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All smartphone app ideas start somewhere—an entrepreneur starts scribbling on some napkins at the local coffee shop, a visionary sketches on a whiteboard, a team has a brainstorm. Regardless of how your app begins, most app ideas are relatively vague at first, perhaps a basic drawing or a few bullet points of things you want the app to do.

With all the design templates available for Photoshop, Illustrator, and OmniGraffle, many designers may be quick to translate their app ideas into wireframes. While diving right into wireframing may work in some cases, most apps can benefit from some level of upfront user research. User research helps define the high-level product vision, and enables your team to make informed decisions throughout the product life cycle.

In this article, I'll introduce three complementary user research techniques that are well suited to mobile design: shadowing, and field interviews combined with diary studies. I chose these techniques because they can help mobile app designers understand their app's context of use. In contrast to the desktop context, which is relatively self-contained, the mobile context is influenced by many external factors, e.g., people, objects, the cellular network, etc. Understanding these external factors will help mobile designers create great user experiences.

Shadowing

In shadowing, the researcher follows participants over a period of time and records their observations. In contrast to user interviews, the data may be more reliable since user behaviors are observed in their natural context by a researcher. This is often referred to as a "sit back" technique; the researcher may probe with some questions but it's generally undirected. In addition to shedding light on the participant's environment, shadowing may help uncover less tangible influences such as social norms and user perceptions.

Shadowing sessions can take one hour or up to a full day—the context and duration will vary based on the app and the research goals. Imagine that you want to develop an app that enables parents to easily record and share their newborn's special moments. Because the app may be used in a variety of contexts throughout the day, it may require a full day of observations to get an adequate understanding of the parents' needs. In contrast, much less time would be needed for an app for museum visitors to learn about museum artwork since participants could be shadowed in the museum for only the duration of their visit.

Photo from shadowing session with an art dealer. She uses her iPhone to take photos for clients, convert art prices into foreign currencies, and to make sure artwork is level (using the iHandy app.)

Field Interviews

Field interviews, which are derived from anthropological research techniques, are one-on-one sessions with participants in their natural environments. The interviews are semi-structured, meaning the researcher will prepare questions in advance but will adjust the script based on the participant's responses. They typically occur in one place for 1–2 hours, excluding travel. Given these time and context limitations it may be difficult to get a complete picture of the participants' mobile usage. As a result, mobile researchers often supplement field interviews with a diary study. Diary studies, discussed in the next section, can provide more insight into the participant's context over a much longer period of time.

Choosing one place for a mobile-oriented interview can be a challenge. Ideally, the interview should occur where the app will be used most often, providing researchers with a better understanding of the context of use. In the earlier example of the museum visitor app, holding the interview at the museum would enable participants to easily refer to exhibit information and explain what works or doesn't work well for them. If the interviews were held at an offsite location, it would be harder for participants to reference such information and for the researcher to understand the influence of the museum context. Additionally, it would require the user to recall behaviors or memories about the app, which can be less reliable than studying their app usage in context.

Sample Excerpt From a Field Interview With a College Student

"I would have chemistry in the morning for five hours, Trig in afternoon, English at night. My chemistry teacher would lecture for two hours. I would have my periodic table open. I was in class one day and forgot my periodic table. I Googled it and found an iPhone periodic table app. I showed everyone in class and then they downloaded it too. It's free and they have a light version. A lot of people in class have an iPhone—half the class. Everybody is on the iPhone, especially on the train.

"I'd also use my scientific calculator. If you turn the iPhone landscape, it expands. I removed the other calculator app I had installed before. I don't like a ton of apps on my phone at once. So the iPhone replaced my TI89. The other app allowed more numbers than the built-in calculator app, and could do longer equations than the built-in iPhone app. I looked in the App Store under 'scientific calculator,' looking for graphing one. I got this one [shows me]. There was a pop quiz one day so I asked: can I use the phone? Professor said yes but some would say no."

Diary Studies

Diary studies shift the burden of data collection onto the participant. Instead of the researcher shadowing participants for an entire day, participants record their activities over the course of one or more days. When combined with field interviews, diary studies can approximate the depth and richness of data gathered during shadowing sessions. Consider using a diary study under the following circumstances:

• Participants can easily capture the kind of data you are seeking
• You need to collect data over a long period of time, such as in cases where the app is used only intermittently
• You need a non-intrusive way to gather information

Although this approach can lead to valuable insights, there are some limitations. First, participants may not record activities that seem trivial to them but would be of interest to researchers. Second, since participants are mobile, stopping to document their activities could be disruptive or impractical (e.g., when the participant is driving.) Third, diary studies are less effective at ascertaining the how and why behind behaviors. Because of these limitations and others associated with self-reporting research techniques, researchers often combine diary studies with other methods such as field interviews.

Sample Diary Study Entries and Field Interview Clarifications

Choosing a Research Approach

Most smartphone apps will benefit from a combination of user research methods. The optimal mix will depend on the app, your research goals, and the design phase. Very early stage apps will benefit from observational methods, whereas mid-stage apps should benefit most from observational methods as well as prototypes. These app stages are discussed in more detail below.

Early Stage Apps

Companies without a clear concept may conduct user research to help uncover app opportunities. Even though the company has not formulated an app concept, they should have a well-defined audience or problem space in mind. For example, young children often use their parents' iPhones. Shadowing these parents is one way a researcher could uncover app opportunities for this demographic. Similarly, a company may be interested in offering an Android solution for small business owners, thus they may want to interview these types of users to better understand their needs.

Mid-Stage Apps

Companies with a rough app concept can utilize a variety of user research methods. In addition to shadowing and field studies, they may find it beneficial to introduce early app sketches to prospective users. These sketches can be presented in a demo format—meaning the researcher will walk through the sketches and elicit feedback on the ideas—or through a paper prototype study. If the concept is not fleshed out at the user interface level, another option is to create a concept video that will give prospective users a feel for the idea. You can find an example here: http://vimeo.com/2420799

Existing Apps

Apps already in the marketplace may conduct upfront research before designing a significant feature or embarking on a redesign. Regardless of the project scope, the research typically incorporates the existing app. For example, it would be valuable to shadow existing customers as they use your app, or have them diary their app usage over a specified period of time. Alternatively, the app creator may consider running a usability study to establish a benchmark for the app. Lastly, a user feedback survey at this stage can be beneficial for getting a broad reading on features that you may then want to delve deeper into with qualitative research.

Summary

Upfront user research can benefit both new and existing smartphone apps, shedding light on prospective users' context of use, perceptions, pain points, language, and customs. Understanding context of use is critical for smartphone app design since context can be a driving force in your app's user experience. With a solid user research foundation, app creators can make informed decisions throughout the product development process. Moreover, user research can reveal new app opportunities and inspire innovative solutions.

New technologies begin by imitating older technologies before evolving to their true forms. For example, early automobiles looked like horseless carriages, and early television shows imitated radio programming before finding their own forms. Online experiences have followed this pattern—getting their start by imitating the printed page. Although many of today’s online experiences have evolved to include more function and interactivity, the “Web page” still dominates our thinking. So the question still remains: what new form will the Web take as it continues to evolve over the next five years?

Three types of trends are driving online experiences into their next phase: capabilities, consumers and competition.

Capabilities: Changing Technology Platforms

Today’s default platform—a browser running on a PC—is quickly moving toward a host of highly diverse environments. The types of devices connected to the Web are rapidly growing beyond PCs, laptops, and smartphones to include new types of devices like iPads, Ambient Umbrellas, and Chumbys, in addition to traditional devices like TVs.

Additionally, handheld devices like the iPhone or Droid make complex online interactions possible anytime, anywhere—fueling customer expectations of rich experiences on demand and shrinking the tradeoff we used to have to make between mobility and capability.

Consumers: Evolving Online Behavior

New technologies attract broad interest, confirming there is a market for capability advances. Recent Forrester data confirms this point: 45% of U.S. online consumers are interested in touch screen TVs, 69% prefer rich interactions and 34% expressed interest in netbooks.

Even with the broader marketplace reception, it is Gen Y that truly signals a more aggressive wave of change. 61% read updates from friends when visiting social networking sites and 55% would like to access the Internet on a TV.

Competition: Millions of New Entrants

There’s been a flood of information providers crowding the Internet with information targeted at increasingly wired consumers. In the last three years, the number of active sites has almost doubled with literally tens of millions of additional sites dividing consumer attention. This means incumbent firms will have to be more concerned about challenges beyond their traditional competitive set as technology capabilities like cloud computing help startups like Mint.com put great ideas into action without major infrastructure investments.

What are the implications of these trends? Forrester has identified four attributes that will define the future of the online customer experience—a framework Forrester has termed CARS. From the end user’s perspective, online experiences will be:

• Customized by the end user. Consumers will not only control what they get online, they’ll control the form that they get it in to a much greater degree than they do today.
• Aggregated at the point of use. Content, function and data will be pulled from different sources and combined at a common destination to create a unique experience.
• Relevant to the moment. This customized, aggregated content will appear on the device that’s best suited to the customer’s context at a given point in time.
• Social as a rule, not an exception. Social content will be integrated into most online experiences, not segregated into today’s blogs, micro-blogs and wikis.

Nationwide Insurance iPhone apps: customized, aggregated, and relevant. Nationwide’s mobile apps for the iPhone are available to anyone, Nationwide customer or not. The Accident Toolkit app guides the user through the post-accident process, aggregating location-based information on repair shops and Nationwide agents, as well storing data such as photos to integrate into an accident report template. Their new Cartopia app helps users shop for cars by aggregating information on invoice prices and trade-in values, as well as the locations of Nationwide insurance agents. The app provides a customized experience, with the ability to rank and compare vehicles based on the details most important to the user.

Avis: customized, aggregated, and relevant. Avis ads which can appear on any third-party site allow users to search for a car and make a reservation without ever visiting the Avis website. This ad placement creates relevance around the customer’s Web browsing experience. Additionally, the Avis iPhone reservation app is customized for the end user’s needs, accessing past preferences and reservations, in addition to aggregating pricing, location and car availability information as an added convenience.

Firms with poor online experiences today will only fall further behind without significant changes as the gap between great and poor online experiences becomes even more dramatic. The developments in online technology capabilities and consumer behaviors mean that there are many ways for firms to evolve their online experience. To develop their firm’s CARS experience, customer experience professionals must start by gaining consensus on the most important business objectives, brand attributes, and customer behaviors for their customers’ online experience.

Moira Dorsey will be talking about building the online experience of the future at the Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum in New York, June 29-30.

This is an interview with Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy, the founders of Occipital and creators of the popular iPhone app, RedLaser. We became interested in their story when we learned the differentiating factor between a somewhat unsuccessful first version and a wildly popular second version was due to their attention to UX.

You can listen to the audio using the player below (on our site) or download the audio file.

Olson: Hi, I'm Jeremy Olson, a contributor for UX Magazine and developer of a recent iPhone application called Grades. I'm the writer of the tapity.com blog. And I'm here with Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy who are the founders of Occipital, and the creators of a very popular iPhone application called RedLaser. So, Jeff and Vikas, could you introduce yourselves briefly and talk a little bit about your company?

Powers: Hey, thanks Jeremy, this is Jeff. I'll tell you a bit about myself. I was working on a PhD at the University of Michigan where I met Vikas when I realized two different things. First was that the science of computer vision, this field, was incredible. And then there's a lot of new science—very practical stuaff—in the field, but really none of it all all was being used by everyday people. And second, I realize that the only way to really change that would be to start my own company. And then Vikas joined a few months later.

Reddy: Yeah, so I was actually working for a startup in New York called zenga.com and I quit that to join up with Jeff to do the startup. So we started working on some ideas around photo organization and visualization using basically computer vision, artificial intelligence, things of that nature.

So we got into TechStars in 2008, which is a seed-stage incubator based here in Boulder, and went through that program. We tried to raise money after that and weren't successfully. We changed our focus to trying to get to cash-flow positive and also switch into mobile, and that's when we launched ClearCam, which was a super-resolution application on the iPhone that let you take 4-megapixel photos with the original camera. And that got us cash flow positive, just on very little money.

Powers: And that brought us up to present day, where we launched RedLaser.

Olson: Great. So why don't you tell us a little about RedLaser, the iPhone app?

Powers: Sure. RedLaser is our most popular application so far. RedLaser is a barcode scanner for the iPhone, and in addition to scanning barcodes it can also check prices. The idea is that if you're in a store and you want to know if something in front of you is a good price, you can scan it and find out within a few seconds whether it is.

We called it RedLaser because we wanted people to think of it like those checkout scanners that use RedLasers. We didn't want to call it something like "Camera Scan," or something like that, because we didn't want to emphasize the camera too much. We wanted users to think about it like they were actually pointing a RedLaser at a barcode.

The way that RedLaser came to be is that I came to work at this office we were in in a deli (a basement office in a deli), and I was looking at a copy of Scientific American with the usual barcode printed on the cover. So I guess in a way you could say the idea came from Scientific American, but we didn't get past the cover. A few days before that, before I looked at the barcode on that cover, we had been brainstorming all of the things we could get the phone to recognize via the camera, and it sort of hit me at that point that despite that the iPhone was well on its way to becoming a mainstream device, there was absolutely no effective barcode scanning technology for the iPhone.

And so usually when you have an idea like that that seems pretty obvious, you get disappointed—you do a quick Web search and it reveals that indeed there's something else out there trying to do what you just thought of. But in this case there really wasn't anything. Everything that was out there was pretty terrible or it required a special add-on lens. And the reason for this terrible experience with the existing applications was that the iPhone camera wasn't able to focus up close. So this led to the conception that barcode scanning on the iPhone was impossible…until we came along.

Olson: So you created this great technology and combined it with a practical product idea, and then you finally got it on the App Store. So what happened?

Powers: Our first release was moderately successful. We got to the front page of Digg, which was exciting. We peaked at something like number 87 on the top 100 of all the App Store apps, or paid apps specifically. And so we were pretty excited about that, but it fizzled out pretty quickly and RedLaser went back into relative obscurity at that point. So our first release wasn't a big hit, in the end.

Olson: But obviously something happened—the idea was obviously good—since now it's one of the most successful apps in the App Store. So what happened that bridged that gap between then and now?

Powers: Truthfully, it just wasn't easy enough to use. We actually thought it was pretty good, and it was indeed better than anything else out there at the time. But that wasn't enough. Outside of very tech-savvy users, the experience just wasn't very intuitive. For example, specifically, the first version was photo-based. It required you to hold the barcode some distance away (about 10-12 inches) and to take a still photo. In addition to that, there wasn't any feedback on the device itself, so you had to send a photo up to our servers, which would then process the image and then respond to you. So it took a lot longer.

We thought it was pretty good. At one point I actually went home to Ann Arbor to visit my grandparents, and I showed my grandma how easy this new app that I had built was to use. And it turned out it was completely foreign to her. Even though she'd used checkout scanners for years, she just had no idea how to use it. So we really had to make the capture process more in line with her mental model for how a barcode scanner should actually work.

Olson: So you revamped the capturing experience. What exactly did you do to change it?

Powers: We totally revamped that technology in the second major version of RedLaser—version 2.0 and then on. Instead of using still photos like we did before, we used real-time scanning straight from the video feed. Rather than waiting for a server to respond several seconds later, we gave feedback in a fraction of a second. We have brackets on the screen that will turn green and inform the user that the barcode's in range. It then informs them to stay still while the scan occurs. So you get some feedback immediately with no training.

And then the accuracy of the process was greatly improved. One of the things we did is we specifically focused on reducing the chances that the scanner would decode a barcode incorrectly—by that I mean, making an incorrect guess about what the barcode is—which is a big departure from version 1 where the application would always make a guess. Even if it wasn't sure at all whether it was right it would always make a guess. And that frustrated some users because you'd scan a barcode and it'd come back with completely gibberish numbers. We thought that was better than returning nothing, but in version 2 I think we realized it's better to return nothing than to return something that was completely wrong. Once we did all of these things, there was a threshold that we hit where people started telling their friends about the application.

Olson: So this is version 2 now, you've made these changes…I noticed that for version 2, you got a lot of great press; I think TechCrunch and a bunch of different places covered you. So what'd you do to get their attention? What did you do to get noticed?

Powers: The new version took off by word of mouth, really. And although you have seen a lot of great press now, and if you do a historical search you'll see a lot of great press, we didn't really get any great press at first. Remember it was version 2, so it was an update. You're launching an application now yourself, and I think you'll find that when you come out with version 2 it's going to be really hard to get people to pick up that story—just because it's an update, it's not that newsworthy. So we had a lot of trouble getting people to pick it up.

But nevertheless, after the update occurred that really increased the quality of the experience, new users per day started to grow exponentially. Actually, it doubled literally several days in a row, taking the app from basically obscurity where it was after that first launch had died down all the way up to top five in the App Store, just by growing and doubling and doubling and doubling. Based on the fact that we saw this exponential growth, we were able to infer that the growth really was word of mouth.

