An Evening With Luke Wroblewski
10-12-11
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>> FEMALE SPEAKER: Ladies and gentlemen, will you please take your seats? The men's
rooms are this way and the lady's rooms are that way. Welcome to our event and October. This is
an NYC event and thanks so much for coming tonight and it's nice to see such a great crowd
tonight. All the way from the west coast and we imported some guests to Washington. It is a long
ways. All right. So my name is Gloria and this is the NYC Usability of Professionals Association
and I want to say a great big thank you for providing a great space and many of the goodies we
have tonight. It's an honor to the agency. How do I say this? Thank you.
>> BRYAN: So and I want to say a few things about we really appreciate bringing in a very
exciting speaker here. I want to say something about the agency very quickly. And we have made
a huge effort and increased digital with traditional and I think it's enormously powerful. For example,
we are developing tablets in house and methodologies and there is constantly education going on
around here and everybody is constantly asking the question, where are we at? Where is the
future? And are we going to be there, too? So, you know, this is one place to work with digital
people and we are also interested in big traditional advertising. Additionally, we have a heightened
technical work and serious, too. I wanted to say a little bit about that and I will turn you back over,
so thank you.
>> FEMALE SPEAKER: All right. So how many first-timers do we have for the main event
tonight? Thank you for coming. I want to welcome you. Our organization basically has all types of
people coming from all different industries and levels. If you are interested in using your experience,
whether it is industrial design to global to online experiences, we are happy to have you here
tonight. We have a group page on LinkedIn and we have listings for folks coming in and trying to
find a job in this town, and it's not an easy thing to do. We are on Facebook fan page and we are
also on Twitter. So we have lots of favorite channels.
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We have a couple of updates next month. On November 10 and we are actually having a
conference. I assembled the registration page on our website, so if you are interested in registering
early, you can do that right now and put information up right now. How many people have been to
the rubric before? You know, they are going to be the host for our event and seats about 300. So
we tend to sell out quickly. It's free for members. If you're not a member, you can pay for the year.
So now for some housekeeping. Hash tags and NYC, UPA. Let's see. What else. We will -as a part of registration, we ask people if they have job positions to advertise as part of registration
to put them in, so look for those tomorrow. Some people socialize. What we have is, okay, this is
the part where we turn to the person, and go to the person to your right, hopefully we have a person,
you can keep talking and we can talk for five minutes. Go.
I think if we keep it fun and start recognizing people, a person could end up next to a person or
you could have a job with them. Keep that in mind.
So next up is our intro, and I believe it’s for Luke, Luke Wroblewski, and I'll give you some
points on him. He was a Benchmark at Capital; I want to ask him about that job, chief design
architect at Yahoo! and interface designer for eBay and a former board member of IxDA. In 1996
for design and -- at least one of two, the first is design and writing a book on "Web Form Design &
Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability," the world usability day, and it's hot of the press if
you want an advance copy. Okay. Hard copies, right? I want to make sure. There you go. So
without further adieu.
>> LUKE: Microphone? I guess I'm not loud enough. I appreciate an audience that gets
liquored up before I talk so you can indulge me more and indulge my advice. But, speaking of
devices, I want to start off by asking you a question. Does anyone have an echo thing with them,
with the microphone thing? So two of you? Who has an Android thing? A couple hundred? A
Blackberry? This is okay. IPhone? This is the east coast like I said recently. On the west coast
nobody would raise their hand but here they do. Does anybody have a Nokia? No one has a
Nokia? So you're all Americans. That is interesting. Welcome to our concert.
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Anybody with a windows phone? I used to say windows phone series seven, but the last time I
did that some Microsoft guy got mad. Anybody have a windows phone now? None of you are
providers. It's easy to see the demographics on here with the providers.
I'm one of the iPhone people with the smugness and cheap behavior and use Apple products
and also on the Twitters, so if you have a follow-up question or want to talk more about this stuff
later on, meet me over there.
Today it's a simple topic but one I think is important and the simple topic is we should start
doing the things in the lab about software in general with local prices before we start talking about
experiences and it's simple to get in to why and how and the reason I think it's interesting is we for
many, many years and still today continue to do the opposite. We start thinking about a website or
start thinking about an application, an Internet enabled application you start thinking about a loud
pop. However, I believe we are entering into a time where the opposite is a better approach and
you start thinking about it. One thing I'm not alone. This is the Google chairman, Mr. Eric Schmidt
and says we should do mobile things first but he says it's because the programmers want you to
understand if you have been at Google you know the programmers get to do whatever they want but
they have reasons beyond that. So his this is CEO speaks so forgive me for a second he calls the
mobile phone the high volume endpoint with a number of convergent technology trends and those
who raised your hand which was pretty much every single one of you have more processing power
in your pocket than NASA and even has access to a network or maybe through AT&T but network
activity in general is a pretty big deal. In Europe in what was it, 2009, it was 39%, 3G penetration
and by 2014 it's a five-year window, it will be 96%, which is crazy how fast that happens.
