doesn’t really help manage the unexpected — and we encounter the unexpected everyday. So you’ve got to have a mobile UI to manage who knows where you are, when. And it needs to take into account the fuzziness of all those concepts. The “are you my friend?” question is getting ever more unhelpful, as is the “are you a friend of my friend?” question. And the thinking of “location” as some sort of unified, uncomplicated set of numbers that we can all just integrate into existing interfaces is also pretty unhelpful too. As Chris Heathcote remindsme, “location” means something different when you’re driving than when you’re walking. It’s different at 1am and 1pm. It’s different when you know where you are and when you’re lost.
That’s a lot of difference to pack into a tiny screen. I’m thinking here of what Pet Shop Boys told us back in the ‘80s:
Too many shadows, whispering voices
Faces on posters, too many choices
If, when, why, what?
How much have you got?
Have you got it, do you get it, if so, how often?
And which do you choose, a hard or soft option?
(How much do you need?)
Part III: Soft options
It’s funny how “preferences” in UI-speak mean the exact opposite of general usage. Often, “preferences” are a code word for maturity. I prefer cream in my coffee — but I don’t need it. I’ll take the powdered stuff if necessary. Preferences are why adults don’t raise bloody hell over dairy-free coffee at 8am. People with preferences, as opposed to people with needs, have a little built-in wiggle room. They are tolerant of failure.
Preferences in UIs, whether mobile or otherwise, tend towards the imperious and the absolute (it’s like they’re small children or celebrities). [This is, I think, a discussion similar to Molly’s thinking on vagueness.] My cell phone doesn’t have preferences in any way I understand the phrase. It has dictates. I wish there was an input field for commands like: “I’d actually rather not get calls right now, but if the message seems very urgent you might keep bugging me until I pick up" - but that’s a bit much to expect. However, it's reasonable at some point soon to expect the phone to cope a little bit better with social ambiguities.
Sketching on a touch screen (including pressure and speed variables) is one way to introduce that kind of softness. I could doodle on a map of NYC to register interest in events in specific neighborhoods. Or I could draw “blackout zones” where the ringer is never on. Drawing could also introduce some social distinctions in my address book by letting me create, edit, and link groups more quickly.
Time-based media and semi-transparent overlays might also help add some flexibility to the mix. I’m just wildly speculating here, but maybe managing my social/geographic visibility by using transparency as a UI widget might be helpful. I’m recalling a very interesting paper I saw last year from James Hudson and Alan Parkes at Lancaster University on combining “context dependent gestures, animated periphicons and transparent overlays” to save on screen real estate.
Part of why I keep the clamshell — despite its evident flaws — is the satisfying snap when I close it. With my last phone, I’d periodically forget to lock the keys and would suffer inevitable embarrassment when it dialed friends, ex-friends, and casual acquaintances. I like the snap — so why not use more tactile interactions? Why not a squishy phone I can squeeze to shut up, or a phone that responds to gesture and deletes a txt when I shake it.
More and more, I don’t want to fiddle with my phone to get a message. I'm not so convinced I want an always-on, push-to-talk, radio-style communicator. But it would be nice if the little screen on the front of my clamshell acted like an always-open porthole, providing a limited, fleeting glimpse of a larger sea of social communications. I may not always have the time to read messages or participate, but its nice to hear my friends as a low murmur of conversation underlying the main activities of my day. Because that’s what I did with shells when I was a little girl. I put them to my ear and listened for the ocean.
