Unlimited texting instantly changed my habits.  No more wondering how many texts I had left and where I was in my billing cycle.  No more concern about abbreviating words to squeeze the message into 140 characters, or for the cost of texting people internationally.  The freedom to send photos or videos, especially from WiFi zones.  When it’s free, communication becomes less like a precious telegraph message, and more like a free flowing instant messaging conversation.

It was surprising at first that Apple added this feature, threatening as it is to the mobile carriers’ SMS cash cow.  But with Blackberry offering a similar service for a while and mobile apps doing the same, it became legitimate.

So now that text message is starting to gain its freedom, what about voice calls?

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)

But it’s not trivial to figure out what that distance is.  It depends three inputs: the current aperture, focal length (zoom) and sensor size.  You can either look it up using a table or an iPhone app and hope that your lens has distance readings.  Or if you have substantially better eyes than mine you can locate it using depth-of-field preview button on your SLR camera.

But why should you have to?  The camera knows all three of the input values.  They’re present in the EXIF data of dSLRs.  Why shouldn’t you be able to issue a command to the camera to just focus on the hyperfocal distance right now?

Or, you could enter a mode where it continually adjusts to that hyperfocal distance as you vary the aperture and focal length.

It could even provide a schematic diagram on the LCD showing the nearest distance that things are in focus and hyperfocal distance, so you can learn the relationship between the inputs and results.  (This would be valuable for all kinds of other shots, not just huge depth of field shots.)

It seems like such camera features would make sharp landscape shots a lot easier to attain, and would help make the abstract math of hyperfocal distance intuitive for photographers.

Google’s design is a little different from my quick mockups.  Google’s approach lets you see a thumbnail of the page by hovering over a magnifying glass.  That’s a little lower friction than the button click I had proposed.  But you can’t do too much with that miniature of the page since you can’t read it. You still have to click in and hope that the result is what you need.

In my approach you have to click to see the preview.  You get to see the full-size content, and so you may never have to actually click in to find your answer.

My mockup also highlights the matching text and scrolls to it, which reduces the work of making sense of the hit.

The Goog never sleeps and I am sure they will exceed both these ideas sooner or later.

They have FaceTime video conferencing in iPhones and, soon, iPads.

The $100 AppleTV, which runs the same iOS, has a USB port.

Hmmm, I wonder what could be plugged into that USB port to make the system act as a living room videoconferencing system.  A camera+mic perhaps?

That would be more than a little disruptive to the office videoconferencing world, also.

But will it really?  For video that is resident on the device, yeah, okay.  (I wonder how well an HD signal streams over today’s WiFi).

But for internet-based video, wouldn’t it make a whole lot more sense to hand off the streaming to the iTV?  i.e.: Click play on the iPhone.  Click stream to the living room iTV.  The iPhone tells the iTV, “Play this stream, would you?  Starting from this point in the program?”  (The iTV fetches its own data… it doesn’t stream from the iPhone.)  User clicks Pause on the iPhone, and it tells the iTV that the user clicked Pause.

Wouldn’t that make more sense?

is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera?  Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button

Today, MacRumors reports Apple building HDR into iOS 4.1:

High Dynamic Range photos are photos created using 3 separate photos captured in quick succession at varying exposure levels. The photos are then combined using some complex algorithms to create an enhanced composite photo.

Good question to ponder: why did it have to be Apple to have come up with this, and not Nikon or Canon or anyone else with imaging as its lifeblood?

Sure enough, when I got my iPad last week this quickly emerged as a pain point.

Apple decided in its noble quest for simplicity that the file system should be kept invisible.  Simple, right?  Just don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

It’s a great idea until you actually need to transfer files.  Then it amounts to a really bad idea.

What happens is that each file transfer and remote document viewing app (Air Sharing, GoodReader, DropBox, iBooks, Stanza, etc.) has no choice but to reinvent its own UI for transferring and managing files.  The resulting user experience is massively inconsistent.

And, all of these buckets of files are siloed.  No app can see see another’s contents.  The user is left having to remember what PDF is accessible from which app.

The iOS (was iPhone OS) needs to expose the file system to people who need it.  There should be a clear, obvious way of transferring files among the devices.

Here is the demo I’d like to see some day:  The iPad or iPod “desktops” show up as an extension of the PC’s desktop.   The user drags a file or folder from the PC to the iPad’s “desktop”.  Yes, the mouse cursor extends off your screen and onto the iPad* (*there’s already an app for this).  Boom… file transferred and accessible to all apps.

For bonus points: let the user indicate that changes to the files or folders should be kept in sync across all media.

Within a few moments of playing with the iPad’s photo browser, two things became apparent: 1. there is a better way to crop, and 2. multi-touch, despite the hype, really does have some advantages over the mouse.

The iPad’s photo browser lets you grab an image with two fingers to both pan it and resize it with a single fluid motion.  On the iPad you are merely zooming into a picture to check out your friend’s pores.  But it’s clearly a faster and more fun way to crop images.

I haven’t yet seen cropping done this way, so it constitutes today’s idea to steal.

[Researchers: It would be interesting to validate this claim by comparing the time to crop between using the mouse vs. multi-touch method.]

This scenario also exemplifies a sweet advantage of multi-touch over mouse, which is that it lets you do multiple direct manipulation operations at once.  Cropping is one fluid operation, as opposed to many micro-interactions to do the same task with a mouse:  targeting edges and corners of the crop rectangle with a mouse and dragging them.

That said, you can potentially accomplish a similar fluid crop operation with today’s mouse.

1. User selects the crop tool.  A crop rectangle appears at the largest possible size.
2. User presses turns the mouse wheel to enlarge the photo within the frame.
3. User drags the image around within the frame

This method eliminates the picky targeting of edges and corners in regular cropping.

On Macs the nubs are on the F and J keys.  On PCs they are typically on the D and K keys.  Either way, they help the touch-typist to get their fingers in the right place without having to divert attention from what they are looking at on screen.

The strange thing is, these are the only keys with nubs.  This helps with the heavily used keys.  Our muscle memory helps our fingers find other letters around this center.  But it’s difficult to accurately stretch those digits up to the digit row.  It’s error prone and slows typing as one must carefully check typed numbers for accuracy.  And typing numbers with accuracy is critical.  It could mean the difference between a $6000 and a $7000 request.  And unlike typing words, numerals cannot be assisted by automated spell checkers.

