Really?  Apple is going to do better than Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video and so many other streaming services?  These guys have been refining their offerings for years.  Netflix streaming is already awesome.  Is there really room to do much better than the beloved Netflix?

Yes, lots.

A radically improved video delivery mechanism could:

1. Let you download the entire program locally, not just the next minute.  This eliminates pauses for rebuffering when the network connection gets flaky.
2. Have continuous high speed fast forward, not the jerky frame skipping that we’ve become inured to on both video and digital audio.  DVDs are better than streaming; analog VHS tape was better at this than DVDs, but continuous fast forward and rewind has the potential to be cleaner, smoother than streaming, DVD and analog tape.
3. Let the viewer instantly, continuously rewind to catch that moment one more time.  Have you noticed that you rarely rewind anymore?  The pain of rebuffering makes it rarely worth it.
4. Play that scene in continuous slow motion. This is another feature we haven’t seen since the VHS days.
5. Establish a queue of top titles to trickle down while you sleep. After a couple of days of background downloading you will have weeks of programming available to you.
6. Allow the video content to be viewed without any Internet access, (not even for DRM checks) for when you are in the subway or at the cottage or overseas.
7. Provide a hybrid of streaming and offline download.  You might, for instance, preview a title and if it’s worthy, click a Download button to add it to the download queue.  Or, go down your list of movies and click the download button on those that you wish to bring locally.  Better yet, have the top 20 titles in your list download automatically.
8. Download the highest resolution.  Individually paint every pixel on all 1040 glorious lines of resolution on that expensive high-def TV.
9. Provide full 5.1 Dolby surround. Please?  My receiver, speakers and ears are feeling neglected.
10. Download and access the entire content of DVDs.  I want my DVD extras back, and multilingual subtitling, and alternate audio tracks of director’s commentary, and other languages.
11. Let the viewer switch between different aspect ratios for when the movie’s dimensions doesn’t match your TV’s ratio.  Do you want the bars along the edges and a smaller image?  Or a full screen image that cuts off some of the periphery?  It’d be ncie to have that choice again.
12. Let the viewer zoom in to part of the action to study it closer.
13. Proactively download programming I will probably like.  Advertise this content to me on the video perusal experience to entice me to it.  If I ignore it, replace it with something else.
14. Proactively download subscribed TV shows.  They’re on your devices automatically, they day they’re released, ready to watch in full HD after you’ve had dinner.   This would obviate 80% of the reason to pay for cable.
15. Stream live events. Live events are the last bastion of cable programming.  But 200 channels with cable?  Pshaw.  How about providing a selection thousands of live events happening worldwide.  Any match, any sport, live:  American football, Irish soccer, Indian cricket, Australian Rugby, Chinese ping pong, Japanese sumo — you name it.  When there is a crisis, watch local coverage live.
16. Synchronize your viewing position across all of your video devices.  Pause the video on your big screen, pick up your iPhone and continue where you left off while on the subway.
17. Transfer video peer-to-peer within the house. One device downloads it; it syncs  to other devices directly over the LAN, much more quickly than downloading it again from the mother ship.
18. Download directly to the NAS (Network addressable storage; essentially a huge hard drive with brains) The NAS then serves the video to all the devices through your house.  It’s like your own internal mini-cloud in your closet (a.k.a.  fog or mist) that wirelessly serves terabytes of video to all the TVs, tablets and phones in your house.  (A 2 terabyte hard drive can hold 40 blu-ray discs and today costs about $80.)
19. Point out to your friends which parts of the show you thought were amazing. Skim to segments of So You Think You Can Dance that the mob thought was amazing.
20. Have a shared playlist with select friends.  in the old days when millions watched Seinfeld simultaneously and discussed it the next day.  This has been lost in a world where no two people are watching the same thing at the same time.  Create your own film festival centered on Marisa Tomei, WWII, or 70′s sci fi.  Have a closed discussion with your friends.  This would help make watching video a more social experience again.
21. Make the content available worldwide. Bandwidth and connectivity limitations around the world can make reliable streaming an issue.  But they aren’t an issue when you are trickle-downloading.  Give it a couple of days and plenty of video content can be collected in a couple of days.
22. Provide all of these capabilities free in exchange for mandatory advertising. The consumer gets access to any content, for free, conveniently, in exchange for their eyeballs.  With all these features, even pirates might lift the eye patch and check it out.
23. Have the advertising be interactive, targeted, choose-able by the viewer. Advertisers get far more effective ads that they know are being experienced, and feedback about what’s viewed.  Consumers get more tolerable advertising that they may even enjoy.  There are many

As you can see, there is plenty for a radical innovator to upset the applecart in video.

What’s amazing from a product vision standpoint is that these have been possibilities for years.  All the big players who attempted to take on Netflix – Walmart, Blockbuster, Amazon – could have been working towards many of these unfulfilled needs.  Instead, they chose to copy the leader rather than innovating themselves and coming up with a differentiated offering.  Now, if the rumors are true another industry has left it to Apple once again.

—

Philip Haine is VP of User Experience at SuccessFactors, where we are hiring world-class user experience designers.  Please contact me if this is you!  (email: phaine at successfactors dotcom)

Today, if you mark your beautiful template as stationery, when you subsequently open it it creates and saves a copy of the file under the same name with the word “Copy” appended, in the same directory.

This so does not make sense.  First, people often to store templates a central repository of tools, outside any project.  That is not where you want your new project-related instance to be.  Moving it to the right location is an added, unnecessary step.  Secondly, the name of the template is never going to be the right name.  If the user doesn’t think to change it immediately it will cause confusion and make it hard to find the document.  That’s more unnecessary work, including closing the document you just created to move and rename it and then reopening it.  These required steps make the stationery worse than useless — it’s less work to just manually copy a template file to the destination.

The better behavior (to steal) is to instantiate a new, unsaved, untitled document when the stationery file is opened.  Later, when the user saves, it  she can give it the right name and put it in the right location the first time.  In other words, just like how untitled documents have always worked.

[Didn't stationery once work like this?  Anyone have insight into how and why it went astray?]

Here is the workaround I’ve been using for a while.  Never use the Stationery bit.  Do mark templates as Locked bit.  This will have almost the correct behavior.  When you open it, it will look like you are editing the template.  But it will prevent you from saving over it, instead prompting you for a save location and name.

[Bonus idea to steal #1: why can't the File Save dialog give instant access to the Finder windows that are already open?  These are the most likely save destinations because they relate to the current project.]

[Bonus idea to steal #2: When you do Save As, why must it give you what amounts to an arbitrary default save location?  Why not default to the current folder?  This would match the scenario of retaining an old version of a document while branching it for further editing.]

To understand the irony we have to go way back through the annals of user interface history, a history that is unkind to Apple’s repeated efforts at improving the mouse.

In the early days of GUI computing, it was common for mice to have three or buttons. The problem was there was no standardization for what each button should do. As a result, various apps used different buttons for the same basic operations.

Sun's 3-button mouse, circa 1987

I remember programming on a Sun workstation that had one of these three buttons mice.  It was extremely difficult to master the basic tasks of clicking, dragging, selecting and opening.  One app would train your fingers to do it one way, and another app would train them in a different direction.

Apple’s 1984 Macintosh (and the Lisa before it) avoided this confusion by limiting the mouse to just one button. Users never clicked the wrong button because there was no other button to click. Click to select. Click and drag to move something. To open an icon on the desktop, use issue a bit of Morse code, and double-click it.  Dot dot.

1984 Apple Macintosh Mouse

In the early 90s, Microsoft and Apple one better. They reintroduced a second mouse button.  But this time they avoided the foibles its predecessors by establishing a rock-solid standard for what the second button would do.  The button would invoke a context menu on the clicked object and never anything else.

It was a welcome innovation in the progression of object-oriented UI’s that we now take for granted.  You could now right-click on any object to pull up a tailored list of actions that can be done on just that object.  It was a lot faster than hunting through all the menus for items commands that became available by the existence of the selection.  And it brought the most used tasks to the forefront, right under the cursor.

A 2-button Mouse by Microsoft (there was a plainer white mouse that came before this model, but I couldn't find an image of it)

[The unsung hero who pushed this standard through deserves a place in the User Experience Hall of Fame.  Anyone know the responsible party?]

Apple resisted this convention. Actually, different parts of Apple reacted differently.  The industrial design part of Apple resisted it, never dedicating a button to context menus.  But the OS software side supported the PC convention.  Right-clicking worked on the Mac with third party USB mice since before the dawn of Mac OS X.  It was a quirky position for Apple to take: it’s okay to have a mouse with two buttons, as long as it doesn’t have an Apple logo on it.

Apple’s hack for giving access to in-place menus was to have the user hold down the Control key and click menu.  It’s always been pretty clumsy for such a common task.

Even more clumsy was the little gear sprocket button that showed up in the button bar area, introduced a few years ago. This gave the hitherto invisible context menu a visible affordance, which sounds good in theory.  In practice I don’t know if people use it much.  And unlike in-place menus, it’s dissociated with the object it relates to.

Apple's context menu sprocket button

Innovation in mice continued its march forward without Apple. Around 1997, in the early days of the Worldwide Web, Microsoft introduced the scroll wheel between the two buttons.  You could now scroll a web browser or a word processing document without having to mouse over to the little scroll bar widget.  You could keep your gaze on the article you were reading and scroll the page almost telekinetically.  We’d never had to scroll so much before the web was invented, and the scroll wheel was a welcome advancement.

Microsoft mouse with scroll wheel

The right mouse button and the scroll wheel are so critical to basic productivity that any serious Mac user simply needed to buy a third-party mouse. Buying a Mac?  Buy a functional third party mouse to go with it.

In the late 90′s an apparent error in Apple’s lab led to the inadvertent release of a mutant puck mouse, which must have scampered through a door left ajar.  The puck mouse was perfectly round.  So round that you couldn’t feel which way was up.  It was very common for it to be at a slight angle when you moved it, causing the cursor to go careening off in a diagonal direction.   Luckily for the puck mouse, it had a cord, so defenestration was hard to achieve.

Apple's painfully symmetric puck mouse

(Later models added a little indent so you could feel which was was up.)

So Apple stuck to its guns, suffering from its ongoing affliction of button-phobia.  Form continued to triumph over function.  True simplicity lost out to the appearance of simplicity (as it does on the iPhone).

I suppose a second mouse button would mean that they surrendered. Or that they were desecrating the clean lines of their laptops or and mice with another button. Never mind that brining up a context menu is such a frequent operations.  (And please put out of your mind the fact that the keyboard already has about 76 other buttons for typing.)  That second mouse button would kill.  We’re trying to think different(ly) around here, people!  (See also: Apple’s Revolutionary Laptop With No Keyboard)

Apple continued its buttonphobic ways.  They even went backwards, to no visible buttons.  Instead of clicking a button with your finger, you apply pressure to the top part of the housing and the whole thing rocked forward as a click.

Apple's zero button mouse

Beautiful, right?  And that clear outer shell never got scratched up, because it was always kept in a desk drawer.  It didn’t help that the USB cable on this mouse was only long enough to reach the port on the (also functionally challenged but also transparent) keyboard.  It would not reach the USB port on the back of the noisy G4 tower under the desk.  Oh, yeah, and the (transparent) wire frayed easily.  Anyone with actual work to do put the mouse away and desecrated Apple’s sculpture by using a functional, ergonomic, ugly Logitech mouse.

Then came Apple’s Mighty Mouse. It too used the whole housing as one physical button switch.  It had a touch sensitive area under the fingertips, and you could bring up context menus by clicking on the right side with your middle finger. If, that is, you dug into preferences and activated the feature.  That’s right, at this point right-clicking is still not acknowledged as a mainstream thing.

There was just one catch: the touch panel would only register a right-click if you lifted your left (index) finger off the left area of the mouse.  Without knowing this critical piece of information, and practicing it enough to be automatic, right clicking was haphazard.  This was fatally unintuitive and aggravating.

Apple's Mighty Mouse

The Mighty Mouse was and is also loathed for its miniscule built-in trackball.  This innovation was supposed to allow for scrolling in all directions, but would jam up with dirt after a few weeks’ use.  Later Mighty Mice were cordless, so there was no saving the poor things from windows left open.

Which brings us to today, Tuesday October 20, 2009.

Apple has been adding gestures on its laptop trackpads for the last few years.  Those gestures were nice refinements, but not earth-shattering.  And they only worked when you were actually using the trackpad.  At a desk, if you use an external mouse, the trackpad and its fancy gestures are irrelevant.  On this date, Apple introduced the Magic Mouse, with, lo-and-behold, a trackpad built in.  You can still drag it around like a regular mouse, but you can also twiddle your fingers on it to do other tasks.