Olson: This was before you had any press for it?

Reddy: The press was actually interesting because it was probably a cause rather than an effect. The word of mouth got us popular, but then got us the attention of the press that wouldn't cover us before. And it probably helped that it was holiday season as well, and there was this new idea about mobile and shopping that helped it get picked up by some pretty major press.

Olson: This really shows how word of mouth can really push an application to the top charts without even the help of the press, which is pretty amazing to me. Being that word of mouth was so important with this release and how it played such a big role, what do you think motivated people to share the experience? How can we make experiences that are viral, shareable experiences that people want to share with their friends?

Powers: In the case of RedLaser, the experience was new—there was a lot of novelty— and it was something you could only do on a mobile device—you couldn't really do it on a computer. And it was something that mimicked an experience that people had every day. They saw these barcode scanners doing this, but they couldn't do it themselves on a mobile device. So you gave them this big novelty factor—now you can do something that you could never do before on a mobile device but yet you're prepared to understand it because you've seen it day in and day out. And so because we were able to give them a novel experience that they immediately picked up on, that was completely easy for them to use and share with their friends.

And I think a similar pattern could be followed: essentially look for something where people are prepared to understand it, but they're not able to use it today because it just doesn't exist. Create an application that can then allow them to do that thing on their mobile device—and by the way, if it's something that you can only do on a mobile device, that's going to add to the novelty and the cool factor of it.

If you put all those things together, I think you have something that people are going to be wanting to tell their friends about, especially as they get a new iPhone and they want to show off. "Why did I get this new iPhone? What's so cool about it?" Sort of bragging to their friends, and they can show you these experiences. If, on the other hand, it was a new experience that was very hard to understand and none of your friend will even get it if you explain it to them, you wouldn't want to tell them. With barcode scanning it was completely obvious and easy to explain, so I think that led to getting a lot of word of mouth.

Olson: Speaking of this novelty factor, you mentioned people showing it to their friends…what kinds of users were these? Were these mainly serious users? Could you talk about the kinds of users that you got?

Reddy: I think there was definitely a novelty factor to the application. We kind of anticipated a little bit the extent to which our number of users downloaded the app or thought it was cool just for the novelty factor of walking through their cabinets scanning barcodes for fun was pretty interesting. But the core user group is still price comparison; a lot of people are using it for that. And then there has been some use of it for inventory. I'd say probably those are the three main categories. We released an SDK so people can take our technology and use it in other applications, and we see that as a way for people to take on other uses.

Olson: Let's talk a little bit more about the user experience of RedLaser. What were some of the other aspects of the user experience other than the capture interface that you think contributed to RedLaser's success?

Powers: The other aspect of the RedLaser user experience that was important was just an extremely simple experience, or an extremely simple interface. The capture was good, and you were able to scan something and be immediately dropped in results. You didn't have to go through two or three steps to get to results. And so there was one button press to bring up the scanner, and there were actually no more button presses after that—you were done. So you press one button press to bring up the scanner, you scan the barcode, and you're dropped into information.

And so I think that dead simplicity was key to the user experience. In addition to that, we did a lot of work to increase the odds that after you completed the scan you would actually get something back, because we knew it would be a bad user experience if you would scan a barcode and the application would say, "I don't know what that is." And you'd scan another barcode and it'd say the same thing.

So we put a lot of effort to increasing the odds that it would at least be able to tell you something—maybe who's the manufacturer, or what's the product title at a minimum—and then, in the best case, return a bunch of prices and all kinds of other information. But just the dead simplicity and the odds that you got something back so it was a pleasant experience after you did complete that initial scan.

Olson: Your app definitely got a lot of good word of mouth and obviously became very popular. And a lot of apps become popular, but for a time. I've seen so many apps go to the App Store and get into the top 100 and then fall out, so what were some factors that you think that contributed to your continual success? Your app is still in the top 100 and it seems to be doing very well for a very extended period of time. What were some of the factors that you think contributed to that?

Powers: The timing was great—and we didn't necessarily anticipate this—but the update to RedLaser occurred in September and that was a couple of months before the holiday season. So what we had was an initial spurt due to the novelty factor and word of mouth growth, then we had a little bit of a decrease in actual sales and popularity.

But then this led right into the holiday season, and just as we were getting some kind of critical mass of users where people in media were starting to learn about the application as well. And so as people started shopping and media started talking about shopping stories, it was a pretty obvious connection to connect shopping with mobile, which was another hot topic, and talk about the intersection of shopping and mobile. And so we ended up getting a lot of stories in major press and media—on television, the New York Times, and everywhere—about RedLaser because it was this perfect combination of mobile and shopping together.

And so that helped us sustain users for quite some time, all the way through December. And after that we still managed to maintain fairly high popularity, and I think a lot of that is just due to the fact that word of mouth growth doesn't tail off as fast as an ephemeral press mention or just the initial launch of your application. I think what's contributing to this is, whenever someone gets a new iPhone and their friends that find out about it—their friends that have iPhones already and have applications—RedLaser is one of the first applications they mention.

So we retain a lot of new sales just based on the fact that there are new iPhones coming out every day and RedLaser's one of the apps that are often mentioned. And we've seen this happen a lot of times on Twitter, where someone will say they got a new iPhone and then you'll see someone else telling them all the apps they should get, and RedLaser's often mentioned. Those are two key factors.

And then the other theory we have—which we haven't been able to prove, but an interesting theory nonetheless—is that since barcodes are printed on just about everything, it's kind of a constant mental reminder of this application. So since you see barcodes every day, we think it possibly increases the odds that you'll remember RedLaser on your iPhone among the other hundred apps you have on your iPhone. You'll remember it, it'll be top in memory, so when someone asks you what apps they should get, you might remember RedLaser just because you stared at a barcode five second earlier.

Olson: One of my friends got an iPhone a while back, and the first app he showed me was RedLaser. So now that your app's been out there for a little while, how has seeing what people are actually using your app for affected your strategy and your plans for the future?

Reddy: The only big thing we did was we added two features centered around food because we saw that a lot of people were scanning foods—partly because when you first download an app you're in your house and the first thing that's around you is probably some food or whatever household items. Other than that, though—and those features were nutrition information and some allergy information—but other than that we probably stayed pretty true to the goal of price comparison and product information. The SDK is supposed to address the other possible uses of barcode scanning. We anticipated that this technology isn't just for price comparison, but you can actually use it for many, many uses.

Powers: And to add to that, the SDK (since we haven't talked about it yet) is essentially a component that we've created and allowed other iPhone developers to use such that they can add barcode scanning into their applications because, what Vikas just mentioned, we didn't think we could create every application using barcode scanning so we enabled other to hopefully create all the other cool applications as well.

Olson: Let's move to more general user experience on the iPhone and your thoughts on that. Based on your success with RedLaser, what do you think are the most crucial principles of user experience in iPhone apps?

Reddy: From what we've seen so far—obviously this is from our perspective, this isn't globally true—simple, easily understandable actions with high reward seem to do really well on mobile. For example, Shazam, our own application, there's tons of games like Doodle Jump—if you've seen, that game's been doing really well for the last couple of months even—where it's just a very simple action but the payoff in either enjoyment, or information, or any kind of utility's high. And I think a lot of the apps that you couldn't really do on non-mobile platforms seem to do best—the ones that are inherently mobile, for example, using the accelerometer, or using the GPS, or using the compass, things that you couldn't really do if you're just sitting at your desktop, that are made specifically for mobile, do well.

Olson: In terms of user experience, lots of iPhone apps—and I've definitely seen a lot of mistakes made in terms of user experience—what do you think are the biggest mistakes developers are making in developing for the iPhone?

Reddy: I've seen a lot of cases where people are trying to port a desktop or Web application to mobile, but then instead of trying to focus on what's good about the mobile version or what's unique about the mobile version, they try to jam all the features over to the mobile version. A lot of people have actually done this pretty well in the sense of avoiding clutter. One really good example of that I've seen is the New York Times; they didn't just take their website and try to jam every single feature and every link into their Web version, they pared it down, figured out what's the core information people want to see. And, interestingly enough, personally I prefer the mobile app to the Web one.

I think the other mistake is complex value propositions. There's a lot of cases where you have to jump through a couple hoops before the app becomes useful to you, which is kind of an issue because people have (it seems like on mobile) a shorter attention span. So if you can do X, Y, and Z, and then get some kind of reward—set up an account, add a bunch of things to a list before that app is useful to you—you don't get that immediate payoff and you risk the person just uninstalling it or losing interest.

Olson: I've definitely seen that. When the first thing you see is a signup screen, or a register screen, or a login, that's not a good sign. I want to talk about learning user experience. Am I correct to say that neither of you really came into this whole experience with a user experience background? Then how has your experience with RedLaser changed your view of UX, if at all, and what would you suggest to other developers who aren't necessarily trained in user experience who are seeking to learn more about it?

Powers: Yeah, you're correct, we had essentially no background in user experience, especially nothing formal. We were both engineers and there isn't a lot of focus on user experience, at least in engineering at the University of Michigan. So no, we didn't have much experience at all. But we were users, as well, so we knew what made sense from a user perspective.

But that said, we did learn a lot. I think some of the things that we realized—and this may not necessarily be strict changes in our thought process, but at least an evolution in our thought process—and one of those things is that you need to have something that is easy to use without any training at all. With barcode scanning in our first version, it required some training, and because users have a very short attention span—especially on mobile—that didn't work, it didn't fly. Even though it was the best technology for the purpose, it required training and thus it kind of failed.

Another thing that we realized, which came to our advantage early on when RedLaser didn't have the greatest database backing it, was that we were able to be successful even without the greatest database in the backend because the user experience—that initial capture experience—was very good. So as soon as we launched version 2.0, RedLaser still didn't have the greatest database backing it, but yet the user experience was very good. So RedLaser became probably the most barcode scanning application on the iPhone even as its database was still fledgling.

I think the takeaway there is that user experience can trump the end value just because with a lot of other applications you'll never get to see the end value because you can't get past that initial user experience hump. That's something we realized, and it actually came to our advantage because we were focused on that capture experience more than anything.

Another thing that we've learned is you shouldn't worry about adding a lot of features to the application if the users can't even use them or can't even get to them. So focus on the initial features that people are absolutely going to use, and then later add the features that are nice to have, because there's no sense in blowing a big huge feature list at everyone if they're not even going to get to use them.

And then the last thing that we learned is that really the best way to learn how your user experience or your app works is just to launch it. Don't worry too much about the first version being terrible because the truth is not a lot of people are going to see the first version if it's terrible. We were a little over-concerned with that, and in the end those initial users that told us our first version was terrible only account for maybe 0.1 percent of our total user base. And so it isn't really worthwhile being too afraid of launching something that's not quite there.

Olson: Alright, so now let's talk about Occipital's future—what you guys are working on next. I know this is related to augmented reality; you guys are interested in augmented reality. How would you describe augmented reality, and what do you think people think when they hear that term?

Reddy: I think broadly it means overlaying virtual objects and information onto real-world scenes. Currently through mobile devices it could be through a heads-up display on top of a video feed. In general, you can think of it as Terminator vision or, if you want something that's a little less evil, Iron Man vision, when he looks at things through his helmet he often sees information overlayed on top of the scene in front of him. There's actually a variety of technologies used to achieve this—it's a pretty broad field, with a lot of different technologies trying to achieve this overlay.

Olson: I've messed with a lot of augmented reality experiences, and they tend to be (at least the one's I've tried) a bit unsatisfying and kind of novel, have a kind of novelty factor. Use it once, kinda cool, but it's not really that useful. So what do you see are the current downsides of the current technology we're seeing.

Powers: I think that's a common experience, that there's a bit of novelty in trying out a new AR application, and then there's just something about it that just isn't quite satisfying or useful. What we think that is is really just the way people are going about augmented reality on consumer devices today is by relying on the compass, and the GPS, and the accelerometer to give the understanding of where the user is and what they're looking at.

And that works to some degree, but it tends to break down a lot. Compasses, specifically, are notoriously inaccurate if you're anywhere near a piece of metal, and if you're in a city (which is where these AR applications of today are particularly interesting) that's actually where compasses work the worst. And not to mention GPS works pretty terrible in urban canyons as well.

And so you get this jumpy experience where the information being overlayed bears no real correlation to the screen itself, or to the video feed itself, and so I think you get really confused. And then you start to think, is this really just better than looking at it on a map or maybe looking at some top-down view where everything isn't jumping around quite as much. That's the conclusion we've come to, that the current approach to augmented reality really lacks this true correspondence between virtual information and the real world. And until you can address that, the user experience is going to be jumpy, it's going to be floaty, it's going to be frustrating, and so you're not going to use it.

In fact, even if you just turn on the compass function on the iPhone 3GS, you can get frustrated by that just because it isn't pointing in the right direction. And i think Apple realized that as well, and they made it so that compass feature wasn't on by default because they knew users were going to get a little bit frustrated by it. Those approaches just don't get you to the point where AR is truly intuitive and useful.

Olson: So that being said, what is your vision for the future of augmented reality?

Reddy: In our vision, we see computer vision specifically as the way to bridge the gap between this user experience. I think if you take that technology and advance it far enough, it enables pixel-accurate augmentation, which means you can easily maintain the illusion of virtual objects existing in the real world, meaning if there's a virtual character on a tabletop they don't jump around as you move your phone around, or move your devices around. That's what we see as the future in the sense of bridging that gap.

Olson: Can you give any use cases for that kind of technology?

Powers: Sure. In one example of a very relevant use case, especially in the context of RedLaser, is product visualization or product preview. You can imagine pointing your camera at your living room and seeing what it would look like if you had a certain model of couch over in the corner, or if you point your camera at your kitchen counter and you can see what a new espresso machine would look like if you had it on the counter there.

And to the extent that that can be a realistic experience, it'll allow you to maybe feel confident with ordering things online that you normally would have to go into a store to see. Especially when you think about furniture, everybody really has to see it typically before they buy it. But with augmented reality, particularly very accurate positioning, you can start to get comfortable with doing that kind of stuff.

Another example that we think about a lot is in gaming. You can imagine pointing a camera at a tabletop and playing a game where there's creatures running around your table, jumping off of real-world objects and doing things like that. So you can create a game experience where the real world is actually kind of the level, so we think there're some interesting things there.

You can think of a lot of other examples like outdoor navigation. One of the examples that we've posted on our blog is a video showing how you could overlay the route that someone can take to get from point A to point B on top of their video feed. This is being done in some sense, if you think about it, in car navigation systems. It shows you the route in front of you, but it's not really showing you on top of the actual video feed. At the point where we can actually show it on top of a real video feed, it becomes very, very tangible, very easy to see and follow, whereas sometimes looking at a street name on a screen and then trying to figure out how that matches up with the street in front of you can be confusing.

But again, until we can get those very precise overlays, it's almost worse to try to overlay it and tell you the wrong direction. So better augmented reality navigation is coming, and that's an application I think is interesting.

Reddy: One idea that a lot of people will bring up to us is the idea that you guys should build an app where you hold your phone up to somebody's face and it recognizes it and gives you information on them. But I just don't think that's going to happen until we have heads-up displays because you can imagine going up to somebody and trying to take a picture of their face while holding your phone up to their face as you try to recognize them. It's kind of a ridiculous user experience there. It's definitely possible in the future once we get some sort of glasses that can overlay information.

Olson: Sounds pretty exciting, I'll be looking forward to what you all come up with. It's been great talking to you guys, Vikas and Jeff, thanks so much for the interview.

Powers: Thank you.

Vikas: It was a pleasure.

Am I going to ditch my iPhone for a Puma phone? No. I am, however, really impressed by how Puma has chosen to enter a space that’s already way over-saturated. In an industry full of me-too-ing, they clearly recognized that the only chance they have to make any mark is to come to market with something genuinely different and from the looks of these demos and screenshots, they’ve done just that. This is evident from the memorable (and very well-branded) UI, the playfulness that permeates the OS and even some of the hardware additions:

That might be thanks to some of the silly stuff like a calculator that teases you when you try an operation it deems too trivial, a pet puma on the device called Dylan (who shows up on-screen when you leave your handset untouched for a while), and an audio player with a turntable you can actually scratch—but the real draw is probably the solar panel around back.

In a lot of ways, Puma is showing up manufacturers that have been making phones for years by demonstrating how even the little guy can make a splash if he’s willing to take a chance.

Read more about it over at engadget.

Here's a case of an interesting new capability made possible by an even more interesting bit of science. The BBC recently reported that "hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm's material that exploits a quantum physics trick." The UX/IxD possibilities enabled by adding a pressure dimension to touch interactions are as numerous as they are exciting.

