from Christopher Nolan's film "Memento"

PR pro, author, blogger, quantum physics’ excellent guy and friend Joel Postman just posted a new article What Do They Mean by Social Any Way?

I recommend you to go read it first.

OK, welcome back. As I read Joel’s post I was processing some ideas in the background which may or may not be unrelated, these are the thoughts his post triggered, anyway:

1) “More” social network features don’t necessarily translate into “better” social networks. Hence the socialness of a network is not necessarily helped by tons of social features. Facebook have also been proof of it, doing regular dashboard cleanups, throwing all those fancy apps to the background. Thank God.

It can be argued that if you throw in more social features, your sample of good social features should also grow, because you’re trying many more new ideas at once and more of them will stick. the problem with this approach is that you’re at risk of making the thing cluttered and incomprehensible. Facebook was this close to getting there at some point, they reverted course since then.

2) On the other hand, producing applications that are poor in features greatly reduces your potential of being useful for a wide public. Overload of features is dubbed by some “featuritis” but this problem is really debatable. What they’re frequently arguing against is really against clutter and making too many features available at once, at the wrong time or the wrong places.

Two main desirable features of any application on any platform are discoverability and user interface simplicity. When succesful, these usually go together.

The key to success in these matters is threefold:

1. Empower users, give them all the features they need, never less of it, don’t subestimate your users. “featuritis” is misplaced. those who use that term are actually talking about clutter, which is a different kind of problem.
2. Hide the less frequently used features so that the main functions don’t become incomprehensible, or difficult to tell from those that are rarely used.
3. Make the less frequently used features discoverable. human beings are unable to learn everything at once, they generally do progress bit by bit. Your features are hidden, but they’re not too far away that they become a buried treasure. You encourage your users to discover more bit by bit after they learn the basics, with a learning curve that is not too steep.

I’ts strange to me how poorly understood this still is in year 2010, after decades of application design.
The Web 2.0 was beneficial in some ways, and has been detrimental in many others, one of them is a “Memento”-like sense of always being discovering things for the first time, when in actuality these findings are what we’ve collectively known all along.

Not a critique to Joel, obviously… he’s not a designer after all… but the voodoo way of dealing with these matters in many Web 2.0 circles is really remarkable.

                          

As you probably noticed, Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t pass the vruz test of proper e-reader device design.

One key element I mentioned in my feature set of 7 items was support for people with low vision and blindness should be a standard feature.  And I cited not just moral reasons why this should be this way, but also marketing and user experience reasons.  It’s quite shocking to me that no know-it-alls have gotten this right, or provided it as an afterthought.

Now the Feds seem to agree with me on this one at least, as reported by Eric Engleman of Seattle’s Tech Flash

Feds to universities: don’t buy Kindles until they work for blind

The U.S. Justice Department today announced agreements with three universities over their use of Amazon’s electronic reader, the Kindle DX. Under the agreements, Case Western Reserve of Cleveland, Pace University of New York City and Reed College of Portland, Ore., will not buy or promote the Kindle DX or other e-readers “unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision.”

There’s a sore need for human designers who can design for other humans.   I have not lost all hope yet.

                          

And by a product I mean, not e-reader technology, but something human beings can use (and are willing to buy).

Image via Wikipedia

1)  Touchscreen  ( back and forth keys are a definitive no-no). You have to be able to flip pages with your fingers. Still with me?  Remember, touchscreen.  Throw your Kindle thing away.

2) The display must cover the entire surface of the device, with no frame.  Books have no frames.  You can have controls.  Eight of your fingers are always on the back of the book, why place buttons on the front side?

3) Unless you have perfect e-paper (and you most likely don’t have it yet)  it’s better to deliver a high density LCD screen, say 1280×800 in 10″.   A rotary control on the side should serve to control brightness. Or better, the device should come with an auto-brightness mode that self-corrects in tune with ambient light. Make the auto mode optional.

4)  A non-ingredient:  you don’t want an OS,  you want to read things.  So your most recent books should be available on the main screen. Not applications. People don’t want applications the same way they don’t awant shelves, nor book covers.  Shelves and book covers are a minor nuisance when you want to read a book. You must be able to switch between thematic bookshelves that must be readily available with a single gesture or keystroke. A rotary control with three positions (back, forth and select) can do this job. All user interface must be hidden most of the time.

5) Make it easy to share pages with other users. I’m reading this page and I want to beam it over wi-fi to my colleagues, and have that displayed on their screens automatically.  It’s not that hard, the technology is already available, you only have to put it to work for humans.  Extrapolate to the internet:  integrate Wordpress, Typepad and Movable Type api support.   Keep the “social” nuts happy providing Facebook and Twitter support. It’s easy and it doesn’t cost a thing.

6) You need an iTunes-kind of bookstore. Make it open so bookstores from all around the world can publish their stuff.   Make the whole Project Gutenberg catalogue easily accessible.  Forget about DRM. Play embrace and extend game with Amazon and send them customers.  Do the same with Barnes and Noble and with every small player too.  There’s 6 billion people in the world and every one of them on average have a penny to put in your piggy bank.   That’s a lot  more than you are making now.  Mind you, maybe you have to give these e-readers for free.

7) Let me take audio notes and attach them to pages. Include a screen reader. It doesn’t have to be a perfect screen reader, it will be okay as long as it’s understandable what it says.  People with low vision problems and blind people deserve better.  I know it seems that this could cut down on the audio books market.  Not so.  If I want to hear William Gibson reading out loud, I will buy the audio book anyway.   Send the greedy marketer to the closet, you will sell more books by letting people rest whilst listening to any book.

                          

Technological advance in the last five years has given birth to previously unforeseen possibilities in computing, and tablets are here to kickstart what will probably be an effervescent computing decade.