The third trend that he talks about is the fact we have things in the software services and data
on files so there is stuff out there, we can connect to it and do stuff to it because we have these
things in our pocket and processing power and that opens up a ton of interesting possibilities. This
is Kate and she returns design over at Facebook. Similar story, Facebook starting with the mobile
experience and you follow what they have had over the last couple weeks and starting to see the
stuff more and more visible in public. This is Kevin Lynch and if you think of a company that wasn't
there with mobile, he got up on the stage and said this shift we are seeing right now with devices
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and the PC Revolution and start thinking "Mobile First". Since there is likely to be financial people
here, finance examples? This is my friend Bill. He is the creative director of BankSimple. Can I do
this global for my enterprise app or work in the application? I don't see why and this is where
BankSimple is trying to reinvent banking or if they do they do the mobile app first because it forced
them to figure out the things. There are examples across but I don't think you should do things just
because people who make more money or play music better than us want to so I want to spend the
rest of the time getting into everything.
There is an interesting opportunity for all of us for growth. There are inherent constraints
based on the ergonomics of global devices for the focus and new things I will tell you about tonight
and all this stuff adds up to a very compelling story.
The first one is this opportunity. And Morgan Stanley put out a resent paper, about two years
ago or so, where they put a line trend in the mobile Internet and looked at the mobile area and
across different industries and they put together this thesis which essentially says hey we had a
piece of Revolution and internet Revolution and the mobile Revolution will be another big one and
see each cycle and order of magnitude in people's homes. We are in more financial area than the
west coast so I suspect more of you are more adept to the MACs. Those of you that know the
MACs, there are more people or less people in the world than there are places in the world. So if
you are having a laptop and you have a smart phone keeping up and you have a tablet, and you
have like a PS3, Xbox a Wii connected to that and a set top TV box, Apple TV, you start to see how
this can happen really quickly? And what? I have an Internet enabled dishwasher. What is the
acronym? We are seeing this big cycle of growth. What does that mean? It's interesting to see all
the big numbers and I will show this again. It's interesting to see the big numbers and growth curves
and the rate of growth is tremendous. Is this amounting to anything? Are people actually making
money off of this stuff? All the sudden people get interested if there is money to be made. So is
there anybody actually making real money off this opportunity? If you look at the things that will
drive the Internet, visual economy and commerce is a huge part of the economy. And eBay just off
a single iPhone app are going mobile and made about $2 billion and $2 billion in sales in one year
and that is pretty real. A mobile rep, a retailer like Best Buy with dozens of users and all that, social
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which is a very big thing on the Internet so they tell me. If you look at what is happening in Japan,
this is like a nice trajectory, 14% of their page is used in Japan. So I imagine if you go to a world
where all the sudden 85% of all your information is on devices you probably think about the design
of the processes and even things like surge and media. So Pandora, which is a music sort of
engine, more than half the user base subscribes now are by e-mail anywhere. There is real stuff
happening. People care. But that is a lot of little nuisances.
If you walk away with a single thing, this is the one I want you to walk away from and talk with,
in the Morgan Stanley research paper that I talked about it made a very bold prediction, they said
within two years the number of global shipments of laptops, desktops and notebooks is going to be
surpassed by the number of mobile smart phones. All the sudden worldwide, the network
landscape changes significantly. Well, this happened years earlier, at the end of the last quarter.
And this is sort of the theme with all these crazy predictions and people say what is the next big
thing? But it's really actually happening this time. And pretty much any crazy prediction you see is
starting to come through faster and faster. Google search, like I included earlier or in commerce it
was repeated for an hour, we predicted that but it happened faster. You hear the message for an
hour and walk out. What does this mean? What does this mean when we see a shift in personal
computer usage? When I say personal computer, the definition of a personal computer is a big,
plastic tower that sits under your desk. When you get to it, you blast it with an air can to start it up.
You know what I'm talking about. That is what people call a personal computer and they have
laptops. But the use of these types of devices at home has dropped 40% over a two-year period.
When they dig into why is that happening, people are getting things done in between hours on the
smart phone and tablets and are more portable. And they are home and going to the office and sit
in the chair and fire up the box. You do it everywhere. So this is actually having a big impact.
There is a shift in usage of what was the personal computer to what isn't the personal
computer. You see it in actual applications. So Web based e-mails, there is Gmail in the U.S. and it
dropped 7% on computers and it jumped 36% in mobile and we had 32, 34% of smart phones in the
United States and we are starting to see the swing. Very early 30% of people had smart phones.
And what is the definition of smart phones? Even the crappy ones, and you see it. And relatively
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the crappy ones, you think it's a joke, but there is a difference in the type of device you have and the
amount of people that have them. You see huge numbers. Two-thirds of the mobile Web search
comes from the IRS I think he said. There is a big disparity, the shift in usage. There is also new
usage. This is one of the things that it's really undersold about the story, about emotional, and a big
span of our time right now. What is the biggest constraint on us being able to get things done? So
what mobile allows us to do is opens up new things on the network and digital information services
and it's not just we have a two-hour block at the end of the day and being online and anywhere and
everywhere. You can have user mobile devices and the user base is responsible for more than a
third of your total searches.
In addition, they create all kinds of calling and call local business and driving directions. And
this is new. This was not happening previously. A real estate company and people that use their
service on mobile devices are in the neighborhood of where they want to buy a home. What do they
do with the opportunity? It's a new use on the device. And I mentioned Facebook earlier; people
who use it on the mobile device are twice as active on the desktop as people who do not use mobile
devices. This is an interesting thing about cross-channel customer. You see who works on a
desktop or Web and mobile is 1 + 1. What most companies start to see is 2 + 2. And that is why we
are going to go all kinds of places.
