Adaptive Path Blog

For most casual web users today, the smallest thing on the Internet is a web page. This is the element that a user can recall via a URL, store in a bookmark or forward to another user. Sure, there’s sub-elements of a page such as the text or an image or an embedded video, but most users are not savvy enough to deal directly with these. More importantly, users typically don’t care to break sub-elements out of the context of their web page since the browser offers no compelling reason to do so.

For Aurora we saw an opportunity to change the browser’s focus from the page to the individual “object”. Giving users the ability to interact directly with the atomic parts of a given web page offered greater personalization of their Internet experience. As we see in all three of the movie segments users can tear off parts of a web page and store them for use later in their browsing. Sometimes those parts are recognized as people objects and sometimes they are discrete data objects. The objects can be combined with other web pages or other objects. For example, refer to the second segment where a calendar event (data object) is pulled from a web page and dropped onto a person that’s resting in the browser frame.

My favorite combining of objects is displayed in the first movie segment where rainfall data is styled to be more usable. The browser automatically recognizes that the data bound to the page is interactive and this data reacts visually when a second presentation object is dragged on top. The intersection of the data provided by the National Weather Service site and the preferred presentation from the user creates an information source that clarifies the rainfall trends for our actor.

At UX Week I was thrilled to see Jeff Veen present a similar idea in his session titled “Designing Our Way through Data“. Amazingly his example even uses rainfall over time as the data source. Here’s the five relevant slides (pdf) from his presentation:

During our brainstorming we envisioned that a marketplace could open supporting the creation of presentation objects. You don’t like the way that Google search results look but you like the underlying data? Well, just purchase Dan’s Fancy Results (only $9.95 for a limited time) and add it your browser. Did you create an amazing mash-up with data from Amazon and Last.FM plus your own visual design? Sell it in the presentation object marketplace!

Like many of the ideas in Aurora, objects are based on the extrapolation of current technologies. The semantic web is already recognizing and defining the atomic elements of a web page. The browser can sniff out these elements (microformats) via plugins like Operator. By default all modern browsers also present the existence of an embedded RSS feed to the user. Our notion is that data and presentation objects in Aurora are some evolution of markup, like XML.

A prototype was released by Mozilla Labs this week that tackles many of the same concepts. Aza Raskin describes the Ubiquity concept as “allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs”. Similar to Aurora’s data objects, this experiment relies on the ability of the browser to see information within a page as discrete elements. The atomic level of the web is reduced to something smaller than the page.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Adaptive Path is a pretty homogeneous company, technologically speaking. We’re a 100% Mac shop. Some of us fire up Parallels to create a Visio document or to play with Expressions, but this is a rarity. As a developer this limits my ability put a page design through it’s paces on disparate platforms and web browsers. Also, we only have a limited need for browser testing. Many of our projects don’t require us to deliver production-level code to a client. It doesn’t make financial sense to spend a lot of time and money setting up a lab and staffing a QA team for browser testing. This is why I love Browsershots.

Browsershots is a automated service that will take screenshots of your site on various browsers. You start a request by feeding the site a URL. That request is distributed amongst a network of volunteer computers each of which is running one or more operating system and browser combination. Sit back and wait for your job to move it’s way through the queue and return your screenshots. I submitted the uxweek.com homepage to 55 browsers and it took about 1 hour to return all of them.

What did I find out? Well, I have a little bit of tweaking if I want IE 5.5 on Windows 2000 to look perfect and something called ELinks on FreeBSD doesn’t like the site at all:

As if the FREE service was great enough on it’s own, the software that powers Browsershots is open source so you can create your own distributed testing environment. Why would you go through the effort? Maybe you have super-secret content that you’d like to keep behind a corporate firewall. Maybe you have the expertise and demand for your own dedicated testing lab. Whatever the rationale, it’s great that the site author was willing to release the source code.

What’s Browsershots NOT good for? Because of the queue nature of the service, it doesn’t work well for real-time trial and error. You would need enormous patience to make a one-line change in your CSS and wait to get a screenshot back only to find that the change didn’t have the effect desired. For the same reason, you won’t want to count on Browsershots for testing pages right after they go live. It just takes to long. Use the service for the occasional testing of your design on an enormous number of platforms when you have the time to wait.

Who’s using Browsershots right now? Take a look at their recent screenshots page.

A foundational concept within Adaptive Path’s Aurora browser vision is that your web is always available. This idea is visualized in the video when the New York Times’ article Jill is reading on her desktop computer later appears on her mobile device.

What do we mean by your web? With advances in computational power and limitless storage, we envision a future where everything you do online is recorded and available via any device. Your web includes your entire web history and all of your saved objects, be they people, data, sites, etc. All of this information is saved to the “cloud” where it is now available to any other computer connected to the Internet.

Combining months, years, or even decades of your personal history with the context of a device opens the possibility for real insights that help a user make the most of their surroundings. Take for example the personal route that MapQuest recommends based on the users’ interest in bike shops and a book title.