Apple's Magic Mouse, 2009

And here we finally arrive at the irony.  25 years after the 1984 Macintosh mouse – belligerently endowed with just one button for the ostensible sake of simplicity — we have a sleek little wireless mouse that lets you not only click, not only right-click, but also scroll, pan, zoom, and swipe using invisible gestures.

Simple, right?  :-)

But is it crazy enough to work?

I’m curious about how usable this integrated touchpad/button is going to be.  The video certainly looks compelling. Did they solve the Mighty Mouse’s right-click problem?  Will all these gestures be inadvertently triggered during regular clicking and dragging?

If it licks these problems, Apple will have, finally, trapped a better mouse.

[Update 10/22/09: Alas: "Right clicking requires a lifting of the left click finger, just like the Mighty Mouse".  Oh well.]

Requisite idea to steal

Why is it that web apps don’t get to use right-click events? This goes both for AJAX-style apps such as Google Wave, and Flash and Adobe Air web apps. That’s right, you cannot right click on an object to bring up its properties.  This a serious productivity limitation for SaaS apps, which are striving to catch up to the evolved usability of  desktop apps. [11/17/09 Update - I'm wrong wrong wrong.  Per the comments below, it is possible for AJAX and Flash/Air apps to tailor the context menu.  It's just that many apps just fail to do so.]

And here is an older idea to steal a different way to pan and scroll without resorting to gestures: make use of an accelerometer.

See also

• Panning & scrolling with a mouse by tilting
• Apple makes the trackpad a mouse button

—–

Philip Haine has been using Macs continuously since the original 128k model in 1984, for the most part as a fan boi. He is founder and principal of Product Vision Associates, an innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision and build products that are even better than Apple’s mice.  He also writes the Product Vision Blog.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

“I would just caution people that think they’re going to walk in here [to the cellphone market],” said Ed Colligan.  “We’ve struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he added. “PC guys are not going to just knock this out.”

Apple, the novice, didn’t merely walk into the business. It climbed a 10-meter platform and executed a back two and a half somersaults with two and a half twists in the pike position.

The iPhone remains best-in-breed three years later.  It is raking in huge swaths of the total market and is a testament to the power of product vision.

I love my iPhone and use it enthusiastically, daily, for all sorts of things I could not previously imagine.

There. Now that the props are out of the way, it’s onto the gripefest.  I pick on Apple a lot for three reasons.  First, because their products are the only ones worthy of criticism.  Secondly, because I use them and know them intimately.  Thirdly, I want to fight the perception that Apple can do no wrong; that Apple design is equivalent to good design; that everyone should strive to design their products just like Apple.

The reality is that Apple has a number of bad design habits which others should avoid to create products that are even better than Apple:

• Apple sacrifices actual simplicity for the appearance of simplicity (parodied scathingly by the Onion).
• Apple puts form ahead of function, to the actual detriment of users.
• Apple is can be obstinately not-invented-here, depriving users of good ideas that are well-known and work
• Apple has a tendency to bolt new features on, accumulating complexity over time, rather than blending them in.
• Apple often fails to identify and streamline the most common, frequent tasks (you know, such as pausing playback on a music player or typing an email message into a mobile device or placing a phone call).

My post from a year ago critiquing the iPhone calendar continues to garner a steady stream of traffic and amen-brothers.  In that post I was focused only the calendar.  But there are several other aspects of the iPhone that stick in my craw daily.

1. The phone app itself is terribly inefficient and demanding of the user’s brain and eyes for the most common tasks.  On my 12-year-old flip phone I could press and hold one number to dial a frequently used number.  I could do it in two seconds, without even having to look at the device.  On the iPhone I have to wend my way through the modes to get to the page of favorites, then I have to look at the screen and target the right entry, possibly scrolling.  [Voice dialing may or may not be a panacea for this; my iPhone 3G doesn't have that feature.]

   Dialing an arbitrary contact: I have over 3,000 contacts, which makes the primary navigational UI, flick-to-scroll, useless.  Searching by typing should be the primary way of finding a contact from the entire set.  (In contrast, the Palm Treo’s had a clever feature where you could type the first letters of someone’s first and last name to jump straight to them.  To dial me you might type “pha” for philip haine.)

   The iPhone doesn’t learn your habits and tune its behavior to your patterns.  If I search for Mark, it always presents me with the same set of 28 Marks in the same order, beginning with Mark A, even though I have only ever called up Mark D in the last year.  (My favorite precedent of a UI which tunes itself automatically based on your real-world habits is LaunchBar).

2. I have loathed the home screen / app launcher since the beginning.  It scales poorly.  When searching for an app I feel like a flicking idiot, paging madly through screen after screen of icons to find an app.  And if you move one icon it shuffles the rest of them on the page.  So much for positional stability and muscle memory.  Trust me, there are better paradigms for navigating and organize scores of applications.
3. The new Spotlight feature that lets you search the whole device is welcome.  But it suffers from Apple’s habit of bolting on new features.  For example, the Spotlight page is now better at looking up someone to call than the dedicated phone app (which ought to tell you something about the phone app.)  Yet when you find someone to call, can you just tap the person and choose a number?  No, that would be too blended and efficient.  Spotlight instead passes you off to the the Phone app to complete the task.  Adding insult to injury is the UI friction of the zooming away visual from Spotlight and then zooming into the phone app.  I’m busy; just give me a dial button.
4. iTunes is tired.  It is simply too clumsy to move media back and forth between the computer and the iPhone.  Managing playlists is a chore.  Backing up the iPhone takes a ridiculous amount of time (up to an hour for me) and often fails.  Coverflow is distracting eye candy.  I once lost all my apps by syncing.  My calendar has never synced properly.As a result of all of these problems syncing, I do none of it.  Yes, that’s right: the exact same scenario that Apple+iPod+iTunes exploited in the early days of MP3 players has come around again.  The process of syncing is so onerous that non-use is a better solution than dealing with the hassle.  Time to reinvent iTunes as Apple did with Mac OS 9 and iMovie.
5. Alarms, alerts and notifications are inconsistent and not trustworthy.  Each feature has its own policy on how to alert you.  I had to really study the UI to isolate the idiosyncrasies of each.For example, an SMS message will beep and buzz every few minutes, indefinitely, to make sure you find out about the change of restaurant plans.  But if the same message happens to be left as a voicemail you’d better be paying attention, because voicemail beeps and buzzes just once and thereafter remain silent.

   And unlike every cellphone or answering machine built in the past 20 years, the iPhone has no blinking message indicator light to let you know there is something you are missing.  The only way to know you have a voicemail message waiting is to check it.

   In contrast, the countdown timer in the Clock app is like a drill sergeant.  It will insistently remind you to feed the parking meter now, repeating the alarm continuously and indefinitely until you stop it.  If left upstairs it will vibrate the iPhone clear off your nightstand and onto the floor.

   Different still is the Clock app, which is kind enough to completely ignore the silent mode switch, so you can hear it over those pesky stage performers.

   Appointment alerts take a kinder and gentler approach.  They will prod you gently every five minutes to tell you about the upcoming meeting.  If your volume is turned down it will do so quietly.

   The clock app lets you snooze alarms, but you can’t snooze the countdown timer, nor calendar alerts.  For example, you cannot tell the calendary app,  “Thanks, I know the phone meeting is in 15 minutes; remind me once more in 10.”

   The alarm clock and the countdown timer lets you specify the duration down to the minute.  But the calendar appointments limit your choices to 5, 15, 30, 60 and 120 minutes, which is just not enough specificity.

   There are even more quirks that make it hard to understand the rules and predict the behaviors: different alert options whether the device is on standby or on, message indicators that make you do the busy work to visit the Phone and Messages apps just to clear their status, repeat options that differ between the alarm clock, the calendar app, and iCal.

   The entire paradigm of iPhone notifications deserves a nice, healthy, systemic rethink.

6. The slide to unlock feature lacks common sense.  It is a dexterity test to perform with one hand.  And if the phone times out while you’re reading a screen, it should let you turn the device back on within a few seconds, bypassing the swipe.
7. The lack of real background processing is a huge limitation.  “Oh but we want to save your battery” says Apple.  But what about when the device is charging?  How about doling out limited slivers of time?  How about giving the user the prerogative to decide who may work in the background, as is done with notifications?  This one smells of disingenuous self-interest – SMS, voice mail, money makers, would be threatened if third parties could play on a level playing field with Apple.

   Background processing is an enabling technology and when other platforms exploit it it will be clear what iPhone users have been missing.

8. Mac and the iPhone are not very friendly towards one other. They are on the same wireless LAN most of the time.  Why don’t they just say Bonjour, and just trickle sync in the background throughout the day to keep my Apple world in sync?  (Surely not because Apple wants me to subscribe to Mobile Me?)
9. If I’m re-downloading an app I’ve already purchased, why do I have to click BUY NOW and then have it tell me that it’s free because I already bought it?  The device should just say hey, you own this, help yourself.
10. The app store approval process is a bottleneck that is truly hurting users.  Bugfixes cannot be dispatched instantly to users and are delayed for upwards of a week.
11. Apple’s patriarchal control over what apps show up is an idea that is playing itself out.  Protecting the users from badness is one thing.  Artificially protecting Apple’s interests at the expense of the customer’s is another.

    Every app that Apple prohibits is a set of needs that will never be fulfilled by the iPhone. The controversy over the Google Voice app rejection is only the most vivid recent example.  When the Pre eventually gets its act together we will, hopefully, see how different the world can be.  Apple could use the competition to keep it honest.

Given the triumph that was the iPhone, these issues were tolerable for the first year or so.  But we are now at the third version of the iPhone OS.  It’s time for Apple to get back and fix the basics.

Until they do, there is an opening for competitors to exploit.

Here is an idea to steal for whichever competitor is first to trump the iPhone interaction design:  launch an advertising campaign with billboards that trumpet the ease of use and efficiency advantages: “Call your spouse.  iPhone: 6 steps.  Pre: 2 steps.  The Palm Pre.  For busy people.”  “Move an appointment.  iPhone: 13 steps.  Palm Pre: 5 steps.  The Palm Pre.  For busy people.”  You get the idea.

Readers: what serious long-standing iPhone issues did I miss?

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

There were two main options. If you give mobile surfers the whole site (Option 1), it will be slow, and it will be poorly formatted to the small screen.  If you reformat the websites to make them fast to load and easy to read (Option 2), you lose the authenticity of surfing the real world.

The iPhone took a clear stance in favor of the former alternative.  They download and display the whole website quite accurately.  They were able to pull this off (years after the Palm initiative) because of important technical advancements: higher res screens that allowed small text to be legible, a scalable graphics and text rendering layer that allows pages to be zoomed to any level of magnification, and 3G & WiFi networking that made loading the full, original web page directly, without a transcoding proxy, tolerable.

And this works.  Sorta.  Apple’s early iPhone ads featured someone pinch-zooming into an article blurb on the New York Times home page.  Well, this just so happens to be a narrow newspaper-like column of text that actually lends itself to reading on the small display of a mobile phone.

Most prose on the web is not so narrow.  In real life, reading a web page as originally formatted involves a lot of laborious pinching and scrolling, both horizontal and vertical.  It’s so laborious that I have found it simply too much work to read articles this way on my iPhone.

Instead, I channel all of my iPhone articles through an app that caches and reformats it for the small screen. (I happen to use Instapaper, which I have found edges out its close competitor, Read It Later.)  It’s a great solution, and as a bonus, it even increases my productivity: rather than getting lost in the surf when I am at my computer supposedly working, I click the Read Later button and channel it off to my iPhone for reading during downtime.

But importantly, Instapaper reformats the web content so it’s very easy to read on the iPhone.  The text is as large as you need it to be, it syncs quickly since it cuts out the graphics, and no evil horizontal scrolling is involved.  Instapaper also has a brilliant tilt-to-scroll feature that makes scrolling feel like it’s not a task at all, just a subtle change in the angle at which you are holding the device.  This experience is a night-and-day difference from attempting to read the original web page that was designed for a computer display crammed onto a screen that fits in the hand.

The only remaining trouble is that moving everything through Instapaper is extra steps, and I am still forced to skip some content because of it.

Which brings us to today’s idea to steal:  To Apple, and anyone else who creates web browsers for mobile experiences:  it’s great that you can render a web page accurately.  Thanks, and congratulations.  But for actual readability, please provide the option to quickly load and reformat a page for the small screen.  Support both Option 1 and Option 2.

(Oh, and while you’re at it, you should pick up on what Instapaper has discovered and build in support for offline caching and reading, so it’s available to all applications.)

My critique of the iPhone calendar continues to be one of the most commented on this site.  Unfortunately, we are going to have to continue our wait.

Why can’t I just follow #hashtags in Twitter like they were @users?