I’ve long wished for nubs up there on the number row to help me out.

Exactly which keys deserve nubs is a good university research project.  The 5-6-7 keys I find difficult to get right without care.   The 9 and 0 I find difficult also.  So offhand I would guess that the 1, 6 and 0 would be good candidates.

By the way, did you notice the little in-joke on the onscreen keyboard on the iPad?  Yes, you guessed it – the images for the F and J rows have little nubs on them. It’s surprising this one got through given Apple’s extreme discipline for minimalism.  Har har.  Yes, Apple, you’ve reduced us 60 wpm typists to hunting and pecking amateurs, and here’s the salt thrown in the wound in the form of nubs that can be seen but not felt.  Good one.

Someone at Apple has a sense of irony.

you can see from the graph what a huge effect changing the name and icon had on downloads. [..] For this app, we saw 20x difference in download rate for the best app listing vs the worst. Wow.

Click here for the scoop.

The ingredients are all in place.  And yet I still haven’t seen a strong play to command our smartphones by voice.  It should be easy pickin’s at this point, nay?

By now, we’re all used to Googling things, which means typing something approximate into Google and having it read your mind and come back with what you meant, without you having to say it properly.

Spotlight, on the other hand is old skool computery.  The results are not ranked.  There is no separation between close hits and distant hits.  Typos lead to null results (Google corrects them for you).  There is no preview of context.  You cannot interactively view the context from the search results UI.

When will Spotlight get a refresh?

But increasingly I found myself depending on these tools.  Why?  Because of the new paradigm of collaboration that they enable.  No longer must you sit in a cave and perfect a document before tossing over the wall.  In the new era, you don’t have to wait for a document to be finished to get feedback on it; multiple people can collaborate on it simultaneously, and everyone always has the latest version at all times.  It’s a better way to work.

But we are still stuck with that clunky browser-based user experience, that is now 12 years old and not much better than it was two years ago.  It’s usable, yes, but let’s be clear: Google Spreadsheets cannot hold a candle to Excel in the tightness of the user experience.

So when Microsoft announced over a year ago that it was going to match Google Apps I thought, that’s kind of nice.  The documents will be accessible from any web browser, and Google could use some competition.

But why are they racing to give up their evolved user experience?  It really is a pain to use web apps within a web browser; there are countless little user experience compromises that we must still live with.  Why must we have either cloud-hosted documents or a modern user experience?

After all, it’s not the web browser that makes web apps special.  It’s the fact that the apps and data are available everywhere and are shared in real time.

Vision to steal: Why doesn’t Microsoft let you browse, open and edit cloud-stored documents directly from within Office apps?  Users would have the best of both worlds: ubiquitous access (even from a web browser when needed), continuous publishing, and the most comfortable and responsive UI.

If you and I are co-editing a document, we’d see each others edits in Word or Excel or PowerPoint in real time (as in Google Wave).  This is not just a parlor trick; it’s a fantastic way to work collaboratively over distance while on speakerphone.  (We can expect to see much more of this.)

As a bonus idea to steal, cloud-hosted documents can be kept in sync with local copies (which is what Google Gears does).  Opening a desktop .DOC or .XLS that you have shared on the cloud would keep all edits synched to both places whenever possible.  The user could do offline editing and have the changes propagated when their Internet access is restored.

If the competition is zigging, you should be zagging, because by the time you catch up to where the competition is today, they will be somewhere else.  Don’t make it easy for customers to continue to pick the leader.  Add some enticing benefits that catch the customer’s attention and make them make a choice.  Then, over time, fill in the parts where you are behind.

No unlocking to make the volume UI available.  No having to ensure that you are in the right mode.  You can feel for it and operate it without even looking, with instant response. What a great idea!

Hmmm… come to think of it, I think my 1979 Walkman had a similar UI.  Maybe other products should steal that idea.

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.

Most of the time you will see that I have the big monitor plugged in to my laptop.  When I do, I have things arranged a certain way. I put my e-mail on the laptop monitor. I tell the Dock to stay visible and not recede into the edge, because I can afford the screen space. I want my palettes in various productivity apps to be arranged so as to make efficient use of the big display while leaving plenty of real estate to do my work.  Scrivener and Inspiration need lots of space, so I want them to be maximized on the big screen. I want my instant messaging app to be down on the laptop monitor.

On other occasions, you will notice that the big monitor is not plugged in. It’s just me and a 15″ laptop screen.  You see me hide the Dock to free up precious space. Scrivener and Inspiration will still be maximized, but that of course means smaller height and width on the smaller screen.  You see palettes in my power tools arranged just so, to make best use of my smaller on-the-go set up.

You see me switch between these two configurations pretty regularly.  You should know now how I like things in each case.

So please, when I come and go and switch my workstation around, take care of these details for me so I can concentrate on my work.

This implies that:

• Each application needs to be aware of the various display configurations that are actually in use.  And each should keep track of UI layout so it can recreate it automatically when I move about.  The first few switches will still require the user to move things about.  But the UI will be trainable and it will learn over time.  This will save a lot of time diddling around with UI elements every time I move around.
• The Dock should learn (possibly with repetition) that you prefer it to be hidden on small screens and always visible on large screens.
• Treat “maximized” as a special state.  When the machine awakens to a smaller display, don’t put a 1900-pixel-wide window on a 1400-pixel-wide laptop display without resizing it.  And vice-versa: if a window has been told to be maximized, then make it maximized when moving to a larger display.
• When the configuration changes, put windows in reasonable locations.  (In moving to smaller displays, I find many windows stuck along the bottom edge, with only the title bar showing.)

This will also help in the future, when our world is in the cloud, and our workstation is any computer, anywhere.  Those workstations can come in any shape and it will behoove the software to arrange the workspace accordingly.

See also:

• Making efficient use of big displays (from almost four years ago)

—

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.  He also writes the Product Vision Blog.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Money quote:

I am also praying that some genius from the late 90’s can help Apple develop a user friendly calender with an alarm.

I hate to break it to you Palm fans.  It’s officially true, the Palm Pre has thrown the usability baby out with the bathwater in its reinvention of the Palm platform.  Let’s hope this is just a growing pain for the new Palm.

That “cloud” is actually made up of racks and racks of servers. Those servers are not actually in the clouds, where it is quite cold, but down on the earth, where it’s warm and getting warmer.  Those racks of servers generate heaps of thermal energy, which requires yet more energy to keep cool.  Otherwise they melt onto one another like Hersheys in the glovebox.