Those of you who are students who have a device, isn't this great, Internet? And how does the
Web fit in and the mobile app? The mobile app, but it's true. Your fancy Google and Twitter and on
the native Twitter phone, and it's also true that Twitter has a lot of activity on mobile. 40%. But no
one is going to sign up on Twitter on mobile. That is sort of dangerous to assume people won't do
stuff because they have a small screen. We will talk about that one later.
Actually it turns out mobile Web is a big one. And, in fact, the data browsers are where Twitter
had the big growth. What about it? Facebook. And so they spend a lot of time designing them.
Facebook is the same story, a third of posts on mobile. What is the biggest client? The mobile
website by a big shot. These guys are sort of the biggest player in mobile of apps. And the number
one app is Facebook. So they spend a lot of time recently redesigning the mobile experience and
as of last week or this week they did it again and are investing time in this particular aspect.
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So the thing about the Web, in addition to this, is people assume if they need an app, pretty
much everywhere you go, Internet uses are growing and this is what leads us to say that the mobile
Web experience is also sort of a first and foremost experience. The crazy statistician. I expect it will
happen sooner rather than later. When you have people accessing websites and information using
mobile devices and PCs, mobile is first and it's common sense. You capitalize on the opportunity.
And it's not just the big guys. An average person with a smart phone gets 24 sites a day and the
Google and Facebook only 40% of that. What does this mean to you? It's totally fair game with the
server. Just like Facebook.
And to summarize the piece before I throw the news at you, there is a ton of growth in mobile
and shakes what used to be the personal computer and what is the personal computer and think it's
in our pocket and the network, that is creating new amounts of time where people can make it to
digital services and experience different kinds of opportunities. People in the neighborhood who
want to buy a home, cross channels where people use each service more and each to channel.
And all that stuff is a very reason to start thinking about mobile and start thinking about what you
want to do next because you don't want the opportunity to pass you by and don't want someone
else to come in there and shake things up.
Because the mobile experience and they figure the stuff out, what is next with this data? 50%
of people who connect to the network do not do it on a desktop, laptop or notebook. In India 49%
never frequently use a desktop to get on a network. How about now? 22% never use the desktop.
We have Internet. Are we scared? And flip that to 2015, more than 50% of all people will use
mobile devices. What you are starting to actually see is a generation, if you will, and a culture that
really has grown up with the network and mobile and power. This is making an example. And so
people refer to Kenya as the silicon valley of banking. All the innovation they are doing in financial
services and it's driven through things like this. And it's very hard for us to go back and say, okay,
let's remove 30 years of interface from our memory, let's remove 20 years of what the Worldwide
Web has been from our memory and let's zoom the way we get on a network, is through a mobile
device. This is a very, very hard exercise for us here. But there are entire generations of people,
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that is how they started and that is the way they envision sharing information and it's probably not
something we can find easy.
As an exercise my friend Jason is trying to do away with his laptop for a month. I think that is
crazy, how can I get anything done? Yet many people are. So this is actually even more
interesting. But it's not about these numbers and the growth and that opportunity, I think there is a
different kind of opportunity here which is exciting to me personally.
This is my friend, Joe, and he is a man who created this application, which is the most popular
Google application ever, Facebook for the iPhone. But the exciting part of it is when he basically
said this and realized he could make something better on the website on a mobile device. And that
is the second piece of this "Mobile First" argument. The first piece is let's find the big growth and
opportunity. We are seeing shift in what is a personal computer. The second one is things that are
inherent to mobile devices forces down to better experiences, which I think is great.
So as a simple example of one of these experiences, for years we had fights on the Internet
about how much pixel space we have. Did anybody lose a friend to this battle? So we fought and
figured and said it's probably 1024 or 716 and let's work within that grid. Let's assume this is what
we have to work with. It's not. It's all variable. But take the typical, average smart phone, sort of an
illusion, but you go from 1024 and you just lost 80% of your space. That means 80% of the crap
you have on your web page needs to go away. And I love that. Because most web pages are filled
with crap. It's true. Does anybody have a web page they can remove 80% of so they can do what
they want with it? It's not like Southwest Airlines, they clearly only have focus on the stuff there.
Unless, I think, if it's that important, I can engage in it, it's fantastic.
I want to talk seriously and forget the jokes for a second. Anybody remember the psychology
principle and they show you two images, right, and because they are so similar with the brains and
the lines change? I want to show you a desktop and I'll show you the mobile version. Let's try that
again. What we see in the mobile experience for Southwest Airlines, how do they make money?
Sell reservations, airline reservations and car reservations. It's in your face and ongoing, people
who have a reservation and want to check in or check the status. So what we see is when a
company makes business, when they exist and what their customers are doing there is nothing else.
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And because you literally, physically don't have room for other stuff and working with stakeholders
and everybody who is involved, why not take that agreement and put it wherever, on any screen
size you happen to have, apply the same prioritization and focus.
Another company, this is a photo sharing site called Flickr, you probably know it, but you
probably don't know over the years they lost features to do things, but when it came time for them to
design the mobile Web experience they went from this to this. They had 60 plus options, down to
about 6. You can't fix some of the options on a little screen. How do they do that? Design 101.
