1. Subliminal Suggestion

Research shows that objects and images you see around you can prime you for certain behaviors. For example, a study on children showed that after being shown a Santa Claus cap, they were more likely to share candy with others. The cap embodied the concept of sharing and giving in their minds, and exposure to it primed them for regarding sharing more positively. The same study also exposed kids to a “Toys ‘R’ Us” logo, which had the opposite effect of the Santa Claus cap, making them less likely to share their candy.

When choosing images for your website, think carefully about the message you’re trying to send. Pick images that are meaningful and that embody that message or feeling. Don’t put graphics on your website for their own sake — if they’re not doing a job, they don’t have to be there. Clichéd and overused imagery and stock photos are also dangerous because it may not send the right message in the given context, so select images that get the effect you’re after.

2. Prevent Choice Paralysis

There is a phenomenon in marketing known as “choice paralysis.” Choice paralysis happens when the user is given too many options. Choice is great, but when your customers are presented with too many options, they may be confused about where to go. Nobody wants buyer’s remorse (where a person chooses an item and decides later it’s not right for them), so many people spend more time than they should on the selection process: they become paralyzed.

In fact, according to Barry Schwatz, when customers have too many options to consider, they end up avoiding a specific service or the task in general (Paradox of Choice) – and this is exactly what we as designers need to carefully consider in our designs.

To remedy choice paralysis, make it easier for people to find the right product or service for them. Tell them what each option is great for, and then suggest the one they should choose. You can even use visuals to highlight the most popular product and steer potential customers towards it. If the product is not right for them, they’ll pick another, but if they’re confused, a “default” choice helps prevent choice paralysis.

3. Show The Product

When you visit a physical store, perhaps a grocery, you can look at, examine and sometimes even taste the products on sale. You make your purchasing decision based on the information you gather there. Are the tomatoes ripe enough? Are those strawberries red enough? What about the look and smell of that freshly baked bread?

When you sell services or Web apps online, you should do exactly the same thing: show the product. It’s surprising how many websites that sell software don’t actually show screenshots of their applications. Sure, these are intangible goods, digital goods that you can’t touch or smell, but they’re still goods you can see.

People make judgments based on what products look like. Why? Because appearance is an indicator, rightly or wrongly, of a product’s usability. This is known as the aesthetic-usability effect.

If people see a complicated and cluttered interface or, in some cases, even just an unattractive interface, they may assume it is not very usable or is hard to learn. On the other hand, if people see an attractive and simple-looking interface, they may start figuring out how it works right then and will want to give it a try. Get people to imagine using your software, and you’ll get closer to closing the sale.

4. Let People Try It

Once you start using a product, you become involved in it. Once you start entering data into it, you begin to make it your own. Every second a user spends trying out features is a second of their time invested in learning and using your product.

When that user is then presented with the question of whether to purchase or subscribe to the product or service, they will more likely say “yes” because they are already involved and have invested time in it. Of course, if the product is bad, then it may turn people off, but then your priority should really be to improve the product until it reaches a level people are happy with.

In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of the “freemium” business model. A freemium service allows people to use a portion of it free of charge, but requires a purchase to use all of its features. It gives people a taste of the full product but doesn’t limit them to a trial period. This lets them use the product for free without monetary commitment and then upgrade if they like it.

It’s a great model for many online Software-as-a-Service businesses because once somebody begins using your product, they get sucked in. They start to rely on it, and when they rely on it to do business or manage their life, they will very likely need the premium features down the line and will be happy to upgrade because they already know your service well.

Stories are very important in sales because they get potential customers to imagine what it would be like to use your product. Letting people actually try your product for free goes even further. They don’t have to imagine because they can begin using it right away at no cost. Letting people try out your product, whether through a demo, a trial period or a freemium model, is an excellent way to win customers. Now, this isn’t really a “design” element but is important to mention here because of its potential to drive conversions.

5. AIDA

AIDA is a well-known strategy in sales and stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It is relatively simple and describes the sequence of events you should aim for to get a sale. So, first of all, you must capture the attention of your potential customer. Once you have it, you should win their interest by explaining how your product or service can help them.

Then, once they’re interested, generate a desire in them for your product. For example, a story about how this product has helped someone like your visitor can help them imagine what this product would do for them, and especially what benefits it would bring. Indeed, the benefit part is key here because benefits, not features, sell products.

