Orange is introducing Tabbee, a multimedia tablet for “everywhere around the house and all the members of your family.” It has a 800×600 touchscreen and looks a little bit like a Macintosh display reduced to small size. Reading the text on the introduction website made me wonder about the underlying use scenarios.
The tablet can be carried around in your house and gives access “at any moment” to a range of information services, internet included. How often do we have the urge to consult the weather or our calendar while walking around our house? And even if you decide to walk around your house carrying the tablet wouldn’t you sit down to surf the net? And is a 800×600 screen then not somewhat on a small side for viewing websites?
The tablet can connect to your PC by wi-fi (so you DO still own a PC), on which you find your own stuff. I am not sure the tablet can store any stuff by itself and if not, it becomes an expensive PC remote viewer. Why then not carry around your laptop if your want to watch a movie quietly in your room?
The site does mention one believable use case, however: having the internet recipe before your eyes in the kitchen. Now there, I say, Orange did their user research well. You see, an average kitchen in Paris wouldn’t fit you AND your computer at once. It hardly fits you AND your kitchen equipment at once and you have to be truly creative in using the space. But then you would want to hang the tablet on the wall, because the wall is the only place left. In my kitchen, anyway.
A friend who just moved back to France after a long time in US complained about not having a French version of Yelp, a social review service allowing you “to decide on the best place to eat in any part of the country within minutes”. The service exists due to kind souls who sit down after a good meal (or a bad one) and write something about it. You’d be surprised how many kind souls there are if you look at the site. And not so kind ones too. Personally I wonder whether the urge to write a bad review is not slightly stronger than to write a good one (after a good meal you are satisfied, after a bad one you still crave something), which would make this kind of service unbalanced. But this is not the point. The point is that for a large number of things we now more often consult opinions of people “like ourselves” rather than experts on the subject. We “rely on the kindness of strangers” rather than institutions.
We had encyclopedia, written by scholars, now we have Wikipedia, written by… well, everybody. We had travel guides written by journalists, whose job it was to visit those places, now we go a social network to talk to other travelers. We had search engines, now we prefer to Twitter our question or pose it in our Facebook status. Someone would always answer and the answer would probably be exactly what we asked for, because those people happen to know us – and institutions do not.
One could argue that we now let ourselves be misled more often. But one could also argue that all information is always in some way subjective.
Just consider how many institutions are now on their way if not to extinction than at least to a profound transformation. Phone books. Yellow pages. Travel agencies – does anyone still go to those? Travel guides. Folding maps, so impractical when you have GPS on your mobile. Cook books – the last time you bought one was probably to give it to somebody as a present, and this person put it on the shelf and never looked at it again. “How-to” books – we have a YouTube category for that. Dictionaries – long live spell checker. Paper agendas – not flexible enough anymore. And so on.
In Italy I came across a typical British public phone booth, now a curiosity in somebody’s garden. Italians cannot live through a day without their mobile phone, so I thought this illustrates well my point.
I love the little yellow man on Google maps, navigating my favorite city, in which I also happen to live, among photographic images. I can show my house to my mom, who lives far away, and say: look, I am on the sixth floor, and this is my window. Some kind soul took the pictures and Google assembled them rather seamlessly. Paris is one of the cities mapped this way completely. When last week a friend called to consult me whether she should take a certain rental apartment, I let the little yellow man jump to the number on the street that she gave me, had a look around, glanced up and down the building she would be living in, looked how close she was to some points of interest and said: yes, you should.
I love Google maps. I make maps for my friends with pins popping up useful information about things in any location to which we would be traveling together. It’s not Google Maps for me anymore, it’s a googlemap, a tool so useful, it becomes a term in itself. But so far it is limited to my computer’s screen. I am yet not one of the 10% of world’s mobile phone users who, according to this article in New York Times, use navigational tools on their phones.