The software architecture that makes these clouds of servers work is modular, and fault-tolerant and distributed.  They allow plug-and-play expansion when more capacity is needed.  They are built to withstand any node failing (with thousands of servers, several will break down every day).

And those nodes can be anywhere, since everything is connected.  But given a choice, it’s preferable to put them close to where they are needed, because things are faster that way.

The purpose of a space heater is to generate heat.  Heaters are pretty dumb.  That’s all they do.  They have an electric heating element, maybe some oil to circulate through and some fins to radiate the heat, a thermostat and that’s it.

What if a space heater instead had a bunch of cheap, older generation, heat-generating CPUs and a wireless connection?  You could crank up the number of processors and their clock speed for a nice cozy hearth, or turn them down a few GHz if you just needed to keep your nose from freezing overnight.

The cloud computing companies could even give you a few cents for each MIPS-hour your heater burns.

At a larger scale, an entire office floor could have computers built into its HVAC system.  Even our desktop computers could be enlisted for the job.  They are ridiculously overpowered for what we need them for most of the time anyway.  The building’s climate control system could instruct all those idle CPUs to do something productive with their downtime, while warming the office in the winter.  Those computers could even monitor the local temperature and provide more heat where it is most needed.

All of this would:

• do something productive in the process of heating your home or office
• reduce the cost of cooling servers
• distribute computing closer to where it is needed
• maybe control temperature in a breezy office to a finer degree
• maybe subsidize heating costs by donating cycles to the cloud

My wife, tactfully: “I think you have an idea that is ahead of its time.”

Yes, it could be a while before this idea is stolen.  [This would be a fun and compelling research project for some engineering & system design students.  Anyone?]

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, an innovation consultancy that helps guide product leaders and their teams to generate ideas even more important than the Network Heater.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

It’s kind of cute, as long as the laptop has its own bedroom.

But, like a snoring dorm-mate, it’s the most annoying thing when you have no choice but to share sleeping quarters.  Such is the case in hotel rooms, or when a home office serves as an impromptu nursery for an eight-month-old.  The laptop causes the ambient room light to cycle from pitch dark to bright night light, piercing photons through your eyelids, keeping those synapses firing, and inhibiting sleep.

The analog remedy for both snoring roommates and obnoxiously glowing MacBook Pros is the same: get out of bed and smother it in a pillow.

What we need is a digital remedy, today’s idea to steal:

• Or, provide a preference to stop the throbbing glow
• Or, employ an ambient light sensor on the outside of the device to smartly control the throbbing glow.  By daylight, throb away.  When the room is dark, don’t.
• And while you’re at it, also dim the charging light when the room is dark. It, too, must be covered to keep the room dark enough for the laptop’s very young roommate.
• Or, just stop throbbing

As for snoring roommates, I’m unaware of a digital remedy.  Anyone?

A while back, I wrote:

“[The only way an iPod has communicates with you] is with its display, and that is useless when your eyes are on something else.  You already have the earphones in.  Why shouldn’t the iPod use them to speak with you? [..]

“[The system could]  pre-render text-to-speech of the tracks on the desktop before syncing to the device. The device would declare the names of the songs as you skip around: “Alicia Keys track three superwoman. (forward) four: No One. (forward) five: Like You’ll Never See Me Again.  [This verbal approach would also bring] badly needed playlists to the Shuffle.”

Over a year later, Apple make quite a hoopla over just this type of features to its third generation iPod Shuffle.  Check out its resemblance to the excerpt above:

“VoiceOver also tells you the names of your [songs and your] playlists, so you can easily switch between them to find the right mix for your mood. Without having to take your eyes off your run, your ride, or whatever you’re doing. [..]

How is this possible? First, iTunes reads your song information, then [generates] the announcements for the songs, artists, and playlists [on the computer]. Just sync your iPod shuffle with your computer and it really speaks to you.”

My original article provided details about other elements of the sonic design, including sound effects to convey how fast you were skipping between tracks, and how quickly you were rewinding.  I don’t have a recent Shuffle.  If you do, I’d appreciate if you could compare my original write-up with how Apple’s implementation really behaves.

Now that they are starting to speak to us, the next step is for our mobile electronics to listen to our verbal commands.

See also:

• Audio UI for Audio Players
• Using gestures and voice for access to key tasks on a mobile device

With a high contrast scene like a face against a bright daytime sky, you have to choose between detail in the shadows — your friend’s face — and highlights in the bright areas — like the cool billowy clouds.  [..] Is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera?  Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button

A team at Stanford has demonstrated this feature (see the video halfway down the page).

Plus those idea robbers also stole another idea straight from my head: the ability to program the camera for all kinds of tricks.

However, their model is open-source software, and so it will be limited in use to real programmers.  This is nice, but I want Nikon and Canon to let any computer-literate person write – or visually snap together – scripts to be executed by the camera. (That’s the new idea to steal.)

This is an enabling technology that would let the end-user do all kinds of tricks:

• Adjust settings & preferences according to your rules (If it’s in Manual mode, fix the ISO.  If it’s in Aperture priority mode, use Auto-ISO.  If the flash is on, drop ISO to 100.)
• Set up a lightpainting program: blink the light for 3 seconds to indicate the start of the program, then open the shutter for 60 seconds while you paint, then beep for 5 seconds so you can pose, then take a flash image to capture you.
• Baby or lightning capture: With the camera on a tripod pre-bufferring video, and when a spike in lighting happens or the baby finally laughs, let the user press the remote to begin capture a few seconds earlier
• Wildlife capture: Pre-buffer video, and when motion is detected, start recording it from a second earlier.  Then capture stills every 10 seconds for the next minute, then wait for motion
• so much more

The scripts would be sharable and rated online among the community.  Serious photographers are a techie, enthusiastic bunch and this creative capability would go over nicely.

Photographers, what tricks would you teach your gear if it were easy and fun?

A big ongoing question is whether it will be possible for newspapers to stay afloat by charging for its content.  I happen to think it is possible, especially for those few papers with original, high quality, highly differentiated content.

But my point in this article is not to argue that it would work, but instead to stick my neck out and take a stab at the question of, if requiring payment were attempted, how such a system should be crafted.  My fear, and expectation, is that when paid online newspapers are introduced again, it will once again be done clumsily and greedily, and will foster user rebellion and further decline of journalism.

So here is a blueprint for another way.

