[Sigia-l] Decent exposure

[Ziya Oz]

As one of the remaining 17 people on the planet who can afford a cellphone
but never owned one, I'm anxiously waiting for the actual availability of
the iPhone.

For another project, I've been parsing responses to the iPhone over the last
couple of days in many different forums. I must have read close to 5,000
articles/posts/comments.

Obviously, a prime point of debate is Apple's virtual keyboard vs. the
tactile feel of the rest for text entry. The "iMac will flop because it
doesn't have a floppy drive" crowd and those weaned on thumb-boards think
Apple's soft keyboard is a joke. Of course, virtually none of these people
had the sustained experience of using it, but who's counting.

What remains essentially unexamined is the way in which designers will have
to think differently about how to expose actionable data to the user. In
fact, this very point will determine to a large extent the success of UIs
targeting not just the iPhone but similarly smart devices designed for fast
data/info retrieval on-the-go.

In other words, it's insufficient to discuss whether the iPhone soft
keyboard is good enough to enter text when you want to go from an entry in
your address book to a map or to copy a phone number in an email to initiate
a call, etc. 

Apple's general approach is to make the notion of constant text entry
obsolete. Intelligent parsers render actionable data as points of inter-app
connectors: address book entries as Google map links, phone numbers embedded
in emails as call initiating links, current location via GPS as Google map
start-direction entry, randomly accessible voice mail entries as clickable
links, Mail to-do links as task lists for phone calendars, and so on. You
can smell and taste the possibilities therein.

I've just finished a two-year project where I designed an app that connects
and drills down a huge amount of what used to be opaque and unrelatable
info/data without the user ever touching the keyboard. Once the user selects
a point of entry, the rest of the info "naturally" unfolds in-place with
zero page navigation. I'd been thinking about this arch/UI approach for 3-4
years and finally I got to execute it, so I've been very psyched about the
potentialities insinuated by the iPhone interface.

In this regard, what separates the iPhone from everything else out there, as
far as I can see, is the presence of a real OS and pervasive multitasking,
coupled with an enticing visual layer that makes inter-app interaction a
pleasure to use. 

Anyone else believes, as designers, we need to rethink how we structure and
expose actionable info so that, especially for small, mobile devices,
inter-app connections become seamless flows as opposed to requiring user
text-entry in a stop-and-go fashion?

Ziya
Nullius in Verba