Convergence in My Living Room

Not too unrelated to yesterday's post on multiple screens is convergence in the living room. Internet on TV-attached devices. And not just the web browser in your Wii. This has been coming for a while, and like a lot of when-will-it-get-here technologies arrived, oh, some time ago. I've had Netflix in the living room for a year, and of course then there's that Wii browser. And what about all the networked gaming that's been going on for years and years. This post is driven by two things that happened to me lately, playing with a Sony Google TV, and getting a new DVD player. The Google TV was... disappointing. And I saw it while shopping for a new DVD player because my previous, marginally-connected one died, and Best Buy decided to screw me on the warranty. So a few days later, a new cool one arrived in the mail. It was not just rather more connected (no browser, but lots of other neat stuff) but the services (apps, if you want) were all significantly better and easier to get to than the Google product. All this basically for free, instead of the premium (or all new box) for Google TV in your TV. So, here's a 10 minute walkthrough of the best and worst connected services and some interesting interactions patterns, or anti-patterns. Coupled with lots of chatter (with some of the phrasing I remember from information superhighway days) this has been on my mind. We're supposed to be seeing convergence in all sorts of devices, in all sorts of areas, and with some new products, and people like Netflix moving into into everything they can get into, the living room is the current frontier. So, like I said, it's here. It's not all good. And not just because of the bad bits of the connectedness above, but because of fragmentation in the worst way. The PVR/DVR does some stuff. The DVD player does other stuff. The game station does some other stuff. The TV will soon do stuff. Annoyingly, much of this is the same stuff, and you have to choose which version of Netflix you might want to use today. Not to mention that consumer electronics and home A/V systems are terrible things to set up anyway.

My programmable smartypants remote is the only thing that makes a lot of the functionality tolerable. But that also took far too much time, and almost no one else I show any of this to, from calibrating my 7.1 surround sound, to getting that remote programmed, is willing to put up with the fuss. There are lots of marginally good-enough solutions, and as the always quotable Russell Davies said the other day "It turns out that homes are mostly full of solved problems. " Most people will keep living with the easiest, quickest solution. And they might well just keep going to their computer or mobile. Unless this gets a lot better, it's not going to get any market traction. Except incidentally. Cameras in phones became default well before they were demanded. Don't get confused by just counting the number of Netflix-enabled devices in homes; look at how many people actually use these devices. Oh, and since I've been writing up lots of design patterns, I always look at new cool products to get good ideas, and avoid bad ones. I just often can't talk about other things I get to see.

More on Context: Musing on Multiple Screens

Aside from spending all my time looking for work (please hire me!) or writing in excessive detail about mobile design, I've been slowly noticing myself doing things like this: I have a couple additional handsets that are active (thanks, various old clients), and I sometimes carry the extras around. And I find myself not so much switching to the coolest, newest one, but using all the tools I have available, often at the same time. Yes, they now all multitask just fine, so why am I doing this? At first I thought it was just that I'd found something else to gripe about. The switching is bad. Or they don't link up well so I might as well be typing. But I don't think that's it. Because when I started becoming conscious of this, I noticed doing it a lot more. And in all sorts of places. Like this. For example, I'm watching something on the DVR with the family, and using the Sling-provided function to see what is on the DVR (to make sure the show we want is being recorded, to find out what we can watch next) without interrupting the viewing, and using the computer to read the IMdB page about the movie for other types of entertainment. And that's not even counting doing Facebook or Email or Twitter or blogging while watching TV. Very often, I am extending the experience with another device. And yes, sometimes I do that with more than one handset, instead of a computer. But I am not sure it matters. A few others have been talking about use of multiple screens lately. Most notably, I'll mention these two posts by Russell Davies (no, not that one) on using multiple handsets, and ancillary screens. And I've known people for years who are similarly issued a work phone (perhaps a high-security one), and have a normal phone for the rest of their lives. And I haven't even gotten to iPods, in-car navigation, kiosks or those annoying video-playing screens on gas pumps. But back to what it means: I am not sure. Working on it, but it helps to type things, and maybe you can contribute. I am sorta thinking along two paths now. First, the "fourth screen" thing may not be what I think a lot of tech pundits seems to want ("Technology Y is Dead!"), which is generational improvements, but /additional/ types of interfaces. And they don't necessarily displace, but can be used in addition. Like my use of mobile and computer while watching TV. The other is about context. Where, again, I think I work best with photos. The desktop, as I've mentioned lately when discussing context, is about what happens on the big glowing rectangle. It can assume you are sitting right in front of it, and all the interaction happens in windows within the display rectangle (or, to me, two adjacent rectangles). Laptops are not much different, and still assume they are more important than the surroundings. You don't carry a screen around with you out in the world, but can carry (or place, or mount) an arbitrary number of screens in the context in which you live; the whole world. Previously, I had really considered context to be a screen bound to the viewport or device and strongly influenced by the way the user worked, and the environment they live in. Even though I have drawn pictures of the device in context, I wasn't quite getting that it literally lives in the context of the rest of the world. So, I have yet to decide how this impacts how I might design a service. Certainly somehow, at least for entertainment and CE products. And probably some for everything else. If I come up with more, expect to see additional ranting, or topics in the book. I think there might be something to say about remote input as well. To which I'll remind everyone: please visit, provide feedback and contribute to the mobile design patterns and information wiki at 4ourth Mobile.