Precedents

The system I propose rests upon elements of several precedents which provide proofs of concept:

• SMS messages - Each message is too cheap for the customer to think about (although in the aggregate, the price is enormous).  There is no purchase confirmation; it just happens.  Consumption is separated from payment, which happens at the end of the month.   (Someone tell me again that micropayments won’t work?)
• Ringtones – even at $1 or $2 it was cheap enough to be a no-brainer for status-conscious kids.  The purchase was also separated from billing.
• Electronic toll collection systems such as FasTrak or EZ-Pass.   I had read that bridge tolls increase far faster than otherwise when electronic payment is implemented (I can’t find the reference.  Anyone?).  It’s is a lot easier to cross the bridge without having to feel the pain of handing over a fiver each time.
• Apple’s iTunes Music Store - Anyone can download any song online for free from file sharing networks.  Yet lots of people pay to get it from iTunes Music Store.  Why?  It always boils down to their needs.  The iTunes store addresses the need for convenience (speed and streamlined purchase workflow), the need for audio quality (random downloads vary in quality), and the need for a clear conscious.  There is a market for legal.
• Apple’s iPhone app store - iPhone apps are so cheap that it’s almost a no-brainer to just buy them.  And you can buy them right from the phone, greatly reducing the purchase friction.  Estimated sales?  $2.5 billion per year.
• Skype - You only have to pitch in $10 occasionally.  The amount trickles down slowly as you call your distant relatives.  (Tell me again how micropayments don’t work?)
• Wall Street Journal online – offers a proof of concept that differentiated content can attract paying customers.
• Nintendo Wii game store, iStockPhoto and others deal with credits rather than dollar value.  Not necessarily the customer-friendliest trick, but it allows prices to be increased while obfuscating the normal pricing calculus.
• Credit cards – You only pay at the end of the month.  Credit cards divorce the desire to acquire from the pain of paying, and that makes people much more willing to spend.
• Amazon 1-click – Radically reduces the purchase friction.  You click that button and your mind switches modes from, “Should I buy it?  Let me think about it.” to “I bought it, now let me think about how to justify my actions.”

Elements of all these systems can be incorporated into our architecture for moving people to a paid model for newspaper articles.

Incidentally, I think it’s silly for people to make blanket statements that micropayments can never work or that people will never pay for online content.  Micropayments are nothing more than small payments.  Anyone buying a gumball out of a machine is making a micropayment.  That said, to make it work the content has to be valuable enough to be worth buying, differentiated enough to prevent migration to lower-cost competitors, cheap enough to not think about, and the payment mechanisms has to be streamlined enough that it does not impose its own burden of inconvenience.

Overall strategy

The solution requires some systems thinking to account for the psychology of visitors.  There is some social engineering going on here but I hope you don’t construe it as evil.  Society needs strong journalism and we’ve had a free ride for many years.  Those doing a good job of journalism deserve to be compensated well and we have to find a way to get from here (unsustainably free) to there (sustainably profitable).

The strategy involves these elements, which have been notably absent in prior attempts:

• Position ourselves to be on the consumer’s side.
• Overcome the barrier of having the customer pull out that credit card for the first time
• Boil the frog.  (Yes I know frogs don’t really allow themselves to be boiled slowly.)  Start the user off with plenty more free content, then make it so cheap they don’t care.  Give time for people to get used to the idea that there is no more free lunch, but make lunch extremely cheap.  Then ratchet up the price gradually profitability slowly as
• Make the transfer of money and credits as frictionless as possible.
• Separate the act of consuming from the act of exchanging money.  Avoid having people make purchase decisions.
• Plan to lose money for a while, as you transition the audience to a paid basis.  Getting greedy and trying to make a huge profit immediately will just leave you wondering why the frogs just keep jumping out of the water.

The system would work something like this:

1. Preparation

• Make it clear to visitors in advance that access to certain content will soon require credits.  Not because you’re greedy or mean, because  you can no longer survive without it, which is true.  The point is to combat the first instinct of critics that anyone who tries to charge for something is evil.
• Start as soon as possible, to space out the future price increases as far as possible.

2. Pricing and sign up

• Use credits as currency for accessing content, not cash.
• Do not expire credits (like some services we know)
• Give unlimited access to nonprofits and educational institutions, for good will.
• Give away a large number of free credits to anyone who wishes to continue reading the site.  Give enough free credits for 6 months of typical usage and convey clearly that this is the case.  The point is to soften the discomfort at transitioning to metered access.  Users may initially think, “This stinks!  I don’t want to pay!  But whatever, just give me the article I want to read; I can opt out later when my free credits expire.”  But as they use the site over time they will incubate in the thought that the content is actually worth something and think, “Well it’s not that much and fair is fair.”
• When the user signs up, require a valid credit card, PayPal account or direct withdrawal.  Don’t charge anything at this time; instead, deposit a few cents in the account.  The point is to disconnect the act of giving the credit card information from any purchase decision.  Getting over this hump is a major strategic turn.
• Give the user the choice of how much the auto-bill amount should be when the user runs out of credits.  $5, $10 or $20.  The point is to give the customer some level of control so they don’t feel like helpless victims.
• Make the initial price for reading an article so low, few will care:  2 credit per article, with one credit worth roughly one penny.
• Keep the price structure extraordinarily simple.  Make all the content deduct a single credit.  Don’t charge different amounts for different length articles or different “premium” articles.  Don’t make some content free and some paid.   Your goal is to avoid having people ever snap into purchase decision mode.
• Make the cost of credits an odd ratio, such as 1000 credits for $9.50.  This will be increased over time.
• Continue to serve ads and, of course, collect revenue for them.
• Allow for an ad-free version of the experience, for, say, 3 credits per article, whatever recoups the lost revenue.  Indicate in the box in the corner that this price level is activated.
• If you detect that ad blockers are being used, then, after a generous grace period, let the user know that they will be automatically switched to the ad-free experience in a few days.  Give instructions on how to disable their ad blocker if they would prefer otherwise.
• Offer unmetered access to the site for $50 a year.
• Be fair, and when the user hits the annual subscription amount, automatically upgrade them to unmetered access and let them know.  You could bilk them as, say, cellphone carriers and banks do, but remember, you want customers to see you as the good guys to lower their resistance to paying you.