English translation:  Twitter lets anyone toss their transient thoughts into the ether for anyone in the universe to listen in on.  This is useful if you know of people who say interesting things.  You can subscribe to such people — many of them — and then conveniently track their utterances over the course of the day.  And this can be very interesting indeed.  It is like being on the listening end of a cocktail party conversation where the other person says something that makes you pause and go, “huh!” (*) Serendipity happens several times a day, and it becomes addictive.

The problem is that you only every hear from people you already know of and to whom you have already subscribed or followed.  If someone you don’t know of says something brilliant about something you care about (say, cats or Madonna or product vision) you won’t hear about it unless you go out of your way to search for it.

To help identify the topic of their dispatches into the Ether, Twitter users have taken to appling keywords (a.k.a. tags) to them.  But Twitter doesn’t officially support keywords or tags.  So people make up their own and tack them into their 140 character Twitter message.  By convention, to identify the tag as such, they start them with the hash symbol (#) and call them hashtags.  Hashtags look like #cats or #madonna or #productvision.

The problem is you cannot subscribe to hashtag traffic directly, as you subscribe to people. (You can subscribe to the RSS feed for the hashtag, which means going use another program.  The benefits of centralization and serendipity are lost.

So I repeat:

Um…

Why can’t I just follow #hashtags in Twitter like they were @users?

—–

*This doesn’t apply if the people you follow insist on telling you about their flight delays or what they just ingested.

Here is my love/hate list for the iPhone after using it for a month:

iPhone Behavior love/hate list

Both my love and hate lists are pretty long.  But overall, I love my iPhone, and I’m not going back.   No, you may not have mine.  Get your own.

What is on your iPhone love/hate list?

Link to this article at: http://StealThisIdea.com/articles/iphone-love-hate/

See related article: The 1995 Palm calendar creams the 2008 iPhone’s

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Philip Haine is product vision specialist and product designer in San Francisco.  He founded Obvious Design, LLC in 1997.  He’s used Macs continuously since 1984 and the iPhone since August 2007.

One of the best skills a designer can have is empathy with the user.  And one of the best ways to achieve empathy is by looking at things from the user’s perspective using scenarios.

Scenarios have been around a while in different forms and flavors, but I haven’t found the standard formulations entirely satisfactory.  They are either too verbose, or too unstructured, or not scalable, or they don’t articulate the underlying need or explain why the need exists to begin with.

Over time I converged on a different, simpler way of composing scenarios which I thought worth sharing. I have been using this technique since 2002.

Elements of a SSNiF Scenario

The technique is based on the observation that there is a common storyline and set of elements to all good scenarios.  There is a stakeholder, typically a user or customer or persona, in some situation.  The situation results in a need. The need is resolved by a feature, or by the product as a whole.

The first three elements, Stakeholder, Situation, and Need, express the problem.  The Feature is the solution.  Adding a gratuitous “i” to suggest a pronounciation spells SSNiF.

I like the metaphor: on a new project we need to SSNiF out the domain to make sense of it, as a dog sniffs out strange new territory.  To test whether a proposed idea is a good one, we SSNiF it out.

Big SSNiFs

SSNiFs come in two sizes, big and little.  Big SSNiFs describe the overall purpose of a product or feature.  Little SSNiFs delve into detailed use cases.  They describe why individual features exist, or aspects of the design.

Let’s look at some big SSNiFs related to the iPod.  One key group of stakeholders are those who must take public transportation on a regular basis.  The journey is long, repetitive, and boring — that is the situation.  The need that results is for something to make the idle time more enjoyable.  The iPod is the solution that addresses the need.

We can lay this scenario out in a SSNiF table.  I’ve added a few other Big SSNiFs representing other key usage scenarios of the iPod:

Some Big SSNiFs for a portable audio device

These Big SSNiFs clarify why the product is needed. In fact, the essence of a product concept can be conveyed in terms of few Big SSNiFs.  With a tight set of Big SSNiFs in hand you should have no trouble conveying to someone what problem the product will solve for customers.

Little SSNiFs

Whereas Big SSNiF are for clarifying the big picture, little SSNiFs are for working out the details. Here are some little SSNiFs of mass transit commuters:

Notice how each feature is connected back to its underlying use cases.  We could enumerate all of the features this way, tracing them to their purpose.

How SSNiFs fit into the product creation process

SSNiFs are involved at each level of the Design Pyramid.

• At the Understanding level, customers research is made more actionable by synthesizing it down to a set of big and little SSNiFs.
  
• At the Vision level, we can sift through the all the big SSNiFs we discovered, and sculpt a product vision out of the right set of Big SSNiFs.
• At the Requirements level, we can play out the Big SSNiFs into lots of little SSNiFs.  SSNiFs make wonderful requirements, as I’ll get to in a minute.
• At the Design level, we create a solution with the scenarios in mind.  We test our design by walking through the selected big and little SSNiFs from each stakeholder’s perspective, asking ourselves, “does the solution we came through truly address the SSNiF?”

If you chose important SSNiFs, and if your solution addresses them, you will have a pretty good product.

So what’s the big deal?

SSNiF scenarios have a number of benefits:

SSNiFs are relentlessly user-centric. SSNiFs force us to figure out not just what users need but why.  This emphasis on understanding why is unique to this method.  Knowing why is the test of true mastery over the user’s world.  It is what lets us interpolate and extrapolate from what customers are able to articulate to us directly.  It is a critical aptitude for visionary thinking.

The purpose behind each feature is clear at all times. Every feature is connected to the scenario it addresses.  You will appreciate this if you have encountered features in your product whose existence no-one can explain.

Real-life SSNiF table in Excel

SSNiFs distinguish stakeholders – There is a common trap of thinking of “the user” as part of a single, homogeneous bunch.  You cannot fall into this trap if you do SSNiFs, because identifying differing stakeholders is inherent in the process. SSNiFs help us stay connected to to the different worlds of different audiences.

SSNiFs are scalable enough allow you to model as many narrow user groups as you come across in the real world.  You can capture and model what you see without oversimplifying it.  This is useful because observations about obscure groups and their predicaments is grist for the idea mill.

SSNiFs give us a place to capture the hot feature ideas, but without committing to them.  No designer enjoys it when our colleagues wildly jump ahead to the feature they envisioned while taking a shower.  We’d rather have a calm conversation about what the requirements are, then work out the best possible solution from there.  Designers are always trying to get product managers to think in terms of requirements, not concrete features.

In practice though, our human brains can’t help but think in terms of the concrete.  SSNiFs offer a compromise: it gives us a slot to place our (possibly lame) initial solution as long as (a) we agree to call it the potential feature, and (b) we back-fill the other columns of the SSNiF.  The spontaneous feature idea then turns into a vehicle for getting at the scenario.  The initial solution is traced back to the problem (where the important part of the idea lies anyway), and from there we can move forward and see if we can find a better solution to the SSNiF.

Which leads to the next benefit:

SSNiFs leave the door open to a better solution – By labeling a feature as potential, we are making it clear that this is a tentative idea on how we might solve the need.  The door is open to other potential approaches.  If someone comes up with a better way to solve it, we’re happy to toss the earlier concept.  Because this is built into the process, this helps prevent us from getting too wedded to our ideas.

SSNiFs make user research more actionable – Have you ever attended a fascinating, informative research presentation that was completely forgotten by the following morning?  The problem is that the findings just are not boiled down to an actionable format.

I have found that almost all of the actionable findings from ethnographic research boil down to either SSNiFs or “key observations and their potential implications to the product” (the subject of a future article).  SSNiFs go a long way towards making user research actionable.

Anyone doing basic user research should try distilling their findings down into a prioritized table of SSNiFs.

SSNiFs provide a reality check – To fill in a SSNiF that backs a proposed feature you must ask some key questions: “What need does it solve?  For whom?  Under what circumstances?”

Merely asking these questions puts the new idea in perspective.  We’ll find that there just aren’t that many users of that type, or that the situation just doesn’t come up that often, or that when it does, the need is not terribly strong.  At this point we should take a courageous gulp and just cut the feature.  Worthwhile features will have solid answers to these questions.

Next time someone proposes a feature, try asking the three key SSNiF questions to see what is behind it.

SSNiFs are thorough – some approaches to scenarios buckle under the weight of complex-real world design problems.  They become onerous to author, review and maintain.  SSNiFs scale easily from a handful to scores or even hundreds of SSNiFs for large-scale initiatives.

Process benefits

As a process for capturing scenarios, they have more benefits:

SSNiFs are easy to understand – a SSNiF table makes sense to anyone on first reading.  Others can jump in and start contributing right away by following examples.

SSNiFs are concise – SSNiFs distill the minimum and sufficient elements of a scenario into a tabular form.  This makes it possible to categorize, prioritize, sort and filter any numbers of SSNiFs.

My preferred medium for capturing SSNiFs is the spreadsheet.  I use Excel when capturing lots of little SSNiFs just before doing a design.  I’ll even capture SSNiFs live, while conducting customer interviews, dropping new insights into any of the four columns and back-filling the other columns later.

SSNiFs work in a group process – Initial SSNiFs can be captured using a spreadsheet projected onto a screen or with a wall of sticky notes.  I also have had success with Google Spreadsheets, because it allows anyone on the team to annotate or refine the SSNiFs at any time.  (See also: Free templates for SSNiFs)

SSNiFs get everyone’s assumptions on the table – It is fascinating what comes out of a group SSNiF process. Different team members will have different insights, ideas and scenarios weightings.  SSNiFs provide a medium to capture the “best of” multiple peoples’ perspectives.  When a fundamental difference in belief about a user scenario arises, we can add it to a “to be researched” list and get to the bottom of the discrepancy later.

More examples of SSNiF Scenarios

Here are some prior articles that involve SSNiFs:

• Open, yet encrypted Wi-Fi
• Hosted vs. Local applications
• Marriage Sav-R Toothpaste Tube
• Who Read your Email this Morning?

Summary

SSNiFs are a concise way to model scenarios that emphasizes the connection between features of a product and the underlying customer scenario and need.

Please give SSNiFs a try and feel free to write me with questions or comments at: phaine at obvious design dot com.

Continue to Part 2: How SSNiFs fit into the product creation process >>

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

[6/24/09 Did editing pass based on feedback]

That said, I’m disappointed in some of its designs.  The particular object of my ire is the calendar app.  The Palm 100 calendar UI from 1995 laps it in terms of moment-to-moment usage.  In this article I want to show how a thirteen year old UI designed for a 160×160 pixel, monochrome display on a cheap, slow CPU is so much more effective than a 2008 iPhone with a larger, high-res screen and fast CPU.

Here is a real-world example of what I mean.  When I have a tentative appointment, I append a question mark to show that it isn’t confirmed.  For example: “Dinner with Rich?”  Later, when the appointment is confirmed, I will removed the question mark.  Here’s how to remove that question mark on every Palm device from the first PalmPilot to the latest Palm Centro:

1. Tap at the end of the appointment text, to place the cursor there
2. Press (or gesture) backspace

That is it.  Two steps and you are done.  You can now turn off the device or navigate away to some other task.  The direct manipulation is similar to how you might do it with a paper agenda.

Now, here is how you remove that question mark on the iPhone 3G:

1. You can’t edit the appointment text from the day view, so tap it to open it up in the “Event” details screen.
2. Well you can’t edit the text here either, so tap the “Edit” button in the top right corner
3. Unfortunatly the “Edit” view doesn’t let you edit.  Instead it shows the components of the appointment.  Go ahead and tap the event name to tell the iPhone you want to edit it.
4. You are now in the “Title & Location” field with the cursor blinking on the appointment, with the on-screen keyboard shown.
5. Press backspace.
6. Press Save to get back to the “Edit” screen
7. Press Done to get back to the “Event” screen
8. Press the back button at the top left corner (labeled with the Date)

Them’s a lot of steps.  And a lot of modes.  And a lot of thinking to do an every day task.  Four times as many steps as the 1995 Palm.  This design conduct is unbecoming of an Apple product.

This is not an obscure task.  We are not changing some technical configuration on a one-time basis.  We are making an adjustment to the title of an event.  It’s the sort of thing that everyone who uses the calendar needs to do all the time.  No excuses here: common, frequent tasks should be the most streamlined.

And it’s not just this task.  Creating a typical appointment on the Palm takes two steps versus about ten steps on the iPhone.  Five times more steps.  (And that is being generous with the horrendous spinning slot-machine style time picking UI.)

Palm, and in particular the guys chiefly responsible for its UI design, Rob Haitani and Jeff Hawkins, understood that for a PIM device to replace the reliable, always-on paper-based planner, it would have to be  simple, direct and fast.  When you are trying to capture an appointment while on the phone, only a sliver of your attention is available to spend on the UI.  The Palm’s UI is direct enough that you can do it during a conversation.  With an iPhone, you’d better jot it down on paper and transcribe it into the device later if you want to avoid putting your caller on hold mentally.