This is accomplished using a material called Quantum Tunnelling Composite (QTC). As it turns out, QTC has been around since 1996, and is being developed by Peratech Ltd. The sensing capabilities of QTC extend beyond just touch. From Peratech's website:

Peratech has come up with a very interesting collection of possible applications of their technology—definitely worth your time to peruse. I apologize if this is beginning to read like a Peratech press release, and we usually try to avoid drawing so much from a corporate website, but there's so much fascinating stuff on their site that UX/IxD folks should know about.

The science behind QTC is intriguing, as it relies on some Star Trek-esque quantum mechanical concepts. Here's a brief rundown by the BBC:

The composite works by using spiky conducting nanoparticles, similar to tiny medieval maces, dispersed evenly in a polymer.

None of these spiky balls actually touch, but the closer they get to each other, the more likely they are to undergo a quantum physics phenomenon known as tunnelling… Simply put, quantum mechanics says that there is a tiny probability that a particle shot at a wall will pass through it in an effect known as tunnelling.

Similarly, the material that surrounds the spiky balls acts like a wall to electric current. But as the balls draw closer together, when squashed or deformed by a finger's pressure, the probability of a charge tunnelling through increases. The net result is that pressing harder on the material leads to a smooth increase in the current through it.

Full article here, images courtesy of Peratech.

For science geeks, there's a more complete explanation (again, with apologies) on Peratech's site.

QTC already has some mainstream commercial applications, including in PANiQ wearable electronics by QIO Systems, and in a "Tier 1 mobile phone" (Engadget) using components from Samsung Electro-Mechanics. I'm excited to see broader-scale uses of the QTC technology that makes fuller use of its ability to detect the position and pressure of inputs, especially coupled with haptic feedback. After the mild letdown of the iPad, this is something to really look forward to.

In his iPhone Resolution video, information design expert Edward Tufte praised the information density and content resolution of the device. Known for evaluating Web interface designs by counting the quantity of links present, Tufte is a big proponent of clarifying information by adding detail, not "computer administrative debris."

Computer administrative debris reduces information resolution and steals content space away from the user. The iPhone brilliantly suppresses much admin debris. The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface, not computer administrative debris.

In particular, Tufte called out the iPhone's Photos application as an example of clarifying information by adding detail. "In this collection of photographs, many information elements are arranged on the same surface as the user scans 150 images arranged in a two dimensional small multiple format."

With this in mind, it's interesting to compare the information density of the iPhone's photos experience with Microsoft's Window Phone 7 Series experience. The iPhone's first screen concisely lists available photo sets and with one tap drops people into a dense grid of images where the user interface is minimal and transparent enough to enable the entire screen to display content.

The Windows Phone 7 Series begins with a top-level navigation menu consisting of three options. A quick tap on "albums" brings up a similar listing of images but with substantially more interface elements. It's also a bit unclear if all the pictures in an album will be listed in this view or if another tap on the album title is required (adding a third step to the navigation process).

The differences in information resolution between the iPhone and Windows Phone are even more stark in the application store features. In addition to seven ways of finding and filtering apps, Apple's App Store displays four apps complete with icon, title, publishing, average rating, number of ratings, and price.

Marketplace on the Windows Phone features one application with an icon, title, and one-line description. One touch gesture (drag/flick) later, there's a menu consisting of six items. Tapping on "applications" takes you to another featured application. One more drag/flick and you are finally seeing three applications you can download. Contrast the amount of information present on this screen (the fourth in the process) with the amount shown on the iPhone's initial App Store display.

It will be interesting to see if these differences in information resolution have an impact on the overall user experience of using the Windows Phone 7 Series.

While the Windows Phone 7 Series user interface may not be optimized for high information resolution, it does make interesting use of teases and transitions, which I wrote about today.

This article was originally posted on Luke's blog, Functioning Form.

Adobe is releasing AIR for smartphone platforms, starting with Blackberry and Android. After announcing that Flash CS5 would allow developer to build iPhone apps, Adobe is now pushing its platform onto other devices. While purists may squirm at the idea of building apps with something like AIR it will allow true multi-platform mobile development by the large and already heavily invested Flash development community. From Gizmodo:

Android's the first to get AIR, but WebOS, BlackBerrry and Windows Mobile are slated to get it too. And remember Adobe's initiative to push Flash apps onto the App Store for the iPhone? Apps developed for that will work just fine in AIR on other phones, letting Adobe have their iPhone cake and eat it too.

TechCrunch also wrote about this:

The bane of all mobile app developers is the need to rewrite the same app over and over again for different devices: the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Nokia, Windows Mobile. Adobe is positioning its Flash platform (which includes the Flash player, AIR, developer tools, and media servers) as the write-once, deploy-anywhere solution for both the mobile Web and apps.

Via Engagdet: "The phone operating system does away with pretty much every scrap of previous mobile efforts from Microsoft, from the look and feel down to the underlying code—everything is brand new." Video:

Microsoft has officially unveiled its new mobile OS and wiped its slate entirely clean of the oft derided Windows Mobile platform. New code, new name, and a new experience that builds on that of the Zune. It's great to see Microsoft really do its own thing here and by the looks of it do it well. Looks like we may have three viable smartphone OSes now.

Microsoft's new UI makes the iPhone's actually look out-of-date and it's fantastic to see so much courage and innovation from them. I would actually be more excited about a tablet with this OS than the iPad. The official video:

Check out the official site, too.

A man could write for days and not say all there is to say about optimizing a UI for multitouch and tablet use. So I'll limit my observations for now to a few specific cases having to do with the mouse, which has influenced UIs so deeply, and for so long, that it's hard for people to imagine how to do anything substantial without one. This is, in fact, one of the reasons it is taking so long for a tablet to emerge. And although a tablet OS must be more than a touch-enabled desktop OS, it makes more sense to start with more and pare it down, if one cannot start from scratch.

A lot of what I want to say was actually nicely summed up in this video by Clayton Miller, author of 10/GUI, a prototype gesture-based multitouch interface. I had been mulling over many of these design ideas when I saw the video, at which point I spent some time cursing myself for not proposing such a GUI myself. Please watch, if you haven’t seen this already:

Of course, he assumes a bit of an ideal situation. If ten fingers are interacting with the device, what's holding it? What if I need to switch the left and right windows but I'm standing up, holding this thing in my hand? Not only that, but there is a huge amount of noise when you have multiple inputs on a capacitive device. Fingers are resting here and there—is that garbage data, or is the user holding that window down with his little finger? These are problems that the Microsoft Surface team assures me are not easily solved with thoughtful design, but in fact take hundreds and hundreds of hours of user-based testing and experimentation. 10/GUI has some very interesting proposals, but raises questions as well.

On with my own recommendations:

One of the well-known facts about mouse-driven interfaces is that the corners are the easiest places to go to. The mouse moves easily along the edges of the display and gets "trapped" there. It's the reason we have our menus, start buttons, and so on in those places. They're even optimized for right-handed people: you usually have more freedom of movement in the leftward direction since that's the way a right hand and arm grasping a mouse will naturally curl.

Furthermore, in mouse-based UI, it is safe to assume that if something is being interacted with (a window being moved, an icon being dragged), it is happening with a fair amount of precision and care. There is no need to put the trash can in the corner, really, except to keep it out of the way; once I pick up a folder to throw it away, a visual feedback loops lets me guide it easily to wherever the trash can is.

Last, because the mouse stays in the same place if you don't touch it, you can make the tiny adjustments necessary to, say, grab a one-pixel border to resize a window. If you miss with your initial mouse movement, you can instantly and easily adjust. It's a bit like the way we our visual system looks at things: you "cast" your eye into the general area of what you're going to look at, and then you more or less automatically seek out the specific object you were aiming for with a second movement. This tendency has been borne out in countless experiences, and can be relied on as a sort of axiomatic user behavior.

Note of these UI principles—principles which have informed the development and control method in a whole generation of OSes—works in a multi-touch, tablet-oriented OS, or else is not nearly as effective.

First, the corners on tablets are actually the least-accessible places. This is not so with the Surface, actually, because it's gigantic, but with smartphones and anything under ~12", the corners are no good. For one thing, edges are generally bad on capacitive touchscreens and there are of course two edges in a corner. If you can't count on precision input, it's best to assume it won’t be there and plan around it. Even if you could, your control implement (finger or fingers) don't automatically skirt the edge of the display. This makes getting to a corner a precision affair—not a great one to be sure, but a far cry from the automatic cornering of a bounded mouse cursor. This hasn't stopped a lot of people from putting things in the corners of tiny screens; sometimes there's not enough real estate to do anything else. Sad, but true.

Second, precision in general is not to be relied upon when you are dealing with differently sized fingers, shaky hands, and perhaps most important of all, occluded visual feedback. I can't see where I'm putting a file if my finger's on it. I may only be able to reliably drop it within a circle of diameter x, and depending on whether you use your pinky, thumb, or what have you, x may be quite large. Humans can, however, be counted on to move things in some direction—if we must move something left, then left it goes.

Third, there can be no secondary movement with coarse touch input. Sure, you can try again and again, but there's no way of telling where you're touching until you touch it. There's no passive cursor, in other words, that lets you place your pointer precisely and then touch down only when you're exactly on target. Moving your finger after you've put it down can tell you where you need to be, but if you think about it, you just performed a drag, and forcing users to perform an unrelated action in order to execute their intended one is plain bad design.

The consequences to a UI are clear: de-emphasize corners, implement natural gestures everywhere, and make actions intuitive enough that precision is unnecessary. Easier said than done, of course, but still one asks oneself: why hasn't anyone done this? Well, the ready answer is that consumers aren't asking for it. But as I believe I've shown, consumers aren't asking for it because no one has done it yet! It's a common enough story in tech, and has led to the creation of many now-familiar device classes. Game consoles, MP3 players, laptops, and smartphones all got off to a slow start because for years people were making them poorly and thinking that was the extent of the device's potential. The breakout device is rarely the first in its class. Certainly that is the case with tablets, and whether the Apple Tablet is the breakout device or not, I believe that the potential is huge and almost completely untapped. With luck that will change soon.

[At this point I stopped writing and woke early the next day to cover the Apple Tablet, which I would soon know as the iPad. That part of this story you're probably familiar with.]

Unfortunately, the iPad was a bit of a letdown. No surprise there; anything less than a winged iPod that lays golden eggs would be a letdown considering the hype this device has engendered. But it was more of a letdown to me, since I secretly hoped they would shock us all with something truly new and not merely grow the iPhone interface in such a practical and predictable way.

However, it is still an effective tablet device, even if it's not the full-scale, full-power tablet OS we all wanted. Giving a tour of the iPad interface right now would be both useless and sort of ridiculous, since I haven't even touched one. But there are many cues in the videos and screenshots that suggest that this is a definite step towards a real tablet OS. Not as many as I'd have liked, but enough to warrant description.

The similarity of the iPad's interface to the iPhone's is no accident, and it's a good thing in some ways. The buttons are the size of "real" buttons, have a regular shape, and rarely touch each other. And Apple's avoidance of windows means they get to use the screen real estate very effectively (if inefficiently, for would-be multitaskers). The relaxed feel of the email, contacts, and calendar apps, with their big, distinct touch areas and natural interface show how good an app can be on a touch-based device of this size. Maps, similarly, shows how by removing all the buttons and scrollbars results in a more intuitive app when you use your fingers to manipulate it. Steve Jobs has repeatedly said that Google Maps is better on an iPhone than on your computer, and it’s even better on the iPad.

There are exceptions. Really information-rich things like iTunes or the YouTube app, as well as, I'm sure, some web pages, have borderless interactive areas and tiny buttons shoved into corners.

Apple has been careful to limit the device to things they know it can do well, though, so few real gaffes were on display. Compare to the HP tablet shown here. It's a veritable gallery of elementary (so to speak) mistakes.

Why are there two very thin scroll bars on a touchscreen device? Did no one tell them that the whole reason we desire touchscreens is to escape things like scroll bars? Microsoft has a lot of work to do. If they’re smart, they’ll quadruple the budget of Surface and the Zune and Windows Mobile teams and tell them to make something amazing.

Thus far I've discussed the actual UI elements, but what about the way you interact with them? This was the truly disappointing part for me. The ability to use two, three, and four-finger gestures, short and long taps, and other benefits of direct digital interaction are pretty scarce. Sure, there are some specific gestures in, say, Keynote, but come on… I have more multitouch capability on the laptop I'm writing this piece on, so I know that Apple has the imagination for it (a piece here on UX Magazine showed many intriguing proposals), but they decided to phone it in here. To be fair, many of these gestures lose their meaning when applied to a monoprocess device like the iPad (I just made the word up, do you like it? It means you're limited more or less to a single action or application at a time), but that doesn't mean they can't find a use for them. How come I can't hold four fingers on the screen to pull up my favorites? Three fingers up and down always controls volume, maybe? Where are the widgets I can summon by using both thumbs and forefingers to draw a square?

The fact is that what Apple has done is merely make an extremely elegant last-generation tablet. The larger screen, which elevates the device to a new kind of object that is interacted with in a fundamentally different way, is simply used to show more of the same interface they've used for years. They haven't advanced one inch, but rather satisfied themselves with keeping it simple and making a nice little device on which to browse the Web. We can't really blame them for this; they never said it would do any of the things we convinced ourselves it would. And to be perfectly honest, I want one, and I’m betting anybody who handles one will want one too.

As I finalize the edits on this piece, I read rumors that Apple is preparing a second, more powerful device like the iPad but better and more powerful. That sounds like the desperate fantasy of a despondent fanboy to me. Apple is too savvy to put out such an underwhelming product when they have another coming down the pipe, one closer to what they knew was expected. Not only that, but their stated goal (to put something out that is, in capability and price, between a mobile and laptop device) shows that such a device would violate the parameters they set for themselves.

As Jobs said at the beginning of the presentation, though, there is a third class of portable device between phones and laptops. Alas, the iPad does not exemplify it. It may, however, alert people to the existence, and more importantly, the potential of the position it was meant to fill.

As an exploration into the creation of a true tablet computing device, I wrote the piece you are about to read, which, while originally a single 3500-word monster, has been split into two fairly coherent parts in order to spare you a headache. The first part is an examination of current devices, why they are not "true" tablets, and why they have not caught on. It was written the day before Apple's "Creation" event. The second part, which includes some hopes for a revolutionary tablet OS, and how they are (not) reflected in the iPad, was written after. I thought it would be interesting to compare my predictions with the reality. The tablet didn't turn out as I hoped, but the lessons learned are no less valuable.

The main trouble in visualizing an interface for a tablet device is lowered expectations. This stems from the lack of true tablet devices available to the consumer. Of course there are convertible laptops and a few tablets here and there, but they all share the same crippling flaw: they run an OS that was not designed for tablet use. The limited resources of a physically small, low-power computer have restricted them to either running Windows XP, CE, or some sort of heavily accoutered mobile OS. There are small exceptions here and there in trade devices like medical tablets or field and military devices, but by and large these are still running on one of the OSes mentioned, and are likely even running minimally modified desktop software. Thus my assertion that there are no "true" tablet devices available at this moment (which is to say, January 26th), and although I do not know what Apple may be announcing tomorrow, I think that it has a fair chance of being the first. As I write this, I know I could still be wrong, and that gives me no small amount of anxiety.

The lowered expectations I mention, then, are those that result from a decade of being exposed to nothing but half-thought-out compromises in devices of this class. One can be forgiven a certain lack of imagination if the players in the industry have worked hard at scouring it from one. On the other hand, people are happy to up-size something like the iPhone or an e-book reader, foreseeing only gains in screen real estate and not stopping to think of the ergonomic consequences of moving an OS designed for a 3.5" screen to one with four times the space. Therefore it is that most people expect too little in one way or another—and will not have the dust shaken from their skulls without a plain demonstration of what is possible. This period of low expectations is an excellent time to strike with an innovative device, as the iPhone proved, for there is a greater delta between consumer expectations expect and what you provide.

Before entering into fantasy and making a wish list for tablets of the future, let's examine more closely the proto-tablets from today. Why haven't they caught on? Well, what exactly is the benefit of a tablet device to the average consumer? There isn't one apart from simple portability, because full-size OSes are designed around the mouse and keyboard, and are more easily navigable with those tools. Sure, it's nice to be able to touch the buttons on an ATM, but is it actually more convenient to open your folders and move things around with your fingers? Certainly not in Windows XP, though Vista included some touch out of the box and Windows 7 more so. And let's not forget that the resistive touchscreens that first made tablets and convertibles touch-enabled are limited in precision when using your fingers, and limited in versatility when using a stylus. After all, what is a stylus but a means of simulating a cursor? Capacitive screens are less cursor-aping, but also less precise, which requires accommodations I will detail later.

I have tried several UMPCs, slates, and tablets, and all suffered from the same fundamental usability issues. And while these issues may be negligible to, say, an IT worker who needs a compact full XP device to troubleshoot servers, the average user will find the devices clunky, slow, and difficult to read. Just so I'm clear: it's not that these devices don't function, but that they kind of limp along and no one minds because they've never seen a tablet run.