3. Reading / purchasing experience

• Show the meter of credits remaining in a box at the top-right corner at all times.
• Indicate within that box the price of each article: 1 credit per article.
• When the user clicks a link for an article, just deduct the credit.  Don’t request confirmation.  Put a small note in the box in the corner saying that a credit was deducted for this article.
• The price is for unlimited use of that article.  Don’t charge them multiple times for re-reading an article they already bought.  Remember:  you’re on their side.
• Let the user click an undo button if they didn’t want the content.  Don’t haggle; give the customer ample benefit of the doubt.  Maybe they clicked by accident, maybe they didn’t get what they expected, or maybe they don’t like the writing.  Have a money back guarantee and just credit the content back.  Say something only if you notice the right being abused.
• When the user has 25 credits left, put up a note saying that their account will be auto-billed for $5 or $10 or $20 worth of credits once their account falls to 10 credits.

4. Dealing with piracy

• Take a soft stance on the inevitable content piracy that will ensue.  Focus on the mainstream users who are willing and able to pay and who don’t have the inclination to bother with the workarounds.  The main site will always be faster, more cohesive and more convenient than the rip-off sites and thus differentiated.
• Be gentle with content pirates; they will all blog your cease-and-desist letters.  Go after the worst offenders.  Say, sorry, we wish we could give away the content for free.  But we are forced to prosecute copyright violators otherwise we lose the copyrights.
• Over time gradually increase the exchange rate of credits per dollar and/or the number of credits to read an article.  If you devalue existing credits (e.g. by doubling the cost of reading an article from 1 to 2 credits) then be fair and make existing credit balances whole (e.g. by doubling the number of old credits).

5. Bonus points

• The hard part:  Establish a consortium of content providers.  Newspaper creators, TV vendors, eBook vendors, bloggers, etc. that all will run on the same system and display the price in the same way.  Signing up for any one service signs someone up for all of them.  The point is to reduce the sign-up pain.  The less the user has to whip out the credit card, the better.  This may be the only chance that the smaller players have.
• Different types of content may cost a different number of credits.  Use as a basis the amount of time the content keeps the user occupied.  If an average article takes 5 minutes to read and costs 1 credit, make a 25 minute TV show 5 credits.

No matter what, the newspaper business will contract.  There are just too many papers out there relying on syndicated (read: commodity) content, that have too little to offer.  But for the top papers ready to try again to charge for content, they should follow an approach like this that accounts for buyer psychology.

Readers, what did I miss?  Please pass this article on to people who might benefit from it.

—

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.

“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.)

Front Row, Spaces, Exposé, Dashboard, Time Machine, Stacks and the iApps have continually expanded the basic rules by which the graphical user experience operates,  making it harder to predict, harder to learn, and unnecessarily complex. No new Mac feature appears without another surprising jack-in-the-box animation or mind-bending world-within-a-world paradigm shift.

This is not so bad for people who have been continually using Macs every step along the way since 1984 (like Steve Jobs, or me).  But it’s an increasing challenge for the new user, the less technically savvy, and the switcher.

Features that are bolted on violate two of my top principles of user experience architecture:

1. Minimize the bag of things the user needs to learn. Do not add things to the bag lightly.  Try and find something to remove from it.  [Consistency, by the way, is a sub-case of this rule.]
2. When adding features, blend them in, don’t bolt them on. Each bolted-on UI adds to the bag and diminishes the coherence, elegance and simplicity of the whole.

With all those trademarked features and their funky UI’s, Mac OS’s bag of things to learn is becoming positively santaclausian.

This is not a push for UI conservatism.  It’s wonderful that Apple continually challenges and improves past conventions.  But please, don’t leave us with seven different conventions in one package, which is where we are today.

As software ages, the fun and important architectural challenge — and a real test of a designer’s ability — is to work out how to blend new features in, rather than just bolting them on. We have to ask, “If the system had these features from the beginning, how would it have been designed?”  The user shouldn’t be able to tell where one era’s design team left and another one picked up.

Blending Alt-Tab behavior into the Dock

Take, for example, the Alt-Tabbing UI to switch apps, which was (rightfully) stolen from Windows for inclusion in Mac OS X.

We already had a way of switching apps: clicking on icons in the dock.  But it required reaching for the mouse.  Alt-tabbing provided a way switch apps without moving one’s hands from the keyboard.  Here is how it has looked for several years:

Here, with the Dock and the Alt-Tab UI visible, we see two ways of displaying open apps, and two ways of switching between them.  They are shown in different places, in different ways with different rules.

The Alt-Tab UI sorts its icons unpredictably.  (The order mirrors the Z-order of open windows, a deck that is shuffled as you switch windows.)  The user cannot develop a spatial memory of what is where because they keep shuffling around. And the location of items in the Dock has no bearing on the order in which the same icons are presented in the alt-tab UI.

The interaction design challenge is: rather than bolting on the Alt-Tab UI, could the functionality be blended with the existing Dock without diminishing the effectiveness of either?  Here is an approach I’ve been sitting on for a while:

Before the alt-tab:  Dock appears as usual

When the user keys down on Alt-Tab, the Dock icons of the open apps stand apart from the others.  Here is a quick & dirty mockup of one way to do that:

During Alt-tab (alternative 1): active apps jump forward; inactive apps which aren’t part of the alt-tab cycle are suppressed

Alternative 2

In this variant, the icons jump out of the dock into the familiar Alt-Tab UI.  Suppressing the inactive Dock icons lets the user visually estimate how many key presses are needed.  The most recent app is the first one to be highlighted, preserving the ability to toggle between the two recently used apps with one keystroke.  Subsequent Alt-Tabs walk through successive open apps, in the usual order they appear in the Dock.

Here is a variant that is even more naturally blended in with the Dock:

During Alt-tab (alternative 2): inactive apps are dimmed back; alt-tab grows the current selection

In this alternative, the inactive apps are dimmed back, and the current selection grows.  This borrows the Dock’s pre-existing magnification feature.  It’s even more seamlessly blended with the Dock behavior.

Et voila, Alt-Tab functionality without having to bolt on another paradigm.  The order of the apps is stable and predictable, and leverages the user’s spatial sense of what apps are where.

The key lesson: as software ages, be wary of layering on new UI paradigms.  Take the time to study how things already work, and find ways to make the new features and old features feel like they’ve been together all along, and were designed by the same team.

See also:

• Bring related windows forward during Alt-Tab
• What is the Alt-Tab order?

—

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.

