My Curious Life

Today was one of those days where things just kept percolating to the top of my consciousness, steeped in the information I’ve been taking in recently.

I had an opportunity to view the broad, but not deep, D5 interview with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, which was actually quite amusing. Take about 45 minutes and help yourself to some playful banter and snippets of what’s to come from these two competing computing giants.

Gates hinted at a lot of things to come from the Surface technology announced just a couple of days ago, and it got me thinking about all the surfaces in our day-to-day lives and how a bit of intelligent interactivity might revolutionize how we view the world.

The Microsoft team already showed off an example of an interactive dining experience, doing practical things like ordering food and divvying up a bill. But what about interacting with other guests? I can easily conceive of some interactive games as simple as cards or checkers that could be played on the tabletop surface with other individuals at your table or at a table across the room … perhaps even around the world. I might not mind waiting a bit longer for my order to come if I had something intriguing or entertaining to keep me occupied … think of it as a high-tech butcher paper tablecloth and set of digital crayons.

But what about applications elsewhere? Why couldn’t the surfaces of school desks be transformed into independent virtual learning stations? Imagine children completing tests, studying materials, or working together on virtual projects at individual or shared workspaces. Gates hinted at how the surface technology uses video input to help interact with items placed on the display/touch surface. This same tech could easily recognize items placed upon it and bring up static and active content about the items, in addition to allowing virtual experimentation. The possibilities are literally endless.

Even mundane things like our physical desks could be turned into virtual workspaces … an extension of the “files and folders” metaphors we’ve come to take for granted. A work surface that large would allow for some very interesting positional relationships to come into play when it comes to our virtual content … my stack of family photos in one corner, my live World Cup feed in the other, a desk clock, my current blog post up for editing …

Extend these surfaces to walls and suddenly things that occupy physical space to perform key functions can literally disappear into the walls, changing our environments much as flat panel televisions are changing the places and ways in which we incorporate them into structures … no longer as physical pieces of furniture to be placed and occupy space, but as a kind of virtual picture frame or window allowing the world outside to come in.

For example, a hospital room equipped with a wall surface interface might act as a television or music entertainment system for a patient until the nurse comes in to monitor vitals and enter information into the patient’s chart. Wireless monitors on the patient (wired, perhaps for those with pacemakers sensitive to interference) could feed data without requiring extensive equipment to be present. Star Trek fantasies of high tech medicine would inch closer to reality.

And not to be forgotten are the surfaces upon which we walk. There’s no reason that we couldn’t allow our floorspace to respond to our presence. Think of places like airline counters where customers are instructed to queue up in line. Virtual lanes could be displayed as necessary, in adaptive ways, to accomodate varying traffic densities. Or perhaps entertain and inform customers as they wait. Virtual instructions could light a path to your seat at a stadium or guide you to the nearest open exit.

The possibilities are nearly endless, and I can’t wait to see what a few enterprising startups might do with the new technology.

Sometimes the most innocuous things can be the stuff of great innovation. I’ve been a book lover all my life, reading more before the age of 10 than most of the people I know read by the time they were 25. For a long time, I kept a catalog of index cards with the books I owned (and hoped to own) on them.

Later, when I got my first computer (a Texas Instruments TI99/4A) I wrote a little program in BASIC to keep track of my books, but tools like that aren’t easily accessible by the masses.

Well, here we are in the Web2.0 world and along comes LibraryThing, which takes advantage of Amazon’s huge database of books, and helps you keep a virtual catalog of your library. Add in features like finding books in the libraries of others who have some books like your own, and you can imagine the fun a bibliophile can have with this thing. I’ve put a small sampling of my library into the sidebar of this blog, courtesy of LibraryThing.

Oh, and I have to give a shout out to a woman who’s a bigger bibliophile than I’ll ever be, the TurboBookSnob. Just say Booker Prize and she’s all over it.

I am constantly amazed at the creative, intelligent and inspirational people in the world, a number of whom blog regularly and share their wisdom with those who are willing to accept it. The trouble is, I don’t have time anymore to seek and find these brilliant minds amongst the noise. My newsfeeds have increased to the point that Bloglines is now a creaking, shifting behemoth that I expect at any time to collapse under its own weight and smother me with information.

Computers have, over the past few decades, been primarily an empowering force, enabling us to produce faster and more efficiently, automate repetitive tasks, and generate more connections than ever before. This explosion of communication, knowledge, creativity and production has now reached a point where it’s no longer pleasurable, but overwhelming. The limiting factor seems to be our ability as human beings to filter and process this information.