What do people who use Flickr do? They keep checking in to see if anybody has photos or
uploaded anything new or kill some time if they are board. So front and center is the way people
actually use the service and things that matter to them. And they do that because they are the
audience, so it's design 101.
The "Mobile First" experience started with the heightened strain of having much less physical
space to work with yet see down time making more priority than matters. The best experience is
sort of like the carp in the bathtub. Everybody knows how that works. If you feed it, it will grow to
the size of a bathtub where it can't move anymore. The same thing happens to websites. We will
keep growing until there is no more room. It doesn't apply to these home page things.
I fly a lot. I used to use Expedia for my travel and this tells me where part of my flight takes off.
It's not a joke. Here is the information right there. This is the useful part. Everything else should
probably die. Once again, compare the best experience with the mobile experience. Is this the
same company? Do they have visual hierarchy appropriately? You can move by date and by
itinerary and it has a box and if I flip it sideways and it says something about getting your butt in
here in 15 minutes. You use the information. Who remembers those two experiences? We are,
versus trying to dig through the mass and trying to figure out what time my flights leave. The
constraints I think are mobile, and to get down to more relevant and the capability of the device and
orientation and I will talk more about that later.
Another constraint. You never know when that is going to happen, too. As a result,
performance matters. If you are sitting there and replace AT&T with whatever we want, I switched
out Vodacom to AT&T, the smart phone, here is AT&T, and they don't actually sound like that, how I
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sound when I go there. And so they really care about it. And I'm not going to go through the stuff,
but there are a number of things you can do to help performance with mobile and take advantage of
techniques. But the bottom line is did you start with "Mobile First" and tightened speed and
performance? When you get to a desktop, things are lazy fast and every single time anybody has
measured whether performance is important on the Web, they find it's crazy important. With
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, a hundred second delay they have drops in usage and revenue and
anything and engagement and Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve. Google studies have shown after
they repair a speed delay Google still has service loss. So if you make it fast enough for a situation
I showed you on a mobile device, it will thrive anywhere else.
The last constraint is basically dealing with how people use these mobile computers that they
have with them. Think about traditionally mobile use and laptop or desktop or something like that
and have a pretty decent size screen and power and usually a network, you have a keyboard, a
mouse, a chair, a desk and the last known Apple accessory to man and a coffee mug. When you're
mobile to mobile, pretty much all those things are different. The screen is really small and has to fit
in your hand and be palm size. The battery is portable; the network is not the same everywhere.
Because it's small you have to turn the screen into an interface so you can use it all at once and has
sensors and what direction we are facing and how close to our face we are and can go off on the
screen when we talk on them. All these things make it much more versatile than the previous
computer and lead to interaction points, so these are some differences, so there is usages and
where we use the devices.
When people think about it, they think I need a phone number for a restaurant or to a meeting
so it's typical in a mobile case and pops in everybody's head. Well, where to use your smart phone,
84% at home sitting on the couch, watching a TV show and are on Facebook. 39% of people say
they use their smart phones in the bathroom. 61% of people are waiting in line, at work. So pretty
much anywhere and everywhere and it's a great opportunity for new engagement or it's a constraint.
It's a constraint because when you're out and about in the world, you see it, there we go, out and
about in the world there are things going on so if you like this car and there are cars driving by and
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playing a game outside in the yard, there is birds and cats or whatever you have in your backyard,
with all these like distractions. We are not locked in a room and in a cubical facing a computer for
five hours but it's activity throughout the day and there are times you have an Angry Bird session
where you lock yourself in a closet and get a ride home but that is an rarity.
So because we have all these different opportunities, I think of people and it embraces the fact
we don't have all their attention all the time in many cases. Partial attention requires us to simplify
the design down which is why I think this is a constraint. Last piece we will look at, this is getting
interesting for me, when do people use these devises. They have a read it later service and it is
exactly what it sounds like. Save an article to read it later. People read stuff later on on desktops,
laptops and what happens they are asleep and get up and read and it's pretty quick. This is when
people on the iPhones read the same articles and this is the message here, this is the exact same
behavior, the only thing I changed is the device. And so what you see when you look at this, there
was a woman pretty much still any time people pull out the mobile phone, but compared to computer
use, compared to computer use it's the shorter of a burst of behavior and not the sessions that we
saw on the old computers. You compare a pack to computer use. People are reading the same
articles and reading them on the iPad, at night, in bed, on the couch, just reading articles and just on
the device. This is an example. This is the social professional network. Where you all put your
resumes and this is when people access it. This is when people access it during the day on mobile.
What is going on there? A totally different use. Here is my theory. I'm at work, it sucks, I'm going
home, look for a new job, look for a new job.
Something is going on there, right, it's totally different. Here is another example. This is
actually a use case, all this is a type of device that was connected to a 3G network and grabbing
one data point from one device at random and you need to see it because the laptop and smart
phones, right. When they are on the network, what we are doing the smart phone.
So these constraints, screen size and mobile uses and all these things add up to an increased
focus. A lot less screen space and think about what really matters and the network could be gone
and we have to focus on things fast. The use, people can use these things anywhere and
everywhere in distracted environments. And we can slow things down but consider real world use
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cases. This is a comment from XKCE. They have University pages like press releases, slideshows,
and literature. They have the right to have things you actually care about like the core list, campus
map, what have you. When I read on the higher education and I looked at the review of the mobile
site, it was only the stuff on the right and nothing on the left. Why is that? A, there is no room. B,
what will you do? Download a form of the president of the University holding a plaque? No. You
have to put the stuff that actually matters. Because the modes of use and we get news everywhere,
you gravitate to real world news cases. Somebody is running late for class and wants to look at
their schedule, all sorts of real problems and real situations.