Simply authenticating with a new device provides users with instant access to the last state of their browser. The user interface will appropriately render your web to fit the device, everything from tiny screen on a watch to a wall-sized touch-screen. A critical concept is that while most users will have personal devices on which they interface with the browser, your web can be accessed via any device. Walk up to a public computer in an airport or a library, authenticate yourself, and the browser immediately has access to a user’s lifetime of web browsing. This would also work on other people’s devices, such as a friend’s mobile or television.

We envision that the vast amount of personal information available to the browser will create powerful trend and recommendation engines that applications can utilize for future needs. For example, a decision that a user made months ago on a home computer can instantly inform a travel planning web app accessed on a mobile device used at an international airport.

It’s your web and it’s always up-to-date and always available, wherever you are.

Aurora is just one possible vision for the future for the Web. There are many others, including yours. Whether you want to build on our ideas, explore areas we didn’t cover, or demonstrate where you think we missed the mark, Mozilla Labs wants to see how you think the Web of the future would work.

Mozilla is already one of the most impressive and successful open source development communities in the world, and now they want to bring that approach to design through their concept series.

You don’t need actors and animators. The basic tools to create a video showing off an experience design idea are available to just about anybody with access to a computer. All you need is an idea and the desire to show people your vision.

We’ve always emphasized collaboration and openness at Adaptive Path, both in our engagement with the experience design community and in our work with our clients. We see Mozilla’s new initiative as a way to take that collaborative approach to thinking about experience to a whole new scale. Check out Mozilla’s call for participation, or jump into their forums to contribute your ideas to carry the experience of the Web forward.

Working with Mozilla on their browser concept series gave Adaptive Path the unique opportunity to tackle a design project in the world of open source software. Joining an open source software project usually requires one thing: the ability to cut code. If you live in the world of functions, methods, Git, SVN, and SQL, you’ll find many a friend in open source. If you instead work with Photoshop, wireframes, sketches, and stickies, you’ll find it is a bit of a challenge to join an open source project. The community of developers has a history of shunning anyone who is a not programmer. Plus, open source software projects are not heavily promoted in the design community.

Adaptive Path and Mozilla are taking a stand to change that. The Aurora browser concept video is our first venture into the new world of open source design and, in keeping with both Adaptive Path’s and Mozilla’s core philosophies, we are sharing our insights into the design process and providing much of the original source material. Our hope is that others will be inspired to try their hand and release their own vision of the web browser of 2018.

The timing of this project could not be much better for galvanizing design participation in open source software. Competitions such as hack days put on by both large and small companies are including more and more design. We are seeing not only functional software come out of open source but also software that has a good design aesthetic. There is also more and more attention given to the user experience in software. I am especially interested in the intersection of UX and agile development. As user experience disciplines sync up with tried and true agile processes, developers and designers will both benefit by sharing their processes. An increased focus on UX overall will naturally increase its visibility in the open source community.

How can we continue to move design professionals onto open source projects? Along with partnering with big names like Mozilla, we can share our ideas in venues that get attention. Putting our experiences in open source design out into the world for public scrutiny can be daunting, but the pay off is a better understanding between designers and developers. I have already started my list of News Year’s resolutions and one of them is to join an open source project. After working on Aurora, I have renewed desire to seek out a project and make a real contribution. Will you offer you time and talent to open source as well?

I recently chatted with Jensen Harris, commonly known as the man behind the Microsoft Office ribbon interface. Jensen will be joining us in 2 weeks as a UX Week speaker. I find it interesting that both Jensen and Adaptive Path share a strong belief in using what we call “design principles” and he calls “design tenets”. Whatever name you prefer, these are well defined goals that drive the creation of your product. It is critical that the entire team working on a product share ownership of these principles, be it management or design or engineering.

Here’s a snippet from the complete interview:

DH: We sat on a panel together at MIX discussing techniques to “Get It Right” when developing software. You mentioned the use of what you call “Design Tenets.” What are these and why are they so important?

JH: Design tenets are a list of shared design beliefs that a team uses to help them make consistent design choices. Think of it as your team’s design philosophy. It’s the way we were able to end up with a design that has a coherent voice despite the fact that many people contributed to it.

For Office 2007, we had six design tenets. One of them was: “Give features a permanent home — prefer consistent-location UI over ‘smart’ UI.” Another was: “The user’s focus should be on the content, not on the UI; help the user work without interference.”

Before you start designing, you need to explicitly agree on the tenets your team believes in — those which are consistent with the kind of user experience you want to create.

Once you have your design tenets, you can use them to help make decisions when you have several design alternatives to choose from. If everyone consistently makes decisions based on the tenets, your user experience will hold together and feel like it was designed with a single voice.

There’s still space for UX Week, and if you register with the promo code BLOG you get 10% off.