The first slot is reliably the most recent other app, and so issuing a single Alt-Tab toggles between the two most recent apps.

Beyond that it gets random pretty quickly.  It seems like it’s trying to order the icons in LIFO order, but I often find a recent app buried down in the 8th position.

It’s been like this for years, and it makes task switching more of a chore than it should be, because you have to work harder to scan the icons for the app you want.  And it’s only going to get worse as we upgrade to computers with a cushy 8GB of RAM.

Can anybody tell me what that the algorithm is for the order of the icons in the alt-tab UI?

See also:

• Bring related windows forward during Alt-Tab

Why is the Mac icon smiling?

Goodbye historic body of work.  I am going to miss you.

The strongest influence on reputation isn’t what a company says about its product, it’s what people actual experience with it.  Whether customers love or hate your offering, they are sure to tell two friends, and so on. The channels for doing so are myriad, and the message is a far more credible and influential.

And so the most powerful way for us to establish a valuable brand is by consistently creating great products.

Duh, right?

Yet take General Motors, which keeps trying to convince us through its words, not its actions, that we’ve changed, baby, we swear.

One need only rent a GM car to be reminded that this is not the case.  Each rental event is powerful negative advertisement for GM, reconfirming the “hoary old conventional wisdom” about GM’s lackluster quality.

This is not entirely GM’s fault.  We who rent cars are notoriously price-sensitive.  If rental agencies were to spring for more expensive and enjoyable cars they’d have to raise rental rates, and they’d instantly lose business to lower-cost competitors.  Rental agencies need to acquire cars as cheaply as they can to keep prices down.

But this still doesn’t solve GM’s brand problem.  What might GM do about it?  Here are some possible strategic visions for them to steal:

• Option 1. Spin off a new, separate brand and separate models for the rental market, and distance them from the GM brand.  Only permit premium vehicles to be rented under the GM badge — cars that will leave renters with a positive impression of the brand.  Forbid any sub-par car from carrying the GM nameplate.
• Option 2. Think of car rentals not as a profit center but as advertising opportunities.  Only permit GM cars to be rented that will reflect well on the brand.  Give the rental agencies a break on price to make this possible, or perhaps lease the cars to the rental agencies or buy them back after they start to show poorly.
• Option 3. Throw in the towel on the old GM brand.  It’s horribly tainted and will take a decade and a half a billion dollars to repair.  Spin up a fresh new brand for vehicles to be sold to consumers that has no “G” and no “M” anywhere.

And of course, support the brand by making nothing but world-class quality cars from now on.

Any other options?

—

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.

Anyone whose job it is to teach others should read this, every month, forevermore.

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.

Well, I should clarify.  The current Google workflow is just fine for searches for which there is one clear, perfect hit to pursue.  One search, a bit of scanning, and one click to get to the results.

What Google is missing is that finding an answer often involves hunting through several sources.  Google could be made significantly more efficient by considering this larger workflow.

Here is the typical best-practices workflow for checking out multiple hits from Google:

1. Type in a search
2. Skim the results for hits that may be credible.
3. Control-click the links that may have the answer you are looking for into new tabs.  This could be many tabs.
4. Peruse the tabs one by one.
5. Search within the page for the results you are looking (it could take some digging).
6. Once you find the answer you are looking for, go back and close the rest of the tabs.

It’s up to the end-user, using facilities in the browser to efficiently examine multiple search engine hits.

Here is the design to steal:  Search engine results don’t require very much width.  So why not show the search results in one column and a preview of the destination page in another?  Clicking a link would still go directly to the destination page.  But there are additional clear buttons to view the destination page (or its faster, cached version) in another pane. The new workflow might look something look like this rough mockup:

Step 1. Type in a search and get search results

Step 2. Click the Cache button next to pertinent search result to instantly see the cached version.

The cached version appears much more quickly than loading the page from the destination site.

The user could also click “Show page” to fetch the latest, live version.

Step 3. If that isn’t the result you needed, click on other cached results

Here is the result after clicking “Show cached” button for a different search hit:

The page is pre-scrolled to the area that most closely matches the search and the relevant section highlighted.  This saves the user from having to work as hard to find the useful information within the results page.

Step 4. If you want to read the destination page, click into it.

If the user has found a useful page there is a clear way of going to it.  The search results would disappear and the entire browser window would show the destination page.

A further optimization

If Google had clear a sense of what the top hit would be for a given search, it would take the liberty of loading it by default, without the user having to click any links.  This effectively integrates the “I’m Feeling Lucky” functionality with the regular search results.

What is going on?

This solution is made possible by the larger screens we now have.  They are wide enough that we can see both the search results and a useful part of the destination page at once.

In this design approach the search results behave like a vertical set of tabs. You don’t have to manage your own browser tabs, which confers several benefits:  (1) You don’t have to work as hard to find the results within the destination pages.  Since Google is controlling the presentation of the results it can highlight the relevant parts nicely.  (2) You don’t have to worry about the memory drain of having many browser tabs open at once.  (3) You don’t have to clean up the tabs after you have found what you were looking for.  (4) And one click on each search result is enough to peruse its content, as opposed to one Ctrl-click to open the results in a tab, another click to go to that tab and another click to close the tab when you are done.  One click instead of 3 for each search result you visit.  If you have to check out four hits to find your answer, that’s four clicks instead of twelve.

For best results, the cache would be fast.  It must be, because it is competing with the efficient alternative of ctrl-clicking tabs and having the browser load the pages in parallel in the background.

Content owners may not be all that thrilled with a search engine employing this approach.  It encourages access to the cache rather than hitting the target site directly for the guaranteed freshest content displayed as the site owner intended.  Google might do is set up an API whereby site owners could find out how often their site is being served up from Google’s cache.  [Readers, do they do this already?]

[As usual, if you know someone who might be able to do something with this idea, please forward them this article.]

—

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.

Since then I’ve added a couple of other power tools to my frequently used set.

I drank the DevonThink Pro Kool Aid.  DevonThink is a general note taker and snippet database.  It’s hard to get how useful and important such a tool is until you have used it for a while.  The functionality should be built into the OS.  [That's a vision to steal, btw.]

I also started using Scrivener to organize and compose long articles and the book.  Simple and wonderful.  It’s what Word would have become 15 years ago had Microsoft realized that writers need word processors to help them think.

(Interestingly, both these Mac-only tools use TextEdit at their core.  They also rest on the Mac’s package architecture that lets a document contain other documents.)