Finally, you need to get people to act. This means purchasing the product or signing up for the service. If people want your product, all they may need is a button to check out. If they are interested but not yet sure, you could use a few methods to motivate them further; for example, creating a sense of urgency with a limited-time offer or limited supply.

Now, the AIDA approach applies more to copy — the actual marketing text on the website — than design, so what we need to do on the design side is reinforce that copy, make it stand out and ensure visitors read it. This means making sure the first thing a new visitor sees really grabs their attention. The flow of the page should then direct their focus to the items that achieve the other two goals: interest and desire. Finally, at the end of this flow, we need to convert. So, provide calls to action: “Order now,” “Sign up here.”

It’s important to understand that the design alone won’t sell: you need strong copy in place to do most of that work. The design is there to reinforce and support the copy, rather than the other way around.

This means you shouldn’t design a nice website first and then fill up the space with words. Instead, think about the message you want to send out, write the copy and then construct a design that delivers that. If a delivery truck breaks down, then the package does not arrive, but if there was no package in the first place, then the delivery wouldn’t matter at all.

6. Guide attention

To benefit from something like AIDA, you have to lead your visitors through your content. You can do this by aligning items in a manner that will flow, and using images that guide the eyes. For example, if you want to focus attention somewhere, use a big arrow. Our eyes will notice the arrow and will naturally want to see where it points to.

Structure your content in a way that will flow towards something. Having a bunch of scattered feature descriptions may confuse and make your visitors lost, unless of course if all of the points end in calls to action. If you want to ensure your visitors don’t miss anything, align everything in a linear structure so that the user scans along it. Make sure to end it with the ultimate call to action: that signup or download link.

7. Always Provide Next Actions

ABC: Always Be Closing. If you’re designing a website to sell something, whether a software application or Web service, you should always be thinking about how you’re closing the deal on each page. This doesn’t mean filling every page with big “Buy now” buttons; it means when the customer is ready to buy, they shouldn’t have to look around for the check-out link.

Always provide next-action links to keep the flow going and to ensure you don’t lose the attention of potential customers. Next-action links can direct the visitor to a page with more information about the product or to the actual page where they can make the purchase or sign up. These links could read something like: “Ready to order? Click here,” “Learn more,” “Take the tour” or “Shop now.”

Don’t leave a dead end on any page: always suggest to your visitors where they should go next.

8. The Gutenberg rule

The Gutenberg diagram (or the Gutenberg rule) is a concept that maps out something called reading gravity. Reading gravity describes a habit of reading in the western world: left to right, top to bottom. The Gutenberg diagram splits up a page into four quadrants: the “Primary Optical Area” in top left, the “Strong Fallow Area” in top right, the “Weak Fallow Area” in the bottom left and a “Terminal Area” in bottom right.

The Gutenberg diagram

It suggests that the bottom left area of the page will get least attention as our eyes scan the page from top left to bottom right and that our glance would end up in the lower right portion of the page. How can we utilize this concept? Buttons and calls to action could be placed in bottom right instead of bottom left, as this is the place where the visitor’s glance is likely to alight.

Note that the Gutenberg diagram is more likely to work on pages which have more a balanced distribution of content. If parts of your page have strong highlights through high contrast and bold typography, then those areas would likely attract more attention and so will direct the way a user scans the page.

iPhone owners will argue until their dying breath how good the Apple handset is, Android users pushing the flexibility of Google’s operating system. Some swear by WebOS or Windows Mobile, even so, all of these OS’es have their own limitations which continue to frustrate even the most die-hard users.

There is no such thing as the perfect mobile operating system but with all software products there could always be improvements. What would be included in your perfect mobile operating system? We will discuss this below.

Customization

A huge prerequisite for any mobile owner. The ability to switch wallpapers whenever you feel like, change a theme or assign different ringtones to your contacts, it gives the user a feeling of control, they have power over the phone – not what Apple or Google tell them they can and can’t do.

iPhone owners have long wished for a way to personalize their devices and Apple relented to a point with the introduction of iOS4. Now, iPhone owners can apply a lock-screen and background wallpaper – insane. This is much to the delight of Android users, if the OS can’t perform the specified task, you can bank on there being an app available on the Android Market that can.

