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Mark Zuckerberg swore his team wasn't making a Facebook phone. But today, he greeted a room full of press in Menlo Park with a different message. "Today we're finally going to talk about that Facebook phone," the social network's CEO said. But by "Facebook phone," Zuckerberg doesn't mean actual hardware. Instead his team created Home, a concept that changes the "soul of the phone," the home screen. "What would it feel like if our phones were designed around people, not apps?" Zuckerberg asked the audience. "We're not building a phone. We're not building a new MP3 player. And we're not building a new internet communication device," Zuckerberg said. Instead, Facebook Home appears the moment you turn on your phone or wake it up from stand-by mode (Zuckerberg says people turn on their phones an average of 100 times per day). Facebook Home doesn't display the typical static background photo. It shows story after story posted by friends to Facebook or Instagram in real-time. It displays status updates, photos, and other open graph stories with large images. Below is a graphic that simply explains what Facebook Home is. It's an integration on top of Android's Operating System but beneath the app icon layer we're all used to seeing on our smart phones. Facebook has built the first home screen that comes to life, and updates in real time.
In 1984, the New York Times ran an article slamming the concept of windows-based operating systems.
Nicholas Carlson just pointed it out as an example of why you shouldn't listen to gadget reviewers. He's right about that as far as it goes: You shouldn't listen to gadget reviewers. It only leads to heartbreak.
But the New York Times article is actually amazingly prescient, if you think about the future of computing today.
What's magnificent about Apple's iPad and Microsoft's new Surface? They let you focus on a single task, by design.
UI design is about maintaining consistency while expanding possibilities. Looks like Facebook's latest iOS update does the opposite... Today facebook changed (once again) the gestures that everybody knew by now (given the high usage rate of the app), which will induce latency, friction and frustration from single handed, zero attention span millions of users. But maybe one can see some wisdom in such choices, that over time may be progressively forgotten. More frustrating are some feature reductions, namely in the photo area of the app that now longer allows posting pictures that are not in the camera roll. For instance, it is no longer possible to enrich a post with a photo picked in an existing album, including the photostream. This is a big restriction in terms of features and UI, with no understandable reason. Please voice your comments and reactions.
Could you succeed in every aspect of your job using just a smartphone or tablet? One exec decided to try it for a year. Here's what he has learned. Caveat: success depends a lot on the type of job, and in this particular case there is some strong bias
Via Alain Rodermann
So Apple won its big patent lawsuit against Samsung (at least 1st round) and everyone commented about the consequences and the Apple Tax, but what about the ground ? Business Insider have pulled together the six patents the jury says Samsung violated. For instance Utility Patent 163: Enlarging documents by tapping the screen : you know when you double tap text that is too small and it enlarges? Or when you double tap and the text centers? Well Apple owns that patent and the jury agreed that Samsung violated this one with 12 of its phones Maybe Steven Spielberg or John Underkoffler should have patented most of Minority Report's gestures after all as evidenced in http://fon.gs/minority-report-ui-analysis
The Pathway explores how systems responsive to behaviour patterns and sensor data enable new experiences better suited to individual user needs. It aims to solve specific design challenges around the self learning process, balancing dynamic and consistent interface elements, approaches to privacy management and making it easy for users to correct contextual mistakes. • In which scenarios do real-time sensor data and behavioural patterns combine most effectively to reveal user context?
• What is the right balance between dynamic, contextually responsive elements and consistency in the user interface?
• How can contextually responsive experiences respect privacy yet learn user behaviour quickly enough to deliver benefit?
• How do graceful failure techniques allow users to correct inaccurate contextual guesses and reassure the system is learning from mistakes?
The ability to understand user context is increasing continuously. New sensors and data points colour ever more detail into the picture of who a user is, what they’re doing and where they are interacting with digital services. The way in which design responds to context, however, lags this new availability of contextual data points. This is due partly to the relative complexity of creating contextually responsive digital experiences and partly to a misconception among designers that users are willing to change their context in order to gain access to particular products. In reality, such life altering products are few and far between. Most experiences, and particularly those distributed across multiple digital touchpoints, can be made better by embracing contextually responsive principles.
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For the last couple of years, sales of Android-based smartphones have been smoking every other kind of smartphone, including the iPhone. Android phones now account for nearly 75% of the global smartphone market. The next closest competitor is iPhones, which have about 15% of the market.
In the U.S., Android is clubbing iPhone 53% to 34%. Given such a disparity in phone sales and usage, you would think that things people do with smartphones--smartphone-based activities--would be equally dominated by Android.
But they aren't. They're not even equal.
In fact, iPhone users completely dominate Internet-based smartphone activities. A recent survey of mobile web usage found that a staggering 60% of mobile web visits came from iOS devices, while only 20% came from Android. A study IBM did of Black Friday online sales showed much the same thing--except that it was even more skewed. iOS (iPads and iPhones) accounted for nearly 20% of Black Friday sales. Android devices, meanwhile, accounted for only 5.5%.
Not content with synchronizing your phones to make one giant speaker? Researchers at the Tokyo University of Technology have developed "Pinch," an interface that lets you connect multiple devices together to form a giant disjointed display. Although the technology behind the interface remains a mystery — described only as a Wi-Fi based system — a video posted by DigInfo TV shows Pinch in action. To connect two devices, a user simply needs to pinch two adjacent screens together. The screens can be linked together in whatever alignment you choose, as the position and screen size of each display is communicated on a successful pinch. It's not the first time developers have managed to link together multiple smartphone displays, but this is definitely the slickest interface we've seen.
Takashi Ohta, Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Technology, envisions the Pinch interface being used for a variety of apps. "People probably own just one of these devices each. I think people could communicate in fun ways by getting together with friends and putting their devices next to each other." Potential uses include music, advertising, and photo sharing — although depending on how fast the tech is we'd love to see some games take advantage of the interface. The research team is offering Pinch to interested developers and says that several have already taken them up on the offer.
Price and shipping might not seem like the traditional remit of a user experience team, but they should be. .../... If you look at it from a customer perspective, there's no mystery to the success of the iPhone: it fits your life better. It only seems mysterious when you can't understand why someone would choose a slower processor, smaller screen and fewer megapixels. The mystery comes from measuring the wrong metrics and, indeed, trying to measure intangibles which can't be calculated in a spreadsheet.
Worth a full read on his blog : Six months ago I deleted email from my phone by unlinking my Gmail account from the iPhone Mail app. Technically I could still check my email using Safari but I use 1Password to manage my passwords and the experience on mobile requires several,...
Beyond an impressive (and long awaited) speed and UX improvement, facebook's last iOS release raises the HTML5 vs.native apps debate to a whole new level
"Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard." Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen. For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements. This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements. The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market — at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter. This is like day one of the mouse. Except, no one needs an instruction manual for their hands.
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