Joshua Porter made a fantastic post yesterday that expanded upon his post the previous week, discussing circles of relationships and how each circle has a special significance to us as individuals. His follow-up post includes Ben Shneiderman’s original circles of relationships diagram, as well as a fantastic variation provided by Alex Mather and a beautifully dynamic Flash relationship example by Sarah Cooper. All of these examples try to categorize and map our trust relationships with others, but Sarah’s seems to document it best by showing how it changes with context.

Several years ago a brilliant friend of mine (non-blogger Dean Sanvitale) helped brainstorm an idea that I’d had for what would truly be a personal digital assistant. This PDA would take advantage of the gains we’ve made in adaptive computer intelligence, raw processing power, and wireless communication protocols. More like a traditional secretary (nee Administrative Assistant) than a portable electronic device, this trusted advisor would know everything it needed about me to intelligently administrate my day. It seems to me that we are on the verge of seeing this technology come to maturity at any time. My calendar is now digital, my contacts are digital, most of my interests and tasks are now stored digitally, and with the Facebook announcement, even rudimentary relationships are digital.

This personal assistant would know, for example, that a friend calling during my 10am staff meeting should be routed to voicemail but marked as a higher priority than the solicitor’s call from a few minutes before (or perhaps even know to delete the voicemail from the solicitor unless I say otherwise). This same assistant would know that I am intrigued by topics on interaction design and might cull the many blog postings on the internet into a collection for me to review at my leisure, perhaps even highlighting those that are from individuals whom I either email or comment on frequently.

In essence, this intelligent assistant would, like its human counterpart, know with whom I interact and in what capacity, what type of priority certain types of information should have based upon my past needs and feedback, and would even be able to handle some administrative tasks without my direct intervention, such as scheduling those necessary, but often time-consuming meetings. Place this assistant at the heart of my home and it could do even more, like inform me of incoming messages or other information as I’m watching a television program, perhaps pausing the program while I decide what to do with the new info. By being familiar with me, my preferences and my contact points, my digital assistant would know when and where to reach me when the time was right.

All of this technology exists now, and the company that first brings these things together into a cohesive system will have the chance to revolutionize the way we interact with the flood of information around us. That’s what I’d call “smart” technology.

It’s amazing how keyed in we as humans are to touch. We interact with many things by feel almost intuitively, reading surfaces, distances and tactile sensations like a keypress without consciously registering it all. Despite this, the best touch interfaces we’ve seen until recently have been keyboards, mice, stylii and crude touchscreens.

Advances in touch technology have been mostly behind-the-scenes or in specialized niche industries. Apple’s announcement ealier this year of the iPhone was a glimpse into where touch technology might be taking us in the future. Their multi-touch interface is a move toward more touch-oriented interfaces across a variety of devices. Rumor has it that some of Apple’s upcoming iMacs might even feature multi-touch, though I’m not sure that would be a practical use of the technology, except perhaps on the largest iMac model.

Recently, though, Microsoft has been promoting its new Surface technology, even featuring a cameo appearance of Bill Gates on NBC’s Today show to talk about the technology launching just before Gates steps out of direct management of the corporation he helped found. Ironically enough, I saw a video about this technology back in 2005, but the interface was still primitive at that time. What’s appealing about Surface (formerly known as Milan) now is not so much the touch interface itself, which is strikingly similar to Apple’s multi-touch, but the interesting example uses that the Microsoft team has put together, which can be seen in several video snippets on the Surface website.

Touch surfaces suffer from one common flaw and one shared challenge that was even talked about when the iPhone was announced … touch surfaces lack strong tactile feedback, like physical keypresses, that help us unconsciously register that our input has been accepted. Without that feedback, some users will feel disoriented and interaction with the touch surface will require additional focus and concentration to register the visual feedback necessary to fill in the gap. Some people find this uncomfortable and as a result, dislike touch surfaces.

The shared challenge is that when interacting by touch, we are often much less precise, expecting tactile feedback to help us adjust. Without that feedback, errors are more common, especially on small touch screens like the iPhone. Apple accomodates this by having their UI make some judgement calls on your most likely action and tries to minimize errors in that way. What’s interesting in the Surface examples is that Microsoft is accomodating human behavior by maximizing its real estate and using larger surfaces (can’t help the pun) plus the addition of some very significant visual effects that overemphasize the action being taken. This is a very clever move on their designer’s part, because the overemphasis draws your attention and focus. This is in contrast to the lack of tactile feedback requiring your attention and focus.

