Idean specialists will be guest blogging in the Käyttö ja liittymä blog
(in Finnish) in Tietoviikko. Topics range from usability and user experience design to business trends analysis for the digital domain.
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Is it justified to call the internet cyberspace? It is cyber, ok, but is it space? By space we generally mean something which has three dimensions, and various objects which can exist there. Does the internet have dimensions? Of course the servers are located all over the globe, but that is really not the point here. The point is the users, and how they experience the internet.
If we are talking about surfing the web, which for many means the same as accessing the internet in general, the user experience mainly consists of downloading two-dimensional web pages to the computer’s screen, browsing through them, and possibly taking some further actions. There really is no feeling of distance or space in typical web surfing. Well, sometimes there can be, if downloading some site takes a long time. Then the user can wonder whether the page in question comes from a server somewhere far away.
Institute for the Future’s Alex Pang has done a good job preaching about the end of cyberspace for a while now. He probably would agree with most of what I just wrote above. However, I see two current development paths, which encourage me to bring “the space back into cyberspace”. The first is mobile web. In many respects mobile web is still in its infancy. Majority of the web pages, which function perfectly fine with computers and their various browsers, can cause bad usability experiences if accessed with a mobile device. Furthermore, unlike some downloadable apps, mobile web cannot yet take good advantage of the user context, most importantly the user’s location.
We can expect to see changes in the power of mobile web in the near future, and this is interesting with regard to the notion of cyberspace. The “web-part” of mobile web, that is, digital content residing in some server, is still something where the concept of space does not fit. The “mobile part”, however, is a completely different story. Mobile users can augment real world objects with material from the web. Some applications already enable this, but more so in the future. As an example, a user can take a picture of a statue, tag it with various metadata (like ‘statue’, ‘london’, ‘man’), and send it off to Flickr. If this was the first image taken about that particular statue, it now as a consequence has more relationships than it did before. It is now related to anything tagged with ‘statue’, ‘london’, or ‘man’. This information can then be used both by stationary users, who surf Flickr searching for certain kinds of pictures, and by mobile users, who are strolling in London and wishing to access information about things spatially close to them.
The other phenomena, where the notion of space is natural, are virtual worlds such as Second Life, Habbo Hotel, and the World of Warcraft. These are completely digital applications, hence the word “virtual”, but moving around in them still makes sense. A nice thing about virtual worlds is that they can mimic the real world to a degree they wish. They typically respect it enough for the users to conceive what’s going on, but in some respects abandon the physical restrictions. This is an important factor to the success of virtual worlds; being familiar enough, but going beyond the boring restrictions such as humans’ inability to fly.
I see the web in general being influenced by both mobile web and virtual worlds, and expect this trend to further strengthen. As we know, there are already more mobile phones in the world than there are PCs, Nokia sells more cameras than traditional camera manufacturers, and so on. There is a huge opportunity in developing the mobile web. As many have said, in the future there is probably no distinction between mobile web and “the rest of the web”. I tend to partly agree: mobile web is no longer a crappy and slow subset of the web. I also disagree, because mobility can augment the web with material from the real world. In the future, mobile web will be more than the “traditional web”, not less. Finally, virtual worlds combined with mobility enable switching between the real world and the digital one. If you are too tired to walk to see your friends, or if the weather sucks, why not teleport yourself? If you are interested in the history of the city square you are visiting, why not download pictures, videos, and other content describing just that?
Santtu
www.idean.com/iphone/spin
NOTE: Requires an iPhone 2.0 or the new iPod Touch. SDK simulator works too. People with an older iPhone see the bottle but it won’t rotate…
UPDATE: Our Spin-the-Bottle got “staff pick” nomination by Apple. Cool:)
http://www.apple.com/webapps/
As a software developer with a focus on web I’m very excited about the browser in the iPhone, the Safari Mobile. It is one of the most advanced browsers in the market even compared to desktop alternatives. The engineers at Apple have packaged some really cool features yet to be discovered by mainstream.
Spin the bottle could have been easily implemented as a native iPhone application but I wanted to experiment with the new features of the browser: touch events, CSS transforms and animations. The CSS features are new innovations of the Webkit rendering engine and might end up in the standardisation process in the future.