The article explores new trends and opportunities of the future use of maps on mobile phones. It describes scenarios on how you would be able to see a friend dining just two blocks away, or simply orienting yourself when emerging from a metro station you have never been to before. You would hold up your mobile to an urban landscape and see an enhanced image of it – together with the information about the real things in front of you. Because, you see, it would not only be the maps. When you arrive in a foreign country your phone would tell you the way to the airport shuttle service and how to pronounce “One ticket to downtown” in Italian. It will become your very own pocket googlemap.
Going to another country is always an opportunity to stumble upon interesting examples of design in public spaces. Below the monitor on the tram number 10 in Amsterdam, indicating, from left to right, the next stop (”Volgende halte”), the 4 stops to come after that and the destination (”Bestemming”). The tram line number is in the left bottom corner, not very visible on this picture (taken with my mobile).
I am quite a fan of Dutch design, which I usually find clear and efficient, even if this particular example is aesthetically not the most elegant. Add to this display a friendly voice saying ‘The next stop is…’ and you get a very reassuring user experience of public transport, especially for the tourists who, unlike me, do not know the city.
I like Paris metro line number 14. It’s the only line, which is never on strike. Why? It is fully automatic. The stations are modern, clean, the trains spacious and light, and the ‘user experience’ is, so to say, very pleasant. Not that I don’t like the ‘traditional’ metro lines in Paris – I do. Even when the stations are a little bit old, a little bit smelly, the light a little bit yellowish, the trains small and crowded, the advertising huge and the strikes as regular as public holidays. One thing that surprises me as not very well considered, in terms of user experience on line 14, is the traffic prediction monitor. You see a blue screen with small white characters, which you can only read from very close. So, if you want to know when your train is coming, you have to go look for this information. And what will you see? The first and the second train, its destination and the expected time in minutes AND seconds. Something like this: Saint-Lazare 0min 40sec Saint-Lazare 2min 40sec The thing is, on line 14 there can be only one destination in each direction, so why repeat ‘Saint-Lazare’? And does the user really need to know how many seconds still remain? Besides, it will take you some time to figure out, what time it is and the whole monitor looks like an old Windows computer with a permanent fatal error. Consider, on the contrary, the monitor on most ‘old’ stations. Practically from the any spot on the quay you will be able to read the direction of the line, the current time, the expected time before the first and the second train – in minutes. I find it a fine example of an economical and self-explaining information design, taking into account its visibility and immediate understanding. Somehow I find the second monitor to look much more modern than the first.
Here is an older article on information design in Moscow metro.
Gare de Lyon, pour trouver la ligne 14, vous avez le choix, tout droit : vous sortez directement dehors (oups: erreur demi-tour); gauche vous arriverez alors sur un panneau ligne 14 à droite (encore demi-tour) et si vous prenez à droite vous arriverez sur un panneau ligne 14 à gauche… et je vais ou sinon ? Car la je tourne un peu en rond. A se demander si ils ont au moins une fois testé leur signalétique avec des utilisateurs.
Après avoir envahi de nombreuses villes à travers le monde (Londres, Tokio, New-York, Barcelone, etc.) avec ses mosaïques tirées du jeu Space Invaders et avoir fait grand buzz, l’artiste français Invaders est de retour avec un nouveau projet le Binary Code à base de QR Code (tag graphique) en mosaïque. L’explication en vidéo :
Voici une présentation intéressante sur le design d’interface tactile pour téléphone mobile. En dehors de l’aspect technique des différents type d’écran, cette présentation aborde notamment la problématique de la taille minimum d’un élément pointable par le doigt et l’aération nécessaire à cet élément pour une utilisation confortable.
Voilà une idée plutôt novatrice venue d’un développeur d’application pour iPhone : utiliser les capteurs de l’accéléromètre pour permettre le défilement d’une page.
Ainsi, il suffit de pencher légèrement son iPhone pour que la page défile.
Cette fonctionnalité a été développée pour l’application Instapper, qui permet de stocker des pages web sur iPhone afin de les lire plus tard avec un format de lecture plus adaptée.
C’est plutôt malin, d’avoir penser à utiliser ces capteurs. En effet, en général ceux-ci sont très utilisés dans la conception de jeux vidéos, mais raremment pour des fonctionnalités plus basiques comme le défilement des pages.