It will be interesting to see how this techology gets used … Microsoft has already posed some very clever uses, like ordering from a menu and divvying up your restaurant bill or sharing photos among devices, that benefit from both the visual and the tactile. They also hint at technologies “under the surface” that recognize devices like cell phones or digital cameras, and also read or register magnetic strips from credit cards. This additional tech starts to bring to life the idea of ubiquitous computing as well.

You know you’ve run a long way when all you can think of is how sore you are in unexpected places.

Today was my longest run ever as part of Portland Fit … an impressive 11 miles, which is a personal first for me. I can’t say that I flew along the course, but I have to admit that my pace was pretty steady up until the last mile or two. The worst of it was when the group leader all-too-perkily flew past us yelling encouragement as he ran ahead to meet us at the finish line. I wasn’t the only one in the cluster of people running near me muttering under our (strained) breath about how he was making this exertion look effortless and much too easy. Of course, at probably about 120 pounds soaking wet and with concrete laces, he’s got a lot less body to move around and I know he’s got a few (dozen) marathons on his belt.

Regardless, I did it, and I have the blisters, sore nipples and thighs to prove it. (That statement alone ought to flag a few firewalls and web surfing filters, but ah well, sometimes the truth hurts … literally.) If you’ve ever run long distances before, you’ll find that as you sweat, various parts of your anatomy begin to wear against your clothing and/or each other. Body Glide is a must, but even it has its limits.

Having survived my 11 mile ordeal, which was mostly a mental toughness exercise, I signed up for the Helvetia Half Marathon, paying $39 to torture and torment myself for 13.1 miles in just a couple of weeks. We’ll see how it goes … I definitely won’t be breaking any records, but if I can run 13.1 miles, than anything is possible. Perhaps even the Portland Marathon …

It really does make me wonder how ultra-marathon runners survive what seem like insane distances to me … 50 miles, 100 miles or more. I understand the mental aspects of running, and especially endurance, but there is a definite science to managing your body’s physical limits over a grueling distance … hydration, nutrition, temperature control, chafing, fatigue … there are enough studies of regular marathon runners exceeding their thresholds to suggest that ultra-marathons are in a class way beyond normal. If you want to read up on someone who’s mastered this art, just check out Dean Karnazes … he’s incredible.

And if you want to hear an overweight guy whine about doing a half marathon … stay tuned.

Today there was a confluence of events that really brought this idea home:

Experience design is relationship building.

I had an opportunity to watch Jesse James Garrett’s presentation from MX San Francisco today. I loved how he commented on the fact that we, as humans, tend to anthropomorphize things. We are hard-wired to interact with the objects around us, especially those things that we integrate into our daily lives, as if they were people. We attribute human characteristics to completely soulless devices. We become emotionally attached to our cell phones, iPods, cars and other objects of routine, repeated interaction. They become objects of friendship, frustration and everything else in between.

Later in the evening, as I sat with my wife to watch television, along came one of Liberty Mutual’s commercials:

Liberty Mutual is a company who has really come to understand, either on their own or through their advertising agency, that humanizing their business lowers the barrier to developing an emotional connection with their customers and potential customers. This is one of very few commercials that I actually stop to watch, even going back on TiVo to watch it again. There’s something visceral and enticing about the ad itself, especially since Liberty Mutual isn’t an overpowering presence, just a lingering thought at the end. Their second commercial in the “Good Deeds” series continues to build on the initial impact, further emphasizing the character trait of responsibility that they want to come to represent.

Various elements of the commercials, like the haunting, solo voice of the lead singer of Hem, stand out amongst the rock/pop soundtracks of most ads I’ve seen recently. The Liberty ads embody the idea that “actions speak louder than words” … each ad is a series of random acts of kindness, showing the traits that Liberty wants you to believe are representative of their company. And each commercial ends with the Liberty Mutual logo and a short voiceover that drives the point home:

When it’s people who do the right thing, they call it being responsible. When it’s an insurance company, they call it Liberty Mutual.

Another thing they’ve done well is to make this characteristic consistent across their touchpoints … print, TV and web. The real clincher will be if they can be consistent across the personal touchpoints of phone and physical office. That will be the key … are they making their entire system, from montly statements to agent conversations, into a cohesive system that consistently represents this concept of responsibility. Doing that will turn every experience into a step in the building of a lasting relationship.

Scott Berkun has a reputation for savvy insights into the business of design, especially in the world of software development. He shared one of those insights on his blog earlier this month in a post about the underuse of imagination. He made an interesting point about how the term imagination, the source of innovation, is almost shunned in the business world, yet the word vision, connected to shamans and drug use, is embraced by C-level executives at corporations around the world.