Here are some other reasons why the old skool Palm’s calendar laps its young cousin.

In the day view:

• If you have appointments far apart in the day, the Palm is intelligently condenses hours of the day, so you can almost always see all your day’s appointments without scrolling.  This is important to give you the big picture.  If something is concealed you might very well miss it.  On the iPhone, if you set up an appointment at 7 AM, and another at 7 PM, it’s possible to look at the day view and completely miss one of them…or either!  We are talking missed appointments here.  The iPhone tries to help by auto-scrolling as you step between days, but this ostensible bit of cool just adds UI friction.
• 

  The irritating iPhone slot-machine spinner UI.   Please, just give us a calendar to tap

  To change the a date of an appointment the Palm gives a standard calendar UI that you have seen on every travel planning site.  Calendars are tried and true and have some great information visualization benefits.  You get to see where the dates are relative to the week and month and relative to other important dates.  Assigning a new date is a simple matter of tapping on it.  The iPhone instead gives an atrocious spinning slot machine picker.  It provides none of the contextual information and requires a lot of painstaking work to flick to the right date.  It’s easy to inadvertenly touch something in the wrong column without even knowing it.  I have had several appointments that have been off by hours because of this.  Form gave function a beating the day that one was designed in Cupertino.

In the month view:

• The month view on the Palm shows you roughly how busy you are on each day.  The iPhone shows a dot on each day with an event.  Any event: appointment, birthday, multi-day.  The result is that just about every day has a dot, eliminating any useful information it might convey.
• The Palm’s month view shows multi-day events with a dotted line that spans multiple days.  It shows me when trips are happening or when visitors are in town. The iPhone just gives me that dot on each day, which could just as well be a morning workout appointment as a business trip.  There is no way to distinguish those big multi-day events in the month view.
• On the iPhone, when you tap a day of the month, it tries to be helpful by showing the day’s events in a little pane at the bottom. The problem is, in six-row months like this one (August 2007) there is only enough height to show one appointment.  You are supposed to scroll that little area vertically to see more.  It’s like looking at your appointments through a straw.  To make matters worse, there isn’t even an indication of there being more than one appointment.  The scrollbar only appears when scrolling.  If you are checking to see what you are doing on a certain day you must scroll that tiny text area, always. In contrast, the Palm lets you tap on any date to see everything.

Furthermore:

• The Palm has a Go To date function.  You can get to most dates in two or three taps.  It’s a wonderfully tuned UI.  The iPhone makes you press and hold the Next Month button as it whirrs through the months.  It’s attention-consuming and clunky by comparison.
• On the Palm, you can get to the calendar in one step, even if the device is off, by pressing the calendar button.  Brilliance!  On the iPhone this is three to seven steps which vary depending on the state in which the device was last left, which means you need to pay attention (cf. Don’t Make Me Think).   [Step 1. Press button on top.  2. Slide finger.  3. Press home if you were in another app. Step 4. Figure out where you are and slide the home screen left or right one or more times to get to the page with the calendar app.  5. Tap in the calendar.  6. Switch calendar modes if necessary.  7. Navigate to today if necessary.]  For a worker who checks her schedule twenty times a day, this makes a difference.  Apple’s buttonphobia undoubtedly makes things look sleek and elegant but it really does hurt, every single day, many times a day to not have direct access to the most frequent and common tasks.  [11/14/08 Update: see some ideas for instant access without adding buttons.]
• The Palm lets you search for an event (“When is Peggy’s wedding?”); the iPhone does not offer this.  This is an important SSNiF that should be covered.  [6/18/09: iPhone v3.0 software now allows this]
• Why can’t you flick left and right to go to adjacent days in the day view, as you do with, say, the photo album?  There is already a left/right spatial paradigm established by the small arrow buttons.  Instead, you have to press those small arrows with your finger, obscuring the screen with your hand in the process.
• [added 6/18/09] There is no coherence or consistency between the calendar and alarms. The (non-calendar) alarm are more insistent, and therefore reliable, then the calendar reminders.  You get to choose the sound, unlike calendar reminders. (For instance, I use the “Vrrroom” sound to remind me of street cleaning times in San Francisco, when I have to move my car.)
• [Added 6/18/09] You still cannot create repeating appointments that happen on, say, the second Thursday of the month.  This is basic, required functionality.  iCal on the Mac allows such appointments, but they do not sync to the iPhone.  (At least I don’t think so… I’ve been waiting… over 30 minutes… for my iPhone… to sync… with iTunes…)  I anticipate more parking tickets.

In this giddy age of hi fidelity UIs, iPhone design team and those trying to emulate them would do well to carefully study the old, low-fi masters.  Get the function right, then make it pretty.  It’s the Apple way.

Please link to this article at: http://StealThisIdea.com/articles/palm-vs-iphone/

See also: iPhone love/hate list

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Interesting strategy.  Rush a broken product to market, leaving a gaping opportunity for the competition.  Then, with customers desperately clinging to the prior version, cut that off too, leaving no credible OS offering.

Could Apple have wished for a kinder gift?

(Prediction:  MS will ease back on their restrictions within a quarter.)

We’re so lucky. We have cellphones and GPS, cheap high speed Internet, free shipping and Wiis. I’m grateful, I really am. The progress has been astounding.

But there are some perennial UI issues in everyday products that year after year never seem to get fixed. Every year I expect someone will finally do something but year after year ticks by and nothing happens. Perhaps if I wish real hard out loud here on StealThisIdea some of these these problems will finally be resolved.

Here is my wishlist for 2008:

1. Awesome speech recognition on MacSpeech recognition works and it’s here to stay. It is one of the few remaining advantages that Windows has over the Mac. Unfortunately the Mac has been second-class citizen for years. It’s only worth using the best speech recognition system available, and that system is Dragon NaturallySpeaking, available for Windows only. Apple, buy Nuance, willya?[1/27/08 It's working already! Within days of writing a draft of this article, MacSpeech announced they have ported the Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine to the Mac with a product called Dictate! I can't wait. I currently use NaturallySpeaking on WinXP within Parallels on a MacBook Pro, channeling input to the Mac side of my Mac using TightVNC on the Windows side and Vine Server 2.2 on the Mac side. It works really well, and I depend on it. But it's memory-intensive and cumbersome. A Mac-native solution will be most welcome.]
2. Put a real second mouse button on MacsIn the mid-80s, I used a three button mouse on Sun workstations. It was a scourge of usability. There was no standardization of which button should do what. The user was left to flounder, learning and relearning button definitions across applications.In that climate, it was refreshing for Apple to pronounce, “let there be but one button.” One button, no ambiguity. If you wanted a second action you could double click. Advanced users could Option-click or Shift-click. (Or Shift-Option-click. Usable indeed!)

   Later, Microsoft introduced a second button, But they were careful to declare a clear and unwavering mandate: “Let there be a second mouse button, and let it be used only for contextual menus.” It has been an unqualified success. Every app uses it. Even your proverbial mom knows how to right-click to get options on things. Even on the Mac, support for second mouse button is ingrained in every serious app.

   Apple seems to agree: Mac OS X, the iLife and iWork apps fully support the second mouse button.

   The only thing missing is an actual second button on Apple mice and laptop trackpads. It’s as if Steve Jobs himself is petulantly holding out on his 20-year-old pronouncement out of sheer stubbornness. The only Apple-branded bone we’ve been tossed is an invisible, barely functioning fake second mouse button on the Mighty Mouse that requires that you lift your fingers off the left part of the mouse in order for it to register a right button click.

   A third-party mouse with a proper second button therefore remains a required purchase with any Mac. Laptop users are still out of luck. It is a point of confusion and an ongoing barrier for Windows users who would otherwise switch to the mac.

   Apple is a well-known button hata and we hope it gets over it in 2008.

   [1/27/08 The signs on this one are not good; Apple looks like it's going to use multitouch trackpad gestures to get around having to desecrate its laptops with a second physical button. Maybe that will work, but I'm skeptical, based on bad experience with gestures on Powerbooks]

3. Put a real, physical keyboard on the iPhoneWe are evolved to sense things by touch, not just by sight. Tactile, haptic user interfaces make use of that faculty.On-screen keyboards require much more user attention than physical keyboard. The user must look not just at the text field but at the keyboard. The user cannot trust that a keypress will be interpreted correctly like a real button and must therefore verify what has been entered. It’s a “type->verify->proceed” mental loop instead of a more efficient “type->proceed” loop you use when you can unequivocally trust that a key press gave you what you expected. Finally, keyboards with real buttons you can feel are easier, faster, and more gratifying to use. Apple, please get over the buttonphobia. Stop trying to be clever with the workarounds and put a proper keyboard on the next iPhone.

   [Update 4/24/09 - Apple has said "emphatically" that it does not believe in fixed keypads for phones.  This either means that they aren't going to do it, or they aren't yet ready to show their fixed keypad for the iPhone.]

4. Put physical playback and volume controls on music devicesThere are very few universally-applicable UI principles. Almost all have contingencies and caveats. The only safe answer you can give to a general UI questions is, “It Depends.”But there is a solid, generally applicable principle that you could teach a monkey: identify and streamline the most common and frequent tasks.

   My first Sony Walkman cassette player got this right in 1979: I could adjust the volume and pause the music instantly, without looking, without changing modes, without unlocking anything, without even removing it from a belt clip. Yet most iPods are horribly modal. Turning down the volume on my current iPod requires pulling it out of the pocket, unlocking it, looking at it, turning the click wheel, locking it again and putting it back in my pocket. As I have pointed out, this makes the iPod touch flawed as a music player. So please, Apple, in 2008, put the volume and playback controls physical, pressable buttons that you can feel.

5. Stop the bouncingOn the Mac, icons of applications which require your attention bounce. And bounce. And bounce. Even if you’re in the middle of something else. They clamor for your attention like a needy child. Instead, icons should bounce once or twice and then stop. If they still require your attention, they may step forward from the dock, peeking out a little bit until a moment befitting the user.
6. Cars should stop self-destructingHow many products can you name, that you rely on for your life that self-destruct when the user makes a minor error? This is what happens when you accidently walk away from most cars with the dome light or headlights on. The car will dutifully shine that light all night long until your battery is dead and the car is no longer operable, leaving you stranded.In 2008, at this point in human history, all cars should be smart enough to know never to allow the battery level to get below what is needed to start and recharge itself. This should be a national safety requirement.
7. Allow graphics to be copied and pasted into web forms; allow files to be dragged inBlogging apps, SaaS apps like Google Docs, any webform requring a photo: all of these require that you provide files. Unfortunately you cannot interact with a web browser as you can with regular apps and the desktop. You cannot copy and paste images one application into a web app. And you cannot drag one or a dozen files from the desktop into an upload area. Users must contend with a cumbersome file open dialog, and do so repeatedly to upload multiple files. These facilities are needed now to upload images in many web apps, and they will be needed for evermore in RIAs and SaaS apps.  [Update 11/9/09 I was extremely surprised to discover that dragging a photo from my desktop into a Google Wave pane accepted the upload elegantly.  How'd they do that?!  Turns out it was Google Gears at work, the offline extension that was created to let you work with your web apps when you had no connectivity.]
8. Cell phone service with the clarity of VoIP and the low latency of landlinesCell phone service sucks. It has always sucked and so we take for granted its suckitude. But it doesn’t have to suck. There are two key problems: latency and audio quality. Latency is the delay from when you say something to when your friend hears it. You can get a sense of how bad it is by having both parties clap on the count of three. Latency affects cellphone service and VoIP and makes for awkward conversations. Either you work out a telegraphic protocol with clear, unnatural pauses to clear the air, or you talk over one another clumsily. Latency doesn’t have to suck so badly: it is negligible on old fashioned landline service, so it should be possible with cellphone communications.The other problem is audio quality of phone calls. You don’t know what you have been missing all along until you participate in a VoIP call using headphones. The other person sounds like they are right next to you. Puhs, buhs and duhs are clearly distinguishable, as are v’s and f’s. It’s wonderful. This is a mere matter of bandwidth and it should be solvable, not just for mobile phones but for landline phones as well.  [Update 11/9/09 As of September 2009, "France Télécom has become the first mobile operator to transmit voice calls and audio in high definition, part of an effort by telecommunications companies to improve the quality of cellphone conversations."  h/t Steve Portigal]

   How many more years must pass before we have clear, instant, reliable voice communications? I hereby wish for someone to do something about it in 2008. We have HDTV; the time is ripe for HD phone service.

