Some Thoughts at the Start of the New Millennium...
By Gerd Waloszek, SAP AG, Product Design Center – 09/15/2000At the start of the new Millennium, we take a short break in this SAP Design Guild editorial. No, we will not create a great vision of the future, here. As with all the visions of the past, most of it would be wrong, anyway. Look at those old caricatures, which predict traffic jams on the ground and in the air showing streets abounding with steam engines (see Figure 1), or a myriad of balloons swarming through the sky. While the basic idea of traffic jams was right, the technology shown was wrong, the artists just employed the technology available at that time. The same would happen to my vision. Therefore, I will just stop for a moment and take a snapshot of what is going on.
Figure 1: Traffic jam predicted in 1828
Portals - A Question of Organization and Content
Portals are still a hot topic. So let's shortly stop here. As the term "portal" implies, portals should be the entry point into something. This "something" should be relevant information and functionality. The crucial issue for building portals is to know what is relevant. Portal builders can only try to make a "good guess" here. SAP, for example, attempts to make a good guess by defining user roles as organizers for portals. But roles alone are not sufficient. Users may have several roles, which have to be represented in one portal. Then, there are also those "generic corners" like "Home" or "Private". These are hard to pre-think, because the end users themselves fill in most of the content.
Companies also further modify portals for their employees, because they know better what information and functionality is needed in their realms. Companies can shape a portal to their needs: they can declare things as relevant and include them in the portal while excluding certain others. In this respect, the company's interests may not always coincide with the end users' interests and needs.
In my opinion portals are nothing really new, because many Websites for long tried to offer structured information, and to a certain degree, functionality. I am also convinced that portals compete with the desktop - we put one organizational structure (the portal) on top of an already existing one (the Operating System - OS) which serves the same purpose, namely to structure information and provide access to functionality. I already put this notion forth in the first SAP Design Guild edition (see there). So I do not want to reiterate this point here; but I feel confirmed by the latest trends in the portal field, because more and more features of the OS are becoming replicated in the portals. So, in the end you could ask, "Why do we need a browser?" or "Why do we need a desktop?" Couldn't all that stuff on my computer be organized in one coherent way, irrespective of where the information and functionality come from?
Computers - One or Many?
The portal issue brings another question to my mind: Is it really a good idea to put the "whole world" into one device? Don't we have lots of books and magazines at home, as well as several radios and TVs - not to mention CD players, tapes, and so on? As computers are universal and expensive, they are used as multi-purpose devices: they are used as information appliances, tools, game stations, entertainment stations, and much more. But isn't this multi-purpose character a funny idea? As with TV where different family members might want to watch different programs, different family members might want to do different things with the computer - a quarrel seems to be unavoidable...
Many people already predicted that "computer intelligence" will migrate into dedicated devices. Game stations are on the market for quite a while, other devices are following now: small slide viewers that fit the pocket, organizers, and all the breed of Personal Digital Assistants PDAs and palm or pocket size computers, cell phones, combinations of cell phones with mobile computers, and the like. Stand-alone storage devices with card slots are one of the latest gadgets. They can store, for example, the image files of a digital camera during a vacation. Blue tooth technology will add a new dimension by freeing us from all the cables. But this is only the beginning of an "intelligent" household to come.
Let me spin this thread a little bit further. Our computers are enormously fast these days. However, most of them still serve one person. Are the GUIs eating up all the power? Whatever the problem may be with our computers, wouldn't it be a nice idea to have a central computer in a household, which every family member can use from any location? Naturally, it should also be possible to communicate with or use any other computing device in the household, as we will have many in the near future. In my opinion the bottleneck is the I/O devices and the cables. So, let's make the I/O devices wireless and let every family member have one - a "combo" of a screen, a keyboard, and a pointing device; and the "PBook" is created! I am sure, it already lies in the drawers of some companies (for gamers there may be a "special" version needed with a game pad and better graphics)...
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| Figure 2: The PBook - a wireless I/O device for computers containing a screen, a keyboard and a pointing device (pen, mouse, trackball) might look like this; actually it's the pen-operated Psion netBook which has a design that comes close to my vision (from Psion). | Figure 3: If a keyboard is not needed, the design of the PBook could look similar to the Wacom PL 500 (from Wacom) |
On my wish list are LCD displays with at least double the resolution of today's screens, because it is not size but resolution that matters (look at a pocket book and see the high resolution of the print). There may be versions without a keyboard or with a removable one in case you do not need a keyboard. And what about the price tag? Early purchasers should pay no more than $500, and the price should come down to $200 or even less in a couple of years. Impossible? No, not if everybody wants one.
No GUIs anymore - Will there be Design Anarchy?
We observe a trend in the SAP Design Guild, which has been caused by the Web: GUIs seem to be "out". Maybe, the same will apply to OS's as well some day in the near future. So, what about all the standards and guidelines like the Windows Style Guide or the Apple Human Interface Guidelines? Will this be the end of interface design? Of course it will not, but design will become more difficult, when the standards begin to vanish. I believe that we will move more and more into a situation similar to print media. You will still be able to tell good design from bad design, but there will be no clear-cut "rights" and "wrongs" or "hard coded rules" anymore.
Who will be the judge for the quality of the design? Will it be the experts, such as the graphic designers, the interaction designers, or the usability engineers? Will it be the customers? And whom should the customer believe, if the experts contradict each other (that's just one issue in the current debate between graphic designers and usability engineers)? Or should the end users be the judges, as the usability people say? Actually, I can see no clear answer, because there is no "one-fits-all" solution. The different groups - customers, designers, usability people and end users - each have their own interests, which implies that there are role-specific conflicts between these groups. For example, a company may want users to spend a lot of time in their e-Commerce shop, whereas users may want to order their goods as fast as possible and then leave the site. Designers and companies may make much fuss about branding issues, while end users may barely take notice of such subtleties.
Perhaps one last word to the current quarrels between graphic designers and usability people. In my opinion, both qualifications are important for user interface design more than ever. What is really needed, is a close cooperation between all groups, including customers, developers and end users, from the beginning of a project onwards. Then everyone is "in the boat" and chances for misunderstandings are minimized. And note, we are not alone - we should also take the "content people" in the same boat, that is, the documentation developers, technical writers, or whatever their job titles are, form one of the three cornerstones of design - visual appeal, ease of use, and content.
Conclusions
Let's end our short break here. Things are moving so fast these days - I don't want to lag too much behind with my snapshot.