F8 and Be There - What Mobile Convergence Means

I only took so many notes, but I /think/ it was Josh Clark who said at Design for Mobile 2010 the other week something along the lines of "the best notepad is the one you have with you." And went on this for a while, then I left the room to solve some other crisis, I am sure. I also don't think it was this presentation but that one's pretty good also. So read it.

I was wrong. Jason Grigsby wrote to say it was his presentation. Which I cannot find, but all of his are good, so go browse some of them: http://www.slideshare.net/grigs

My busyness trying to run the conference – among other reasons – is why I am just now writing about this. I probably missed the good bit. And I had to let it stew a bit, and wait for my brain to get back into designer-mode. But it immediately reminded me of some stuff. And that stuff reminded me of... something. Which I think I have a handle on now.
My dad was a photojournalist (then a PR guy, notably for the KC, MO police department, and so on. But that's not important now). He raised me right, photography-wise, which is why I am always the photographer (such as at d4m2010). I have, for example, no lenscaps. Before there were "Auto" settings on the dials, photographers referred to their exposure settings as "aperature at speed." F5.6 at 125th. And so on. A story he relayed to me, and which I heard later in many similar ways, is that the cub reporter is sent out to cover, oh something. He asks the competing, but friendly old coot next to him how he should be shooting this particular news event, which will happen at any moment. The reply is "F8 and be there." Now, the key of this isn't that F8 is the right exposure for everything (though it's not bad for outdoors, with reasonably slow film), but the "be there" part of things. The above is a diagram I drew for another presentation. If too small, grab the PDF. I drew it two years ago, actually, so it is predicting the future in this diagram. If anything it understates the convergence. For example, sales of dedicated MP3 players (the thickness of that green line) should be shrinking even more, as even larger numbers are finally to the general mobile devices with embedded players. But what does it mean? Not just convergence in general, which could confusingly mean anything. Does it mean devices are confusing? Does it mean that sales of other items will be cannibalized? More importantly, what do I do about it? Well, what Josh's comment made me realize is what this means. It's that we need to design for these everyday cases. A key context is "convenience." Can everyday users be aware of, find, and use all those add-ons, and add value to their lives (and stickyness to your device, os, app or site) as a result of it? Contextually, the mobile can be a notepad, a camera, a game, a message center, a music player... No, that's wrong. At any one moment, for any particular user, it can be the notepad, the camera, the game, the message center, the music player. The one and only version that matters, at that moment. I carry... okay, most of this stuff every time I leave the house, and still end up using my phone as a flashlight, or to take notes, and am sad I can't pay bills with it. If it had a folding knife, I'd be set. If I was making my own choice of device for maximum productivity (vs. being a full time mobile nerd), I would probably pick one with a darned good camera, because I care most about that. So one key tactic is that you can design devices that are particularly good for a market. Photography, music, messaging. These exist. Eventually we'll see a game phone that sticks. But phones are no longer phones. They became general purpose computers some time back. And I don't mean the CS definition but the utility definition. The mobile device (you can't call it a phone anymore) is suitable, or satisfactory, for a large set of needs. Indeed, it's satisfactory for an arbitrarily large set of needs. And a key attribute of smartphones (with their installable apps) or practically any connected device (with the web) is that it's infinitely customizable, and changes moment to moment. Mobile phones, even into the text messaging era, were among the most pure appliances that maybe we'll ever see. Now they have turned into anything devices (and merged with other appliances, like PDAs and GPS), the convergence chart means any task a person can do, that is at it's heart information-centric will be subsumed into the greater mobile experience. Sensors mean that lots of not-pure-information tasks will begin to merge with this also. And if that sounds like the robot apocalypse, it's not. Quite. Remember, this is still satisfaction, not always delight. Not always perfection, or professional-grade, or the most efficient way to do the work, or even the most satisfying experience. It's the good-enough device, because it's always with you. There will always be a market for pen salesmen, and professional cameras.
So my key takeaway for designers (and product developers, and marketers, and everyone else really) is to make your mobile services decently useful, pretty darn usable, and really, really easy to find. If your MP3 player or payment scheme is buried under menus and legal agreements every time it starts (like GPS often is), customers will just keep carrying an iPod or wallet anyway. It becomes functionally un-converged, and you missed out. Or, they buy someone else's device that is converged enough. I also think it's important everyone (at least at work) stop saying "cellphone." Do everything you can to get your mind wrapped around the world we already live in. It's not tomorrow, but has already been going on for years. While telephony is still a key killer app, it's an app. Literally software that can sometimes be replaced with another – just one application among many. The device in your pocket is no longer a phone with add ons, but a general purpose computer that fits in your pocket. The future is here. And it's mobile.