Apple iOS5 location-based reminders for Just in Time/Place task assignment

RemindersApple introduced a new feature in the new iOS 5 that could open several opportunities for developers. As described by Apple here:

A better way to do to-dos.

Next time you think to yourself, “Don’t forget to...”, just pull out your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and jot it down. Reminders lets you organise your life in to-do lists — complete with deadlines and locations. Say you need to remember to pick up milk during your next shopping trip. Since Reminders can be location based, you’ll get an alert as soon as you pull into the supermarket car park. Reminders also works with iCal, Outlook and iCloud, so changes you make update automatically on all your devices and calendars.

I have explored location-based reminders in one of my works on Kinetic User Interafaces. I instantiated this type of reminders to a shopping-list (UbiShop) scenario where a shared shopping-list is used to send reminders to people when they are located in a place where items in the list can be purchased (e.g. near a grocery store).

This not the only application of location-based reminders as it is applicable to several other situations. I called this "just-in-time/just-in-place" task assignment. You can find here a research article on this subject.

If Apple will provide API to manage location-based reminders within the OS for developers, what I have conceived can become a true reality. I am very excited about that and willing to dive into it.

You can watch below a video made by some of my students who implemented a prototype of Just-in-Time/Place reminders for the UbiShop scenario.

Multi-touch input: when is it really needed?

Multi-touch input is an emerging input modality where several point of pressure can be detected on a surface.

To a great extent the success of graphical user interface was that it was possible to perform direct manipulation of graphical objects with minimal effort, namely pointing and clicking. The mouse lies on the table and does not need to be continuously held by the user. Then, switching from mouse to keyboard is very easy (even better with touchpads in laptops).

Now with multi-touch screens the user has to make the additional effort of point on the screen with two hands. I see it comfortable only in the situation where the screen is a tablet. But still in this case the multi-touch feature is not really needed because the user hold the tablet with one hand and interact with the other.

If the multi-touch screen is a tabletop as in the case of the Diamond Touch or the Microsoft Surface, then I see a possible comfortable use, especially for multiple users.

Then there is the case of multi-touch input on portable device such as the iPhone. In this case I believe that the multi touch feature is not really necessary. Users of mobile devices use only one hand and one finger.

A strong case for multi-touch input is touch pads in laptops. As in the case of the new Asus EEPC and the new Apple MacBooks, the possibility of making gestures with two touch points is very useful. This is true because when the hands are on the keyboards the two thumbs are naturally located on the touch pad affording for combined movements.

My conclusion is that multi-touch input is not applicable everywhere and one shoud be careful to not force the user in making unnatural physical movements for interactions that can be made effortlessly with simpler input devices.

The role of computers...

In his blog, Luca Chittaro explains the paradox of automation in critical systems by elaborating the Lisanne Banbridge's paper on "Ironies of Automation". Basically, nowadays computers take care of automation of complex control tasks (e.g. in aircrafts), while human are requested to monitor the correct behavior of the system, and switch (when possible) to manual control in case of detected failures. Monitoring is even a more boring task than controlling instrumentation. Moreover, intervention in case of failure is more difficult and critical than controlling the system in normal conditions.

I believe that the role of computer is exactly the opposite than the current practices. Computers should "silently" monitor the interaction between users and the physical devices and take care that everything is done safely and correctly. When something wrong is detected, they should first warn the user and ultimately take control of the devices in order to re-establish a safe state.

I advocated this perspective in human-computer interfaces in my recent work on Kinetic User Interfaces where I propose an interaction pattern called "continuous tracking". In this pattern, the user performs some motion activity within a given context (e.g. in a place). The system's interface continuously monitors the activity and pops up providing relevant feedback (e.g. warnings, alerts, information) when something unusual happens (e.g. anomalous, danger, new). In the normal case, the interface stays in the background providing only minimal feedback in order to tell the user that the monitoring is done correctly.

This pattern has been implemented by Pascal Bruegger in a test scenario for paragliding assistance: the UbiGlide project and showcased at UbiComp 2007.

The UbiGlide FlyNav Simulator

Less Features, More Freedom!!

Yesterday, I participated to a very interesting workshop part of the LIFT08 conference where one topic of discussion was how to design a mobile infrastructure and interface for empowering and enabling marginalized people to produce multimedia art and eventually get some revenues.

Well, being the topic very interesting, one thing that emerged from the discussion was about design choices. With a vague idea of potential users, it is very difficult to select those features that are expected to be useful to them. So the tendency is to add more and more features with the hope that some of them will be actually be used.

Experience tells us that this is a bad practice. In fact there are two important usability factors here:

1. Users will use technology in an umpredictably way.
2. Users will not use (unless forced) messy and cluttered interfaces.