On the other end of the spectrum, though there are fewer of these, you have tablet or slate devices that use a handheld OS that has been modified to work on a device larger than a handheld. I suppose there are more than I think, given that many embedded devices and kiosks run on Windows CE or some such. And I have to admit that CE was designed to be a portable OS. But let's be honest: when you think of an internet tablet for today's consumers, Windows CE is the last thing on your mind. It's two or three generations old, and far too dilapidated to be restored to any popular use.

Android is now the hot OS to "grow" into larger devices. It certainly has more promise than Windows CE, but the fact is it was designed by Google to be a mobile phone OS, and its apps and native interface designed with that in mind. It will serve very well as the foundation OS for other devices, but tablets are, I believe, beyond its effective reach. And they were never intended to be, really: Chrome OS is much more suited to a medium-format device with a wireless data connection. Any Android tablets you see now were a backup parachute deployed by tech companies that didn't want to bank on Microsoft due to fees, yet couldn't wait for Chrome OS or a truly layman-friendly Ubuntu or the like. They'll throw Android under the bus as soon as Chrome OS lets them.

It's unfortunate that we haven't had any popular tablets before now, but the growing popularity of smartphones has at least set a floor for what's expected. The big players, of course, can either aim for what's expected (Lenovo has an interesting convertible in the U1, but it's firmly rooted in existing tech and the UI is weird) or shoot for the moon.

And shooting for the moon is necessarily a lot of work. Innovation may be required. That pretty much rules out 90% of the industry. Apple's still in there, though they will almost certainly lean on the iPhone for UI cues, and Microsoft is still there as well, or at least the subdivision of Microsoft responsible for the Courier. I complained to a Windows Mobile guy the other day that we have seen neither hide nor hair of Courier since the big leak, and he got quite evasive, so I'm going to guess it hasn't been canned. At any rate, what needs to happen to make a tablet work for the average person on the street?

The Surface is a great jumping-off point for tablets. Anybody who's played with one can tell you how intuitive, how fun, and how seamless the touch-based interface is. The project, which has grown from a handful of guys in the early 2000s to a full-blown division of Microsoft, also largely underpins Windows 7's multitouch capability. But you may notice that Windows 7, while more touch-friendly than its precursors, is still very much a desktop OS. The way I understand it, work on the Surface mainly let Microsoft create an OS that would be open to being touched without relying on it. You know: creating standard behavior for things like dragging a scroll bar in both directions at once, or implementing momentum and friction for windows being tossed around. Good, but a tablet OS is made from the ground up to be touched.

Apple, too: the iPhone and iPod touch are what most people will think of if you were to say "internet tablet" or "slate." But they're still mobile experiences, and Apple's whole design philosophy precludes many of the UI elements from being reused in a larger context. I read a post on Gizmodo about how thumb reach will influence placement of buttons, docks, and so on with the Apple Tablet. I thought it ridiculous; if Apple wanted to make a bigger iPhone, they would have done so a long time ago. [later: oops]

A 10.6-inch screen, as the tablet is rumored to have, presents a completely different ergonomic landscape than a palm-sized device. Furthermore, even on the iPhone, nobody uses their thumbs for any precision work or gestures—not only are they big and clumsy compared to every other digit, but they obscure much of the screen and often lead to accidental presses with the palm while you're reaching for the top. Any problem the iPhone has with thumb-based navigation, an Apple Tablet would have far worse. And Apple, rather than beat their head against it and design an absurd UI revolving around using your thumbs to navigate a large screen, will simply move on.

It is for that reason that I think that the tablet will be far more focused on one-handed, multi-finger gestures. They've pioneered their popular use with their excellent trackpads—it's valuable IP and Apple would do well to leverage it. Besides, they want consumers to think (that is, if I speculate further) they're using a fully-powered, compact Mac, not a souped up iPhone. The latter case would be bad product positioning, degrading the value of both devices.

That forms the first part of this expedition into creating a tablet OS. The second part will be published on Friday, containing some specific limitations of touch-based UIs and some suggestions on accommodating them, as well as a breakdown of the iPad's strengths and shortcomings in this regard.

A few weeks ago, Fred Wilson dictated a post on his blog, A VC, using his Nexus One phone. He also discovered Swype, an alternative text input system, which now has an unofficial Android app. As usual, the comment threads on A VC were very active and had lots of thoughts about the future (and past) of voice and keyboard input.

When I talk about human-computer interaction, I regularly say that in 20 years we will look back on the mouse and keyboard as input devices the same way we currently look back on punch cards.

While I don't have a problem with mice and keyboards, I think we are locked into a totally sucky paradigm. The whole idea of having a software QWERTY keyboard on an iPhone amuses me to no end. Yeah, I've taught myself to type pretty quickly on it, but when I think of the information I'm trying to get into the phone, typing seems so totally outmoded.

Last year at CES "gestural input" was all the rage in the major CE booths (Sony, Samsung, LG, Panasonic, etc.). Translating from CES-speak, this was primarily things like "changing the channel on a TV using a gesture." This year the silly basic gesture crap was gone and replaced with IP everywhere (very important in my mind) and 3D (very cute, but not important). And elsewhere there was plenty of 2D multitouch, most notably front-and-center in the Microsoft and Intel booths. I didn't see much speech and I saw very little 3D UI stuff. One exception was the Sony booth, where Organic Motion (a portfolio company of my VC firm, Foundry Group) put up a last-minute installation for Sony to show off markerless 3D motion capture.

So while speech and 2D multitouch are going to be an important part of all of this, it's a tiny part. If you want to envision what things could be like a decade from now, read Daniel Suarez's incredible books, Daemon and Freedom™. Or watch the following video that I just recorded from my glasses and uploaded to my computer (warning: cute dog alert).

This article was originally published on Brad's blog, Feld Thoughts.

Welcome the coverage, refresh this page or follow us on Twitter for live updates.

Recap: The technology seems quite impressive but not revolutionary, it's essentially a bigger iPhone with more processing power. We appreciate the engineering that was required to make this happen but the many issues that other tablet devices face (such as the on-screen keyboard) do not seem to have been resolved in any meaningful way. This is essentially a collection of new, finely crafted apps. The UI is very Apple but totally adapted to a tablet form-factor. Great work on that front but this is basically the iPhone OS and no sign of multi-tasking or camera. Would have loved a front facing one to video conference.

Screen seems to be getting rave reviews, very clear, very easy to read. Response speed seems fantastic too. "Gorgeous" is what we're hearing. So a great device for sure and definitely something that could be useful for when you can't use a laptop but it's still difficult for us to recommend this as a must-have item.

This feels like a futuristic device, especially because it is so responsive and thin but in the real world we don't see a huge need for it. The iPod made listening to digital music work and the iPhone was quite possibly the first real smart phone but this doesn't really seem to give us something that isn't handled adequately by existing devices in some form or another.

It really has the feel of a gadget, a great, beautiful, futuristic gadget but one nonetheless. Things may change as we get to play with the units in 2 months but for now even Steve hasn't managed to manufacture the need for this in my life.

11:35am - comment: And that's it. No new iPhone OS or iLife which were both expected by many today; and definitely no new iPhone with touch-sensitive casing. I think today will be remembered for all the things we didn't get. This leaves a lot of room for other tablets, especially e-ink, low-powered ones like the Kindle which just do the reading right. I think we can expect many iPad versions of iPhone apps which is great but it will be a surprise if the iPad sales are even anywhere close to those of iPods, iPhones or MacBooks. This feel more like the MacBook air which was cool and impressive but nothing more than a vanity product for Apple. We knew we would be either blown away or underwhelmed by today's announcement. Unfortunately it's the latter.

11:32am: "This is a magical device, at a breakthrough price." Not really and not really. The iPhone was all about those holy crap moments but this is just a bigger iPhone with a smaller potential market.

11:30am - comment: The fact that Apple has built a dock with a "real" keyboard shows that they don't have full confidence in their on-screen keyboard. If touch-based input was good enough they wouldn't have had to but it seems that even Apple can't solve that one. It's just an odd thing to hold unless you hold it with both hands or like a notepad, which means you'd need a (shock, horror) pen. After slamming the stylus repeatedly with the iPhone launch they weren't going to do that.

11:25am: Designer Yve talking about a "magical device" but seems like a lot of internet chatter seems underwhelmed. To be fair to Apple they didn't promise anything and most of the hype was generated by the same audience who now seems disappointed. Steve Job's reality distortion field is in full effect but not really delivering the wow moment we were expecting.

11:23am: Available in 60 days which should give you some time to save if you really feel there's a huge need in your life for a tablet. Hardware isn't at all innovative (but then the iPhone isn't a bad framework to base it on). Dock with keyboard allows you to rest the iPad and type without having to do thumb yoga.

11:18am: The price is $499 for the 16GB base-model (without 3G) which is not terribly expensive but a bit of a downer considering how much the 3G connectivity was just hyped. The minimum cost with with 3G is $629. They have 6 models of the thing at 16GB, 32GB and 64GB with or without 3G. No upgradable memory. Most expensive unit is $829 which takes it into the range of a decent notebook and even Apple's own MacBook.

11:16am - content: Do we NEED this? We seem to think there's definitely a "want" but not a "need". Looks like reading may be great. It may change the way I go to the bathroom however.

11:13am: 3G built in. $29.99/month for unlimited data in the US.

11:11am: Somehow data entry into spreadsheets using touch doesn't sound like the best idea. However, there's a place for the device in areas where you walk around and need to take notes like healthcare, stock-keeping, etc... Not really sexy but it's light and yet big enough to be useable. Still, expect to see this in hip boardrooms everywhere. We hear Jack Bauer may be using one in one of the later episodes of 24.

11:07am: Phil Shiller is demoing iWork. Looks great but once again as you would expect iWork to look if Apple designed it for a giant iPhone. Don't get me wrong, this is the most exciting looking tablet out there but it everyone here isn't running out to get one just yet. Tablets are a hard sell.

11:03am - comment: Twitter seems to be running slow under the load. Apple's marketing momentum seems unstoppable at this stage. The tablet hardware seems good but nothing groundbreaking. Apple is pushing the app design which we already know they're good at. At this stage this is not much more than a really large iPhone but there is definitely a market for it, at the right price. We're still worried that the keyboard will be hard to use as the tablet needs to be held in a way that makes typing difficult.

11:00am: After showing a very slick reading UI as well as the new bookstore they are now discussing iWork for the iPad. iWork includes Keynote (presentations), Pages (word processing) and Numbers (spreadsheets) and is essentially Apple's answer to Microsoft Office.

10:55am: Steve is back and done talking about third-party apps. Now's the time to talk about the Kindle or how Apple will attempt to beat them at their own game. Enter, iBook, a first-party reading app which looks as slick as is to be expected. The page looks like a page, the bookshelf like a bookshelf. Looks like it could be comfortable reading on this even though it isn't an e-ink screen.

10:50am: More apps -- painting app looks very impressive and useful for the doodlers out there. Interface feels organic and responsive. Need for Speed looks slick and quick. Games are being pushed a lot.

10:40am - comment: Reading on this could be the big selling point, the screen looks very crisp and browsing intuitive. The rest of the apps (e-mail, etc...) are handled well by iPhone and MacBooks. This together with the gaming could really sell this thing.

10:35am: New York Times looks just like the paper version with embedded videos. Columns, inset images, etc... Looks like there's still a future for DTP. 

10:30am: Some tech info: it's half and inch thick, 1Ghz processor, 9.7 inch display, Wifi, Bluetooth, compass, accelerometer, 10 hours of battery life, 1 month stand-by. How much will this thing cost?

10:25am - comment: Everything that has been shown up to now looks pretty much as expected, even the tablet design which is basically a stretched iPhone. Buttons are bigger, font sizes have been adjusted. Videos look great, photos look great. Our guess is that it needs more to become a must-have device vs something that fits uncomfortably between your phone and notebook.

10:20am: Apps and more apps. E-mail, photos and browsing look slick and as you'd expect from Apple. Experience between iPhone and computer. iTunes looks nice and tweaked for the form-factor.

10:15am - comment: There was a "missing plug-in" box when Steve went to the NY Times website. No Flash it seems. Odd they let that slide. We're a bit underwhelmed, this looks like a big iPhone and the keyboard looks like it may be awkward to use.

10:05am: Steve is on stage. "Apple is the largest mobile device company in the world".

10:10am: It's called the iPad (as many suspected) and looks similar to an iPhone with that single button at the bottom, a relatively thick border. Think MacBook Pro without the keyboard. OS UI looks like a mixture of iPhone and Mac OS X.

We spoke with Karel Barnoski, an award-winning audio designer who has integrated sound into products and experiences ranging from stoves to cameras. Karel shares his keen insights about how the language of sound relates to interaction design and UX, and about the power of audio to connect users to brands and products.

Q: Karel, your company, 2octave, is very unique. Can you give our readers an overview of your work and how it relates to user experience and interaction design?

A: 2octave specializes in product sonification, audio branding, and audio strategy. We design audio as an integral part of the user experience. Our work is tied to how people interact with the world around them, whether it's an environment, an interface, or a product like an appliance or camera.

Sound is a critical aspect of the user experience that's been sorely overlooked. Strategic use of sound can improve a product's usability and enhance the impact of a brand. Sound appeals to our emotions, and can be leveraged to connect users to a brand even when they aren't looking at a product.

Q: Can you tell us about your background and how you got involved with this field?

A: The seed was planted when I took my first piano lesson at the age of 8. I'm 31 now, so that's about 23 years of playing piano—classical, jazz, rock, blues, etc.

In college, I majored in visual design and minored in music theory. I combined my visual and musical ideas for many of my class assignments, which is when my two interests became one. After college, I started working at Kodak as a visual interaction designer, but there were many initiatives at Kodak that gave me the opportunity to design custom music, sound effects, branded pieces for kiosks, interactive Web applications, and product prototypes.

Q: From your perspective and experience, how much can sound impact a user's perception of a product, software application, or service?

A: Without getting too deep into human perceptual psychology, sound is perceived much in the same way as other stimuli. By manipulating sound you can effect the user's perception of an experience. Through sound, you can make a product be perceived as elegant, simple, complex, etc. Therefore, it's essential to design the audio experience parallel with the other aspects of the product, otherwise there might be a disconnect between the auditory and visual experience for the user.

If a product sounds elegant, users are going to perceive that product as elegant. If it sounds cheap and crude, like the sound was thrown in at the last minute, that's the way users are going to perceive the rest of the product.

Q: How and when do you get involved in the client relationship and how do you get customers to understand the business value of sound?

A: Establishing a relationship with a project's stakeholders generally starts with marketing and human factors. There are proven methodologies for how a sound is designed that leads to better usability of a product, and the same is true for return on investment. Most marketing folks I am engaged with understand the value of a well-designed product. Therefore, it's easy for them to see the importance of sound as piece of the product design puzzle.

Q: Can you give us some examples of your sound design successes both in terms of execution and from a business perspective?

A: The first example is an "Audio Brand Language" initiative I did for a major appliance manufacturer that was successful because it was validated through consumer testing. A set of branded audio assets was designed for a group of brands. Consumer testing results showed that the sounds were aligned with the attributes of each respective brand image.

Another example is Kodak's V-Series camera, which is considered the forerunner and leader of the Kodak Easy Share camera product line. When the series was first released, it was dubbed the "James Bond" camera. I worked with Kodak's creative team to design a sound experience that echoed the camera's sleek James Bond style. When you turn the camera on, the power-on sound reminds you of a James Bond movie soundtrack. All the functional sounds that communicate user actions are derived from that central theme, so the entire user experience is unified.

Q: Can you give us some examples of great sound experiences in different areas of our lives today?

A: The first experience that comes to mind is Guitar Hero because it's a perfect combination of sound and user interaction. Overall, video games have the best sound experiences found in any product today.

As far as devices go, the simplest yet most effective sound I've heard is the iPod click. Without looking at the interface, the click tells me if I'm going up or down in a menu. It also increases and decreases in volume as you change the volume of the current song. It's easy to take the click for granted until you turn it off and try to navigate.

Skype is a good example of effective sound in a software application. It has a playful feel without being overly cartoonish, cliched, or annoying. When I use Skype, the sound of an incoming call never seems to bother me. Remember this: when you use a product, any product, if you turn off the sound, it wasn't well designed.

In regards to environmental sound experiences, I think of the tunnel between Terminals B at C at O'Hare Airport. There, at one of the busiest airports in the world where people are under all kinds of stress, I always feel better after I ride the walkway through that tunnel. It's almost spa-like with ambient sounds cross fading in and out as the user travels down the tunnel.

Finally, there's the classic audio signature of the Harley Davidson exhaust system. When you hear that rumbling sound, you know it's a Harley.

Q: Are organizations looking at product sonification as a competitive advantage in terms of user experience?