So all those things again when you look at Google which I think is fantastic. So growth, shift in
usage, new usage emerging and constraints and screen size and performance and it forces us to
get a better design and give our customer better business because those two things are in line.
Companies that don't do things for customers don't have customers. That is the truth. Last but not
least the constraints and narrow things down, small but slow, doesn't sound like a great environment
for design, boring. Good, it's not boring. We have the capabilities that allow us to do things in a
new way. Simple capability that I outlined earlier is this idea of device orientation. If I flip my phone
on its side I can make sure my layout works. It stretches appropriately. Or I can use it as an
opportunity to create a better experience. So on Android, composing an e-mail and flip it sideways it
gives me a bigger keyboard and moves the buttons to the right. It could have been a worse
experience because maybe it didn't fit in there but instead they said when somebody flips this thing
to its side we are going to give them more room to compose an e-mail and we will make it better.
This is the section, this device orientation about the Web and the device with the technical
capability. It's not technology for technology's sake. We are using the piece of technology as a
pallet, if you will, like a paintbrush or whatever analogy you want to use to solve people's needs.
So here is another example. This device orientation. What can be more rewarding than
reading an article on the Web? It happens millions of times, hundreds of millions of times a day,
hasn't been innovated on since 1994. You have a visual. Well, with that accelerometer you can do
something like this. This is called instapaper. You tilt the device and so it goes the other way and if
you're reading something, you fix it. This works great when you are in a subway, using your phone.
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Reading, hang on. So that is one model. This is actually using the gyroscopes, this is 360 uses of
the device and 360 degree image and this is for us and gyroscope and if you want to look at a
house you're interested in buying, well, you could be in the room and put a 360 degree photo up
inside the Web browser and you have to move the device around, another device we can use on the
core use basis and you can use it to see what the house looks like.
Function is another interesting capability we have in these devices. I'll go through this quickly
but the statistics are a little shocking for some people. Many even two years ago there was a million
touch screen phone that's made it in people's hands per day and there were a million people that
could all the sudden interact with our services using our fingers. Pretty good deal. Today, the iPad
and iPhone and the devices and all this stuff, there is close to a million just of the two operating
systems per day. And people say what about these people that don't do things like Microsoft or
Nokia with trackballs and keypads and track pads and these kinds of things go through direction
information interfaces because it makes sense. It's a small thing to fit in your palm, why not put the
whether or not screen into an interactive service. And when you look at Nokia as a device mix, the
dark green is how many things support touch.
There is a story being told here. And probably all of the smart phones can touch base. What
does this matter? It matters because people are using their fingers and I want to make sure they
can. Like touch target sizes matter and there is a lot of rules and sizing and screens about how big
it should be and stems from the fact that our average human finger had is around 10 -- 8 to 10
millimeters and the distance teen them and I will not go too far in it, I will go through it real fast, but
this is what you want to avoid. Anybody see a problem here? My fat French fry eating fingers
cannot log me in. So that is one thing that a touch target sizes are a big deal. The actual gestures
you have available to you. The URL and the information I will give to you. We do touch gestures
and organize the platform and you can imagine things like tap, multi finger tap are there, dragging,
clicking things with single or multiple fingers, pressing mobile, pressing and tapping, rotating, and
what we did is took the standard gestures that are common platforms and sort of made out more. If
somebody wants to change rows what is the gesture most common for that? As I promised you can
go and take all this information and download it, all the detail about touch size and gesture and now,
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thanks to a printout, we have only four platform gestures and all the core gestures. So we will go
through it quickly like self-serve. Now we have these cool things and generally know about the
touch target and what do we do to innovate it and it's in our capability and we can do small things
but Yahoo! Mail has a drag shortcut and if I drag my finger across an e-mail I can delete it or file it
away or whatever. This is -- I can still navigate the e-mail message in the stuff but they use this
punch gesture shortcut allowing me to do that. This is clear in the Web browser and it refreshes.
And www.lukew.com/touch is the e-mail. And people have used this once or twice and so very
quickly things that are transparent gestures become expectations. It pulls down to reveal a search
thing. And they give you a little message about it. We have an opportunity to move beyond. If I
want to see or move the list or touch the list and move it up and move it down, I want to touch it and
get that one out of the way, get that one out of the way. Remember the person touched a scroll bar
or an iPhone or a menu, all the interactions were directly with content. This is sort of what you do
with the capability of touch, that wasn't really possible when we have an indirect relation; something
else is doing the touching for you. The mouse is doing the touching or the trackball or keypad
moving you up and down. Here you are directing the action. So these principles on user basis
reduce visuals that are not content, uses distance as much as possible, and I think it enables us to
move in interesting ways like Natural User Interfaces, NUI. All the examples I showed you are sort
of like baby steps right now.
