Some good reader comments encouraged to write a follow-up story for this blog entry (in Finnish).

In this blog entry, Santtu Toivonen continues to discusses livingroom surfing, this time concentrating in particular on communication applications.

Share your opinions and read the full blog entry in Tietoviikko (also in Finnish).

More and more people are accessing the web while doing something else, such as watching TV. What kind of a device would best support this?

In this blog entry, Santtu Toivonen discusses some of the desirable features for a device used for surfing from the livingroom couch.

Share your opinions and read the full blog entry in Tietoviikko (in Finnish).

Communications and media are changing - and there is no turning back.

FinnMedia (Finnish: Viestinnän keskusliitto, VKL) has started a strategic initiative to identify the factors affecting media production and consumption. By understanding the change, organizations within the media business can control the change and react early.

The work is being done together with the key players in the media business, supported with market analysis and interviews with early adopters. Idean participates in the strategy work by facilitating seminars and workshops and analyzing the results.

The first strategy seminar identified the following factors driving the change:

1. The message will get through - targeting, delivering and measuring the impact of commercial communication will become more effective
2. Expertise will prevail - while the roles of the professional and the consumer mix, the importance of in-depth knowledge in the area of expertise will increase
3. Even the giants will struggle - the speed of changes in the business environment will force even the biggest players re-think their business
4. Constant regeneration - innovation is no longer an option, it becomes mandatory
5. Target groups become smaller - paying more attention to the special needs of specific user segments becomes more important
6. Ubiquitous advertising - marketing communication will increase in volume and will find new ways to reach it’s target segments
7. Media on demand - consumers become more demanding and require media to meet their needs
8. Networking is the key to success - partnering and turning competition into co-operation becomes essential

The results are based on the lead user research executed by Idean. For more information, see the full report on the FinnMedia site.

The strategy work will continue during 2009.

CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) recently predicted four top trends for 2009. The trends are based on a consumer research carried out by the American association. In summary, consumers expect more ecologic devices, wireless connectivity, devices with touch displays, and internet access in all devices.

What might these trends mean for user interfaces? Let’s take the easiest first: The spread of touch screen devices is a very relevant phenomenon, and reacting to that is a no brainer for a UI design. Touch displays open up a whole range of new applications and interaction metaphors, which call for new expertise.

Internet access to every device? Now that’s a bit harder nut to crack. On the face of it, having mere internet access does not yet presuppose that the device in question also sports a UI. Devices connected to the net can act as pure data sources. For example a lamp could transmit its energy consumption to some web service without the need of human intervention. At the same time, however, one can expect also more new internet-connected devices, which require a UI. Say a refrigerator connected to a grocery store’s web service. The user could place orders and perform purchases remotely from home. The UI can be on the door of the fridge, or a mobile phone can host a dedicated refrigerator app performing the needed functionalities. So this trend, too, can generate new interesting challenges with regard to UI design and research.

Expansion of wireless connectivity reshapes the devices and how they are used. It entails that people carry around devices, which they previously used in one place only. This has already happened to phones and computers, but more gadgets are to follow. As far as the UIs are concerned, most work probably has to be directed to user contexts. In the past people talked typically indoors. Now they do it while walking, driving, and so on. The user experience has to stay good enough even in these challenging contexts, where users’ attention span is fragmented to multiple phenomena surrounding them.

Finally, there is the green tech. According to CEA’s report, consumers expect their devices to be ecologic. They do not always believe in what the vendors are telling them about the nature-preserving aspects of their products and processes. This does not directly concern UIs per se, but some connections can be found. For example, the above-mentioned dubiousness of consumers calls for openness and transparency from the vendors. The consumer has to have access to the original sources bearing this information. Often this information can be difficult to conceive for the laymen, but a simple and straightforward UI can ease the task.

Santtu

Everything is bigger in America, as the saying goes. Cars, roads, burgers, everything. I remember as a kid trying to come up with something, which is actually smaller in the US than in Europe. The only thing I could think of was the hockey rink. NHL teams play in a smaller rink than their European counterparts. Size matters for sure, but sometimes it makes sense to shrink rather than grow.

Recently I have witnessed a trend of many consumer electronics becoming smaller. Small laptops, or netbooks, were 2008’s most visible examples of this phenomenon. Products such as the ASUS Eee PC and the Acer Aspire One have been selling well and receiving significant media attention. There are other devices too, however, which have started to shrink. Last year I read stories of portable desktop computers, data projectors fitting in your pocket, printers the size of a cigarette box, and even portable music studios.

There are two major exceptions to this shrinkage in the past couple of years: mobile phones and displays, including both television sets and computer screens. Stationary displays can still grow. I predict that in the future indoor screens are going to be as big as the rooms’ inner walls. In fact, they can become the walls, as many sci-fi movies have suggested.

Mobile phones, instead, are a different story. They shrank already in the 90s so that the smallest models were too tiny to use with standard man hands. In addition, recently mobile phones have become far more than devices for plain calling and texting: they are used for gaming, surfing the web, personal navigation, emailing, organizing calendars, etc. These functionalities demand large enough displays, better batteries, GPS receivers, and so on. Naturally equipping phones with these hardware components causes them to grow.

Some innovations slow down the growth of mobile phones. Lately touch screens have enabled better browsing experiences without having to make the phone physically bigger. The bottom line is that there is an optimal size to a phone: it has to be big enough to provide good usage experience, but still fit in a pocket.

What about optimal sizes for other consumer electronics? Why are laptops becoming smaller and displays bigger? These questions are rooted to the (evolving) habits and needs of people. Netbooks come quite close to the most powerful smart phones – in fact, many netbooks are sold by telecom operators bundled to a data plan. In other words, mobile phones and computers are converging. They are both personal devices for storing and accessing information, communicating, and so on. These personal devices need to be accessible any time, anywhere. TVs and desktop computer screens are not carried around so there is no need for them to stop growing until the physical spaces they reside in start to set limits.

Some growth/shrinkage phenomena are related to fashion or marketing gimmicks, such as the Zippo-sized mobile phones of the late 90s, but most of them are answering some genuine need or desire of users.

Santtu