WebOS, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Android all support theming, with iPhone users needing to jailbreak (and invalidate their warranty) if they wish to do so. Apple believe that the application of themes would “take away from the user experience” because it “spent a lot of time and effort developing this distinct and innovative way to seamlessly deliver core functionality of the iPhone.” Enough said.

Most support widgets – little home screen apps that update to display real-time information – the best you get on an iPhone is the date and time, perhaps a push notification from time to time.

The perfect OS would allow users to customize the UI of their phone, handing back control to the person who showed faith in the company by handing over hundreds of dollars/pounds/euros to buy its phone in the first place.

Built-in Social

Whilst most modern mobile operating systems make use of social features, none of them store social networking data so that other apps can access it. Confused, let me explain.

Say hello to Android or WebOS. Both of these operating systems allow you to specify your social-networking or email accounts to populate contact information or display information by way of a widget. This is great, but if you wanted to pull this information for a different purpose, you would be unable to – you would need a specific app to give you the functionality you wished for.

There is a mobile operating system that allows developers to pull social networking data specified by the user: Samsung’s Bada platform. Designed specifically to challenge the likes of Android and iOS4, Bada is a linux-based OS that has a built-in social layer – currently supporting Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Myspace (Samsung has already announced it plans to add in more social API’s) – meaning a potential app developer can access profile data without having to make a separate connection to the service itself.

This in essence, allows the user to enter their social network credentials once and then specify what apps can access it. Bada will also update your location data to Samsung’s servers, developers will be to grab your location without having to build in a system within an app to manually search for your current location.

The perfect OS would seamlessly integrate social services with the platforms PIM implementation, reducing the need for the hundreds of Twitter app developers to code their own implementation to complete exactly the same task.

Toggle Between Basic and Expert Modes

Mobile operating systems deal with app crashes differently. On an iPhone, if the app crashes, you simply get chucked back to the home screen.

On Android, if an app quits unexpectedly, you get a funny little error message asking you to try again and force close the app. For me, this helps me identify why the app is misbehaving, for first-time users this might be a little bit daunting and give the impression the phone is doing something it shouldn’t (when in fact it is educating the user).

The perfect OS would allow the user to switch between an expert mode that contains all of the network information like Carrier APN’s, firmware and debugging tools, to a basic mode which makes use of wizards or graphics to explain the functions on a phone.

Making The OS Self Aware

No, I don’t want your Motorola Droid to start killing in the name of Skynet.

Most modern smartphones have issues with battery management, gone are the days of a 4-day charge, it’s now become the 4 hour charge (OK, I am overstating that a tad). Tell me if I am wrong (I’m sure you would anyway) but I don’t think many modern mobile operating systems have an intelligent system to automatically adjust settings on the phone to maximise battery life.

I know you can get apps, for example JuiceDefender on Android, that sit in the background and disabling your phones data connection when its not in use, only to switch data back on once in an allotted time period to give your apps a chance to refresh its data.

The function could automatically prioritize the needs of the background apps running on the phone, dedicating resources to each app when it needed it the most.

For me, the perfect OS would have built-in controls that could intelligently monitor your phones’ use and change settings accordingly. Would be a great way to help improve battery life and allow your phone to get to know you a bit better!

Multitasking

Something that both Android and WebOS does superbly, multitasking is still not a standard feature on modern mobile operating systems. Although implemented in iOS4, full multitasking and notifications still haven’t been created to meet most user expectations.

Windows Phone 7 will launch without full multitasking support, limiting the function to official Microsoft apps and stopping any third-party developers from utilizing it.

A large percentage of smartphones are launching with a 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM, for a phone this is a huge amount of power and memory. The excuse that the phone physically couldn’t handle a large amount of apps at the same time doesn’t hold any weight now.

The perfect OS would allow users to run as many apps as they like and cycle through them if they should choose, in the mobile age it should be a right not a privilege.

Conclusion

It was very tempting to include network coverage issues (looking at you Apple) but the above issues would go a long way towards making a mobile operating system work for both heavy and light mobile users. The great thing is we are able to receive a fair number of official updates as well as those developed by the mobile hacking community, an solution to our needs is never far away.

What features would go towards making up your perfect operating system, let us know in the comments.

But if these tablets do come on the market, will they catch on? And will you be getting one anytime soon? Well, to try to answer that question, let’s take a look at tablet computing history.