Today is LIVESTRONG Day, the Lance Armstrong Foundation’s one-day initiative to raise awareness and funds for the cancer fight. This year more than 500 events will take place in communities across the country to raise awareness and funds for the fight against cancer.

Adaptive Path wants to support this cause by donating $100 from each UX Week and UX Intensive registration over the next 7 days. That’s right, if you register by next Monday the 19th then not only will you get an early bird discount, but you’ll also help to support those battling cancer.

We have a terrific line up of speakers this year for UX Week including…… Katherine Jones and Randall Macon presenting: Building Brands The Build Community: LIVESTRONG and Blanton Museum of Art!!!

So why wait? Register for UX Week and UX Intensive now, and use the promo code “blog” for an additional 10% off. Attend the premiere User Experience conferences in 2008 and support the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

In addition to the company’s efforts, Henning and I are cycling 100 miles in July and personally raising funds for the San Jose LIVESTRONG Challenge. If you’d like you can donate for he and I on our donation pages.

Are you a runner or a walker or a rider? Then you too can participate. In addition to the Foundation’s fund raising goals, there are goals to register people for the LIVESTRONG Challenge. If you register TODAY then you get 50% off your registration fee for the Challenge.

Michael Mace, a former VP at Palm, recently proclaimed the death of the mobile application. His position is summarises thusly:

“The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices. The problems are so bad that the mobile web, despite its many technical drawbacks, is now a better way to deliver new functionality to mobiles. I think this will drive a rapid rise in mobile web development, largely replacing the mobile app business. This has huge implications for mobile operators, handset companies, developers, and users.”

Mace provides a history of the mobile application space as he sees it from his time with Palm. He describes the rush of developers to the Palm platform 10 years ago and how interest in the creation of native apps for the platform has waned. He also quotes a colleague who left the mobile app game because he couldn’t run a profitable business there.

Sorry, but it’s simplistic to assume that native mobile apps are now dead in favor of web mobile apps. Mobile is just seeing the same tension that we see on the desktop between native and web apps. On both mobile and desktop, neither is a clear winner and there are many working to increase the functionally of their application “stack”. Just this week, Adobe launched 1.0 of their AIR platform that further blurs the line on the desktop. It is catching the attention of desktop application developers and I would not be surprised if we see a mobile version of AIR sometime this year.

Does a developer care if their application web or native? I’d argue no, they care about what functionality their chosen framework provides. Look at what Opera is doing with their mobile browser. They are turning it into an application framework as much as a great browsing tool, even giving developers the ability to “widgetize” an app. If there’s something on your mobile that has the hooks you need to build an app, does it matter if the API’s come from a browser or from the operating system? As Webkit builds out it’s offline storage mechanism, your mobile web apps can run seamlessly alongside native apps even when on an airplane.

As the stack currently exists in any mobile OS, native APIs for mobile allow access deeper into the device. This includes the ability to read and write to a user’s contacts, calendar, tasks, photos, videos, SMS, email, camera, GPS and voice. Web browsers lack this functionality. The richness of experience that these features provide provide a ‘wow’ that’s pretty tough to match in a browser.

Browser app or native app aside, the more important change that we are seeing is the opening of the mobile platform. In the article, the certification and requirement to work with carriers was noted as an unnecessary hurdle and I agree. Carriers have a history of stifling innovation in order to milk as much cash out of their pipes as possible.

Apple’s iPhone is an attempt to break that strangle hold by offering a device designed without carrier limitations. This week they release their SDK and if Apple does so with no limitations, then it will be successful. Developers should be able to create an app, upload it to the iTunes store and pick their desired monetization scheme. If Apple puts anything in the way of the interchange between users and developers, then the SDK will fail, just as Michael Mace predicts.

Last week Peter plugged our upcoming book Subject to Change: creating great products and services for an uncertain world. I’ve put together a couple of pages that offer some more detail about the book but best of all, I’ve uploaded chapter one for your FREE reading pleasure.

CHAPTER 1: THE EXPERIENCE IS THE PRODUCT
“How do we deliver great products and services in an uncertain world? The thing to keep in mind, not just in the abstract, but truly and viscerally, are your customers and their abilities, needs, and desires.”

Feel free to grab the embed code (from the full version) and drop it into your own blog.

Oh, and of course if you want to order a copy, you can do that too!

Microsoft is holding MIX, its annual “future of the web” conference in Las Vegas next month. Kim Lenox and I are excited to be bringing our message to this venue as part of the user experience track debuting this year. On March 6th we will lead four intensive sessions over the course of the day. Each session includes hands-on activities where you get a chance to really learn something new. We are focusing on design strategy, interaction design, information architecture and design methods. Participate in the entire day with us and you will take away all the techniques needed to be successful in defining and designing your next product.

If spending a day with Kim and I in Vegas is enticing enough by itself, then maybe you’ll want to come check out a sneak peek of new IE8 features or compete against your peers in Rock Band.

If you are going to attend, then please drop me a line at <danh at adaptive path dot com>. We hope to see you there!!