If you’re a technology enthusiast and you haven’t heard about ‘the tablet’ yet -or Apple Inc’s iSlate, as the rumour goes-, you’ve most likely been hiding under a rock. On the moon.

But there was a time long before planets aligned for 2010 to bring you renewed electronic delight when another company you might have heard of -Microsoft Corp.- was a firm believer that this kind of devices would leave the drawing boards and move into our offices and living-rooms, in much the same way Microsoft’s own Bill Gates clairvoyantly predicted the personal computer would make it into our homes, more than thirty years ago.

Microsoft first demonstrated their product Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in year 2001, programming specifications were developed, and real world products by HP, Panasonic and others were produced to match Microsoft’s blueprints.

Unfortunately these tablets as conceived by Microsoft -despite having heightened the hopes of many techies and evangelists for years- so far have proved an elusive rara avis in the real world that is even more rare in the realm of our households.

If Tablet PCs were a reality early on the noughties, and the public seems to be excited about these products, why has it taken so long (in “internet time”, anyway) for them to become more widely used and available?

The public seems to be indicating that the problem is not so much with the tablet bit of the term, but with the PC part of it.

For most of 2009 (and still going strong) there was a leakage of information details dripping from Apple and on technology and gadgets blogs, pointing to the almost certain conclusion that Apple will be making a major product announcement in late january 2010, very likely a slate-type of tablet device. Programmers around the web also saw new code being shared by Apple (as part of the Webkit project that powers Apple’s Safari browser) which left little doubt in their minds that these programming instructions could only be necessary for use in a tablet-like device.

Little else is known about the Apple product at this time, but the rumours seem to be credible enough that Apple’s competitors thought it was necessary to show their cards in advance to Apple’s -real or imagined- big event. The more stunning of the competing rumours surfaced in relation to Google’s partnership with Taiwanese manufacturer HTC and joint announcement of Nexus One -the much awaited Google Phone. It gave rise to the expectations they could be working on a tablet project of their own, running Google’s Chrome OS or a variation of Google’s mobile phone OS Android.

But we had more than just rumours as well this week at CES 2010, with Lenovo, MSI, HP, and -you guessed it?- Microsoft rushing to occupy whatever mindshare is left in tabletspace that Apple has not taken already. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer in person demonstrated HP’s Slate running a tailored version of Windows 7 with e-reader capabilities, but the specialised press and blogosphere have been largely underwhelmed by this second Microsoft attempt. BusinessWeek reports that Microsoft took a hit in the stock market as a result of this perceived underperforming act.

Other worth-mentioning announcements include Lenovo and MSI who have demoed variations on the tablet theme, months ahead of general availability of their products -as is often the case in tech fairs like CES.

Lenovo are going the way of the hybrid laptop-tablet, an otherwise perfectly normal business notebook can have its display screen removed and used as a slate tablet, which is able to operate independently of the main computer body and comes with an operating system of its own, Lenovo’s SkyLight.

MSI have surprised with a different and completely novel concept: a dual screen tablet, with the ability to fold them together like a book -and presumably use it as an e-reader, of course- but also with the possibility of setting it up horizontally the way you put a laptop on a table, using one of the screens as virtual keyboard and mouse. Not only that, but the virtual keyboard that appears on screen is also a haptic device, meaning that it offers tactile feedback as you touch the surface, producing a sensation on your fingertips similar to the touch of an actual flat keypad.

Is it possible that the more things change the more they become different in computing?

Whilst manufacturers essay their best attempts in their tablet/slate/e-reader endeavours , Microsoft seem unable to escape the centre of gravity of the PC, and continue to advertise the power of Windows as a much necessary tool everywhere.

Counterintuitively so, if we take into account Microsoft’s XBOX -arguably Microsoft’s most succesful hardware product after Microsoft’s Mouse- doesn’t run the familiar -now almost venerable- Windows graphical user interface. Although technically there is a Windows kernel somewhere there underneath, it’s conveniently hidden from the XBOX user.

When Microsoft tried to do the same for mobile phones with Windows Mobile, they failed to translate that familiarity with the brand into marketshare, letting a relatively late comer like Apple’s iPhone to disrupt and dominate the smartphone space.

The public seems to be telling us that they’re as uncomfortable taking a full-blown Windows PC in their pockets as they would be taking a Windows PC to read an e-book in bed.

However impressive on the technology side, so far none of these products, rumours and performances from different companies have been able to capture the same level of expectation Apple Inc. seems to master, steadily building up in emotion towards the grand finale.

That is, if the 90% chance that Apple’s iSlate is a real product turns out to be true, after all.

Whatever is the case, public perceptions seem to be changing, a culture where the TV set is no longer the sole source of information and entertainment was developed in the last ten years, almost inadvertedly making the long-touted convergence so much of a reality that it now doesn’t need to be singled out as a particular event. In the first half of the noughts YouTube was a phenomenon yet-to-be-seen, and video on the Internet in general was a less-than-edificant experience.

But the rise of the so-called web 2.0 paradigm paired with improvements in bandwidth and availability of internet connections helped to deliver a continuum of almost imperceptible changes that have affected forever the usage patterns that we once thought were monolithic and incontestable.

As a result there’s a myriad of new use cases, waiting for a myriad of products to match.

Passing videos around in the living-room? Taking your bookshelf to college with you to give a lecture? Sending your toddler’s fingerpaintings to her grandparents at the other side of the world?

Some of these companies are trying to match these newly developed usage patterns with products to satisfy them. There’s still a lot to be designed, developed and tried and we will see plenty of that in the effervescent computing decade that’s about to begin.

And now, with tablets to get started with.