Judging from Firefox it must be circa 2001.  Otherwise, why would Firefox insist on using Stuffit to expand .zip archives?

The year cannot be, say, 2009, because by then the Mac will certainly have had unzipping capability built-in for years, rendering the clunky and obtrusive StuffIt completely obsolete.

Now, if I can only figure out how to get my Mac to stop syncing the system clock forward to 2009…

Find the most qualified user for the design in question. It could be someone who’s used the product for years or who’s written a book about it, or who is on the engineering team.

Show this expert user the design and see if he or she can make sense of it as you are expecting regular users to.

If they can, so far so good.  Continue designing or test with less apt users.

If not, your design has failed the Einstein test. The most qualified users of your product are incapable of figuring it out on their own, and therefore, there is no  hope that regular people will be able to. Go back to the drawing board.  If it fails the low bar, it is certain to fail the high bar.

This test is slightly counter-intuitive; common practice has it that you should test against typical users, not experts.  But there are a surprising number of designs out there that fail the Einstein test.

What examples springs to your mind?  Did you have any experience with doing something simple simple that you, as an expert computer user, should have been a snap?  Please comment with examples.

Usually after about a year I’m pining for a hardware upgrade and averting my eyes from the Apple store.  But I’ve had my current machine for 2.5 years and it’s still going strong and running the latest version of everything with aplomb.

With one exception.  As my tool set is growing, I am wishing for more RAM.  3GB isn’t cutting it anymore.  I have to keep a close eye on MemoryStick app in the dock to make sure I don’t run out of RAM and start the descent into the swapfile swamp, from which  a reboot is the only rescue.

So in a moment of weakness I surfed over to store.apple.com to see how I might be living. I was surprised to see this:

At left, a brand new midrange Macbook Pro, $2500.  At right, the specs for my 2.5 year old MBP.

They are roughly the same!  Especially since I upgraded the RAM to 3GB a long time ago (cheap) and my hard drive to this fast, quiet, inexpensive Seagate 320GB drive last week ($90 bucks including shipping).  The only appreciable difference is that the newer machine goes to 4GB.

Wow, 2.5 years goes by and a machine with roughly the same specs is still $2500.  I am not sure what to make of that.  Apple continues to do a good job squeezing out margins on their premium (and worth it) products.  Perhaps the performance/battery life curve is taking a breather at a local maximum.

According to the MacRumors buying guide the Macs are all due for a refresh soon.  Let’s hope Apple hits us with more than a few sharp bevels.  It’s overdue.

I have messages with the typical subject line, “Checking in”.   As you can see, it’s threading messages I sent and received yesterday with messages from four and six months ago.  What’s more, there are three different sets of recipients. There is no way that this is a continuation of the same conversation.

So here’s a design to steal to improve threading:

• if the subject is the same but the recipients are different, consider it a different thread.
• If the recipients are the same, and the subject is the same, but a lot of time has passed, take a look inside the message. If there is little or no quoting of the earlier messages ( As happens when messages are replied to), then consider it a different thread.

[Readers: Is this problem present in other mail programs? Please comment.  And, as usual, if you know someone at Apple, please send them this feedback.]

I thought that this sort of thing was behind us.  What happened to just dragging an item into the Applications folder?

This design is old.  It came was modeled after installer from the Windows 3.1 era.  You’ve seen it, the one that starts off, “The Install Wizard will now guide you through the setup process.”  Gee thanks, now I know to roll up my sleeves.  (How about if it just installed the software?)

Apple has been exemplary at questioning and slashing out wasteful steps.  Apparently they haven’t gotten to this old thing.

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.

Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost

The author’s vision to steal includes:

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. [..] A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

Have grad students come down from the ivory tower and pile onto the challenges of the day. Sounds like a plan!

More on Apple’s Buttonphobia at: Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone and in this wicked Onion piece:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

There is a lesson in here about the surprising resilience of great design.  The copycat company could just neutralize a winning design by copying it exactly (notwithstanding patents).  But what tends to happen is the copycat tries to improve on the design, without really understanding it.  The result is not a step up, but a poor imitation.  I call this the principle of

This is great news for companies who have the product design mojo.

As with a lot of copycat designs, the party doing the copying often misses the point and the spirit of the design they are copying.  This is how great design can be surprisingly resilient — the partying doing the copying tries to improve on the design without really getting it, and what they put out ends up being a poor imitation.

Earlier, I ranted how now much more advanced the calendar 2008 iPhone.

[[Blackberry did a poorimitation of the iPhone; the Storm]

I (heart) Obama, but it sucks to see him expend precious first-hundred-days political capital — and money — on this self-correcting problem.  Leaving the schedules as is would have an economic perk: it would make the remaining 6 million households to buy converters or take the opportunity to upgrade their TVs — a nice boost infusion to consumer electronics retailers.

That said, if we are going to make them switch, there is probably a better way to go about it.

But first, some key observations:

1. People tend to act reactively.  They won’t act until they sense a problem, which means further delays will not fully solve the problem.
2. Reaching everyone with traditional ads for the switchover are extremely expensive, and of limited efficacy.  (See point 1.)
3. Who says we have to change cold turkey?  Why not pull it off in stages?

Here is the design to steal:  Give stragglers increasingly bitter tastes of what will happen if they don’t switch.   Disable analog broadcast of regular programming, showing instead a 10-minute public-service infomercial loop on all analog channels, with a phone number and website for more information.

The five week schedule might look like this:

• Warning shot:  Disable analog broadcasts for one hour next week during a low viewing period, say Monday 8-9 am. This will make headlines and get people talking.  Publish the schedule of analog brown-outs that every newscaster across the country will read.
• Give people a week to switch, then fire the second warning shot:  Disable analog for 3 hours on a Saturday morning with the same message on how to transition.
• Third warning shot a week later: Disable analog for 4 hours on a Sunday evening.
• Fourth warning shot: Disable analog from 6-11 on a Monday night.
• Fifth warning shot: Disable analog from 6-11 on a Thursday night.

Here is an even bolder approach:

• Designate a Thursdays as no analog programming day.  Every week, turn off analog broadcasts for the whole day.

Two other refinements to the idea:

• In additional to the tough love, station owners could sell advertising between replays of the public-service infomercial, but only to advertisers providing products and services involved in the transition.
• If there is a local or national emergency, stations would be allowed to start re-broadcasting in analog for the public safety.