Other capabilities that are touch, I'm continuing on capabilities, we have location detection and
that means I can find a hotel right now; using the finance I can find an ATM near me. There are a
lot of systems inside the smart phone. Two thirds, that the iPhone uses Wi-Fi on 50 meters. A
desktop computer in the U.S., what do you do with that? Nothing interesting. If I know your location
out of 10 meters I can create this app. This app solves two things. Remember technical capability
and solving people's needs. If somebody is running late for a meeting or they happen to be married,
if either factor is true you may find it useful to share your location or progress to another location
with somebody else. So with this application and what it does with the Web browser you can say
here is a glimpse of where I am and how long will it take before I arrive. So those of you who may
be late for a meeting or married may find this useful.
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Now a couple capabilities on top of the device positioning and the gyroscope and orientation
and other things and there is so much more. When you start with the mobile experience you have
the power and you don't have all this power on the desktop so you could lose all the activities to
interactions. I'll do a couple more to kind of hammer this point home. I know where you are on a
mobile phone and the direction you are facing because it's a digital compass. Using those things I
can solve problems differently.
I was in London, I wanted to tour the sites and the best way to do that was the London
underground so I went to Google and ended up on the site and that is great and I got good use of
white space and move to the next page, visually it's clear and it's a map and I can pull up videos,
lots of great usability and best practices I can work on for years. Click on that. I can find the
nearest tube station hearing. Why are you laughing? If I demoed this to your six years ago I would
have blown your mind. In my box and I have to get my map. This is revolutionary stuff and what
are we using for this, pages, optimization, layout, lakes, those are the tools we have in front of us
and it's not the same list of things I showed you in a mobile device. The mobile device has the
same use face and I pop open an app and it overlays on my current view of the world right near
where the stations are. As I rotate and change position, here is my position and it will tell me where
it is and senses a device orientation change and gives me more retail information about the stations.
If I tilt the device higher it gives stations higher with the same level of depth. All in all this
experience has something like, I'm not suggesting this is necessarily better, frankly they both have
usability issue, but wholly crap are they different, right, same uses, stationed near me and different
set of capabilities and experience. Those of you with reality say this is crazy, yes, the interface is
crappy and they are hard to use but for fun I was blown away when I use it. I think the potential
here is enormous which is based on my current position and orientation, my current view of the
world, the way I'm experiencing the world, give me a relevant digital information that matters to me,
all right. Restaurants, tube stations, whatever, it's mind boggling stuff when you start to think about
it at that level. Some of this you can do and two things that are missing here with the video camera.
They probably will go slower for the price you pay for the Web and access it's slow. And we will see
if it comes out. Other things you can use with the camera, points it at a bar code and it will identify it
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for you and tell you how much it costs on the Web and see the five star reviews or one star review
or if it is near you and look at the map and see where it is next to you. And forget it; take a picture of
the bar code and you can identify it, the same thing. Take a picture of a place, you point your
camera and it tells you where the restaurant is on Google, the menu, what the reviews are and
phone number.
Other things you can do with Google products and search, they will identify it, point it at a wine
label and tell you what you're looking at or point it at a business card and it will scan text and insert it
into your address book or a work of art, it will identify it for you. I have a Bachelor in art history
which is useless now. Point it at a land mark it will use your location and image to identify what
you're looking at. If you're on the job, I'm sorry. Point it at a foreign language text it will translate it
for you. And not only point it at a picture it will translate it and put it back on the thing you're looking
at, right?
Technical capability. Real use case. The numbers can't sign. Technical capability, you
thought it was use case, since I promised to throw in some financial stuff: I basically take a picture
of a credit card in order to process a payment. We put up the credit card, take it in, it scans it, there
it is, success, card scanned and your payment has been processed. Card.io. I promised one thing I
checked and deposited it from nine different banks and here is real fun, point your picture, your
camera at somebody, and facial recognition to identify them and find their online profiles. Google
Chairman Eric Schmidt said something scary. It only takes seven photos to identify you using facial
recognition technology. That is not scary. You don't think there are seven photos of you on the
Internet? That is what is scary. So we will see what the integration looks like. So I see some of this
stuff. I think it's very exciting but we still have constraints of, you know, holding the phone up to
something. When we are doing this stuff I don't use Nokia's term. There is futures and hope, this is
a reader attached to an iPhone and essentially it intercepts with the radio antenna signal off of a bar
code and put it on something with an ID it plays the video and starts playing the video so all you
need is this and you don't actually need to identify and point your camera at something near you.
RFID reader.
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Just to wrap this up to leave time for questions, we looked at a bunch of different capabilities. I
didn't talk about device connections, I didn't talk about cameras and I didn't talk about ambient light
sensing and barely touched on that and add ones, we didn't talk anything about that, things like
square or bill pay or whatever. All these things give us this new power of capabilities. So the way to
summarize all the stuff in a nutshell, crazy things happening and shift in world device and resources
primarily accessing that in the Web which leads to not only different constraints and capabilities but
also some new opportunities for, engagement. Constraints of mobile screen sizes, networks,
modes of use, all focus and prioritize to get down to stuff that matters, real world this these cases.
This is stuff that matters. The capabilities you saw, new pallet of tools we use to solve people's
problems and business goals. It's not how neat the technology is. It's neat technology and doesn't
go far. It's only interesting when we provide stuff that people want to do. That is the story I have for
you guys. I'm going to leave you with an opportunity to learn more and talk more about this if you're
interested I'm on Twitter and the Web and I'm very excited to have a book on this topic which comes
out on Monday. If you're interested in that book, this is the website. And you can procure that book.