Finding out information about these techniques required some surfing in the Apple Developer pages and in several iphone-related forums around the net. Good sample code was hard to find. Developing of the app took some trial and error, but it was fun to push the limit.
In the end we were quite amazed at what is possible to do in the browser these days, not to mention a mobile one. This is a sign of things to come. When Mozilla, Google and other enter the mobile browser landscape, I’m sure we’ll see more innovative ways to take the mobile web where no man has been before.
We had lots of fun developing this small app. Hope you like it too.
Touch events. The new Safari Mobile has a new set of touch callbacks for tracking touch events. The standard mouse events won’t do the work. The app also demonstrates how to prevent the browser from scrolling the window on finger movement.
CSS transforms, transitions, animations. All of these cool new features are used in the app. The bottle is rotated with a “rotateZ” CSS transform. CSS transition is used to slide up the about box on close. CSS animation is used in the rotating splash text graphic “Spin the the bottle”. There’s some glitch in the CSS animation that I could not remove. Maybe a bug in the browser.
CSS rounded corners and border-image. The forthcoming CSS3 standard specifies a better way for implementing rounded corners. There’s a “border-radius” that applies curving to the standard border. “border-image” offers a way to implement a custom bitmap border around an element in a single compact image. Both of these bring great relief for web developers struggling with “sliding windows” techniques and what not. We’ll see these on desktops browsers soon as well.
Orientation change. Polling of window dimensions with Javascript, the usual way. I wonder why Apple hasn’t yet implemented an event handler for detecting orientation change.
Transparent PNGs. See how easy it is to provide some realism with little transparency in the images. The devil is in the details.
Custom Home Screen icon. If you save the URL to the Home Screen of your iPhone, you’ll get the application specific icon.
There’s no Javascript framework in use here, although I’m a huge fan of jquery. I wanted to keep things clear and simple.
And of course, the brave souls can digg the sources for the details.
Tomi
Great mobile design is a successful combination of several factors, such as identifying the needs of the mobile context and complementing ease-of-use with outstanding yet usable visual design.
Idean, a long-term partner and service provider, cooperated with Forum Nokia to identify and present some of the finest examples of Mobile Design - applications that everyone in the mobile business should take a look at.
Is your favourite application missing from these Mobile Design Showcases? Let us know!
Idean discusses the future of cloud computing in Tietoviikko, a leading IT newspaper in Finland (the article only in Finnish).
CKIR, the Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research, Institute of Helsinki School of Economics organized a workshop on the core essence of what Idean is all about: how do companies, societies and people co-innovate for creating new value and wealth?
The workshop agenda was very interesting and touches the question from many angles, yet the core challenge is simple. As Mr. Ikujiro Nonaka, Visiting Professor from Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo states: The essence of open innovation is to listen and feel the needs and life of users and then be inspired.
See the CKIR workshop abstract (PDF).
Our own Jussi had an interesting discussion with Craig Barrett, Chairman of the Board and former CEO of Intel Corporation. Now, a competition for a limited time: check out the link, find Jussi and take your shot at figuring out the next big thing the two are chatting about. First to get it right gets a chance to win a prize!
Our user research is as innovative as our design activities. Here are two stories of how we do research. They have been published in UPA User Experience magazine. First article is about “Moving with magic thing”, method we’ve used successfully globally to get understanding how people would use new mobile technologies as part of their everyday life. Another article is fascinating story how we used acting to validate concepts with users.
Our aim is to continously develop new, innovative and cost effective research methods together with our academic collaborators and clients. Idean is well known for its ability to choose the right research techniques for each client case. This requires that we master huge amount of methods where to choose. International focus and tight schedules forces us to seek cost effective and repeatable techniques but that does not mean that we would not be cool partner in our research. Afterall we do research in order to inform and inspire design and decision making.
For more information about our research methodologies, please contact our Research Director, Anu Kankainen.
This is really happening - we’re releasing our brand new web site and we’re proud of it. Just stay tuned, more to come and version 2.0 actually already in progress:) -risto