9. Bring back OpenDoc

OpenDoc was killed ten years ago, but the idea of mixing and matching components of applications has always made sense. I want to be able to put an OmniGraffle chart in a Pages document or a Numbers table in Stone Create. PenPoint did it pretty well in 1991, Microsoft botched it (with OLE), integrated apps like ClarisWorks approximated it, and some ISVs have been pushing the ball forward with LinkBack. But it is still not yet a robust, well supported standard. In 2008 I wish a proper standard and a workable cross-platform technology would emerge for embedding components of apps in other apps.

10. Make it impossible to leave an ATM without your card and your cash.My Washington Mutual ATM seems designed to want you to leave your card behind: after it gives you your money, but before it gives you your card, it throws up a full screen ad for several seconds. You’ve got your money, the message it’s sending you is that your transaction is over. You start walking away, and if you’re lucky, you realize that you don’t yet have your card. I saved myself several times but one day it happened to me and I left without my card. When I returned to the bank later the teller told me that this happens several times a week.It’s not terribly difficult UI design problem, and it’s amazing that it persists after twenty years of ATMs. The solution is to withhold all three items, card, cash and receipt, until all three are ready, and spit them all out at once. The best design I saw was years ago in Tokyo, where the three slots where together and you could grab all elements at once. Please, everyone who works at a bank: in 2008, make it impossible to leave without your card.

That concludes my top 10 UI wish list for 2008. Let’s check in again next year to see what has been fixed.

[Readers: if you know anyone involved with any of these products, please send them a link to this article. It's: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/2008-ui-wishes]

MyOwnBags come in many fabrics and colors

Ania designed a bag that she would want to use:

• strong enough to carry a heavy load of groceries
• light and compactable so it could be squished into its own little pouch and kept in a woman’s purse whenever she needed it
• large capacity so that multiple bags are not needed on a small shopping trip
• versatile, so it could be used not just for groceries but for yoga, gym, beach, clothes shopping, changes of clothes
• fashionable, to look good while being eco. They come in many fabrics and do not have huge gaudy phrases trumpeting the owner’s environmental sensitivity
• washable, so the bag can withstand grocery detritus and can be used for a long time without looking dirty and ratty

Ania created her reusable bags years before they became commonplace and way before progressive municipalities like San Francisco started banning plastic bags. Now there are dozens of players in the game. Amazingly, the MyOwnBag product vision has held up well against the flood of competitors:

• Grocery stores sell canvas bags that look like stiff green shopping bags. Pretty good for reducing waste but you cannot keep it in your purse at the ready.
• Many companies sell $5 nylon bags that fold into nothing. They are commendable for making something that can be carried around, and cheap enough that anyone could buy them. But they are typically over-branded and look like garbage bags when freed from their sac. You wouldn’t be seen with it for other trips around town.
• Hermès, Louis Vuitton and others have designer grocery bags for fashionistas willing to pay $500 – $1700.
• Various gym, yoga or beach bags are optimized for their stated purpose but are not meant for groceries

Here is what this comparison looks like in a needs table, which includes the original comparison points, paper and plastic bags (3 is better; 0 is worse):

Needs table comparing various types of shopping bags

The needs analysis clarifies the differentiation among these competitors. For each customer need along the top you can see which solution does a good job of solving it. You can compare any two solutions and immediately see the important differences between them and which niche each has carved out.

From this chart you can see that MyOwnBag is the only reusable shopping bag that squishes down to a little pouch, and is useful for for things other than grocery shopping, and is chic and may be worn proudly around town, without costing $500.

There is one other need which MyOwnBag solves excellently: your need to find a unique gift for your chic, environmentally-sensitive friend, for about $40 to $60.

Warning: do not give her a plastic bag.

.

For more on needs analysis, please see:

• Needs analysis technique at ProductVision.org
• Needs Analysis of Vehicles

$10,000 Honeywell Kitchen Computer from 1969. No units were sold. You can visit it at the Computer History Museum.

One era’s flop is often another era’s success. The typical excuse given for failure is something vague like, “the market wasn’t ready for it” or “the product was ahead of its time.” I dislike these phrases, as they shrug off our responsibility to predict what customers will accept, and they shift the blame to the vagaries of customer behavior and psychology.

Yes, sometimes it’s true that mainstream customers need plenty of role models around them before they’ll even entertain the possibility of trying a new technology. It took some convincing to get people to try out the first microwaves, mobile phones, email and the Web.

But just as often, the early attempts at a product fail simply because they do not meed important customer needs at a realistic price.

It shouldn’t have been a stretch for Honeywell to realize that a kitchen computer that cost $10,000 in 1969 dollars, that required the housewife to take a two week course to learn to program the device, using toggle-switch input and binary light output, might not be a blockbuster. Despite its integrated cutting board.

3Com Audrey of 2000

A more recent attempt at a kitchen computer was a quick flame-out by 3Com called the Audrey in 2000. But that was before widespread broadband and WiFi, before large, cheap LCD panels and many other enabling technologies. For the price, it too was not about to earn its place under the cupboard.

We now we have enabling technologies lined up to make a device plausible: cheap computers, thin LCDs, fast, wireless Internet connectivity. Is the time right to make place for a computer in the kitchen?   There is anecdotal evidence of the demand: no fewer than three of my friends remodeling kitchens are designing a place for a kitchen computer. Lead users often portend larger trends (see von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation).

The need is apparently there, the technological ingredients are in place.  There is no external barrier, so now we await a major manufacturer to introduce a well-designed device and establish the category. (Waits like this are hard to predict. They could take months or years.)

Users can, of course, get by nicely today with a laptop in a cubby.  Many do.  But for high-end remodels that kind of retrofit won’t do.  So here are some specs that we can compare against the next wave of kitchen computers. These specs describe a relatively full-feature devices for big, fancy kitchen. They would be pared down for lower-end products.

Key scenarios for a kitchen computer

1. General lightweight web surfing
2. Family information appliance
3. Follow a recipe while cooking
4. Possible homework & surfing station
5. Audio controller, for background music and talk while doing kitchen activities
6. Decorative element, as a digital photo frame

Features of a kitchen computer

1. Attractiveness, since it’s part of the décor. Designed for a kitchen, not an office.
2. Different finish options to match with different décors. People remodeling choose from hundreds of tiles and paint colors and one style does not fit all.
3. Touch screen for most common tasks.
4. Wireless keyboard and mouse, normally stored, can be pulled out for more serious use.
5. Resilient to spills, oils, greasy fingers. Durable for kid usage.
6. Unobtrusive, since there is enough clutter in the kitchen.
   • Only a thin display is outwardly visible. The main unit is concealed within cabinetry, along with cabling.
   • Display takes up no precious counter space. It is mounted on an arm and, when not in use, folds under a cabinet or rotates flush against the wall. In use while cooking it hinges out. When used for homework or sit-down surfing, it lowers to a work surface.
   • The main unit (if there is one, apart from the display) is small like the Mac Mini to minimize consumption of precious cabinet volume.
   • Speakers are built into the display to further reduce footprint.
   • Quiet, fanless operation. Does not contribute to the background noise.
7. Central control – Display can completely control the device including powering it on. There is never a need to dig into the cabinets to fuss with the device.
8. Media playback, particularly music.
   • Hidden main unit includes amp for speakers and speaker output.
   • Remote control to control playback while across the room or in adjoining room.
   • If IR is used for remote control, the display includes the IR receiver, to allow for line-of-sight.
   • Display matches ambient light in room. When the room is dark, the display turns itself off.
9. Always on, or instant on. As an appliance it must have instant availability.
10. Low power consumption since it’s always on.

Special Software

The kitchen computer should be a standard, full-function personal computer for when it is needed for homework or general usage. For key tasks it should revert to a minimal, streamlined appliance mode with highly tailored apps that don’t require the keyboard or mouse.

1. Family calendar/coordination center visible at a glance, with alarms and reminders.[Has anyone cracked this critical user need yet?]
2. Digital photo frame when idle.
   • Automatic, smart photo syncing with other photo libraries devices in the house. You don’t have to do any management for the images to remain fresh.
   • “Best of” photos from prior years appear automatically.
   • They match the current season, so you don’t get inappropriate winter wonderland pictures in July.
3. Music controller
   • User can stream music from other servers in the house or from Internet radio
   • Can be controlled by the display, either with physical buttons or a touch-driven on-screen UI.
4. Recipe software? This is maybe. Recipes demand flexibility and resilience, something paper excels at. But if a simplified touch-screen UI were to be layered on an outstanding cooking site like Epicurious we would have something. Also: recipe videos on demand is a killer kitchen app, since it’s so much easier to see cooking techniques demonstrated.
5. Standard info appliance stuff to check out while scarfing down your cereal: Weather forecast so you know what to wear. Traffic so you know what to expect during the commute. Top news & sports items so you are up to speed on what’s going on. RSS feeds from the school. Buttons to most-used websites. Number of waiting email or voicemail messages.
6. Quick & dirty email checker. Quickly skim & read email messages & compose short replies, even canned replies, without having to pull out the keyboard & mouse. For full-on email answering mode, pull out the keyboard or switch to your main PC.
7. Family message center? This is another maybe. It’s a traditional scenario envisioned for a kitchen computer. But introducing yet another messaging medium could be a stretch, given how inundated we already are with messaging solutions. If it were to happen, here’s a viable way: Mom presses a “record” button on the display and speaks a message for Junior. The audio is stored on a server, and a link to it is sent via email or text message to Junior, who can retrieve it on a PC or cellphone. A bright button appears on the kitchen appliance for Junior, until he retrieves the message from any means.
8. Videophone — no longer a futuristic scenario, especially for Mac users. Dad can see that Jane, who is away at college, is available for videochat. This is simply a different wrapper around iChat, still by far the best-of-breed for video calls.
9. Integration with other home automation: distributed audio, lighting & climate control, alarm system. [Home automation is another field that is under-developed for the times, in need of an Apple-esque kick in the butt.]

With computers once again at a plateau, new outlets tend to emerge. We should expect to see a trickle of kitchen computers come to market. If they are designed around the usage scenarios they will be a welcome addition to the kitchen, not just gratuitous technology.

[Update 8/22/08 - touched up wording]

everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

Rumors of the desktop’s demise are premature. As described in my analysis of Hosted vs. Local Applications there are simply too many important scenarios for the desktop to go away. Information and creativity workers spend much of their waking lives using computers and require the fastest response possible. They require reliable access to them, even at 30,000 feet, even at overcrowded overseas cafés. They and the businesses and governments they work for require sovereignty over their sensitive information.

The solution to these needs is locally stored apps and data. This will not change for a long time.

Casual users & Internet Appliances

That said, most people on the planet are not information workers. They’re like my mom. Year after year, she uses her computer for communicating, browsing, light gaming and not much more. Her PC is both overpowered and sub-par for the job: overpowered with capacity she will never use, sub-par because it takes too long to bootstrap that capacity just to check email. The telephone gives a dial tone the moment the receiver is lifted — why can’t the machine show your latest messages the moment the email button is pressed?

Casual computer users like my mom would be better served by an inexpensive Internet appliance. For these users, it doesn’t matter whether apps and data are stored locally or remotely, as long as a stable net connection is available. New users in developing countries fall into the same camp.

This era of Internet appliances is almost upon us with new categories of products like the Palm Foleo, the OLPC, the iPhone, and the Nokia Internet Tablet. These type of portable devices (sometimes blended with, sometimes an adjunct to a cellphone) will become the only machine many people in the world will ever need. Especially when they become cheap and dockable to keyboards, mice and larger monitors for longer stretches of use (that’s a vision to steal).

Hybrid apps

Paul Graham and I need not argue about extremes like the death or immortality of the desktop. There is a happy medium between all-hosted and all-local applications, a Reese’s Peanut Butter solution. The best of both worlds is to download and cache first class applications in their entirety and run them locally with the highest-fidelity UI frameworks available. (Hint: not AJAX, not browser apps). The apps would update themselves from trusted sources when necessary — seamlessly, automatically, in the background, with no hands. They would give users access to data that is best stored locally (high definition movies, private data and photos, and so on). Since today’s OS platforms do not support this I’m counting it as another vision to steal.

A stepping stone to this future is the Either/Or Apps (EOAs) — web apps running in a web browser that may be local or remote. AJAX and Flex are pushing the boundaries of app richness within a browser frame. But they are still within a browser frame, an unsuitable container for a complete computing experience. Adobe, Microsoft and Sun are on the case with AIR, Silverlight, and JavaFX respectively, new platforms for rich internet applications (RIAs) that live on the desktop rather than within the browser.

As we look forward to the Internet Appliance era, we can put away the eulogy for the desktop. It will not be necessary.