So thank you. I'll hang out.
If you want the train or transport or those of you who want to stay and ask questions I will pass
the microphone around.
>> MALE SPEAKER: [Inaudible question.]
>> LUKE: And I'm the wrong person to ask that question. The sheer fact there is less places
to deliver things, there is less distraction in deliverables and more concrete for the deliverables.
>> MALE SPEAKER: The examples you showed all had websites first. Would you say -- what
would you predict is the most important?
>> LUKE: What is the risk in trying to predict that, I think it's easier to figure out what actually
matters than not when you put less stuff in front of people. It's quicker in the past than trying to do
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50 things on a desktop when you can do one or two things. When I got my start in the past year we
built "Mobile First" and we had to make a decision and we ended up removing four or five things we
thought were going to be important.
>> MALE SPEAKER: So are you still -- [inaudible].
>> LUKE: Where we discovered it.
>> MALE SPEAKER: The device, on the iPhone, it's like 900 x 900 and then you have Android
with 800 so how do you have design for these different phone factors which I believe is happening is
it's the same thing. So what is the design for this?
>> LUKE: This is interesting. It doesn't matter on mobile Web. Mobile Web will create images
and generally what you have and go on to the complex with a multi matrix thing, it will be a big and
small thing even though you can go little. You have a slide in here. Here is how the one, two, three,
scenario. This goes from the article in reference to that. One, two, three, four, think about the
things in a group. B, have a default reference design that you spin things off of and most of your
adaptation rules are not too big and the image is bigger and to adjust things and everything else as
far as the Web movement, lots of layouts and all the other stuff. This happens with responsible Web
design, the resolution grade points; but then we fill the gaps everywhere else, the EPI thing less and
cross out PPI.
>> MALE SPEAKER: We have to state as an example so once we start and we have this
huge screen with an app.
>> LUKE: Enhancement and put things in sort of a nice tab or a position and let me see if I
have slides on this. Hopefully I do. Generally what you can do is enhance stuff to the point that it
doesn't take away from the core values but it compliments it and the structure may be more, and this
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is the example I want to show you the URL stuff. Performance reasons and other reasons to
breakout a single URL across multiple screens and you may want to combine that together on a
desktop because you have the ability to. So here is a simple example of a URL structure and this is
a desktop version and you can see the different content associated with this. And this is the
dynamic. And on the mobile version each of those are a separates an asset. This is the example
that I was talking about.
Are you going to manage -- who is next because I don't know? Try to make it even so the
people with the phones are the ones you should flag down. And hand them the mic is who I will
listen to.
>> MALE SPEAKER: You indicated there are different kinds of apps that are used differently
from the smart phone and the same application or if you are trying to do something or find you will
actually have different features or add or subtract from the iPad device, that same app, versus the
smart phones?
>> LUKE: No. So where I think things differ at a very high level of experience levels, this is
the stuff that sort of determines more than anything else what your barriers can be. I don't think just
because somebody has a small-sized screen versus a large-sized screen or a touch versus a
mouse screen, they want to do different things and they think your service should do different things.
Sort of a good approach to go to but what you do is adjust the interface and work with the
constraints in the device.
>> MALE SPEAKER: What I meant was when you're using a device at different times and for
different reasons so maybe that iPad is your TV or something, you are watching TV and you are not
obviously going to be using that app in the same way or the same reasons potentially.
>> LUKE: Isn't that a different app? Look at Twitter and Facebook and signature and you can
post a status update on Facebook on your iPad, iPhone or laptop and when you can't do something
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or can't do a tweet on the mobile version of Twitter, you get pissed off. How can I do this? That
core functionality and the purpose of your service remain the same. Things that vary from
capabilities, I will show a tangible example here to show what I mean. There is an example. We
have service that allows you to make lists of products and on the mobile, the service is the same.
You are making a list of products and you want to talk about each product, right. So what we did on
the mobile version, because we had access to the camera, we included the ability to put a bar code
and we didn't do that on the desktop because it's awful and clunky but instead we had a bigger
canvas so where this thing was one movement we made this parallel and mobile so we can work
with multiple pieces of it at the same time we are working on a bigger canvas. The same core and
functionality but manifest differently based on the capabilities and constraints of the device.
>> MALE SPEAKER: If I show Facebook, for example, and keep adding features like the AOL
or text so now it will do everything, not just, you know, show for networking or messaging, those
would be one app or one thing and more focused; now you have the website that does multiple
things and multiple apps.
>> LUKE: If you look at the direction, it is where are we going and you may think more
consistent than less. The recent roll out with the iPhone app and Google website is the same thing
which is along the line with what the desktop looks like and more along the lines of what an iPad
looks like and you make assumptions what will be out for the device and very quickly your
customers bring a lot of the stuff back in. So you start listing the complaints and challenges and find
yourself getting back to your core set of functionality very quickly. The converse of that is when you
do the same thing in lots of different places you should focus on just a few things that you do very
well, sort of Facebook has the resources to be everything to anybody right now. Most companies do
not. And most companies are down to a couple things they do well and that their customers love, so
they have the ability to be in multiple places instead of just one place.
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>> FEMALE SPEAKER: We are at a place and if we want to keep going we can use it for five
or ten minutes, do you want to get going?