A: Absolutely. It's been a slow process, but in the global marketplace, organizations continually seek a competitive edge, and they are starting to see sound as a medium that has been undervalued. Marketers and designers are starting to see sound as an important point of differentiation.

Look at mobile devices, appliances and cars—any product that a potential buyer can interact with at the point of sale. I've seen a refrigerator in a showroom that was not working, so there was no audio or visual feedback, not even a hum. Next to it was a similar model at the same price point that was plugged in and working. Naturally, more shoppers were opening and closing that product's door. When more people interact with products at the point of sale, the potential for selling goes up.

Q: Beyond some of the business drivers, what are the significant technological factors behind this revolution, and how do they affect your work?

A: In recent years, audio technology has improved similar to computer processing. As a result, the price per unit continues to decrease. In mass production, even minimal savings per unit equates to millions of dollars saved.

I categorize audio playback technology into three main groups: pure tones, MIDI, digital audio. The cheapest and simplest solution is pure tones, like a monophonic chime created by a piezo. The second group is MIDI. MIDI technology is flexible and efficient. MIDI files take up very little memory on a device.

Digital audio is the third audio playback technology group. Unlike pure tones and MIDI, digital audio files, such as MP3, allow for endless sonic possibilities. Think of the Intel sound, which has 300 layers of sound, and how dynamic that sounds compared to a pure tone.

Sound technology is on a bell curve and is ramping up so fast it seems like every two or three years there's a new compression scheme that's half the size and twice the quality, and it's cheaper.

Q: Do your techniques for conceiving and developing sound concepts parallel the visual design and creative development processes that would be familiar to our readers?

A: 75% of my process is a one-to-one correlation to that of a visual designer. Just like working in the visual design process, I study the requirements and digest the creative brief and overall direction. Then I sit down and make audio sketches, just like a designer might make on paper.

Sound sketching for me means working quickly to let ideas flow in a stream of consciousness. I come up with a hundred different quick melodic ideas and then start to refine them into sets of themes to recognize patterns—almost like an image board to refine colors and shapes, but with music, it's about timbre, tempo, and other attributes that make sound unique. Next, I choose sketches that align with the overall creative direction of the project, make iterations, and take "comp" to the design team. Once we agree on a final theme, I build the audio assets that go into the product or interface.

Q: How does your process differ from the visual design process?

A: As far as the creative process goes, the differences are slim. But, when you get into the production end of it, there are huge differences in the technical aspect of the process. Obviously, the software and the techniques I use to produce the final assets are quite different. But the idea that you optimize your final assets for integration is the same. It's just that the tools are different to get to the final deliverable.

Q: Much of what you do is on the bleeding edge. What industries or verticals use product sonification most effectively?

A: There's an evolving need in appliances as they become more and more interactive. In general, the experience in one's home, especially in the kitchen, is an area that is growing fast. Another area I haven't worked in, but I think is going to be huge, is the medical field. There is room for improvement in patient care both from a usability and experience standpoint. This includes the sounds devices make, the way technicians retrieve information, and the like. I've got some good ideas of how this experience can be improved through sound.

Mobile devices, especially cell phones, are on the bleeding edge because they're based on communication through sound. Phones are small devices that demand high quality sound output. Therefore, more effort has been put into these products than, say, appliances. Automotive is also a growing market. As the interfaces in vehicles improve in audio playback and the types of interactions people are having increase in complexity, there is going to be a greater need for a cohesive experience with those interfaces that align with the brand image of the vehicle. Lastly, environments where there is a lot of secondary noise like airports, subways, and other mass transit systems are ripe for sound design. It's going to be a real challenge to improve those environmental situations from an audio perspective.

Q: What does the five-year horizon look like to you?

A: The big picture is really exciting. It's actually hard to imagine how far this field could go because, like computing, 10 years ago it was a totally different landscape. But, from a business perspective, as technology becomes cheaper and generates higher audio quality, I think more businesses will embrace audio as an integral part of their product design roadmap.

You're going to see more and more people get into the field of sonification and you're going to see the awareness and the quality improve. It's a revolution because a lot of this technology is so accessible. You don't necessarily need a music studio. You just need a laptop, software, and a good understanding of design to produce good results.

Karel, thank you very much for a fascinating conversation.

It's been really interesting for me, too.

Following up on our previous coverage of the buzzilicious Google phone, check out this TechCruch article that shows a leaked video (also available on YouTube) of Google's phone starting up.

Check out MobileCruch's article about Swype, an interesting touch text input method for Android, or just jump to their YouTube video demo of it.

Finally, that thin layer of skin oil that's always streaking up your touchscreen device has been transformed from an annoyance into a feature: typing glide lubrication.

If you were to draft a profile for a UX thought leader, you'd likely come up with something that closely resembled Kim Lenox. Known for resetting the perimeters of everyday problem solving, Kim has devoted her career to making life—if not the world—better through user experience design.

Fresh from a three-week European speaking tour, Kim spent an hour on the phone with Tim Wood of EffectiveUI. They spoke about one of Kim's passions: the art, science and philosophy of mobile UX design.

Wood: Before we jump into the interview, can you tell our readers about your professional background and what your role is at Adaptive Path?

Lenox: I am a senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path, one of the design leads. Basically, I will take a project from the very first sales call all the way through to completing the product. I will have the conversations with the clients and figure out what their objectives are and build out a proposal that's appropriate, and then take it all the way through to designing the product. If there's research involved, I'll probably do the research as well.

At Adaptive Path, we have design leads and we also have practitioners. I'm actually both; I will lead a project, but I will also be a practitioner on a project under someone else's lead. We flip those roles so we have more than a few individuals who lead projects. We all generally get to lead projects. It makes it easier (and actually more enjoyable) to have the opportunity to lead something and also have a chance to be a design resource or a research resource. That enables me, for example, to focus on the design problem more than client relations at times.

Before Adaptive Path, I worked at Samsung Electronics at one of their six global design centers in San Francisco (which recently moved and merged with Samsung's Los Angeles Lab). At Samsung, I was part of a team of interaction designers, industrial designers, and design researches all sitting in the same room working together on projects, primarily for the North American market, but also for the global market.

We did advanced concepts for the most part, things that were three to five, maybe even 10 years out. I did a lot of research and a lot of interaction design work there. In everything I do, it's a collaborative process working within project teams. Prior to Samsung, I was working at LeapFrog and prior to that I was working in interactive television. I've basically been doing software design and development and project management for the last 13 or 14 years.

Wood: Our discussion today about designing exceptional mobile experiences begs the question: What does "mobile" mean to you? Does your perspective extend beyond the classic telecom context, especially given some of the market trends today and the direction consumer electronics is taking?

Lenox: Yes, mobile to me definitely extends well beyond the feature of communicating by phone. When I think about mobile, I think about how we take our content and our lives with us through a mobile device, which might be a PDA or a Palm Pilot-type of phone. It might be our MP3 players, or an iPod with video. The essence is that we're bringing our stuff with us into a mobile setting, which is quite different from just having a mobile phone for communicating. It's now about moving our stuff around with us.

Wood: Given that mobile devices have enabled new behaviors—like being able to bring all our content with us all the time—what are some of the common challenges you face when designing for mobile devices? With all the constraints that small-scale interfaces present, especially around things that you are able to hold in your hand, put in your pocket or take with you in your car, what are the challenges?

Lenox: I think that the biggest challenge we face within the mobile industry is that a lot of the time our clients and our partners are thinking about features and technology first rather than what the users' needs are within a mobile context.

At Adaptive Path, we help our clients understand that while they have built cool technology, or while they enabled great features, we need to actually find out whether the user is going to want them. And if users do want them, how will they actually use those features?

We take a step back. Instead of looking at features and technology, we look at users' motivations and behaviors in the mobile context to better understand what the needs are. What are the opportunities, what are the gaps that current products are not fulfilling? From there, we can unearth some new opportunities that might be found within the mobile context.

Wood: How do you educate or sell your clients on moving more towards a user-centered model to answer those types of questions?

Lenox: Often clients come to us with a design problem and say, "We need an interface designed for this feature." If they come to us, they're not coming to have somebody just implement a user interface. That's not why you come to Adaptive Path. We really engage the client in the process of understanding their user. We will talk to them and ask: Is this the appropriate feature? Is this the appropriate way you want to approach it? If they're willing to work with us, we take them along the process of educating them about the consumer.

We often do ethnographic research to help us understand the specific problem at hand, but also to help the client understand who their users are and what their users' needs are. We have various research techniques. We pick and choose the techniques that are appropriate for the challenge we're facing.

One of the first projects I worked on when I started at Adaptive Path (Rachel Hinman and Dan Saffer were co-leading the project), we did a deprivation study. The project was for mobile Internet usage before the iPhone came out and mobile Internet usage wasn't commonplace (and it still isn't). In order to find out how people would be using it, we deprived them of their PC Internet usage, gave them a mobile phone, and told them it was their only access to the Internet for several days. That unearthed all kinds of fabulous data about the problems with mobile Internet usage that informed us on how we would actually build a better experience.

Wood: Interesting. Can you talk about the aspects of mobile UX design that you find frustrating?

Lenox: You know, I don't find designing for mobile frustrating at all. I find that we have amazing opportunities right now. There are so many unknowns to tackle that, to me, the field is a playground of opportunities. I don't find anything necessarily frustrating about what I do. It's exciting.

I guess if there's anything, it's that I don't have enough time to do all the fun things that I want to do and there's not enough time to do all the cool research that's possible. There's not enough time to actually design all the features and experiences that I want to do.

The technology is there. Users are much more savvy than they were ten years ago, and they expect a lot more. We have the tools now to actually do amazing things. I think what's inhibiting a lot of innovation right now is the model of having users pay for certain services per usage. It's a limitation on what's currently available in the marketplace simply because the carriers (or operators) and the manufacturers—the players—don't quite understand what the users' needs are and what the possibilities might be.

Instead, they're thinking about the traditional approach where people pay to use this wireless pipe. They're not thinking about the products in a way where we could actually enable useful experiences. If I'm standing in front of a restaurant, I should be able to automatically get access to the reviews of that restaurant from all of my social networks. Why can't we have the technology for that? Or rather, why haven't we enabled that yet? Because the parties haven't figured out the business model that will make money appropriately.

Wood: Is that true for just North America or do you find that's the case in Europe and Japan as well?

Lenox: I think that overall in Asia and in Europe, they're definitely more experimental and they're definitely moving forward a lot more quickly than North America. The hardware available in Asia and in Europe is several years ahead of what we have in North America, so that's a concern.

I'm not quite sure why North America is lagging behind. The knee-jerk reaction in the mobile industry is to always blame the carriers. I don't want to just blame the carriers—we have clients that are mobile manufacturers as well as carriers, and I always find it amazing that the people we work with really understand and can envision where the industry can go and what the possibilities are. But they're limited within their own companies to make real change happen.

Our job as designers is not just to design cool stuff, but also to actually educate at the executive level about the value of our designs and the business benefits of the work we're doing. We're no longer solely responsible for designing the interface or designing the experience. We also have to explain why and how that experience can actually make money and why that experience is worth pursuing.

Wood: Absolutely. I agree with you 100 percent. With respect to the possibilities and potential that is emerging in the marketplace given all the new technologies, what do you think are the key advantages that the mobile platform can offer in terms of user experience, and how is that platform best exploited?

Lenox: Like I said, we've barely scratched the surface on the possibilities. We, as an industry, need to take more time in understanding what the human behavior is and how we can best create beneficial experiences for the consumer.

So it's a different ballgame basically dealing with mobile context because you can't just simply ask somebody what they want. In any user experience design, you can't just ask the user what they want. A well-used story to make this point is if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted before the car was created, they would have said they wanted a faster horse.

Users can't always envision the future the way designers and engineers can. It's our collective responsibility to observe behaviors and realize that a faster horse isn't going to happen. As designers, we need to find those gaps and unmet needs that users don't even know exist.

Wood: So true. Do you think the same approach holds true for other interactive services and experiences beyond the mobile platform, especially now that just about everything's connected in a ubiquitous computing environment with rich Internet applications (RIAs) hyperlinked to other parts of site, and cloudware and software as service?

Lenox: Absolutely. There are so many possibilities that we could be doing right now. Anybody working in software development needs to set aside a certain amount of budget towards just simple R&D—allowing a few of their designers and engineers to get together and think outside the box, think beyond this quarter, next quarter, next year, and really envision what the possibilities are.

Many of our clients have R&D centers that work on future possibilities, mostly around technology. But I really think that there needs to be dedicated resources to behavioral research on possibilities. Combine that with all the new technologies, then what can we do? The exciting thing is: I don't know. Nobody knows how all the connectivity will merge and diverge and what the business models will be. Ultimately, somebody has to make money because we need to keep the roof over our heads and earn a living. I recognize that there has to be a business objective. But if we spent a little bit of time thinking about what the opportunities are, we could come up with a lot of new and exciting products that will improve peoples' lives and make money for the businesses creating them.

Wood: Perfect segue for my next question. Can you provide some examples of exceptional mobile user experiences on the market today, or applications or services available on handsets or mobile Internet devices?

Lenox: I posed this question to my colleagues at Adaptive Path when you sent me the questions in advance. I work with some amazingly talented and really smart people—we have a great mindshare. You can pose a question to the team and get a flood of information.

On the services side of things, the key is that it's less about the device and the actual hardware, but it's about the service and the connections that the services enable. Twitter, for example, I think is an obvious emerging service that is being used in ways that the folks at Twitter had no idea would happen. For example, during conferences people in the audience and even outside the audience are contributing to the dialogue through Twitter.

I used Twitter a lot while I was traveling for the last three weeks to keep everybody up to date. I'm not really a blogger and never wrote a blog prior to joining Adaptive Path. But I found that while I was traveling Twitter was a great way to keep people up to date. When I got back after three weeks, my colleague said, "You know, between your Twitters and your emails, I didn't really know you were gone." That was my intention. Three weeks is a long time to be away from the office, so by just keeping in touch a couple times a day, it made people feel like they were a part of what I was doing and stayed abreast of what was going on.

The different services available to connect us socially are really a phenomenal thing because we are all so dispersed. Our families are dispersed and our connections are all over the place. Twitter is a great example of a tool that enables us to be in touch.

I also used TripIt while I was away and that worked out great because I gave access to our administrative team. When a flight was cancelled, they could take care of it for me during business hours in the U.S. when I was asleep in Europe. I didn't have to dig through any paperwork or anything. I gave them access; they took care of it. Again, these services that happen in a mobile context or happen on your desktop—it really doesn't matter what or where the hardware is any more.

Wood: You mentioned abstract social factors and the ability to make connections and communicate with people. What are some abstract concepts you'd throw into the bucket of defining an exceptional experience for the mobile space?

Lenox: I think it's about bringing my stuff with me—my contacts, my music, being able to have my videos and accessing the various different types of small video clips, YouTube, and having everything personalized. I can collect these things, bring them with me, and share. That creates part of your social identity.

When you look at everybody's digital content—YouTube and Flickr streams, SlideShare presentations—it creates a portrait of who people are and becomes part of how they want to identify themselves and represent themselves to the world.

Wood: The concept is around anywhere and anytime accessibility. Whether or not your content is embedded in a device is irrelevant because it could be on a network, or local or on some kind of storage device attached to your mobile device. It's a matter of having things universally accessible and being able to tailor that content to your specific needs for that specific context at specific times.

Lenox: Generating your own content and making it accessible is also important. My way of doing that on my trip was through Twitter and Flickr. I uploaded photos to Flickr but I had a limited amount of mobile phone data that I could upload and download while I was in Europe, so I didn't do it on-the-fly from my mobile device all the time. That's one of those stumbling blocks. I could have been mobile blogging, had I wanted to fork out lots of money for the data plan (or if I had been traveling in North America, I suppose). But those are the types of constraints that are inhibiting the evolution of where the community is going to take this mobile culture. Technology is limited right now by cost and by bandwidth issues and is holding things to a slower pace than it ought to be.

Wood: I find it interesting that the consumer electronics market is fundamentally different than the traditional Web environment, or the RIA space—that user experience can affect market factors and consumer spending so strongly. Does the churn and cutthroat competition in the mobile handset market drive the progression of user experience?

Lenox: In any software development sector, a lot of really amazing stuff never sees the light of day. When I was working at Samsung, the number of amazing concepts that never saw daylight was phenomenal. Now that I'm working with other manufacturers here at Adaptive Path, it's really clear to me that it wasn't just Samsung. The entire consumer electronics industry generates a lot of really amazing ideas and very few of them actually make it to market.

That's disappointing to me as a designer because obviously designers get into the business because they're passionate about what they do and not because it's not an easy job to be a designer. The competition, the strenuous hours—people generally do it because they're passionate about it, because they want to make change, because they want to put cool products into people's hands. It's really frustrating to see so many great ideas not emerge.