8/3/07 Update: The Zonbu is directly targeted to the casual computer users described above. It is only $100! Great deal! I think. Plus $13/month for 2 years Linux PC with local applications, 4GB of flash storage and remote backup. Total cost $370.95 for 2 years. Optical drive and WiFi costs extra $49+$29=$78. Total so far $449. Monitor, mouse and keyboard are not included. Photo storage will be constrained. Flash video stutters. It’s Linux. It doesn’t work with iTunes or any other Mac-only or Windows-only app. Down the slippery slope we go. Maybe your mom would be better off with a Mac Mini?

See also:

• Hosted vs. Local Applications
• DabbleDB, FileMaker Pro, and Innovation

I ended with a vision to steal:

please come up with a consumer-grade way to let users of standalone desktop computers run web apps locally

With Gears, vendors like Google and Dabble may now offer “Either/Or Apps” — applications that are either hosted, or run locally, or both, according to the user’s desire.

One small step for the web, one giant leap for webkind

App developers today face the dilemma of whether to write new apps for the desktop or for the web. Each carried significant pros and cons. They can how have it both ways, building web apps now with the intention of allowing the app to work partially or completely offline once the technologies mature.

Some applications, like Google Calendar, sat in an awkward space between “nice to have on any browser” and “need to have when offline”. Those applications can now exist with neither limitation. Soon, browser-based email will be available to you for offline processing while on an airplane, isolated from the series of tubes.

Hopefully Gears does not preclude apps that are 100% local — where no Internet connection is needed and where no data is ever stored remotely. As the scenarios show, this is and will remain a separate, legitimate need.

Architects and engineers of hosted apps should start thinking through the implications of Either-Or-Apps — allowing sensitive information to be stored locally, allowing apps to be used completely offline, leveraging client-side storage for caching and increased response times. Understanding these tricky problems will be important skills in the years to come.

By Google’s own admission Gears is immature. There are many more important technologies to build out. One example: having the platform own the problem of keeping the two data stores in continuous sync.

Security will also be a concern. Today, web pages have a strict restraining order and may not come within 500 yards of our precious local data. By relying on Gears, our precious data is moving closer to the dangerous part of town.

But Gears represents more than an evolution in Web technologies. It is another crack in the dam for desktop-based apps. While rich native apps will never disappear as a whole, reasons for clinging onto any one of them are falling away one by one.

Apple’s Front Row UI

Each button press requires that you wait for the cool animation to complete. Input is ignored while that is happening. You cannot queue up several button presses, and there is no short-cut to get to the top of the menu tree. You have to press the button, watch carefully for it to finish, press again and repeat.

It’s a tedious form-kills-function design. It’s not long before the form undermines itself and becomes not cool, just irritating. The experienced user cannot get faster through time and repetition — everyone must wait.

Once again, the advice for interaction designers is: give snappy response first, animate second. Do not let the latter get in the way of the first, and especially not for frequent tasks.

More can be said about UI friction and Front Row’s strictly hierarchical, iPod-like interface. Before you can get to feature B you have to do a lot of mode management overhead work to get out of feature A. Front Row’s Menu button is essentially a Back or Escape button. There is no Home button.

How might the strict hierarchy of Front Row and the iPod be done differently? Imagine if there were not just a mode-relative Back button but a global Home button. Also imagine menu choices that were always in the same place. Operations could then be reached deterministically — with the same sequence of key presses.

Determinism is a very valuable design requirement. It allows users to learn key sequences through repetition and get faster over time. (It also lets programmable remotes work reliably since they are not dependent on the starting state of the system. Every piece of consumer electronics should accept distinct On and Off commands and not just a “toggle power” command.)

We could go a step further. Top features could be accessed directly with separate, global Music, Video, Photos and DVD. Each would always be one button press away, guaranteed. (More buttons on the remote, yes, but that is the trade-off between true simplicity and merely the appearance of simplicity.)

The original Palm Pilot was wonderfully low-friction because of this simple idea. It had independent, global buttons for calendar, contacts, to-do’s and memos.

Globally accessible buttons on the original Palm

The PalmPilot always responded to these four hardware buttons. No state the device was in could override them, no app, no dialog box, not even the state of the device being off! It even had silk-screened buttons for four other most-frequent tasks: Applications (aka Home), Menu, Calculator, and Find.

Palm’s friction-busting approach is a great design to steal for anyone wanting to improve an overly modal consumer electronic product.

See also:

• UI Friction
• Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone
• Impressions of the iPod touch

Giving the user the choice may sound like a user-centered solution, but it’s the opposite. It’s a team dynamic-centered solution — a cop out from our responsibilities to deeply understand the user’s scenarios and their relative weights.

The success of a new preference depends on a chain of contingencies:

• The user has to stop and think at a meta level about what they are trying to achieve and how the product is failing to help them. (Usually people blame themselves rather than the product.)
• It has to occur to the user that an option that will help may exist.
• The user has to risk wasting time by stopping productive work and searching for an option.
• The user has to be able to wade through the available options to find the right one.
• The user has to experiment with the option to make sure it solved the problem

Typically, the user will not search for the option, but will simply satisfice with the default behavior. Therefore, the real winner of the UI debate is whoever got to define the default behavior.

This New York Times article provides some evidence of the power of the default:

In the United States as well as many European countries, when people renew their driver’s license, they also decide whether they want to be organ donors. As a 2003 study in the journal Science found, more than 90 percent of Europeans are organ donors, while only about 25 percent of Americans are — even though most Americans approve of organ donation. In the United States, to be an organ donor you have to sign a form. The reverse is true in Europe, where you are an organ donor unless you expressly indicate that you don’t want to be.

Another study, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that when employers switch procedures for voluntary 401(k) contributions from “opt in” (you sign a form to take part) to “opt out” (you sign a form not to), rates of participation go up by as much as 30 percentage points.

Preference panels with countless arcane options indicate an absence of UI clarity and leadership

That new option, dug deep down in preferences may seem innocuous. But the more options pile up, the more weight is added and the harder it is for users to find the truly important options. This is the core argument for a bias towards minimalism in UI design. This UI cruft accumulates over time, and it’s hard to take it back. As Steve Jobs has said, “We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.” Designers must fight tooth-and-nail to prevent the cumulative effect of these expedient decisions.

More recently there was a story about Internet café’s here in San Francisco and how one of the premier hotspots is just a few blocks from my house.

I would love to walk down and do some work in that environment, but open wi-fi means no encryption between your laptop and the base station. That means anyone nearby can sniff my packets and monitor my communications. Easily, and with no special tech knowledge. Hacking has become a point-and-click endeavor.

To make matters worse, AT&T (was: SBC, was: PacBell) does not encrypt email communications. If I open my email application, every few minutes it will connect to the server, broadcasting my password in the clear for all nearby hackers. Not a bright idea in an Internet café teeming with San Francisco’s nouveau dot commers.

It got me wondering why it was this way. Today, for Wi-Fi communications to be encrypted it means each user must enter a password. Not very convenient for patrons of Internet café’s. But if you turn off password protection you also lose encryption to the base station. It’s an either-or situation.

And the issue is not relegated to Wi-Fi communications. Ethernet LAN connections are similarly insecure. Anyone else on your network can sniff your packets.

For precision and clarity, here is the problem statement rendered as SSNiFs scenarios:

Can’t we have our cake and eat it too? Why can’t the base station establish secure communications to user even without a password? The router and the laptop would each generate key pairs and exchange public keys for the session. No passwords, high encryption standards. As for wired, Ethernet connections, why can’t they do the same?

Seems like a pretty obvious need and idea, doesn’t it? Surely I’m not the first to have thought of this.

Turns out I’m not. I asked my friend David Creemer, who is in possession of sixty percent of all human knowledge and therefore usually a useful resource. He wrote:

The capability you ask for is slowly getting deployed, and is part of the 802.1x authentication standard. 802.1x is mostly associated with WiFi, but works perfectly well on ethernet, etc. It provides for per-port or per-connection authentication, authorization, and encryption. On the Mac, you might see it as “WPA2-Enterprise” on the WiFi password panel. Though generally used with a password or other credential, it can do encryption with no or trivial authentication.

So, it’s coming. Eventually. Deployment of this sort of thing takes years so it could be a while.

Which begs the broader question about product vision. This scenarios is pretty straightforward, isn’t it? Obvious even, at least in retrospect? How could the purveyors of wireless networking standards have missed this use case, dooming years of users to the invisible perils of insecure communications? Moreover, Ethernet LANs have been around for decades now. How did they miss it?

Was it a fear of performance degradation due to encrypting all packets? Was it because customers do not appreciate security risks and hence do not demand stronger solutions from vendors? Or was it a lack of foresight on the part of the standards bodies — a lapse of vision into this core, critical scenario?
—
One final note: Even with the secure WiFi connection described here, your data is only safe within the café, not on its journey between the café and its destination. For that you need to establish a VPN connection. And we continue to wait for widespread, facilitated email encryption.

1. Palettes that must be painstakingly re-arranged to get them off the content area (hello Photoshop and many others). When switching display configurations, the user must get all palettes placed appropriately before doing real work. We would like to see systems recognize common monitor configurations and intelligently partition a display into tool areas and content areas. When switching between, say, a laptop screen and a 24″ display, the user should be able to plug in and work without having to reconfigure the workspace.
   Vision to steal: This should be supported at the OS-level, for two main reasons: 1. For cross-app consistency, so the user can get used to finding tools at the right or left of the screen across all applications. 2. So the system can referee window positions and sizing. For example, on the Mac a maximized window knows not to extend under the Dock, so it’s scrollbar and resize handles remain accessible. See also: Making efficient use of big displays.
2. Often-clicked buttons that are too small and hence difficult to target and click (hello Fitt’s Law). Examples of this abound. In GarageBand, for example, the user must often mute and isolate audio channels, yet the buttons to do are tiny:
   

   The principle is straight-forward: if the user must click a button frequently, make it big. (Resistance may be expected from visual design quarters: tiny text and controls look cooler, especially surrounded by massive whitespace.)

3. Unnecessarily modal UIs that require you to put the system in the right state before being granted access to an important function. Try turning down a blaring iPod when it’s in its protected sleeve with the lock button on. Worse: try turning down Nine Inch Nail’s latest while you are navigating the menu structure. The very cool scroll wheel cannot be used as a volume control until you first navigate your way back to the current song. Better to just yank out those earbuds.
   Compare this against a 20-year-old Walkman: its physical volume dial can be adjusted without even having to de-holster it from your cargo pants. (The upcoming iPhone mercifully brings back physical volume buttons. Apple may have clued into this UI issue.)
4. Gratuitous up-front animation. A Windows XP user wanting to use a menu must first wait for it to fade in. This behavior has reportedly gotten 20% worse under Vista. Mac OS X is not immune: dialog boxes slide down from the titlebar with lovely acceleration and deceleration motions. The taller the dialog, the longer the slide. [Anyone know how I can hack this to make it stop?]
   Before complying with the user’s request to leave, Clippy the insolent paperclip would sarcastically wave Buh Bye. (The stupid bent wire knows that such cloying anthropomorphisms are what did him in to begin with.)

People crave and buy ever faster machines for responsiveness. Yet these up-front animations want you to chill out, take life a little slower. We’re not opposed to elegant animations, but they need to be on the tail end of the user’s operations. The simple principal is: whenever productivity matters, UI elements should snap to attention when called upon but may fade away gently once the user has moved on to something else.

The moral of the story is: when architecting systems, take a moment to isolate the most common and frequent tasks; think of the most efficient theoretical interface to these core tasks and keep comparing your design to this theoretical best. Beware of design solutions that introduce delay or overhead in these core tasks and eliminate this UI friction

Question for readers: what productivity apps have the best palette management UIs? How are Microsoft’s new tool ribbons and Adobe’s new palettes working out?

See also:

• UI Friction and Apple’s Front Row
• Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone

Local vs. Hosted Computing

This goes to the old debate between local versus hosted computing. The debate started in the mid-90′s with Sun and Oracle trying to battle Microsoft’s dominance by replacing “fat clients” — full-featured PCs with their own storage — with “thin clients” that left most of the computing and all of the storage up to the servers.

That was in the early days of the web and it didn’t stand a chance at that time. None of the infrastructure could support the quality of user experience that was taken for granted with desktop apps. All the software industry had to do was wait for those massive initiates to run out of breath and money.

Fast forward a decade. Now we have fast, cheap, nearly ubiquitous connectivity, super fast servers and local machines, cheap gargantuan hosted storage. And we finally have a nascent medium for distributed applications: web browsers with AJAX (and friends).

So the debate is back, argued this time by the likes of Google and Yahoo with hosted productivity applications that are walking and talking more and more like desktop apps. Applications like Google’s spreadsheet, Yahoo’s rich email client and now DabbleDB, a rich online database app (which I am sure someone will snap up for big bucks very quickly).

