27 Mar 2007 2351H

iPhone knockon effects visible in Zenzui demo at CTIA

PCMag blogged about this yesterday, as did Gizmodo and everyone else. AT&T’s COO said at the CTIA Wireless Conference that “ease of use” is the killer app for wireless. Easy for him to say since they’re locked in for the next however-many-years as the exclusive dealer of iPhones, which he, of course, promptly trotted out. Sure they had to invest in the technology to make the messaging seamless with the UI, but, compared to the R&D that Apple laid down? Pshaw. Not the point here.

Point is as speculated on this blog back two, three and a half months ago, I thought

everyone else is about a year, maybe two behind, and only because they can now just blatantly copy the interaction design patterns that Apple’s already sunk so much work into discovering.

Well, software moves faster than hardware and integration can, and I didn’t take into account that people likely had already been working on this for some time. Take a look at ZenZui, a spinoff of Microsoft Research Lab, whose GUI for mobile is demo’d below:

Unsurprisingly iPhone like, you could say, but I think that’s a bit unfair. Let’s look at what it has to offer up close and personal, via Gizmodo.

Thumbnail tiles are fun-ish, so that’s a helpful usability metric, and having spun off the web, they’ve become an accepted convention that should tell you that more detail is available if you click on them, so learnability for that bit does seem to be quicker for this GUI than with any new sort of GUI that any two-bit Flashmonkey could whip up with zooms, transitions, movement and what have you which would ultimately leave users angry, frustrated, and broke. But I’m still not sure this is all that intuitive for users. The persistent flower control in the middle is helpful; it serves as an anchor and a directional control, which is nice, but it is nothing like anything else out there and so people will have to invest in learning. Even if it is a small investment, I’d prefer that the user not pay a “user tax” in such a way. Oh look, they’re hiring an interaction designer. Hmmm. I have always wanted to work on consumer devices. . . . 8D

Since this area is just kicking off though, I still think it’ll be a year or two before the major phone companies catch up, though I’m sure they’re hard at work on it already.

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3 responses to "iPhone knockon effects visible in Zenzui demo at CTIA"

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28 Mar 2007 0121H

tim writes:

I wonder about how well you can use this when the screen is obscured by sunlight. That’s going to be a problem…what if you can’t cup your hand over the screen enough to see the item?

28 Mar 2007 0650H

Gino writes:

That’s a good user experience insight. It’s always been a problem to deal with the cheap low contrast displays, especially in the glaring midday sun.

We always talk about users, contexts, and content, so, the context of using this in various environments, like a snow slope, or in various lighting conditions is pretty important. Maybe it’ll wind up spawning a whole new subcategory of accessories, like sunshields or cases that have shades built in.

29 Mar 2007 0648H

K writes:

That looks very cool.

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