When the iPhone came out, it was a really good thing for the industry and it was also a really bad thing. The good thing is that all the designers who had been working for years on similar concepts were able to say, "See, we could've done it." So that's a good thing. Now businesses are finally looking at designers and saying, "Oh, they knew what they were talking about. Look at that. It actually could work."

However, the bad side is that there will probably be a lot of me-too products coming out now. The companies that were already close to releasing their first touch screen or had released their touch screen—like the Prada Phone that came out easily six months or eight months before the iPhone—aren't getting enough play. Companies now will speed up the production of touch screen display phones that are already in the pipeline.

Matt Jones, one of the founders of Dopplr, brought up an interesting point. He basically thinks that the iPhone is actually going to stifle industry innovation simply because everybody's going to mimic the iPhone. So rather than thinking beyond the iPhone, everybody's just going to be duplicating it. In his theory, it's going to slow the pace of innovation because everybody's putting all of their energy on the me-toos instead of focusing energy beyond the iPhone to what's next. (And forgive me, Matt, if I've butchered your point).

Wood: Aside from industry influences like the iPhone and the Sony Xperia, do you think users expectations are really starting to change and evolve in a positive way?

Lenox: Users are expecting more now, which I think is great. The first mobile phone research study that I did at Samsung back in 2005 was with a group of 18 to 22-year-olds. I was absolutely astounded at how technically savvy these people were. Those of us who have been working in the technology industry for a long time understand hardware and software and what's client side, and what's up in the cloud. We understand the perimeters of software relationships. But I was amazed at how these young people understood all of that as well, were well versed in it, and yet weren't actually working in the industry. They were college students and were just playing around with HTML on MySpace. Our primary consumer has been raised on technology and is a lot savvier than the devices out there can actually accommodate.

That imbalance makes for some exciting possibilities. If we put something into the marketplace that's kind of cool and let the consumers do something with it, it will emerge and it will evolve. We need to allow for more of what the world is looking for, more social input from the consumer—an open source type of approach—rather than clamping things down and keeping access restricted. We need to allow users to play because they're going to take what we give them and use it in a different way than we expected—in ways that no use case scenario could have come up with, that no ethnographic study could have predicted. That's really exciting.

Wood: Sounds like the beginnings of a manifesto, Kim. I'm with you! This may be a politically charged question, but I really want to ask you what has been your favorite device to design for up to this point?

Lenox: It doesn't exist yet. There are too many limitations right now in the marketplace that prevent us from actually releasing what we want to.

Wood: Okay then, what types of devices do you use most frequently?

Lenox: Funny, I'm somewhat of a Luddite. I don't have cable television. I don't have the latest and greatest of home entertainment systems and that sort of thing. For my phone device, I had a Sidekick 2 for quite a while. I bought it in 2004, and I had a black and white version before that, which provided the best experience out there at the time. They got the service and experience right—offering a pleasurable user interface design with your data being stored server-side, up in the cloud. It was designed by Danger down in Palo Alto—one of the first device manufactures to really design around the user. Thinking about that device now in 2008, the user interface is not that compelling. But when you think about it seven years ago…

Wood: It was revolutionary.

Lenox: Absolutely revolutionary. The experience was limited somewhat by the hardware. It was targeted for a younger generation and not a business user. I probably should have had a Blackberry for the type of work that I was doing, but I didn't like the user experience. So I cobbled together my email, my contacts and my calendar. I had two sets of calendars, one on my Mac and another one on my device. I managed those within the limitations of the devices not talking well with each other. There was a piece of software that kind of patched it together, but even then, I never bothered buying it because I read about too may problems with it.

So I was a Sidekick user from 2002 to when the iPhone came out. That's a long time.

Wood: Really long! That just goes to show you just how much user experience can really influence both your purchasing decisions and your behavior in terms the applications and services that are available.

Lenox: Right.

Wood: We're willing to jump through hoops just to make things work because they are vastly superior to anything else on the market at the time.

Lenox: The Sidekick was pleasurable to use. I switched to the iPhone because it's also pleasurable to use. The subtly of the animation, the transitions, the movement—all that is actually enjoyable without being gratuitous. They did the right amount of informative animation (something is shrinking down because it's disappearing). Of course, the iPhone has a lot of limitations. I'm still struggling because I upgraded Tiger on my Mac and I haven't been able to sync my calendars since, which was the whole reason that I got the iPhone in the first place! Hopefully Apple's MobileMe will solve my problems soon.

Lenox: About designing for products that I'm interested in: for me it's more about designing for the experience, trying to solve problems, and unearthing unmet needs. Those are the things that are exciting to me. It doesn't really matter what the hardware is at this point. It's about figuring out how to make life easier and more pleasurable day-to-day.

Wood: Kim, thank you so much for taking the time to call in today.

Lenox: It's been a pleasure chatting with you.

This article was originally published on the User Interface Resource Center (UIRC). For more info, please see http://uxmag.com/uirc

Imagine shopping in a store where the displays never change. Customers select items by browsing through monolithic aisles of products. Store displays are minimal and uninteresting. Items in the displays are hard to find or even unavailable. This doesn't seem like a great shopping experience, does it? Yet this is what online shoppers experience (and accept as standard) on many large e-commerce sites.

At Allurent, our multi-disciplinary team of designers, information architects, user interface and visual designers are passionate about transforming online shopping from a utilitarian activity into an engaging, dynamic experience. We are convinced that online shopping can be infinitely more exciting and rewarding than the banal, page-and-scroll environment many of us settle for today. Improving the shopping experience can lead to the kind of metrics retailers dream about: increased consumer loyalty, better brand differentiation, higher conversion rates, greater customer satisfaction, and higher profits.

Online shopping should be a fluid, visually exciting and immersive experience. By designing great shopping experiences free from the constraints of HTML, we can fully exploit the rich audio, video, animation and user interface capabilities of modern personal computing.

Agility to respond

Traditionally, retailers need to plan to build new features, redesign, and merchandise their sites far in advance. The time-to-market cycle can be surprisingly slow. Today's merchandising tools are surprisingly primitive. At Allurent, we've been working on a set of solutions that enable companies to update and improve their sites quickly and easily.

For Borders, we recently built a feature called The Magic Shelf, which was an interesting challenge. Borders came to us with an interactive bookshelf that had already been built in Flash by an outside agency. Essentially, Borders populates the shelf with books and CDs, and customers can scroll horizontally and vertically across it. But Borders wasn't able to easily maintain the shelf or easily update the merchandise—and it was not commerce-enabled.

We rebuilt and redesigned the shelf and connected it to the Borders product catalog. Using our Visual Merchandiser, Borders is now able to change the bookshelves and merchandise on-the-fly with WYSWIG drag-and-drop simplicity. After Sydney Pollack passed away, Borders was able to populate a retrospective shelf of his work by the next morning. The time to go live was cut to only a few hours.

Catering gracefully to lifestyles

It's essential for retailers to come up with innovative approaches and multiple access points that cater to shifting lifestyles. Similar to having multiple brick-and-mortar locations, the online store needn't have just one location. Soon, there might not just be one Borders site. Rather, there may be a mobile site, an iPhone site, and a downloadable AIR application connected to all of the above. You will likely be able shop through your home entertainment system, via satellite applications, and on blogs through microsites.

Certain vertical markets are experimenting with new shopping experiences more deeply than others. The fashion industry, for example, with its increasing seasonal demands, is apt to innovate more aggressively than most. Fashion by nature lends itself to exciting imagery that can be put together in new ways relevant to different forms of media.

The "Swiss Army knife" approach

Retailers increasingly want to integrate diverse interactivity into their sites—ratings and reviews, links to Facebook and del.icio.us, tagging, videos, blogs and more. Yet retailers also want to their sites to be simpler and easier for customers to use.

The challenge on the part of designers is to take all of these features and make it feel like all feel like a rich, cohesive experience rather than a "Frankenstein" site. I like to use the analogy of a Swiss Army knife, where the customer has all the tools they need at their fingertips and can unfold them as needed. When they're not being used, everything folds neatly back into place and out of the main focus area.

Make shopping serendipitous

Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy and beneficial way.

Online shopping needs more serendipity to feel like an immersive and rich shopping experience. Customers need to brush up against items they weren't necessarily looking for. The practice is common in catalogues (think Crate & Barrel room views) and in brick-and-mortar stores (think wall displays and mannequins). Shoppers get to see a wide range of products, rather than tunnel down to one product category.

The online approach, however, has typically been organized into strict categories. If someone is looking for a top, they drill through the navigation to find pink tops. Navigationally, it's difficult to add or remove filters dynamically to browse in fluid ways. In the process, shoppers bypass everything else — except for the occasional cross-sell. Most of the site goes unnoticed.

We recently built an interesting serendipitous solution for Anthropologie. Using Adobe AIR, customers can download a portion of the Anthropologie catalog to their desktop. The catalog was based loosely on a theme. The initial version has a beach theme. Sandals, swimsuits, sunglasses and other "beachy" products were scattered along a horizontal strip. The layout had a handmade quality and felt unique and special rather than generic and automated.

Our Display tool allowed merchandisers to easily drop products from the catalog onto the strip, rather than having to open Flash and manually create links or embed imagery in the application. Customers were able scroll through the strip, add notes to items of interest and purchase. Each product felt specially chosen and the experience felt more like shopping at a boutique rather than shopping at the local home center for clothing.

The most unique feature was "shop by color," where customers selected favorite hues from a color palette, and saw products that matched displayed in a color wheel. The randomness in the product selection and the immediate dynamic quality made it fun to use as well as different from other shopping experiences. Instead of shopping for a specific product, customers were browsing in a way that was similar to walking into an Anthropologie store.

Retail role models

So what are some of the shopping experiences I like? In recent years, Nike has been doing an outstanding job extending its brand. Its mini sites are all amazing and unique, yet clearly remain under the same branded umbrella. They're innovative, usable, push the boundaries and are still very shoppable.

Etsy.com is a marketplace where people can sell handmade goods. Etsy offers a number of different ways to view merchandise on the site: chronologically, by color, by story, or by category. Etsy lets consumers discover the products in a way that works for them.

Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters know their demographic inside and out. They continuously innovate by adding Flash-based themed microsites, blogs and even extending their brands to YouTube.

Home furnishing giant Ikea has been doing a great job offering interactive video online to walk potential buyers through fully merchandised rooms—just like you'd shop in any of their physical retail locations. Each room is very different and even employ actors with different personalities that help customers better relate.

Uniqlo is a Japanese retailer that's moving into the U.S. and doing some really interesting things with navigation. Using their Uniqlo Explorer on their US site, customers see a full page product image. The image then transforms into a bitmap image. The bitmap is composed of a matrix of tiny product shots. Clicking on small product shot will display that product full-screen and then transform that image into a matrix of other products.

The Volkswagon.co.uk site does a great job of integrating video and offering a fluid car configurator application. There's a lot of functionality and features, yet it feels simple and fun to use. Finally, Ralph Lauren's Rugby.com site does a great job of extending the brand using video, interesting displays, and styling tips, resulting in a cohesive, rich experience.

Walking the fine line between innovative and useful

As users become more sophisticated and retailers compete more fiercely for online market share, design teams are challenged to find the balance between innovation and usability. We do a lot of user testing throughout our design and development processes, and strive to make it easy for a buyer to make a decision by decreasing steps, no matter how traditional or innovative the design is. We're always looking for ways to streamline the approach by eliminating pages and unnecessary information that customers have to wade through to get to that the ultimate destination: a purchase.

Of course, our clients have specific business goals that drive the project. In some cases, they're looking for a better checkout experience. Other times, they want to improve the overall experience, gain traction over the competition, or rebuild their site from the ground up. If we meet the client's goals, the success metrics will follow. For example, Anthropologie realized a 24% increase in conversion rate with its new checkout system over the previous HTML cart, and Urban Outfitters experienced similar results.

Of course, we follow an internal process that involves a discovery phase, wireframing, and prototyping, user testing, and then implementation. When we go live, we watch the analytics information carefully. The ultimate user test is when thousands of people go through your site and we see where they're really going and where they may be dropping off. At that point, we streamline things further.

Journeying with new tools

With Adobe's new tools, particularly Flash Catalyst, the advancements in Flex, and the introduction of Adobe AIR, it's a really exciting time for design teams. More developers are jumping on the Flex bandwagon. Increasingly streamlined workflows between designers and developers are going to result in complex applications that feel more cinematic and operate pagelessly.

Allurent is the first company I've worked where it hasn't felt like designers are throwing things over the wall to the developers. There's a huge amount of back-and-forth between the development and design teams. We have some high-level developers who have worked on really complex backend e-commerce systems, as well as front-facing applications. During iterations, these developers can really help inform our design work. I'm constantly working with developers and tweaking transitions between different types of information, working on the fluidity of applications and how they feel.

It's an interesting, exciting time. Like so many other designers who started out in print, leapt onto the Web, and are now immersed in rich interactivity, I feel lucky. The shopping niche is a corner of commerce where designers can step back and see their efforts realized through real-world success.

This article was originally published on the User Interface Resource Center (UIRC). For more info, please see http://uxmag.com/uirc

Imagine shopping in a store where the displays never change. Customers select items by browsing through monolithic aisles of products. Store displays are minimal and uninteresting. Items in the displays are hard to find or even unavailable. This doesn't seem like a great shopping experience, does it? Yet this is what online shoppers experience (and accept as standard) on many large e-commerce sites.

At Allurent, our multi-disciplinary team of designers, information architects, user interface and visual designers are passionate about transforming online shopping from a utilitarian activity into an engaging, dynamic experience. We are convinced that online shopping can be infinitely more exciting and rewarding than the banal, page-and-scroll environment many of us settle for today. Improving the shopping experience can lead to the kind of metrics retailers dream about: increased consumer loyalty, better brand differentiation, higher conversion rates, greater customer satisfaction, and higher profits.

Online shopping should be a fluid, visually exciting and immersive experience. By designing great shopping experiences free from the constraints of HTML, we can fully exploit the rich audio, video, animation and user interface capabilities of modern personal computing.

Agility to respond

Traditionally, retailers need to plan to build new features, redesign, and merchandise their sites far in advance. The time-to-market cycle can be surprisingly slow. Today's merchandising tools are surprisingly primitive. At Allurent, we've been working on a set of solutions that enable companies to update and improve their sites quickly and easily.

For Borders, we recently built a feature called The Magic Shelf, which was an interesting challenge. Borders came to us with an interactive bookshelf that had already been built in Flash by an outside agency. Essentially, Borders populates the shelf with books and CDs, and customers can scroll horizontally and vertically across it. But Borders wasn't able to easily maintain the shelf or easily update the merchandise—and it was not commerce-enabled.

We rebuilt and redesigned the shelf and connected it to the Borders product catalog. Using our Visual Merchandiser, Borders is now able to change the bookshelves and merchandise on-the-fly with WYSWIG drag-and-drop simplicity. After Sydney Pollack passed away, Borders was able to populate a retrospective shelf of his work by the next morning. The time to go live was cut to only a few hours.

Catering gracefully to lifestyles

It's essential for retailers to come up with innovative approaches and multiple access points that cater to shifting lifestyles. Similar to having multiple brick-and-mortar locations, the online store needn't have just one location. Soon, there might not just be one Borders site. Rather, there may be a mobile site, an iPhone site, and a downloadable AIR application connected to all of the above. You will likely be able shop through your home entertainment system, via satellite applications, and on blogs through microsites.

Certain vertical markets are experimenting with new shopping experiences more deeply than others. The fashion industry, for example, with its increasing seasonal demands, is apt to innovate more aggressively than most. Fashion by nature lends itself to exciting imagery that can be put together in new ways relevant to different forms of media.

The "Swiss Army knife" approach

Retailers increasingly want to integrate diverse interactivity into their sites—ratings and reviews, links to Facebook and del.icio.us, tagging, videos, blogs and more. Yet retailers also want to their sites to be simpler and easier for customers to use.

The challenge on the part of designers is to take all of these features and make it feel like all feel like a rich, cohesive experience rather than a "Frankenstein" site. I like to use the analogy of a Swiss Army knife, where the customer has all the tools they need at their fingertips and can unfold them as needed. When they're not being used, everything folds neatly back into place and out of the main focus area.

Make shopping serendipitous

Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy and beneficial way.

Online shopping needs more serendipity to feel like an immersive and rich shopping experience. Customers need to brush up against items they weren't necessarily looking for. The practice is common in catalogues (think Crate & Barrel room views) and in brick-and-mortar stores (think wall displays and mannequins). Shoppers get to see a wide range of products, rather than tunnel down to one product category.

The online approach, however, has typically been organized into strict categories. If someone is looking for a top, they drill through the navigation to find pink tops. Navigationally, it's difficult to add or remove filters dynamically to browse in fluid ways. In the process, shoppers bypass everything else — except for the occasional cross-sell. Most of the site goes unnoticed.