Of course this will be painful for viewers and advertisers.  But it will be way less painful than the cold-turkey approach.

It’s natural for us to have such partitions.  Our identities are different when we are dealing with our parents, our close friends, our colleagues, our students.  It’s natural and there’s nothing wrong with it.  We need to be able to tell fart jokes to your old high school buddy one moment, be silly with our children the next, then act professional at a meeting with senior management.

This is precisely the protocol that Facebook violates, by having all “friends” be on the same plane, be they friends, parents, work colleagues or nieces.

On the one hand this is a good thing.  It makes us all chillax a bit about the various pretensions we uphold in the spheres of our life.

On the other hand, it’s a bad thing. because despite the Facebook culture, most of us do still have that need to keep our worlds from colliding.  The stories of people who inadvertently made fools of themselves at work for what they did over the weekend are legend. And sometimes, you want to share something silly with one group, that your parents, or your kids, or your employer just should not see.  Without control over who gets to see information you post, prudent people must keep their edgy side under wraps.  Controversial topics that might  offend people whom you don’t want to hurt must go unspoken.

So here is the design to steal for Facebook: allow us to define spheres of friends and place each friend in one more more sphere.  When we post something, give us the option of limiting who gets to see it: everybody, or just certain spheres.

This same facility could be used for special interest sub-groups among your friends.  You could have a sphere for your college classmates, your high school classmates, your club, and so on, and post statuses or pictures that only they would see.

Allowing spheres would open up all kinds of new usage patterns and prevent users from having to water down the information they broadcast.  Go to it, Facebook!

(They were probably working on this when I published my article, but I’ll take credit anyway.)

Wired wrote:

Isn’t it about time your portable player had Heart and Ban buttons on it for personalizing customized radio stations that update with a single click via WiFi? We thought so.

I think so too!

There are several other interesting variants of the Heart/Ban or Thumbs Up/Down concept back in my original posting that the Slacker design doesn’t represent, so check it out.

It’s great to see so much innovation happening in the digital music space.  The one thing I crave is higher fidelity streaming stations.  It wasn’t until I dusted off the turntable I used to DJ with, and dropped the needle into the grooves of a 25-year-old album that I realized what I had been missing.  After listening to MP3′s and 128k-160kbps streaming audio for so long, I had forgotten how much better music can sound.

So here is a follow-up idea to steal: for $4 per month (what Slacker charges for the ad-free version of its service) raise the audio fidelity that will make my ears and my hifi happy.

Over the course of a typical excursion across the city recently I used eight different apps without thinking about it.  Not for the sake of using them, but because I had real problems to solve.  The apps were: Google Maps with GPS to get me to the appointment, email to see if a friend responded to a coffee request, SMS to confirm, Yelp to find a coffee shop, phone to finalize, NYTimes, Facebook and Wikipedia to catch up on news while I waited, photo app to grab a snapshot of my friend.  These were the scenarios we envisioned circa 2000 when I did some vision consulting with Palm.  They have now become a reality in a sleek package.

I’ve ranted about the iPhone and criticized its inefficient UI and lack of needed buttons.  It’s not the best phone in the world, but it is by far the best multi-purpose handheld computer and communicator.  I even think it is worth the high monthly cost.  But I can’t say for sure, because I can’t bear to look at the bill.

Recently I’ve been talking about the tools I use for interaction design and for general mac productivity.  Now I’ll cover the tools I use on the iPhone.

The first page of the home screen contains my most frequently used apps.  (Tip: press the physical home button in the home screen to get to the first page.)  On the iPhone the focus of attention is really near the bottom of the screen, so the most used ones are actually at the bottom of this list.

• iPod – (Now that I think about it, it doesn’t need to be here, since I can get to the iPod by double-pressing the Home button)
• Settings – To turn wifi off when walking around the city.  This is working around a design issue.
• App Store
• Safari
• Clock – for alarms & parking timers
• Zenbe lists – shared shopping list
• Google Maps
• Mail
• NetNewsWire – Offline RSS reading.  Syncs with my desktop RSS reader.  Outstanding!)
• Facebook (which I think of as Headline News of your friends)
• NYTimes
• Google – Amaze your friends by speaking your query
• Wikipanion – surprisingly how often we reference things in casual conversation
• Say Who – voice dialing makes up for the sluggish performance of the iPhone on my 2,400 contacts
• OmniFocus (which I’m going to demote soon because by the time it’s launched, 2.5 minutes later (!) I’ve completely forgotten what i needed to record.  I suggest you avoid this until they revamp their sync architecture and make launching instantaneous.)

In the grey bar, available on all pages of the home screen I have:

• Phone
• SMS/Text messages
• Camera
• Calendar

I sure wish I had physical buttons for accessing those items at any time, like the Palms!)

My page 2 apps include:

• Pandora – The best music app on the iPhone.  We plug it into our home sounds system and leave it on for hours.  (I have AOL Radio and FlyCast next to them for coherence, but in my experience they have been flaky or commercial-laden or both.)
• Instapaper – Click a single button on your PC’s web browser and the long article you don’t have a chance to read will be available on your iPhone, reformatted appropriately.  Great app!
• Weather
• Stocks
• Twinkle – Twitter app.  I may switch to Twittelator.  (Follow me: @feign)
• Yelp – look up restaurants and stores
• MoMuni, so I know when the bus will come by
• Stanza – eBook reading.  Excellent!  Wish I had more time to use it.  Reading prose on this small but hi-res screen really works
• My dreaded AT&T page, a Safari bookmark – so I can see if I’m going overboard in text messages, or just to feel bad
• Tip – restaurant tips
• Calculator

I have four more pages of apps I never look at.

iPhone apps are evolving faster than I can keep up.  So please tell me what absolutely must-have apps there are that I missed.

—

Philip Haine is a product designer and product vision specialist. He founded Obvious Design, LLC in San Francisco in 1997.  His other blog on product vision can be found at ProductVision.org.

These are nice clean calendars with no ads or even a copyright notice.  Very handy for planning projects and vacations, for collecting stickers, for Seinfeld’s productivity method and for manually counting the number of days until Christmas (356 as of this writing).

Download free printable 2009 calendar pdfs in 3 formats

Happy new year!

[Trivia: these nice calendars were generated in the very obsolete ClarisImpact 2.0, which I designed when I worked for Apple/Claris back around 1995.  To make them I have to use an old Powerbook that still emulates Classic mode.]