Our devices, Our selves: a peek into the future from Nokia & UBC

This past week UBC's CS department hosted an industry colloquium focusing on Human-Computer Interaction (more info at: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/industry/HCIcolloq.shtml), featuring CS faculty member Karon MacLean and Nokia user experience team member Ryan Opina. 

This is where we all need to look at the significance of learned behaviours, and the challenges involved with layering new behaviours onto existing perceptions and expectations. In Ryan's words his team is almost invariably engaged in a struggle to resist the temptation to let the technology drive the decisions that are made that affect functionality and form factor. In terms of what Ryan was able to disclose about products currently in the lab at Nokia: he talked about qwerty and predictive text input vs finger tap/finger based touch input and the team's experiments with the the distinct user experience that accompanies a hard key (i.e. a qwerty like keyboard ) vs soft keys, such as the touch screen interface that the iPhone is likely to make the new industry standard....depending on how well it works of course.  

This point seques to the presentation of the event's other speaker, Dr Karon McLean, whose work focuses on the creation of a haptic language.  Simply put haptics is communication through touch...think of using your fingers to tap out instructions, morse code style, to your mobile device. Getting beyond the mouse or the keyboard as the input/controlling device. Karon's work looks at exactly this type of tactile communication, which takes the cognitive of challenge 'when is a phone not a phone' many steps further. Again, the iPhone may advance us leaps and bounds in this area come summer 2007 if/when people are lining up to pay $700 for this year's it device (btw that's the word it, not "IT" the acronym ; )

It is worth looking at the research questions Karon's team is looking at, as many of them are pertinent to our various teams' work with Mobile MUSE as well as our work as a collective.  Such questions as:

With a brand new experience/sensation what is most salient?

What are the key design dimensions?

How is the new experience/sensation perceived by users?

What are the associations users have/make?

How can we best leverage these associations and points of salience?

How many interfaces/icons can people learn and retain?

If we think about how no two microwave or VCR programming interfaces are alike and multiply the problem by whatever number is appropriate to mobile devices (hint: it's likely a large number) we begin to get a sense of the design challenges that exist here.  In addition to this work in the area of haptics Karon's group is also working on issues related to mobile devices and affect; specifically how can we indicate our emotional/affective states to our devices and how that data can elicit a variety of outputs from our devices. With the opportunities ahead of us with such projects as the 2010 Live Sites this research, combined with the MAGIC Lab's work with communication between mobile devices and large screens, could really net us some high impact installations.