We recently built an interesting serendipitous solution for Anthropologie. Using Adobe AIR, customers can download a portion of the Anthropologie catalog to their desktop. The catalog was based loosely on a theme. The initial version has a beach theme. Sandals, swimsuits, sunglasses and other "beachy" products were scattered along a horizontal strip. The layout had a handmade quality and felt unique and special rather than generic and automated.

Our Display tool allowed merchandisers to easily drop products from the catalog onto the strip, rather than having to open Flash and manually create links or embed imagery in the application. Customers were able scroll through the strip, add notes to items of interest and purchase. Each product felt specially chosen and the experience felt more like shopping at a boutique rather than shopping at the local home center for clothing.

The most unique feature was "shop by color," where customers selected favorite hues from a color palette, and saw products that matched displayed in a color wheel. The randomness in the product selection and the immediate dynamic quality made it fun to use as well as different from other shopping experiences. Instead of shopping for a specific product, customers were browsing in a way that was similar to walking into an Anthropologie store.

Retail role models

So what are some of the shopping experiences I like? In recent years, Nike has been doing an outstanding job extending its brand. Its mini sites are all amazing and unique, yet clearly remain under the same branded umbrella. They're innovative, usable, push the boundaries and are still very shoppable.

Etsy.com is a marketplace where people can sell handmade goods. Etsy offers a number of different ways to view merchandise on the site: chronologically, by color, by story, or by category. Etsy lets consumers discover the products in a way that works for them.

Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters know their demographic inside and out. They continuously innovate by adding Flash-based themed microsites, blogs and even extending their brands to YouTube.

Home furnishing giant Ikea has been doing a great job offering interactive video online to walk potential buyers through fully merchandised rooms—just like you'd shop in any of their physical retail locations. Each room is very different and even employ actors with different personalities that help customers better relate.

Uniqlo is a Japanese retailer that's moving into the U.S. and doing some really interesting things with navigation. Using their Uniqlo Explorer on their US site, customers see a full page product image. The image then transforms into a bitmap image. The bitmap is composed of a matrix of tiny product shots. Clicking on small product shot will display that product full-screen and then transform that image into a matrix of other products.

The Volkswagon.co.uk site does a great job of integrating video and offering a fluid car configurator application. There's a lot of functionality and features, yet it feels simple and fun to use. Finally, Ralph Lauren's Rugby.com site does a great job of extending the brand using video, interesting displays, and styling tips, resulting in a cohesive, rich experience.

Walking the fine line between innovative and useful

As users become more sophisticated and retailers compete more fiercely for online market share, design teams are challenged to find the balance between innovation and usability. We do a lot of user testing throughout our design and development processes, and strive to make it easy for a buyer to make a decision by decreasing steps, no matter how traditional or innovative the design is. We're always looking for ways to streamline the approach by eliminating pages and unnecessary information that customers have to wade through to get to that the ultimate destination: a purchase.

Of course, our clients have specific business goals that drive the project. In some cases, they're looking for a better checkout experience. Other times, they want to improve the overall experience, gain traction over the competition, or rebuild their site from the ground up. If we meet the client's goals, the success metrics will follow. For example, Anthropologie realized a 24% increase in conversion rate with its new checkout system over the previous HTML cart, and Urban Outfitters experienced similar results.

Of course, we follow an internal process that involves a discovery phase, wireframing, and prototyping, user testing, and then implementation. When we go live, we watch the analytics information carefully. The ultimate user test is when thousands of people go through your site and we see where they're really going and where they may be dropping off. At that point, we streamline things further.

Journeying with new tools

With Adobe's new tools, particularly Flash Catalyst, the advancements in Flex, and the introduction of Adobe AIR, it's a really exciting time for design teams. More developers are jumping on the Flex bandwagon. Increasingly streamlined workflows between designers and developers are going to result in complex applications that feel more cinematic and operate pagelessly.

Allurent is the first company I've worked where it hasn't felt like designers are throwing things over the wall to the developers. There's a huge amount of back-and-forth between the development and design teams. We have some high-level developers who have worked on really complex backend e-commerce systems, as well as front-facing applications. During iterations, these developers can really help inform our design work. I'm constantly working with developers and tweaking transitions between different types of information, working on the fluidity of applications and how they feel.

It's an interesting, exciting time. Like so many other designers who started out in print, leapt onto the Web, and are now immersed in rich interactivity, I feel lucky. The shopping niche is a corner of commerce where designers can step back and see their efforts realized through real-world success.

This article was originally published on the User Interface Resource Center (UIRC). For more info, please see http://uxmag.com/uirc

If you're a business or UX professional trying to decide how to focus your efforts to have the most impact, it's helpful to know which types of brands have the greatest opportunity to improve their online UX. To answer that question, it helps to first expand our view beyond the online world to understand which types of brands are expected to offer rich experiences in general (whether online through their websites, or offline in their stores).

Four factors that bear on customer expectations

1. Customers don't care about all brands equally. Even some brands that help them solve essential problems (e.g., heating their homes or feeding their families) are simply taken for granted. However, brands that serve a symbolic role in customers' lives—the brands that help people express their identity, tastes, and interests—garner greater interest. Customers tend to implicitly expect richer experiences when shopping brands that help them express some aspect of their identities. The identity-related qualities of a brand are intangible and are, in a way, invisible features of the brand's products. It takes a rich experience to bring those qualities to life and make them resonate with customers.
2. Some brands present customers with high-involvement, high-risk purchase decisions (e.g., buying a car). Customers typically want to analyze a wealth of information to help make the right decision. As their need for information increases, their need to have that information presented in a richer, more readily intelligible way also increases.
3. Certain brands, by their very nature, offer customers high levels of human interaction and product interaction prior to purchase (e.g., when buying a computer). The greater the level of interaction, the greater the potential and expectation for a richer experience.
4. Some brands are able to envelop their buyers. When you go through the door of a retail store, for instance, you're walking into the physical incarnation of the brand—it's all around you. Customers implicitly expect richer experiences from brands that feature enveloping environments.

Verticals where rich offline shopping experiences are the most prevalent

Some industries or verticals are more likely than others to contain brands that:

1. Garner high interest due to their identity-building qualities
2. Are high involvement
3. Have high levels of human interaction and product interaction
4. Feature enveloping environments

The strongest examples that come to mind are:

• Automotive (e.g., shopping for a new car at a dealership)
• Retail (e.g., shopping for clothes at an apparel store)
• Education (e.g., visiting schools as part of choosing a college)
• Real Estate (e.g., shopping for a home and walking through the models)

Within each of these verticals, brands have spent decades creating rich offline experiences. They've done such a good job that we have to come to implicitly expect rich experiences when shopping these verticals. Think about shopping for a new car, for example. It's a self-expressive, high-involvement purchase made in an engaging showroom with lots of personal assistance and a hands-on test drive. All of this adds to a rich offline experience.

The offline–online gap

If you're wondering where you should focus your efforts to have the most impact, look for brands with online experiences that don't yet match the richness of the offline experience they've spent decades honing. When a company has a significant gap between its offline and online experiences, customer expectations are not met, brand differentiation is diminished, and business is lost.

When your experience of a company's website falls short of the offline experience you've come to expect, you lose your motivation to complete the purchase online. If there's a retail outlet nearby, you may abandon the website with the plan of visiting the store to feel comfortable making the purchase. You wouldn't be alone; MIT's Technology Review (citing Jupiter Research) reports that for every $1 consumers spend online, they spend $6 dollars offline as a result of research they conducted on the Internet. But what about those times you don't get around to visiting the store, or it's simply too far away? Those become lost sales. Even if you do make the trip, it still feels like a preventable inconvenience, and like the brand has let you down. And what about those times you do put up with the website experience and make the purchase online? You may be left with an uneasy feeling, wondering if you made the right decision, and with a less favorable impression of the brand.

The greatest gaps

Drawing on my own observations, I estimated the size of the online–offline experience gaps in 13 key verticals.

The greatest gaps I identified are in retail, education, and healthcare. Within these verticals, companies have a huge opportunity to improve UX, especially relative to competitors in their verticals. Closing the online–offline gap improves customer satisfaction, enhances brand differentiation, and prevents lost sales.

It's important to note that not all brands within "big gap" verticals are expected to offer a rich experience. brands that emphasize low price are a key exception. In these cases people expect to forgo the rich experience in exchange for low prices.

But as you'll see in the next section, "big gap" brands are failing to offer online experiences that are differentiated from the experiences offered by low-price brands.

Mystery Shopping

Retail

I recently went shopping for a jacket in both the offline and the online world, first at Patagonia and Walmart stores, and then at patagonia.com and walmart.com. Patagonia is one of my favorite brands; by focusing on Patagonia I don't mean to pick on them, but instead to show that even the strongest brands have opportunities to improve their online UX.

The shopping experience at the Patagonia store was noticeably richer than Patagonia's online experience. The store experience provided a livelier ambiance and greater opportunities to interact with the product and with helpful employees. I found the Patagonia employees to be enthusiastic about the brand and capable of answering tough questions like, "which of these jackets provides more warmth and more breathability?" Although patagonia.com provides a richer experience than most outdoor apparel websites I've visited, the online experience didn't give me as much confidence to make a purchase as the offline experience did. Online, I struggled to choose between four different jackets and worried I'd make the wrong choice.

Patagonia and Walmart are two brands at opposite ends of the low-price/premium-quality spectrum. In the offline world, it'd be impossible to confuse the two—the videos make that abundantly clear. But as the screencasts show, my experiences shopping for jackets at patagonia.com and then walmart.com weren't nearly as different from each other as one might expect. If I had wandered around the sites a little more, I would have encountered interesting things on Patagonia's site such as the award-winning Tin Shed (a virtual shed full of interactive props and stories). But I was on the sites to shop for a jacket, not to wander around and check out peripheral Flash microsites.

During a separate patagonia.com shopping experience (this time shopping for a shirt), a chat box popped up and "Taylor" asked if she could help me. I had wanted personal assistance when I was shopping online for a jacket, but hadn't gotten it. This personal assistance, though a bit intrusive, would have certainly helped shrink the offline–online gap, differentiated the experience from the walmart.com experience, and guided me toward the right purchase decision. But perhaps there's even a better, less intrusive solution: adding a "Have a question? Chat live" button adjacent to product information. On occasion, I've seen a "Chat Live" button in the patagonia.com search area, but it's not always there and it's not in a place where you see it if you're looking at information about a jacket.

Patagonia.com could also be improved by increasing the use of video to augment product photos. After documenting my jacket shopping experience I took a deeper look at the site and found that 17 percent of their men's jacket listings included video depictions of the jacket. I hadn't stumbled on any of these during my initial shopping experience. If more jackets had accompanying videos, I would have been more likely to see a video. Well-produced videos enhance the richness and differentiation of the shopping experience, help close the offline–online gap, and guide customers toward making the right purchase decision.

Education

The selection of a college or university is one of the biggest decisions a person can make in life. In the offline world, you can stroll the campus, audit a class, have lunch with current students, tour the facilities, check out the social scene, and so on. But in my investigations I found that the online experiences in the education vertical generally don't match the offline experiences. Sure, you can watch a video or a virtual tour, but you're just watching from behind the glass, not actively participating and interacting. In the education vertical, as in the retail vertical, the gap between offline and online experiences compromises brand differentiation.

Let's say I want to get my MBA at a school that's convenient to where I live and work. I know I'll be spending a lot of time on campus, so I want to make sure it's an inspiring place that's conducive to learning and working with classmates. Based on their proximity to where I live and work, the schools I chose to investigate were the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) and the Northglenn Center of Colorado Christian University (CCU). As you'll note in the screencasts, the schools' websites made it hard to get a feel for each campus and to get help making this high-involvement/high-risk decision. And what information I did find wasn't presented in a rich way.

The online experience left me feeling that I'd have to make an in-person visit to experience each campus. So I visited both schools.

As it turned out, my offline experience with each campus made the decision an easy one. At one school—the much more expensive one—I felt immersed in the experience as an engaged participant, rather than merely as an observer. It was indeed a rich experience—much more so than online—and it differentiated the school from its low-price counterpart.

Healthcare

To check out the offline experience in the healthcare vertical, my wife and I shopped for the hospital where we'll have our next baby. We toured the family birth center at Foothills Hospital in Boulder, and got to meet the doctor. We found the facility to be more like a resort than a hospital—there was a jetted tub in the birthing room, a DVD player and queen bed in the recovery room, and a beautiful lobby, cafe, and waiting room.

Had we checked out the hospital online instead, our experience would have been far different. We are making an emotionally significant, high-involvement decision, but the hospital's website fails to welcome us with a rich experience. The entry point into the website is cold and off-putting, in contrast to the hospital's warm and inviting lobby. After a bit of searching we found a simple "Welcome Tour" slide show, but it offered none of the richness of the offline tour.

Just as we saw within the retail and education verticals, the offline–online experience gap in healthcare means that brands are missing opportunities for differentiation. An actual visit to Foothills Hospital sets it apart from other hospitals, but a visit to their website does not. In fact, I found a richer online experience with a lower-priced hospital serving an area that's pretty much the opposite of happy-go-lucky Boulder: South Central L.A., including Compton and Watts.

Closing the Gap

The online experience doesn't need to exactly mirror the offline experience; they play complementary roles rather than act as alternatives to one another. But when it comes to satisfying customers, differentiating your brand, and winning business, the richness of the experiences should be on par with each other. It's about creating the same richness online as customers have come to expect from those brands through years of offline experiences.

A good example of a rich online experience that complements and is nearly on par with its offline counterpart is the Volvo Virtual Test Drive of City Safety. The online test drive allows the "driver" to experience the brand's automatic braking technology in a way that would be terrifying offline.

Juan Sanchez, a UX Magazine contributing editor, explained the importance of complementary experiences this way: "I think a lot of companies fall short by siloing their online and offline experiences, or by making them feel too much alike rather than having them work as companions. There are things that online or mobile experiences can do that an offline experience can't, and vice versa. Industries should take into account the ‘experience ecosystem.' They need to consider all the interaction touch points to make the online, offline, mobile, and other experiences seamless. If I do something online and then go into a physical store, there ought to be some overlap in the experiences to make the transition state a smooth and inviting one."

What do you think?

As you reflect on brands that are behind or ahead in closing the offline-online gap, please share your thoughts with us through comments. You can also record your comparisons as we've done in this article, and include a link to them in your response. Whoever provides the best laggard example (big gap) and leader example (no gap) will receive a gift certificate to either Patagonia or Walmart.

If you're a business or UX professional trying to decide how to focus your efforts to have the most impact, it's helpful to know which types of brands have the greatest opportunity to improve their online UX. To answer that question, it helps to first expand our view beyond the online world to understand which types of brands are expected to offer rich experiences in general (whether online through their websites, or offline in their stores).

Four factors that bear on customer expectations

1. Customers don't care about all brands equally. Even some brands that help them solve essential problems (e.g., heating their homes or feeding their families) are simply taken for granted. However, brands that serve a symbolic role in customers' lives—the brands that help people express their identity, tastes, and interests—garner greater interest. Customers tend to implicitly expect richer experiences when shopping brands that help them express some aspect of their identities. The identity-related qualities of a brand are intangible and are, in a way, invisible features of the brand's products. It takes a rich experience to bring those qualities to life and make them resonate with customers.
2. Some brands present customers with high-involvement, high-risk purchase decisions (e.g., buying a car). Customers typically want to analyze a wealth of information to help make the right decision. As their need for information increases, their need to have that information presented in a richer, more readily intelligible way also increases.
3. Certain brands, by their very nature, offer customers high levels of human interaction and product interaction prior to purchase (e.g., when buying a computer). The greater the level of interaction, the greater the potential and expectation for a richer experience.
4. Some brands are able to envelop their buyers. When you go through the door of a retail store, for instance, you're walking into the physical incarnation of the brand—it's all around you. Customers implicitly expect richer experiences from brands that feature enveloping environments.

Verticals where rich offline shopping experiences are the most prevalent

Some industries or verticals are more likely than others to contain brands that:

1. Garner high interest due to their identity-building qualities
2. Are high involvement
3. Have high levels of human interaction and product interaction
4. Feature enveloping environments

The strongest examples that come to mind are:

• Automotive (e.g., shopping for a new car at a dealership)
• Retail (e.g., shopping for clothes at an apparel store)
• Education (e.g., visiting schools as part of choosing a college)
• Real Estate (e.g., shopping for a home and walking through the models)

Within each of these verticals, brands have spent decades creating rich offline experiences. They've done such a good job that we have to come to implicitly expect rich experiences when shopping these verticals. Think about shopping for a new car, for example. It's a self-expressive, high-involvement purchase made in an engaging showroom with lots of personal assistance and a hands-on test drive. All of this adds to a rich offline experience.

The offline–online gap

If you're wondering where you should focus your efforts to have the most impact, look for brands with online experiences that don't yet match the richness of the offline experience they've spent decades honing. When a company has a significant gap between its offline and online experiences, customer expectations are not met, brand differentiation is diminished, and business is lost.