Tablet Evolution, not Revolution

First, let’s just lay this on the table – tablet computers are not new. A few years ago tablet computers burst onto the scene with a lot of promise, only to be relegated to niche markets and specific uses.

While it showed to be quite interesting, it is my opinion that the implementation was not right. The Windows based pen computer was virtually a windows computer with a few goodies thrown in for the pen. Sure, journal and the sticky notes were definitely interesting, and it allowed a lot of freedom when using the pen. But merely replacing the mouse with a pen and adding a few specialized functions is probably a good entry into the “How not to introduce a new computing paradigm” playbook.

The pen took longer to enter data than a keyboard did, and the interface was designed for a mouse. The tablet computer suffered, despite a few holdouts that actually liked a pen computer (I still love my TC1100).

Where tablets are now

As mentioned, the CES 2010 brought out a lot of tablets that will soon see the light of day. And the majority of them are running Windows 7. Aha, isn’t that an OS designed for a mouse? Did we not just go through that with the last round of pen tablets?

Sad to say, we did. Windows with a touch screen is, in this writer’s opinion, not a finger friendly OS. Sure, it does finer touches now – multiple simultaneous touches, even. But even a quick look at a screen shows you that they are using the same screen mechanics as a mouse does for the most part.

The interface is not designed for a pen, much less a finger. Yet the bulk of the new tablet market is going to be running this OS, apparently. So, why would the average person want to forgo the mouse and use their finger instead?

The answer is this – they have no reason to do so. If the tablet computing paradigm continues to be introduced with a mouse designed interface, then we can stick a fork in it. Outside of a few niche areas (and I am in one of those, to be sure), you can call tablet computing done.

Tablet Computers, From the Ground Up

So, if sticking Windows 7 on a tablet with touchpad support is not going to make it work, then what is? Well, the answer to that might just be in recent history. Recent Mobile history, to be exact.

Windows Mobile has seen a good run, and from its early inception to the latest version (sans Windows Mobile 7, if that ever does see the light of day), it has sold in the millions. They precede a lot of the current competition in mobile OS, and they carry with it the branding of the world’s most popular desktop operating system. They should have the market.

But they don’t, and a few relatively new competitors are ripping through the market, leaving Windows Mobile behind in their dust, at least for now. What did they do wrong?

Simple – they implemented an interface that was too much like the desktop. The mouse-evolved screen elements took up a lot of precious screen real estate. As a long time user of Windows Mobile (also known by the more correct name, Pocket PC), I can attest that you needed a good stylus and a steady hand to make use of the interface. It may have been labeled mobile, but you had to stop to see what you were doing.

A New Interface

But recently a competitor released a phone that had an interface designed from the ground up to be finger centric. The iPhone, by Apple, showed us exactly how you could scroll a list using a touch screen without a single tiny scroll bar on the side. Suddenly a finger would actually work, and screen elements such as drop down lists were accommodating to the user, not the other way around. The result was a great success.

On its heels, computing giant Google has released its Android operating system, again designed to be finger friendly from the ground up. The Android name is finding its way onto many different handsets, and the end result is that a touch screen device is becoming accepted as the normal smartphone of choice, no stylus required.

Interface Impact

So, how does this affect tablet computers? Well, if the rumor mill proves to be true, then there are new tablets coming on the market that run these operating systems. This is perhaps the biggest difference from the earlier attempt at making tablets a mainstream device.

A tablet device running an interface that is finger-centric by design, not mouse-centric with allowances, is in my opinion enough to turn the tide and opens the door for these sleek machines.

It really does come down to this – it must be conveniently easy to use. Otherwise the new crop of tablets are again headed for the niche markets and power users only. You have to give the users a reason to use a tablet, not let them make do with a tablet.

Is a tablet in your future?

With that said, I am curious as to how the average computer user feels about the new crop of tablets. Would you want a Windows 7 device so that you can run existing software? Or would you want a new design that allows a new software design to interface to your lifestyle?

“PCs with touchscreens look cool, but what do you do with them?” says Jennifer Colegrove, a director at Display Search. “When it comes to the iPhone there are 50,000 applications that use touch — but what do you do on a PC with touch?”

To help answer that question, some companies are building touchscreen-centric “skins” for Windows aimed at making tactile navigation more pleasant. Two big PC companies, HP and Lenovo, as well as a startup called BumpTop, have built touch-oriented user interfaces that will run on top of Windows.