And so the pendulum appears to be swinging back to something that kind of looks like the days of yore: mainframe computers that knew and did all and dumb terminals that channeled them.

Will the pendulum swing all the way back to a fully hosted world? Should it? Let’s review the debate.

What’s good about hosted apps

A future of hosted apps are great if you travel, if you need to travel light, if you aren’t good for managing your own system or if you have to share computers. Here are the arguments for hosted apps laid out neatly as SSNiF scenarios:

What’s bad about hosted apps

Connected computing certainly has its place, but there will always be reasons for needing to have your apps and your data local. Here are the SSNiFs:

No wonder we have a dilemma. Those are some pretty strong needs on both sides of the equation. Choosing either direction trades off the other.

Vision to Steal

Meanwhile, we still wish we could consider DabbleDB but we can’t because it’s a hosted app. The same goes for other apps like Google Calendar or Intuit’s useful QuickBase. Wouldn’t it be nice if those vendors could just sell me a standalone version for my own use, or for my private workgroup’s use, without me having to be a webmaster?

Operating systems vendors: Can you please come up with a consumer-grade way to let users of standalone desktop computers run web apps locally?

Consumer-grade here means:

• No thinking about Apache or security concerns or being concerned about installing the latest version of MySQL or Perl or PHP or chron jobs.
• Install, uninstall and upgrade apps the Mac way, by dragging and dropping a single icon. Withstands operating system upgrades.
• Launch the local web app by double-clicking it. It opens into the browser.
• Allow the app normal access to the hard drive once it’s been welcomed in. Reads and writes the same types of documents as any other app.
• Let me switch on the app for others who can see my machine on the network. This way, selling into small workgroups would not require an IT specialist managing a server. It would be equivalent to the old pre-Web FileMaker Pro approach. Run it on anyone’s machine and turn on multi-user mode.

There are technical and standards hurdles to achieving this. But we need to get from here to there somehow, there being the place of convergence where we don’t care if an app is “native” or “hosted”… whether it runs as a Mac app or a Windows app or just a web app, whether the app is right here or out there. And where developers don’t have to fret over which platform to support.

Maybe someday, hosting computing will be the norm. The cost- and hassle-reduction benefits suggest that it will win out for casual users like Mom, students, information workers and by those who cannot afford their own machines (that’s a prediction). But the scenarios calling for local computing are also strong and will persist for the foreseeable future.

A recent NYTimes article, “With Popcorn, DVD’s and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home” describes the decline in moviegoing:

“With box-office attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained – a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood.”

The lack of certainty about the underlying cause is not helpful. When a business is in peril it must identify the right cause: the correct explanation leads to action that can save the business; the wrong explanation can lead to actions which hasten failure.

This problem is of interest to us because it’s an instance of a common strategic predicament: an established class of products is being threatened by the emergence of a new class of products. Is the newcomer merely a passing fad? Or is it a disruptive innovation that will render the incumbent obsolete?

We will look at these questions using our preferred tool for the job, Formal Needs Analysis. We will first deconstruct moviegoing into the the primary customer needs it satisfies, then consider how well those needs are met by the competitors, in this case TiVo-style DVRs, Netflix, the web and videogames. This will isolate the points of overlap, clarifying when the alternates are as good or better than the incumbent.

What needs are met by moviegoing?

To model moviegoing and its competitors, we’ve established a needs space of seven primary needs and four supporting needs. Primary needs are the key reasons people purchase a product. For movies, we have:

1. The need to escape – to temporarily get away from the incessant stresses and pressures of life.
2. The need to feel good – to be put in a happy mood, say after a difficult week.
3. The need for stimulation – to be raised into a heightened emotional & physiological state.
4. The need to learn things – to be left with the new knowledge or insight into the human experience
5. The need for social interaction – to feel connected with others.
6. The need for social status – to feel worthy within the social group. With respect to pop culture including movies, it feels good to be in-the-know and it feels bad to be left out of the conversation everyone else is having.
7. The need for fun – to have a good time in the moment.

In addition, there are these supporting needs. Supporting needs help the product fulfill its primary needs better. They are like salt to french fries: salt makes the food taste better, but you don’t buy you buy the fries soley for the salt. For moviegoing, we have the following supporting needs:

1. The need for affordability – other things being equal, the more affordable a product, the more desirable.
2. The need convenience - another cost the customer incurs is non-monetary — the logistical hassle in using it.
3. The need relevance - Relevance of a piece of content is how well it relates to you. When it comes to matters of taste or interest, different folks require different strokes. Thus for content, relevance is largely a function of the breadth of selection available.
4. The need for long experience – the persistence of the experience.

Let’s walk through each of these to see how movies and the newcomers compare. We’ve assigned rough scores from zero to three to each competitor in the table below for reference.

Primary needs

Summary of needs fulfilled by moviegoing and its comparison points, rated from 0 to 3

1. The need for escape

Movies do a good job of providing escape. A darkened movie theatre away from home, interesting characters and an intriguing plot can immerse the viewer in an alternate reality.

Netflix shows the same movies, but at home. This experience is not as immersive as in a theatre, but the gap is narrowed for those fortunate enough to possess a decent home theatre. TiVo or web surfing can provide escape for hours, but today’s best videogames provide immersion to such an extent that time flies.

2-4. The need to feel good, for stimulation, to learn things

The movie industry is adept at crafting films that play directly against different emotional needs. The need to feel good is literally matched by the Hollywood “feel-good” movies. The need for stimulation, both emotional and physiological, is provided by thrillers, sci-fi, action and suspense movies. The need to learn things is met by watching characters in dramas and by documentaries.

As for the comparison points, Netflix has the same content and thus the same potential, minus some points for the less immersive experience. TiVo loses points for commercial interruptions (skippable though they may be) and for lower audio/visual quality relative to DVDs. (We could have added a/v quality as a secondary need.) Videogames can be extremely stimulating. Web surfing may not exactly be emotionally stirring, but it has great potential to help anyone learn anything about anything at any time.

5. The need for social interaction

While watching a movie is itself passive and solitary, going out to the movies is social in multiple ways. Going through an experience with friends makes it more enjoyable and gives common references for future conversation. A crowded movie theatre also provides a lighter version of the mob experience common at sporting events or huge rock concerts. Finally, if we take moviegoing to include activities before and after such as travel, dinner and drinks, there is ample opportunity for personal bonding.

Watching the same movie at home with Netflix or TiVo is rarely as social. Videogames played alone are decidedly not social. But endless hours spent playing videogames with friends is a strong bonding experience.

6. The need for social status

Coolness points are gained or lost based on how up-to-date one is with the latest trends. The movie industry plays this up well, fostering the notion of the must-see movie. You just have to watch it (otherwise what good are you?).

But while watching every top movie may necessary for hipness, but it is not sufficient. No medium has a monopoly on conferring social status. One must also be up to date on the latest TV shows, sports standings, celebrity gossip, fashion, videogames, news, technology and blogs.

We can say that the Netflix movie, arriving in the mailbox months after the playground or water cooler chatter has moved on to something new, is not so hip anymore.

7. The need for fun

The prior needs don’t completely capture the overall feeling of fun and excitement of going out to the movies, so we included it as another dimension of need. It overlaps some of the others, but that’s okay; we are free to choose the dimensions that give us useful insight.

Staying home and watching TV or TiVo or Netflix isn’t quite as fun. But high quality videogames can still be an addictive blast.

Supporting needs

8. The need affordability

Moviegoing is expensive. Aside from the ticket cost there are ancillary costs of parking and dinner. TV, Netflix and videogames are far more affordable per hour of use, and thus they get betters scores on the need for affordability.

9. The need for convenience

Going out to see a movie incurs non-monetary costs of time and logistics. One must get to and from the theatre, park and wait in lines. Staying home is far more convenient.

10. The need for relevance/choice

The Matrix and A Room With a View are highly compelling for their respective audiences, and highly irrelevant to one another’s. When it comes to content, relevance is gained through breadth of choice. The movies offer just a couple of dozen choices at any one time.

Regular TV has dozens of channels, yet there is often nothing to watch. TiVo, on the other hand, filters through thousands of channel-hours a week, leaving the viewer with a concentrated set of extremely relevant programming. Netflix offers an impressive selection of 50,000 movies, old TV programs and special-interest content findable nowhere else.

As for videogames, there is not as yet something for everyone. Many have no interest in videogames at all.

11. The need for a long experience

The moviegoing experience, fun and immersive as it may be, is fleeting. On the other hand, people can spend hours a day with TV, TiVo, videogames and web surfing.

Conclusions & Predictions

Now that we’ve broken moviegoing and its challengers into its component needs, what can we make of all this? Is the bad fortune of moviegoing due to a passing spate of poor product? Or is it indicative of deeper, long-term trends to other media? By walking through the chart above we can lay out some specific conclusions and predictions:

• Moviegoing is still a unique product. Its needs profile — its row in the chart above — is distinct from the others. None of the alternatives are a superset. This suggests that moviegoing will not be obviated by new media (the way that word processors obviated typewriters), but will live alongside them.
• Moviegoing has specific advantages. It is a better escape than home media, more engaging and more social. A night of moviegoing is simply more fun than staying home and watching the same thing at home. First release movies are also trendy and confer social status on those who watch the blockbusters early.
• Moviegoing has weaknesses relative to its competitors. It is costly, both monetarily and in convenience. The home media is far more convenient. Moviegoing is also a fleeting, and leaves discretionary time for other products to fill. The comparison points, TiVo, videogames and the web can occupy the user for hours without extra cost.
• The competitors pose real and specific threats. Videogames are an excellent escape. Netflix and TiVo let the user select from thousands of choices, thereby greatly increasing the relevance and appeal. Videogames played with friends fulfill needs for social interaction.
• All of these dynamics are about the medium of moviegoing itself, not the content within that medium. The threat is systemic, not a result of a spate of poor movies.
• Video-over-the-net has the potential to meet a superset of the needs met by Netflix. Current offerings are of lower a/v quality and limited selection, but this can change. Once it does, the DVD-by-mail model will become niche.
• While moviegoing will persist, it won’t be without pain to the industry. The competition for discretionary time is hot, leaving less of the pie for the movies than they are used to. Movie attendance can be expected to decline, even if quality recovers.

How can the movie industry respond to these threats? I will save that for another article.

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For more on needs analysis, please see:

• Needs analysis technique at ProductVision.org
• Needs Analysis of Vehicles
  

Micropayments are a good idea. Today, providers of worthwhile content must make a difficult choice: do they charge for their content or for a subscription, knowing that a miniscule proportion of visitors will ever do so? Or do they give it away, hoping to fund their efforts via advertising? Micropayments will allow vendors to charge an amount small enough to be inconsequential to the buyer. If done in an unimposing and efficient way, they can open the floodgates to a torrent of impulse purchases.

How else can micro-payments be used?

Here are some scenarios:

• Content providers large or tiny could provide much of their content for free, convey how high their quality is, and charge a nominal amount for extra content.

• Pay to download: pay $0.50 and get a royalty-free photo, or a template or a sound or a font or a set of flash cards to study with.

• Web tools : charge per usage of speciality web apps, calculators, etc.

• New York Times: Read today’s editorialists, or any article from the archive for 5 cents.

• Video: Watch last night’s Jon Stewart without commercials for $0.50.

What are today’s precedents for micropayment user experience?

• Amazon’s One Click checkout – the ultimate enabler of impulse purchases

• Microsoft’s Passport: We know who you are and you’ve given us your purchasing credentials. When you log into a site you’re also all set up to buy something.

• PayPal: vendors, generate a button and stick it on your site. Visitors need only click it, authenticate, and be almost done with the purchase.

• iTunes Music Store: You’ve charged up your account in advance and can now make purchases based on it.

• BitPass seems to be on the right track. Their system is simple for vendors and for customers. [Anyone know how they are doing? Are there other more successful competitors?]

What are the ingredients for micropayments to thrive?

The concept of micropayments is not new, but after years it still hasn’t taken off. However the specifics play out, for micropayments to take off the systems need these characteristics. The absence of these factors has deferred the future explosion of micropayment.

• Standards and interoperability – Credit cards wouldn’t work if there were dozens of clearing houses and fragmentary usage among consumers. Desirous as we are for competition, we need a small number of standard providers of micropayment services for the concept to take off. If they can agree to interoperate it will be better for the entire market. (Think of SMS interoperability agreements that in Europe versus in the USA.) And as a natural consequence of any such market regulation will eventually be required to counterbalance the power of the monopoly or oligopoly.