When your experience of a company's website falls short of the offline experience you've come to expect, you lose your motivation to complete the purchase online. If there's a retail outlet nearby, you may abandon the website with the plan of visiting the store to feel comfortable making the purchase. You wouldn't be alone; MIT's Technology Review (citing Jupiter Research) reports that for every $1 consumers spend online, they spend $6 dollars offline as a result of research they conducted on the Internet. But what about those times you don't get around to visiting the store, or it's simply too far away? Those become lost sales. Even if you do make the trip, it still feels like a preventable inconvenience, and like the brand has let you down. And what about those times you do put up with the website experience and make the purchase online? You may be left with an uneasy feeling, wondering if you made the right decision, and with a less favorable impression of the brand.

The greatest gaps

Drawing on my own observations, I estimated the size of the online–offline experience gaps in 13 key verticals.

The greatest gaps I identified are in retail, education, and healthcare. Within these verticals, companies have a huge opportunity to improve UX, especially relative to competitors in their verticals. Closing the online–offline gap improves customer satisfaction, enhances brand differentiation, and prevents lost sales.

It's important to note that not all brands within "big gap" verticals are expected to offer a rich experience. Brands that emphasize low price are a key exception. In these cases people expect to forgo the rich experience in exchange for low prices.

But as you'll see in the next section, "big gap" brands are failing to offer online experiences that are differentiated from the experiences offered by low-price brands.

Mystery Shopping

Retail

I recently went shopping for a jacket in both the offline and the online world, first at Patagonia and Walmart stores, and then at patagonia.com and walmart.com. Patagonia is one of my favorite brands, but even the strongest brands have opportunities to improve their online UX.

The shopping experience at the Patagonia store was noticeably richer than Patagonia's online experience. The store experience provided a livelier ambiance and greater opportunities to interact with the product and with helpful employees. I found the Patagonia employees to be enthusiastic about the brand and capable of answering tough questions like, "which of these jackets provides more warmth and more breathability?" Although patagonia.com provides a richer experience than most outdoor apparel websites I've visited, the online experience didn't give me as much confidence to make a purchase as the offline experience did. Online, I struggled to choose between four different jackets and worried I'd make the wrong choice.

Patagonia and Walmart are two brands at opposite ends of the low-price/premium-quality spectrum. In the offline world, it'd be impossible to confuse the two—the videos make that abundantly clear. But as the screencasts show, my experiences shopping for jackets at patagonia.com and then walmart.com weren't nearly as different from each other as one might expect. If I had wandered around the sites a little more, I would have encountered interesting things on Patagonia's site such as the award-winning Tin Shed (a virtual shed full of interactive props and stories). But I was on the sites to shop for a jacket, not to wander around and check out peripheral Flash microsites.

During a separate patagonia.com shopping experience (this time shopping for a shirt), a chat box popped up and "Taylor" asked if she could help me. I had wanted personal assistance when I was shopping online for a jacket, but hadn't gotten it. This personal assistance, though a bit intrusive, would have certainly helped shrink the offline–online gap, differentiated the experience from the walmart.com experience, and guided me toward the right purchase decision. But perhaps there's even a better, less intrusive solution: adding a "Question? Chat live" button adjacent to product information. On occasion, I've seen a "Chat Live" button in the patagonia.com search area, but it's not always there and it's not in a place where you see it if you're looking at information about a jacket.

Patagonia.com could also be improved by increasing the use of video to augment product photos. After documenting my jacket shopping experience I took a deeper look at the site and found that 17 percent of their men's jacket listings included video depictions of the jacket. I hadn't stumbled on any of these during my initial shopping experience. If more jackets had accompanying videos, I would have been more likely to see a video. Well-produced videos enhance the richness and differentiation of the shopping experience, help close the offline–online gap, and guide customers toward making the right purchase decision.

Education

The selection of a college or university is one of the biggest decisions a person can make in life. In the offline world, you can stroll the campus, audit a class, have lunch with current students, tour the facilities, check out the social scene, and so on. But in my investigations I found that the online experiences in the education vertical generally don't match the offline experiences. Sure, you can watch a video or a virtual tour, but you're just watching from behind the glass, not actively participating and interacting. In the education vertical, as in the retail vertical, the gap between offline and online experiences compromises brand differentiation.

Let's say I want to get my MBA at a school that's convenient to where I live and work. I know I'll be spending a lot of time on campus, so I want to make sure it's an inspiring place that's conducive to learning and working with classmates. Based on their proximity to where I live and work, the schools I chose to investigate were the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) and the Northglenn Center of Colorado Christian University (CCU). As you'll note in the screencasts, the schools' websites made it hard to get a feel for each campus and to get help making this high-involvement/high-risk decision. And what information I did find wasn't presented in a rich way.

The online experience left me feeling that I'd have to make an in-person visit to experience each campus. So I visited both schools.

As it turned out, my offline experience with each campus made the decision an easy one. At one school—the much more expensive one—I felt immersed in the experience as an engaged participant, rather than merely as an observer. It was indeed a rich experience—much more so than online—and it differentiated the school from its low-price counterpart.

Healthcare

To check out the offline experience in the healthcare vertical, my wife and I shopped for the hospital where we'll have our next baby. We toured the family birth center at Foothills Hospital in Boulder, and got to meet the doctor. We found the facility to be more like a resort than a hospital—there was a jetted tub in the birthing room, a DVD player and queen bed in the recovery room, and a beautiful lobby, cafe, and waiting room.

Had we checked out the hospital online instead, our experience would have been far different. We are making an emotionally significant, high-involvement decision, but the hospital's website fails to welcome us with a rich experience. The entry point into the website is cold and off-putting, in contrast to the hospital's warm and inviting lobby. After a bit of searching we found a simple "Welcome Tour" slide show, but it offered none of the richness of the offline tour.

Just as we saw within the retail and education verticals, the offline–online experience gap in healthcare means that brands are missing opportunities for differentiation. An actual visit to Foothills Hospital sets it apart from other hospitals, but a visit to their website does not. In fact, I found a richer online experience with a lower-priced hospital serving an area that's pretty much the opposite of happy-go-lucky Boulder: South Central L.A., including Compton and Watts.

Closing the Gap

The online experience doesn't need to exactly mirror the offline experience; they play complementary roles rather than act as alternatives to one another. But when it comes to satisfying customers, differentiating your brand, and winning business, the richness of the experiences should be on par with each other. It's about creating the same richness online as customers have come to expect from those brands through years of offline experiences.

A good example of a rich online experience that complements and is nearly on par with its offline counterpart is the Volvo Virtual Test Drive of City Safety. The online test drive allows the "driver" to experience the brand's automatic braking technology in a way that would be terrifying offline.

Juan Sanchez, a UX Magazine contributing editor, explained the importance of complementary experiences this way: "I think a lot of companies fall short by siloing their online and offline experiences, or by making them feel too much alike rather than having them work as companions. There are things that online or mobile experiences can do that an offline experience can't, and vice versa. Industries should take into account the ‘experience ecosystem.' They need to consider all the interaction touch points to make the online, offline, mobile, and other experiences seamless. If I do something online and then go into a physical store, there ought to be some overlap in the experiences to make the transition state a smooth and inviting one."

What do you think?

As you reflect on brands that are behind or ahead in closing the offline-online gap, please share your thoughts with us through comments. You can also record your comparisons as we've done in this article, and include a link to them in your response. Whoever provides the best laggard example (big gap) and leader example (no gap) will receive a gift certificate to either Patagonia or Walmart.

Mobile applications are the new Shangra La for software development shops. This article in the Washington Post reports that more than 800 million iPhone applications have been downloaded and there are now more than 25,000 apps in the iTunes store. Clearly, there’s an enormous market for mobile applications. But, when it comes to choosing the best method for developing iPhone apps, it’s not always obvious which approach aligns with your business goals. This article outlines three different development methods for building mobile apps along with pros and cons to help you choose the development approach that’s right for your business.

Build In the Browser

The easiest option for creating an iPhone, Blackberry or Android application is to build it in the browser using Web development languages like HTML and JavaScript. There are some solid reasons to take this approach. For starters, if you’re a Web developer and are familiar with HTML and JavaScript, but not versed in the native iPhone app development language of Objective-C, you can build an iPhone application in the browser using the skills you already have. Second, browser-built apps are easier to build and distribute. They’re portable and accessible from multiple devices, which helps to spread the application’s popularity. Also on the upside, browser-built apps update instantly, generally load faster, are easier to read and update and offer more flexibility for future feature updates. Popular browser-built iPhone apps include Gmail and SlideShare.

The simplicity of browser-built iPhone apps attracts many developers, especially Web developers, but there are problems with this method. A major setback is that applications built this way can’t access native iPhone features like accelerometer, GPS, camera, contacts, etc. That’s a significant handicap when users are clamoring for applications that make the most of iPhone technology.

Create a Native App

Native applications built in Objective-C make full use of all the iPhone features: GPS, accelerometer, local storage, camera and more. This approach works especially well for robust applications, like 3D games. If your goal is to sell a complex, full-featured application, building a native application is your best bet.

So, why doesn’t every development shop build native iPhone apps? Because they’re built in Objective-C, an obscure programming language that can be difficult to learn. Not only are Objective-C developers hard to find, their skills don’t always transfer to other Web development projects. Finding and hiring a team of Objective-C developers is costly and not very practical, unless you plan to focus entirely on iPhone application development.

Take the Hybrid Approach

If you’re not ready to take the Objective-C plunge, there is a hybrid method that combines the browser-built approach with the benefits of native development. Hybrid development tools, like the open source PhoneGap framework, provide a set of tools and libraries that enable Web developers to build iPhone applications with HTML and JavaScript, but also provide access to native iPhone features. The obvious benefit here is that there’s no need to learn yet another programming language. Your JavaScript team can build these hybrid applications with ease.

Of course, every method has its drawbacks. In this case, achieving JavaScript performance can be a challenge. But, if your developers are already well-versed in JavaScript and HTML, a hybrid approach is the fastest, most effective way to add iPhone app development to your roster, especially if you’re building social networking applications, simple games and companion applications to websites. This avenue opens up options for cross platform development because iPhone applications built with PhoneGap also run on Blackberry and Android.

To find out more about using the hybrid approach with PhoneGap visit www.phonegap.com.

Mobile applications are the new Shangra La for software development shops. This article in the Washington Post reports that more than 800 million iPhone applications have been downloaded and there are now more than 25,000 apps in the iTunes store. Clearly, there’s an enormous market for mobile applications. But, when it comes to choosing the best method for developing iPhone apps, it’s not always obvious which approach aligns with your business goals. This article outlines three different development methods for building mobile apps along with pros and cons to help you choose the development approach that’s right for your business.

Build In the Browser

The easiest option for creating an iPhone, Blackberry or Android application is to build it in the browser using Web development languages like HTML and JavaScript. There are some solid reasons to take this approach. For starters, if you’re a Web developer and are familiar with HTML and JavaScript, but not versed in the native iPhone app development language of Objective-C, you can build an iPhone application in the browser using the skills you already have. Second, browser-built apps are easier to build and distribute. They’re portable and accessible from multiple devices, which helps to spread the application’s popularity. Also on the upside, browser-built apps update instantly, generally load faster, are easier to read and update and offer more flexibility for future feature updates. Popular browser-built iPhone apps include Gmail and SlideShare.

The simplicity of browser-built iPhone apps attracts many developers, especially Web developers, but there are problems with this method. A major setback is that applications built this way can’t access native iPhone features like accelerometer, GPS, camera, contacts, etc. That’s a significant handicap when users are clamoring for applications that make the most of iPhone technology.

Create a Native App

Native applications built in Objective-C make full use of all the iPhone features: GPS, accelerometer, local storage, camera and more. This approach works especially well for robust applications, like 3D games. If your goal is to sell a complex, full-featured application, building a native application is your best bet.

So, why doesn’t every development shop build native iPhone apps? Because they’re built in Objective-C, an obscure programming language that can be difficult to learn. Not only are Objective-C developers hard to find, their skills don’t always transfer to other Web development projects. Finding and hiring a team of Objective-C developers is costly and not very practical, unless you plan to focus entirely on iPhone application development.

Take the Hybrid Approach

If you’re not ready to take the Objective-C plunge, there is a hybrid method that combines the browser-built approach with the benefits of native development. Hybrid development tools, like the open source PhoneGap framework, provide a set of tools and libraries that enable Web developers to build iPhone applications with HTML and JavaScript, but also provide access to native iPhone features. The obvious benefit here is that there’s no need to learn yet another programming language. Your JavaScript team can build these hybrid applications with ease.

Of course, every method has its drawbacks. In this case, achieving JavaScript performance can be a challenge. But, if your developers are already well-versed in JavaScript and HTML, a hybrid approach is the fastest, most effective way to add iPhone app development to your roster, especially if you’re building social networking applications, simple games and companion applications to websites. This avenue opens up options for cross platform development because iPhone applications built with PhoneGap also run on Blackberry and Android.

To find out more about using the hybrid approach with PhoneGap visit www.phonegap.com.

The BlackBerry interface is unapologetically a power user interface. Much of the functionality is only available through keyboard shortcuts or the click wheel (not immediately apparent via buttons, etc.). In contrast, the Palm OS presents almost all of its functionality in on-screen buttons - eschewing menus for the most part.

Once you take make the investment to learn it, you’ll enjoy the BlackBerry’s more efficient screen usage. Google Maps for the BlackBerry 8700 is a great example of this. The entire screen is used to display maps - no buttons, menus, etc. (though overlays are presented in “directions” mode).

I believe that BlackBerry has gotten away with this interface design style choice in part because the majority of their customers are corporate users. They don’t have to sell each user, they sell the company and the company provides the device to the user.

In contrast, the Treo has been a consumer device which has moved into the enterprise. The initial ease of use of the Palm OS helped sell individual consumers on the device.

Now that BlackBerry is creating more consumer direct devices and the Treo is being billed more as a business tool, I’m curious if their respective user interface styles will also begin to converge a little more.

The BlackBerry interface is unapologetically a power user interface. Much of the functionality is only available through keyboard shortcuts or the click wheel (not immediately apparent via buttons, etc.). In contrast, the Palm OS presents almost all of its functionality in on-screen buttons - eschewing menus for the most part.

Once you take make the investment to learn it, you’ll enjoy the BlackBerry’s more efficient screen usage. Google Maps for the BlackBerry 8700 is a great example of this. The entire screen is used to display maps - no buttons, menus, etc. (though overlays are presented in “directions” mode).

I believe that BlackBerry has gotten away with this interface design style choice in part because the majority of their customers are corporate users. They don’t have to sell each user, they sell the company and the company provides the device to the user.

In contrast, the Treo has been a consumer device which has moved into the enterprise. The initial ease of use of the Palm OS helped sell individual consumers on the device.

Now that BlackBerry is creating more consumer direct devices and the Treo is being billed more as a business tool, I’m curious if their respective user interface styles will also begin to converge a little more.

I was wrong when I said you can’t tether a BlackBerry as a modem in Parallels. You can tether in Parallels, you just have to disable your PocketMac drivers first.

Move the BlackberryUSB*.kext folders out of the /System/Library/Extensions folder, restart, then you can connect to your BlackBerry in Parallels with no problem.

This is great, until there is a solution for tethering in OS X (the bounty is up to $560), at least I don’t have to reboot into BootCamp to connect in a pinch.

Okay Lazyweb, help me find what I’m lookin' fer. I want a mobile shoppin'/todo list app that me lady and I can both use t' keep shared lists. I’ve got an iPhone, Susan has a Blackberry Curve — it should be easy t' use on either o' those devices. And o' course, we’d want t' be able t' edit our lists via our desktop web browsers, as well.

It should:

• support multiple lists
• support sharin' lists betwixt multiple scallywags
• make it super easy t' check off items
• be able t' sync th' latest list updates from anywhere
• be easy t' use on iPhone, Blackberry, or any web browser
• be inexpensive

It doesn’t have t' have (but could):

• support store-specific lists
• be aware o' what aisle items are on
• support recipe ingredient lists or meal plannin' functions
• support item categories within lists

I looked at a few list applications fer th' iPhone in th' App Store, and I did some searches on th' general intarwebs, but th' apps I found all fell down in some way. The usual failin' were that they didn’t support (or at least didn’t make it clear that it would support) sharin' lists betwixt scallywags, or weren’t cross-platform.

Is anybody out there aware o' such an app? Given me failure t' locate one meself, I’m inclined t' think that either 1) me Google-fu were weak that day, 2) th' app I’m lookin' fer exists but needs better SEO (this is what I suspect), 3) developers o' th' existin' list apps aren’t doin' a good job o' highlightin' all o' their features (which I also suspect), or 4) there is an openin' in that market space that would be pretty easy t' fill. If I thought I could spare th' time, I’d try t' develop a service like that, meself.