So what gives? For consumer
experiences, HCI research
should focus more on preparing—and industry on creating—
new sweet-spot devices, rather
than wasting time on baroque
extensions of existing paradigms. To make history, look
for that sweet spot providing
the broad public with a device/
application/service to which
they had no usable, affordable
access before.
This, by the way, is also why
HCI is key to innovative products. Sweet-spot solutions are
task-centered in an unprecedented way; they are uncluttered, simple, and elegant.
The other day, after Googling
another nearby store on my
iPhone, because the one where
we were didn’t have what we
wanted, my sweetheart said,
“You know, it’s really incredible
how useful this iPhone is.” Now
excuse me while I go and drool
some more.
March + April 2008
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Peter Winandy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jan Borchers is a professor
of computer science at
RWTH Aachen University in
Germany, where he heads
the Media Computing
Group, studying interaction with audio and
video streams, mobile devices, and ubicomp environments. He has currently
deserted his students for a sabbatical at
UC San Diego to write random rants like
this. He’s not getting paid for this article by
Tom Tom, Apple, or Psion, although he will
happily provide them with his banking
details should they feel obliged to change
that. He can be found at http://hci.rwth-aachen.de.
squarely into their baroque
stage. In a 2007 study we did
for Germany’s largest mobile-technology consumer magazine,
connect, virtually all models we
tested gave users problems with
even the most basic and essential tasks: turn on, mute ringer,
call number. Being able to
browse the Web, take pictures,
watch or record movies wherever you are is great, mind you,
but it has overloaded the sweet-spot product and interaction
design of the traditional mobile
phone beyond recovery.
The only way out was to
radically rethink the product.
Apple’s iPhone did that to a
degree, removing the keyboard
and its dead-end soft-key concept and introducing multitouch
to more directly interact with
what’s on screen. It was far
from perfect, but mobile browsing became good enough to
become useful, giving you the
tingling feeling of a new sweet-spot candidate.
Or take home internet access.
After listening to our chirping
modems for years, it was DSL’s
unlimited-time, unlimited-vol-ume flat rate that changed how
we thought about the Internet:
Suddenly it was free to access
the Net after paying a fixed
monthly fee. Getting movie
showtimes, driving instructions,
or just a recipe for cranberry
sauce became a snap. And flat
rates made our systems always-on, with no dial-in delays. Since
then providers have tried to
integrate DSL, landline, cable,
and cell phone contracts, leading to a maze of options with
some further savings but no
impact anywhere near that of
the flat-rate DSL effect.
Occasionally, consumers will
go as far as backpedaling to find
the sweet spot again. My last
microwaves were all of the one-dial-for-time, one-dial-for-power,
go-bing-at-the-end variety, and
I can’t be alone, judging from
what’s in stores. On my Sony-Ericsson T630 phone, I quickly
replaced the default, distracting,
low-contrast ColorBombs theme
with a simple black and white
one that let me focus on the
important stuff.
The desktop metaphor had
its sweet spot with the release
of the Xerox Star and Apple
Macintosh between 1981 and
1984. Since then its basic idea
has remained unchanged, as is
often lamented, and only small
improvements and secondary
features have made it onto our
screens. Smaller sweet spots
were reached within that metaphor (full-text search or Apple’s
Time Machine backup come to
mind), but most new, more colorful and feature-rich systems
fall into the baroque phase.
Sometimes I fantasize about a
system that returns the desktop
metaphor to its sweet spot (not
that that would be very useful
today), or that finds the right
revolutionary approach to kick
the desktop metaphor out the
door.
Other examples include the
original iPod, or the affordable
consumer digital camera with
enough resolution for standardsize prints, letting you take,
immediately check, and delete
shots for free. TiVos changed TV
viewing habits fundamentally,
and personally, I would include
iChat AV, for letting me show
our new kitchen to my mom
some years ago, walking around
with a laptop and iSight camera
(okay, still geeky).