If you fly through Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) this holiday season, and have some time to kill, look around for a large wall-sized multi-touch screen in one of the terminals (I forget which one) with a Tangram puzzle on it (here's a picture, I couldn't find a public domain one). If you can get past the young kids who are usually swarming around the thing, having fun just dragging the pieces around, you can try actually solving it.
This shared touch-screen computing device in a public place is the future (if you find other similar examples, send me a picture and I'll feature it on this blog). It represents a trend I already blogged about, towards public computing. It also signals a related, converging trend, the transition from the Read-Write Web to the Touch-Tinker Web. Here's a visualization of what I think is happening.
Why is the Touch-Tinker Web important? Because it is the endgame for what started as the Tablet revolution. Recent developments like quantum-dot based screens suggest that the action is heating up.
Let me explain.
Is the Web is Really Two-Dimensional?
The tablet is a converged device that is impacting technology trends in three ways: encouraging device sharing, killing TV and of course, making touch central to computing.
The device-sharing aspect is what I talked about last time (people seem much more willing to share tablets than laptops, and obviously larger flat panels or wall-sized screens are built for sharing to begin with).
The killing-TV effect is both direct and indirect. As we get used to watching video on tablets, we are more likely to drop cable subscription and use a device like a Roku, or just a regular computer, to turn our televisions into computer monitors. I did this recently. For me, buying an iPad was the entry drug that led me on to Roku, streaming Hulu Plus and Netflix, and ultimately, cancelling cable. As I mentioned last time, young children today are already concluding that a TV is a "broken" device because it doesn't respond to touch the way they are used to.
In this post, I want to focus on the most important implications of touch replacing the mouse: the replacement of read-write dynamics with touch-tinker dynamics.
To see why touch has this effect, think about an apparently silly question: we use the Web via 2D screens, but is it really 2D?
It isn't. The Web started as a textual medium, and text-reading is a fundamentally one-dimensional action. We may skip, skim and scan, but the basic pattern is a zig-zagging line from left to right and down (in left-to-right alphabet countries). We view pictures as part of the 1D text-reading experience. Or to be more precise, the symbolic part of the user experience is 1D, and the sensory part is 2D (pictures, video). The former dominates the latter.
Outside of gaming and the minor cottage industry of infographics, there hasn't been much symbolic 2D content on the Web (here I use "symbolic" to mean representations of abstract things rather than images of physical things).
The rise of video (which now accounts for the lion's share of Internet bandwidth use) broke this text-dominant experience somewhat, but not entirely. Before touch, TV was a superior 2D experience, and there wasn't a whole lot of symbolic 2D content outside of gaming.
But as the Tangram screen at LAX demonstrates, once you throw touch into the mix (and de-emphasize the keyboard and mouse), the Web becomes the perfect medium for truly rich 2D experiences that combine symbolic and sensory information. Why? Because we primarily engage symbolic 2D information by manipulating it. That's why gaming and infographics with sliders or zoom/pan controls (via the impoverished manipulation capabilities of the mouse) were the first loci where full-2D began to appear.
Touch in, keyboard out, opens the floodgates. Instead of being constrained by the mouse, and being encouraged to use words by the keyboard, we are encouraged to use a nearly complete range of tactile manipulation behaviors.
The Web used to one-dimensional. When online gaming appeared, it sort of turned 1.5 dimensional. Now it is turning into a full 2D experience (3D is still a couple of decades away, in my opinion: it isn't the technology; human behavior has to catch up).
Towards the Minority Report World
In the world of UI designers, the famous scene in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise turns information processing into a 2D jigsaw-puzzle style tactile thinking modality, is a great conversation starter. I've met UI people who consider it their holy grail, and others who think of it as Hollywood nonsense and an unnatural thinking style that real people don't actually use.
I happen to agree with the first camp. I view it as a holy grail, and we're getting closer to it all the time. What limits us is our attachment to the Web as a textual medium. That attachment is being broken now.
If you recall the scene, you'll remember that Tom Cruise does a lot of manipulation. It's a very physical scene. He is standing, and energetically moving things around, zooming, panning, rotating like crazy.
By contrast, most of us sit while computing, and use the windowing capabilities of our computers mainly to switch between text windows. We don't really do much fancy jigsaw-puzzle type visual thinking.
Besides touch, the other pieces you need to support real Minority-Report type thinking is, obviously, larger screens (which is why the tablet is the opening, not the endgame), getting used to standing and moving while computing (the Ninetendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect are getting us used to that), and getting comfortable with the world of 2D thinking tools and modalities. We are familiar with the classic ones: graphs, conceputal drawings, mind-maps, flowcharts, maps and jigsaw puzzles. We know how to use whiteboards. But the touch-tinker Web opens up a lot more possibilities.
Let's survey a few example tools to get you thinking of the possibilities. None of them is fully set to exploit what's coming with public touch-tinker computing, but they all do a good job of pointing the way.
Three Touch-Tinker Web Tools
Full 2D symbolic-sensory thinking tools have fascinated me for a long time, so I'll start by tooting my own horn a bit.
Trailmeme
At Xerox, where I worked until February of this year, I led an effort to create one such 2D thinking tool, Trailmeme (think of it as a combination of mind-mapping and bookmarking). It does not yet support touch, but it allows you to visually organize all your links and relationships among them (this screenshot is from a trail I made while research the garbage industry).
Bottlenose
While doing Trailmeme, I got to know serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack quite well. He's always up to fascinating things, and his latest venture is another great 2D thinking tool: Bottlenose. It brings in the metaphor of sonar (his previous startup was called Radar Networks, so this is clearly a pet theme with Nova), and encourages you to swim in your own digital stream like a (bottlenose) dolphin, navigating by sonar. It's still in beta, but you can use the invite code forbes to sign up, for a limited time. It takes some getting used to, but personally, I find the sonar UI a very intuitive way to process my stream.
Pinterest is already quite well-known, but I am including it since it is the first solid attempt to bring a very familiar 2D tactile experience -- using a corkboard or post-it notes -- to the Web. I don't use this mode of thinking a lot myself, but I know a lot of people do.
The 2012 Challenge: Touch-Tinker Content
Okay, so we've all played Angry Birds by now and ready for more serious use of the touch-tinker Web. The devices are getting there, as are the tools.
The BIG problem is touch-tinker content. As always, content is the last piece of the puzzle for any new medium, since content creators don't really get the hang of new media until a few pioneers show the way. That has not really happened yet, but I suspect 2012 is the year when the content game for the touch-tinker Web will start to take off. One thing that is holding back the content game is the lack of good generic standard formats for tactile content, but I bet that's coming soon. If you want to get ahead of the curve, start developing modular content that you suspect will go well with other content in mix 'n match ways. Among the good candidates are flashcard type content, iconography in unusual sizes, interesting geometric data (as the tangram puzzle example demonstrates, those who own lots of such "pieces" are going to be in demand).
I have some ideas here, that I'll blog about soon, but none of them are truly compelling. If you can think of a really rich creative vein to tap for touch-tinker content, drop whatever you're doing and start creating. You'll end up as influential in the emerging new medium as the first bloggers, 10 years ago.
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