>> FEMALE SPEAKER: How do I do this? So obviously when I create for myself a tool to get
effectively from Google for articles or webinars or seminars.
>> LUKE: I think you will have a hard time right now around a lot of this because it's still in
developments and hard. So we are in an opportunity and frankly learning software design to build
things on the Web. But five years ago it was the same on the Web server. Amazon, we have
instances across the globe if I want and add a new sever. We met literally five years ago it would be
weeks of reading manuals and troubleshooting and literally in that state right now with mobile, there
are things coming in everyday with a crazy announcement, Google buys Motorola and Samsung will
go to HD. Every week, something crazy to do and that is not going to stop for a while. It isn't like a
book or homework.
Mobile Web best practices have something for you, the start of a definitive resource. There
you go. And we are talking about it actively and we have a book coming out and contacts.
>> FEMALE SPEAKER: I have to say the idea of design for mobile is a good indication for the
industry ever and the market involved.
>> LUKE: I think the mobile has the opportunity to do that and Android their speaking text is
absolutely incredible. Now, we have the iPhone and the 4S came out and now with the speech
perspective it's great. Go back five years and I actually think that while this is certain leading edge, I
think we are asking the next five to ten years if we talk about the best thing I saw, I think the hands
in the room if you think about ocular and think about speech and now that Apple is sort of the leader
is pushing out and with speech technology comes on board, I have to imagine that the design for
mobile applications is large size and large amounts of data and I do think that we are going towards
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sort of the typical direction finding things that actually will give a hand in the next five years and of
the speeches and devices.
>> MALE SPEAKER: Do you see that? This is the state now but back four or five years?
>> LUKE: I will find this link, but there is a guy that I called recently who did modeling and
which innovations are happening and he modeled it for 20 or so years or basically seeing paradigm
change on a daily basis which compared to what is happening right now is going to be pretty good.
So which is perfect segue to this idea that I have been trying to advocate and a lot of people smarter
than me which has been trying to advocate is trying to create services that we can't think about
today. We have to think about what is going to be coming. So a couple things like voice, let's say
voice reform, some concepts about structure, content and exchange is independent of any particular
presentation format. And what I mentioned earlier is part of a data service and a level of
presentation because they have structured content and an API built up and can fit into that role.
Where somebody who has content looked up in a CMS, and as you look forward to the different
types of things come out the more focus on your core and being able to exchange data and with the
device profile, a whole slew of other things, so I agree with you and I think we have to not think
about it but it's a future friendly purpose.
>> FEMALE SPEAKER: Yeah, do you have questions? If you will stick around for a while
and we will continue to talk for a while, okay?
The concept, it seems like the hard frame.
>> LUKE: My problem with wire frame as a real is I represent the physical constraints and
screens so maybe things are a little in the abstract role and now the problem is exponential. The
other thing I find with wire frames is once the image has a box next to it and once the copied
contents in the text or what is on their minds, so you are not actually using the actual content, you
are using an obstruction and the things are not real and you don't want people spending a lot of time
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putting navigation on there so it has every single website on there, it's absolutely controlled on that
face. And now that stuff gets sort of poured into mobile devices and you have sites that have this
giant app menu. These are some of the reasons that are in here.
>> FEMALE SPEAKER: This will be the last time. All right. So the approach has changed
the way we use an application.
>> LUKE: It's a long conversation. It's not figured out yet. We are trying to understand what
we are doing and whenever you do research and whatever your motivation and strategies, they
don't change so much. But what changes more is you have to be a lot more flexible and you have
to be a lot more involved with what you are doing. So I think starting an API and start your content
layer is a good thing and go towards mobile, focusing effort is a good thing and building from there
the way you enhance stuff and you are responsible to other things is a good thing. That requires
different kinds of interactions. The person who wrote the book on Web design is walking around
now talking about his new work book that he has of the design with the developers to account for
the varying state and all the devices. They can't have a designer putting up 10 photo shops up on
every single page. It does not work. Okay. I think we are going to do a drawing for books. Do you
want to scramble and put --
>> FEMALE SPEAKER: Before we do the raffle drawing make sure to take the survey
tomorrow. How many people are hiring who are still here right now? Wow. Yes. Ryan you are
hiring and I will encourage you to conjugate in the back corner there. We did not get a chance to do
the balloons, but that corner, people hiring, you can talk to them. All right. So now, we need
somebody to do the drawing of the business cards because my hands are full. Can we do it? Do
you want to do the drawing?
>> MALE SPEAKER: Sure.
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>> FEMALE SPEAKER: Drum roll and thank you, Ron. Shawn Michael Kapezi. I guess he
would be here if he put in his business card. If you are one of the folks not here, so lucky contestant
number two. Yeah. Anybody home? I feel it. Bryan Keller, I'm so sorry, you cannot have a book.
All right. Let's try it again. K2 Creative, Karen Steiner. We will give it a good shake. All right. Very
cool. Okay. Bryan Keller again. Here we go. Jacqueline Walsh. All right. Thank you for
participating in it. How many are volunteers tonight? All right. We have volunteers and thank you.
Thank you to the volunteers and thank you again to Bryan and to the good folks and thank you
especially to Luke Wroblewski.
(Meeting Concluded at 8:20 p.m.)
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