Hopping platforms: A response to the MEX manifesto

November 16th, 2009

Marek Pawlowski at MEX 2009

Every year Marek Pawlowski, organiser of the excellent MEX conference, sets out a manifesto as a theme for the event.  The 2009 manifesto is a discussion of the multiple channels (or platforms as he’s started to call them) in people’s lives.  Marek has invited comment on the following question:

“During the course of an average day, users consume digital bitstreams through a wide range of channels, from television and in-car music to mobile phones and desktop PCs. What factors cause them to transition between the various platforms and what opportunities exist to enrich the actual experience of transition?”

Here’s some thoughts on that question.

Let’s consider three examples.  The first is communication.  I am communicating with a friend.  The closer the friend, it has been shown, the more channels I’ll have available.  So a distant friend or colleague may be purely email or just face to face.  A close friend you contact via email and text and facebook and in person and by phone and mobile and everything.  The choice of channels is a choice of social etiquette – how urgent is it, should I disturb them, do I need to contact several people at once, and so on.  The transitions between channels are similarly based on social movements and awareness of context.  We started arranging our evening via facebook, but now it is an hour to go we’re texting.  In this case the major effort of the transition is the availability of contact information – do I have the right mobile number stored in the right phone – can I remember your twitter ID?

The second example is media – for instance listening to music.  Here I am going to hark back to some of the original thinking about what was once called ubiquitous computing.  One of the pioneers of this field, Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC, declared his vision of invisibility: “A good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool.”  (from The World is not a Desktop, 1994).  This has often been equated with the idea of seamlessness – many technologies working together for a seamless whole system. However, as Chalmers and McColl argue, Weiser was actually a proponent of seamfulness, maintaining the unique characteristics of each tool while making the transitions work well (beautiful seams).  What do these ideas of seamlessness and seamfulness mean in our music example?

At one extreme I dislike the seams between channels and want everything available from everywhere, all my music from every device, powered by a complex and impenetrable system of synchronisations, networks and magic.  It is all beautiful until it breaks.  Once it breaks, like any complex piece of machinery, you need to call out an expert.  Unfortunately for this domain the experts are not in the Yellow Pages as yet!  At the other extreme I am happy with the seams, and happy to transport my media around and deal with the transitions.  I burn a CD to play in the car.  My kid’s MP3 player has different songs on it than mine (thank God), and my phone has none.  It’s not perfect but it is perfectly understandable.

The first two examples deal with peoples’ personal data, their own stuff.  It is my job to work out how to synchronise my contacts between my devices, or play my music in different places.  You can try to sell me something to make it easier, but it had better be good!  The third example I will give, however, is different.  The third example is ecommerce services, such as our own site lastminute.com.  In this case it isn’t personal data, it is offers and deals and inventory and recommendations.  In this case it is lastminute.com’s responsibility to work out how and what to make available across platforms, not the customer’s.  And because we’re not dealing with personal data you own and want to move between devices in your world, we don’t really have quite the same problems of synchronisation.

At the moment you’re used to accessing us via a web browser from your laptop or deskop.  We’ve been doing that for over 10 years so we have a pretty good idea of the kind of experience people expect from us.  There’s a stable “dominant design” for a travel web site; the market is fairly mature.  But what kind of experience do you want from an iPhone, or a car satnav, or when you exchange tweets with @lastminute_com?  The needs of today’s mobile customers are the focus of our innovation group at the moment.  We mean mobile physically as you move between different places or rooms as well as mobile virtually as you go from Facebook to email to a web site to Youtube on the internet.

Our finding so far is that people expect a mobile device to be very aware of context – where am I, what time of day or day of the week is it, who are my friends, what do I like.  This expectation of a qualitatively more relevant and personalised experience, as soon as people become used to it, will immediately reflect back on today’s one-size-fits-all web sites, that will in turn need to adapt more radically.  So our theory is that not only will the experience of one service (such as lastminute.com) need to adapt to your context in the mobile channels, but that it will have to adapt to information from your other services (your last.fm profile, your twitter feed, and so on).  As we all start getting used to piping our activity streams around between applications, this will naturally begin to blur the seams between what today are very separate channels – they’ll all have access to the same data and the same services.  There will always be a choice of which device a customer wants to use at any given time – the small one, the bigger screen, the one with the longer battery life, the one with the speakers, the closest one – but each will be its own window onto a central set of information and services, with its own unique interaction and capabilities and sensors.  It will be a seamful world of devices with specific capabilities, acting as a window onto a seamless world of services and information.

You can read further discussion on this and related topics at the MEX blog.