Sometimes it’s little observations like Scott’s that seem so obvious, yet so profound. It’s not that no one has ever noticed before … Einstein said it decades ago:

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

I appreciate Scott’s willingness to share these observations and I hope that others will take note. Those of us in the interaction design / user experience design world rely on our imaginations to make those leaps of faith, and we know that information only gets you part of the way toward your end goal … imagination helps you take that last step.

Scott’s new book The Myths of Innovation looks to be a treasure trove of these insights. It’s definitely on my short list of must-reads for just this reason. Thanks, Scott, for sharing.

Anyone who’s a Wired magazine subscriber should be seeing a DVD in the mail shortly, along with the most recent issue. The DVD, a production of Shell Oil, spins a nine-minute tale called “Eureka” of Chief Engineer Jaap Van Ballegooijen, responsible, at least in part, for the “bendy straw” oil drill.

Aside from being an obvious ploy to polish Shell Oil’s global image, I found myself entertained by the tale, which also tries to humanize Shell … putting a human face (Jaap’s) on this large mega corporation. Much like GE’s recent commercials with the theme of ecomagination, I’m wondering if this is what we can expect the next wave of advertising to become … something that’s a combination of entertainment and brand-building, kissing cousins with the dreaded infomercials that seem to be horribly prolific these days.

I’m caught somewhere between disgust and amazement. Much like the “rubbernecking” that occurs near an accident on the freeway, I felt compelled to watch the mini-movie all the way through.

While not making me any fonder of giant oil corporations and the global dependency on petroleum, I’m willing to admit that I now see Shell as a giant with more depth of character than I previously believed. I may not like them any more, but perhaps I despise them a little less. In that sense, I suppose, the group responsible for Shell’s new marketing direction might have good reason to shout “Eureka”!

Peter Merholz made a presentation entitled Stop Designing Products (PDF here) at SHiFT 2006 that made a strong point for designing an end-to-end experience rather than limiting your focus to just a specific product. His presentation was based upon then recent work Adaptive Path had done with a financial services company’s website. They found that the website was just one of many touch points that needed to be addressed in order to improve customer experience (and satisfaction).

Frog Design sums it up this way:

The system is the product.

So, then, if the system is the product, how do you design a system that incorporates a variety of touch points, services, devices and experiences? How do you turn your brand into a tangible thing to be experienced and interacted with?

In Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum, which I can’t recommend enough, they talk about imagining your product (or system) as if it were magic, or as if it were a person. I think that last idea is the key … imagine your brand/product/system as if it were a person … create, if you will, a reverse persona. Invent a person that, were they real, might embody who you want your company to be when dealing with your customers.

One key thing to keep in mind, though, is that just because your company is serving a particular customer, you may not want to “be” like that customer. Taking the banking industry as an example, which person would you hand your hard-earned money to:

Now to be honest, as an individual I’m more like the second pic than the first. For my banking needs, though, I want someone who is more like the qualities I’m projecting on the man in the first picture: trustworthy, financially savvy, and professional. Note that the man isn’t some stuffy, overbearing banker in a three-piece suit sitting behind a mahogany desk. I expect my local bank to be approachable and informative, not demeaning or aloof. It’s these subtleties that can make or break the impression.

Now if I expect this first man to be my local banker, when I interact with the bank’s website I expect many of the same characteristics to be present. If the website is too stuffy or condescending in its language, or comes across as unorganized and overly casual, some loss of trust will happen. The same goes for phone service. When I pick up the phone, call for service and get connected to an agent from Bangalore … you can imagine that I feel a bit of a disconnect between my vision of my bank and the person helping me on the phone. The agent may be very knowledgeable, financially savvy, and approachable, but he’s also forcing me to expand my definition of “local” … my bank became a global organization in just one phone call.

I’d be curious to see if there are any organizations or individuals using personas in this way, and if so, if they’d be willing to share some of their experiences …

If you’ve never paid attention to Tara Hunt’s blog, HorsePigCow, then you’ve really missed out. She’s absolutely brilliant and some of the gems to come from her blog have been inspirational to me.

A few weeks back she wrote an excellent bit about forgiving her Inner Gollum that made me think about something a wise teacher once told me:

Give yourself permission to be great … to succeed.

It was one of those things that settled in the back of my mind and has come back to remind me from time to time that I shouldn’t hold myself back, as I so often do. Not just in self-doubt, but out of a desire not to steal the limelight from someone else. I tend to do my best work in a small team where I can inject valuable insights and critical ideas, then let someone else run with them. Too often I later reflect on things and regret not taking it all the way and owning up to greatness.

So, inspired by Tara’s post, I’m going to try to give myself permission to succeed and come to terms with my own inner Gollum.