• Tiny transaction fees – one penny for a five cent transaction, five cents for a 25 cent transaction. [Can someone tell me if there is a minimum transaction fee for credit cards?] Building up the infrastructure and demand will be expensive and we can expect impatient banks to want to recoup these costs quickly. And banks will walt to start from a price they can reduce later. Greed will kill the concept, however. Everyone needs to remember that the point is huge volume and no-brainer impulse purchases. (Steve Jobs understands this: consider his battles with the music industry to keep all songs at $0.99.)

• Instantaneous purchase. Avoids registration hassle with each vendor, a cost in its own right. Amazon’s one-click payment is the ultimate. Requiring authentication is the maximum amount of extra effort on the user’s part that would be imposed.

• Incubation time – Email is a pretty good idea, wouldn’t you say? But if you remember it took quite a while for it to catch on. Similarly it will take some time for consumers to get over the hump and fund micropayment accounts en masse. The more it catches on, the more it will catch on.

• Content worth purchasing – some think that micropayments will fail, then cite as examples things that are no more interesting than any random thing on the Internet. It will always be hard to sell such content in volume. Payments will work if the content is valued highly enough. The tricky part is getting users to trust that what they will get will be worth their dime as well as their time.

• Brand name sponsorship – There is an “activation energy” needed to get consumer over the hump and sign up for something new. A well-known, trusted brand needs to step up, offer something people want and put it behind a micropayment, to kick-start mass adoption. Notice Apple’s iTunes Music Store essentially did this, albeit with proprietary, Apple-only accounts and relatively large micropayments. People barely notice the new business model they are partaking in, and partaking in it they are, by the tens of millions. Similarly, for payment processors, a MasterCard or Visa will carry more trust and credibility than ElCheapoPayments.com.

• Anonymity – As a consumer, you have good reason to be concerned about what is being gathered about you over the course of decades of living online. (Expect this to come to a boil in the next few years.) Micropayments can do well without this need being addressed. But those establishing the standards now would do the whole industry a favor by offering consumers the peace of mind that the transaction is certifiably anonymous. Remember, the game is to maximize purchases by eliminating every barrier to purchase. Hopefully these factors will come together soon, so I can charge you a nickel or two to get in.

Visions to steal

What would a StealThisIdea article be without an idea or two to steal?

Vision idea #1: CMS and blog tool makers: integrate with micropayment infrastructure. Let bloggers indicate what content is paid and what is free. The visitor would see the title and excerpt of the article and a button: “Click here to continue reading. You will be charged 3 cents.” They click once and they’re in the article. Even better, facilitate Salon-style user choice between paying with loose change versus paying with a moment of your attention. On the server side, allow hits from search engines to get in for free once per day so they can index this valuable content and have it be findable by content.

Vision idea #2: Micropayment vendors and/or CMS & blog tool makers: set up referral incentives. So if B refers visitors to A’s page, B gets a cut of the take. Recommendations are important because the user needs to feel that what they buy will be worth paying for.

Vision idea #3: Micropayment vendors: provide web content vendors with a dynamic pricing model, where the cost adjusts itself automatically in response to demand. If a product sells well at 3 cents, raise it to 4, 5 and 6 cents, until total revenue — cost times volume — rate peaks out. The market could then value a piece of content dynamically and automatically.

Vision idea #4a: MasterCard and Visa: offer one-click web micropayments as an extension of credit and debit cards services. No special authentication is needed if you are using the same browser, say, transactions of 25 cents, up to $5 in purchases per month. Provide this service to millions of vendors as easily as PayPal does to its. (In other words, no merchant account required.) Micropayment totals are included on the regular credit card bill. This space is just waiting to be owned!

Vision idea #4b: PayPal: provide a special "instant payment loop" to content providers. The user would see a PayPal version of the "click to view. It will cost 5 cents" entry point. Present the customer with an option to buy with one click from this browser, to a maximum amount.

Vision idea #5: Web publishers and CMS tool makers: Once the user has bought two or three articles at 5 cents each, they may be reluctant to keep buying. Rather than charging 5 cents to view every single premium article, consider charging 15 cents to view all premium articles for a day. To be even more customer-focused: automatically top out daily expenditures per user once they’ve reached the daily rate. And stop collecting money from a user once they’ve hit the annual subscription maximum of $25. This is radical and the opposite of pricing theory. Th point is to experiment with the pricing mechanics to minimize the customer’s discomfort.

[Readers: got other ideas?]

Other reading

• Jakob Nielson has argued for micropayments for ages and thinks they should have happened long ago.

• Not everyone agrees that micropayments will ever happen. Clay Shirky thinks that micropayments will always fail because they are simply an untenable idea. (Compare his reasoning with the ingredients to success above. I think he is missing the psychology of the impulse purchase.) He reaffirmed his belief as recently in 2003 and was lucidly rebutted by cartoonist Scott McCloud (whose book Understanding Comics is required reading for everyone).

My lazy rebuttal: what if Apple were to charge ninety-nine cents to download a song? Would they sell any music?

• There’s a worthwhile discussion of micropayments at MetaFilter.

• Commentary of 8/19/05 on Amazon’s micropayment scheme.

Updates

October 2005 – The New York Times has decided to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I guess times are tough and they need more revenue. Their drastic response was to put their most popular content — their editorials — behind a new TimesSelect service that costs $50 a year. They will soon know whether this will pay off business-wise. Certainly their readership numbers will be slashed along with the powerful influence of its editorialists, who must be awfully sad at the loss. It would have been interesting to see them experiment with a micropayment scheme or at least a Salon-like forced ad choice. I expect they will.

As anyone who’s had to remove one’s shoes at airport security knows, there is a trade-off between security and convenience. But by trying to make email security perfect, it has been made too complex. Email encryption is out of reach of regular users, leaving them with no security at all.

In this article we will discuss who should care about secure email and isolate the reasons why it’s still not commonplace. Then we’ll describe a vision for a radically simpler approach that can clear the path for mass adoption.

Should we be concerned?

Should unencrypted email be a concern? Yes, and here are some reasons:

• Email is transmitted in the clear. Email has been aptly compared with sending a postcard through the mail. It travels through multiple store-and-forward systems before reaching the recipient. Anyone with access to any of the systems along the way can read it.
• WiFi is unsafe: WiFi traffic including email can be intercepted using hacking tools available to any teenager (as this CNN article describes).
• Email accumulates. Every email you send and receive, over the course of years can be stored indefinitely and searched instantly. GMail and Yahoo! Mail already provide gigabytes of storage. [Readers: How strong are the laws forbidding this type of filtering and capture of email?]
• Email interceptions are not detectable. We have no way of knowing what happens to our bits as they filter through the Internet. We can’t tell who is collecting or filtering through it. But what we do know is not comforting.

What are the use cases?

Concern over intrusions is not just for libertarians and the paranoid. Here are some key scenarios, represented as SSNiF scenarios:

Why hasn’t email encryption caught on yet?

If the need for encryption is so high, how did we get from 1985 to 2005 without it being as common as the CC: line? In fact, encryption capabilities have been in the email clients for years. Why has it not caught on? There are a combination of factors:

• Consumers are not aware that they need it. The risks of having one’s email intercepted are nebulous. “Can email realistically be intercepted? I don’t have anything to hide. What could really go wrong? I don’t know of anyone being hurt by this.” Until there are a series of highly publicized cases, the issue is not likely to hit the radar of most honest consumers.
• Corporate IT officers don’t seem to know they need it. Although it’s common for corporations to establish VPNs, limit WiFi usage, provide shredder bins and require passwords to be changed every couple of months, protecting sensitive information from being exchanged over the open Internet is rare. Executives seem to not understand how much sensitive information is left exposed through this path (at least until they get a demo from a company like Vontu).
• There haven’t been high-profile cases of corporate or government email espionage to raise awareness. It’s hard to detect, and even when it is, companies are loathe to disclose such security violations, which are disconcerting to customers and shareholders. [Readers, do you know of any good cases?]
• There are multiple chicken-and-egg problems. Consumers aren’t vocal about encryption so vendors don’t provide it (especially in a consumer-friendly way). There are zillions of different email systems in use, some which have encryption, many of which don’t. All will need to become interoperable before it becomes mainstream. Fortunately, it looks like an industry standard has been established: S/MIME.
• The network effect hasn’t kicked yet in. As with the telephone, fax machines and instant messaging, encrypted email becomes more compelling as everyone around you gets it. It has yet to reach this tipping point.
• Nobody has forced it. Encryption would gain a foothold if a critical mass of companies and government agencies were to mandate its use. Bold policies, such as bouncing all non-encrypted messages off either side of the firewall, would accelerate adoption.
• The end-user experience is too complex. Anyone who attempts to set up encryption will be left with the conclusion that it is way too complex for consumer-level use. The parents of encryption are the fields of mathematics and security, both highly technical fields not renown for their sympathy for mortal users. Even Apple’s mail.app is not very easy to set up. (If you want to do so, here are the best instructions I found for Mac users. Here are instructions for Outlook 2000).

Because email encryption has not yet been done simply, there is an assumption that it is intrinsically complicated. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Why is encryption so difficult today?

The pioneers of encryption have poorly prioritized the use cases. They allowed concerns for certification to complicate the more fundamental need for encryption. Certification (aka signing) is a solution to the use case of impersonation: someone maliciously posing as another person or company, fooling you into believing or doing something in their interest. Aside from scammers posing as PayPal, how often has someone tried to impersonate your coworker or family member? Perhaps official communications from financial institutions should be certified as a defence against phishing. But there is no need for casual email to be.

Secondly, obtaining encryption keys is a real burden. You must first validate with a trustworthy organization (like Thawte or Verisign) that you are who you say you are. As Microsoft puts it, “digital ID requires signing up with an independent certificate authority. To get a digital ID from a certificate authority, see Digital ID on Office Marketplace to find services that issue digital IDs.”

There is a far more immediate use case to solve: getting a message from person A to person B without anyone being able to gather and read it.

Vision to Steal : Build simple but powerful encryption into email clients

Rock-solid security comes at such a high cost of convenience that users settle for no security at all. For everyone to get on board with email encryption radical simplification is called for.

There are three parts to be simplified: 1. acquiring your own key pair, 2. trading public keys with those with whom you communicate, and 3. actually sending and receiving encrypted mail.

The third part is somewhat smooth once the first two are established, especially with Mac’s mail.app. If you create a message to someone for whom you have a public key, the message is automatically and transparently encrypted.

Visions to steal for vendors of email clients:

• Decouple the certification from encryption. Certifying email is more complicated than just encrypting it for the recipient’s eyes only. Regular users will always have trouble understanding what certificates are and why they are needed, while still needing to send protected email. This simplifying assumption makes the encryption problem tractable: it makes it possible to consumerize encryption technology so that casual users can trade sensitive information without having to learn or do a lot.
• Cut the abstract concepts and terminology that goes along with certificates, certificate authorities, signature validation, Digital IDs, Root Certificate Stores, etc.
• Let users generate encryption key pairs directly from the local email client for free, in two steps, so they don’t have to go out of their way to get it. Propose this as a default for everyone.
• Have email clients automatically request public keys from each other. (This is described in a separate article, Automatically exchanging public encryption keys.)

Visions to steal for webmail services: Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, Google GMail:

• One of you, be the first to support encryption and make it easy to make key pair generation, encrypted email exchange and public key exchange as simple as it can be. (See: Hushmail) Store the messages securely at the server side and decrypt them on the client side (which probably requires a Java component).
• Process signatures on incoming messages now, so they can be used by financial institutions to cut down on phishing.

For PIM makers and standards-bearers like vCard:

• expand standards to serve as the repository of public key fields, supplying them to email programs.

For IT infrastructure vendors:

• build gateways that block unencrypted email from passing through the firewall. Make it hard or impossible for employees to send unencrypted email outside the corporate walls. Force external partners to encrypt email to get it through.

Notes

• The Blackberry encrypts data from the handheld device to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server installed within the corporation. Messages that are destined outside the corporation get decrypted before leaving. The Blackberry supports S/MIME as of 2004. [True?]

More questions for Readers:

Communications security is a large, complex and dynamic field. Help me out here.

• Are there any corporations that insist that only encrypted emails pass through their firewalls?
• Does anyone know of reports of electronic dumpster diving, for corporate espionage? (I expect this to be extremely hard to detect without a whistle-blower.)
• Are there laws prohibiting interception of email? Do the email service providers promise they won’t dumpster dive in their legal agreements?
• How do we know there isn’t widespread email espionage going on? Are there cases that resulted in demonstrable material damages?
• Would authenticated/certified email really reduce the phishing epidemic? How?
• Are there countries or cultures where email encryption is commonplace?
• How come PayPal and other major institutions don’t already sign their emails?

See also

• Design to Steal: Automatically exchanging public encryption keys.
• S/Mime tutorial

[Update 8/21/08: Changed the old name "USN use cases" to "SSNiF scenarios"]