The combinination of these two simple (verifiable) factors led us to the conclusion that it might be better to have simple objects with a great freedom of use. This will enable unpredicted and serendipitous interactions that might be used to understand user needs and improve the design.

So I came with a motto that I checked is not yet present on the web:

Less Features, More Freedom!

Flip3D vs CoverFlow

There is a lot of discussion on the Web about similarities and differences between Vista's Flip3D and Leopard's CoverFlow. Below you can see screenshots of the two interfaces:

Well, the point is: apart from aesthetics, from the user point of view, which one is more useful?

Vista's Flip3D is a substitute of the the ALT-Tab applications switcher. You can now visualize ALL the application windows in the middle of the screen as being "documents" from which select the relevant one.

Leopard offers the same Desktop functionality in a less "obtrusive" way: it's what they call Stacks. Stacks are expandable icons placed in the Dock. You can see below a screenshot of this functionality:

CowerFlow is a new visualization techniques that Apple has bought from SteelSkies. Unlike Flip3D, this technology is not bound to the desktop and can be used in different applications (API). In fact, it is already available in applications such as iTunes, AppleTV, and FrontRow. Enhancing the Finder by CoverFlow allows Mac OS-X user to visually access any type of document by its preview. CoverFlow has been proved to be useful in iTunes because it simply provides user with a better experience.

I did not try Vista's Flip3D, but intuitively I can imagine how much this tool might enhance my user experience with the OS. Switching application should very fast and when I move from an application to another, I don't really care about the preview. I want to switch to the application, that's all. In contrast, is when I browsing the content of my hard-drive that I need to preview the content of the documents.

So what? I believe that, as usual, Microsoft policy is about being impressive but not effective. Vista designers don't care about users, they just wanted to show how good they are at programming 3D interfaces. Maybe, Mac OS-X user interface is less impressive than Vista's one, but certainly more fluid and usable. Special effect are used with parsimony and when they can be of real help in providing a better user experience.

Once again, I am proud of Being a Mac and not a PC!

A nice workshop held in Stanford two years ago...

While trying to cope to the mess in my computer, I discovered a link to a workshop on Ubiquitous Media and Social Infrastructure I attended during my visit in Stanford (August-October 2005).

Below, you can see me while discussing with some students presenting their posters:

The workshop was organized by the Keio university, which is roughly the Japan equivalent of Stanford. The website contains the video recordings of all the speech. It is a nice memory... I hope you will enjoy the talks. One I suggest is that of Clifford Nass, maybe better known for inventing the Microsoft's (annoying) paperclip "Clippy"!!

uMove and Kinetic User Interfaces

It's my pleasure to announce that my research project on Kinetic User Interfaces will be funded by the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research.

uMove

This project is about an emerging paradigm in User Interfaces which is based on motion-awareness in physical space. By moving, people and objects can interact with computer systems. It is a way of taking the computer "off the desktop" as prospected by the Mark Weiser's vision of Ubiquitous Computing.

Nabaztag/tag

We just adopted one Nabaztag/tag!

His name is "Petrica" and you can see him between me and Violeta:


Nabaztag is a very basic social robot. It is only able to move the ears and display some lights on the body. However, it has nice communication skills since it is able to recognize speech and stream audio over the network. Moreover, the last version is capable to detect RFID tags (but this option is still not fully supported on-line).

The main purpose of Nabaztag is to foster social relationships. In fact, after registering it in the website, you start receiving podcast (called Nabcasts) from other rabbits. You can find other rabbit owners in a public directory and start sharing nabcasts or other things... Very nice!!

Adopt your Nabaztag and join Petrica in the NabWorld!

Missing affordance in Flickr...

This is about usability! Have you ever tried to modify the category of one of your contact in Flickr, for example, making them friends or family?

Once you learned is a quite easy taks! But how to figure out how to do it? That's the problem!!

If you look carefully, there is no way of telling where this option is. You might discover it by chance.

Wanna test it? Display your contacts. You'll get some icons as displayed below:
If you move your mouse on one contact's icon e pull-down menu is activated. Then you can choose the option you need.
The possibility of opening the pull-down menu appears only after you moved the mouse over the icon. This is not good because the interface is not telling you what are the operations available until you don't explicitly select them.

While Flickr is a great idea, it seems that usability of its website is rather bad. The contact icon has no affordance that tells you how to operate it.

The concept of affordance is a basic one in Interaction Design and making explicit and intuitive the way of operating the interface to user is the most fundamental design principle one has to consider in order to build friendly interfaces.

I hope Flickr design will soon realize their interface's flaw.

Multimodal interfaces Course

A very nice course in Multimodal Interfaces has been given this year (2006) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Fribourg . Videos of students projects are available here .

Read more at diuf.unifr.ch/courses/0...