Simon says, Organic UX’s time has come

Long before the Palm Pre and the iPhone I predicted (around 2005) that UI’s for mobility whether it is a Smart Phone or UMPC/MID should become more organic and less static.

Since I did not have a blog back then, I of course can’t prove that but you’ll just have to trust me. Let’s explain the major evolutions of how we interact with UI.

Console
In the early days we used text based consoles such as Unix, DOS etc.

Mouse Driven
User interfaces evolved to support mouse interaction. Most of which today has evolved very little. Organic UI “kind” of exists here in the form of resizable toolbars and such but it’s not really what I had in mind. I’ll explain this later.

Touch/Gestures
Even though touch enabled devices has been around for over a decade in the form of tablets, smart phones etc. It really took until the iPhone for a company on a mass scale to really understand what touch enabled in user experiences. For example many devices had touch support, but none were easy to scroll.

Organic UX
With the emergence of Touch and Gesture really starting to become a natural way to interact with an application and device, the organic idea I had plays into this very well, but is also useful in mouse driven applications.

So what do I mean by organic interfaces? Organic interfaces are interfaces you can shape, move, resize, hide etc all in a natural fashion. Whether this is mouse driven or touch enabled gestures/actions.

The UMPC/MID venture in the beginning was that dropping the Windows UI on a 7″ touchscreen is not good enough. Mobility requires a special kind of usability. A stylus or having to touch the scrollbar to browse the web is not acceptable.

Way before the iPhone arrived it was painfully obvious most desktop OS’s were not geared for mobile devices. These OS’s would have to build special themes and shells to really maximize the mobility industry. This did not happen however in the UMPC/MID space, and still has not for the most part.

Let’s take for example Windows. The taskbar, system tray, start menu, minimize/maximize buttons all terribly fail in a mobile experience. What excels in a mobile experience is gestures to replace these items.

Closing an app on the Palm Pre is entirely gesture driven in a very natural way. Swiping sideways to see your open windows, and swiping upwards to “toss the window away” to close one. Much easier because you can do this anywhere on the screen rather than having to pin point accurately press a close button which is very small on a 7″ display.

The Palm Pre’s “quick launch” ribbon type menu is also closer to the organic ideals I speak of. It is a menu that is not visible unless you slide your finger from the plastic below the display in an upwards motion onto the display.

These types of UX means you don’t need toolbars taking up space on a 3″ display, but also have things easily accessible. On UMPC’s and MID’s why are the traditional desktop environments going onto these devices? They can run Windows 7 fine, but need a mobility/touch oriented shell.

Switching tasks should be much more organic. The 7″ display should be available to the app, not pieces taken up by the OS.

In a mouse environment, when I want to resize something I have to move my mouse to the very narrow edge of a window, until the resize cursor appears, from which I can click-drag to resize that border. Why can’t I be near the edge within say 100 pixels and press a button on my mouse (many mice have well over 4 buttons now) which enables the “grab” ability and move the edge anywhere I like?

The same button could be used in the middle of the window to drag-move it around on my screen. This allows for much more casual actions, without needing precise accuracy to find the titlebar of the application. Using this button on the taskbar for example could allow us to drag it halfway up the screen which unveils the “start” menu, I click an item and it drops back down to the bottom of the screen.

There are lots of examples of organic interfaces that could exist today but for the most part our UI’s are static with resizable boundries. Most of the time this resizing is permanent and not very agile in changing size and returning to another size post-action.

On the same note, there are 2 reasons why the UMPC/MID has not succeeded yet compared to Smart Phones and Netbooks and 1st and foremost is Price (many UMPC’s currently run the same chips as a Netbook but cost much more, sometimes 5x as much) and User Experience.

With the rumors of the Apple iTablet (or whatever the rumors like to call it) surfacing as of let, if it runs what is similar to the iPhone based shell, the usability will be much improved in comparison to say Windows crammed on a 7″ display. Even though these systems are fully capable of running Windows 7.

Microsoft had a great vision with its original concept of a UMPC/MID and it can achieve it. People will buy it, if priced properly. With the technologies they have invested in such as Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, they can create more compelling user experiences and applications along with Windows 7’s multi-touch support. However present indication shows that the UMPC/MID concept is a bit of a dying breed because all they did was drop Windows on a mobile form factor and sales did not occur in large volumes.

It’s a good example of taking your worst shot at something and hoping for success. I feel strongly that if it is not Microsoft or Apple someone will be successful in this space. People love the thought of mobile devices, which is partly the reason for the recent smart phone fever.

Mobile devices need touch, gesture and more casual interfaces than a desktop computer. Organic UI’s allow us to maximize the screen real estate to focus on the application running but to accomodate actions we currently have static on a 19″ display on our desktop.