“The question is, can we rethink the touch interface as a first-class citizen and provide a fresh approach to the desktop?” says Anand Agarawala, founder and CEO of Toronto’s Bumptop. “Not only is touch a more natural way to interact with your desktop but it also adds to your productivity.”

Touchscreens are not as popular on PCs as they are on smartphones. Only about 3 percent of the desktop and notebook PCs available today have a touchscreen, says research firm Display Search. But it is a growing market. Driven by their experiences with touchscreen-based smartphones such as the iPhone and Palm Pre, consumers are craving to reach out and touch their PCs — or so PC makers think.

On Thursday, Sony announced a new touch-enabled, multimedia PC called the Vaio L Touch HD PC. The device has a 24-inch touchscreen display. Last month, Lenovo introduced the a tablet PC and a ThinkPad laptop with a touchscreen display. HP is expected to offer updated versions of its TouchSmart computers in time for the holiday season. Even Dell now offers a touchscreen option for its all-in-one desktop or nettop.

But the touch-sensitive hardware is only half the battle, because touchscreens can be difficult to use with an operating system designed for mice and keyboards.

HP was among the first to take on this challenge. The company introduced the TouchSmart PC, a desktop with a touchscreen, in 2007. Since then it has added its own user interface on top of Windows and created applications such as Recipe Box, a slickly designed program that presents each recipe in the form of a recipe card. The program also allows users to search for recipes online and save them in a similar format.

And, despite its identity as a hardware company, HP has built all the software for its touch interface. The company hopes more independent developers will jump in to create similar applications for the touchscreen.

Wanting to give its tablet-PC users a better experience is also why Lenovo designed a touch interface called SimpleTap. SimpleTap is a grid of colorful square tiles. It lets users choose functions, such as previewing the camera, enabling mute, adjusting the volume or screen brightness, or accessing a file, and assign them to squares within the grid.

The idea with SimpleTap is to let users get in, do a task and get out quickly, says Lenovo. “Touch is something we have looked at very hard for a long time,” says Lee Highsmith, a brand manager for Lenovo. “Windows 7 gives native support for touch, so there is less likely to be contention among apps and since it is built into the OS it is easier for everybody.”

BumpTop takes a similar but more-playful approach with its software that turns a touchscreen PC into a 3-D playground of sorts.

Apart from the standard flick, pinch and scroll, BumpTop has interesting new gestures such as “shove,” which uses the little finger to move files to the left, and “fan out,” a two-fingered gesture that spreads files out.

To add realism to its 3-D look, BumpTop is built on top of the Unreal Tournament videogame engine, which let the BumpTop developers give objects realistic physical properties. For instance, desktop objects like files or photos have a “mass” proportional to their size, so when a small object bumps up against a larger object, the large one doesn’t move as much.

“The physics is an important thing,” says Agarawala. “It is intangible but there is something about the experience that makes it more joyful to use.”

BumpTop, which launched a beta version of its product in April, has already seen more than half a million downloads of its software.

For its part, Microsoft is supporting these custom user-interface efforts. The upcoming Windows 7 operating system offers multitouch support for the first time. Windows Vista supported single-finger touch, which only enables an extremely rough-and-ready interpretation of complex gestures, says Agarawala.

“Windows 7 gives us information such as acceleration and velocity, so you can do much more complex touchscreen gestures,” he says. “So you can use five fingers if you want, something that Vista couldn’t support.”

New touchscreen interfaces open up the technology to more users, but they could also end up confusing users. There are no standard sets of gestures. Some gestures may be protected by patents — Apple has filed for patents on multitouch gestures, and BumpTop is doing the same — which could limit their adoption by other interface designers. That in turn could lead to confusion among consumers: Do I scroll with one finger, or two, or three? How do I rotate the screen?

People also have to know exactly what kind of touchscreen their systems have. For instance, BumpTop uses five-finger gestures that require higher-end touchscreens. So if your PC has a more primitive touchscreen and you install BumpTop, you may find that some gestures don’t work. There’s no error message: The gestures simply don’t work.

“It’s kind of the Wild West right now with touch,” says Agarawala. “But it is also an exciting opportunity to carve a new path.”

Check out videos of how Bumptop and Lenovo’s SimpleTap work, below.

While sipping a cup of organically farmed, artisan-brewed tea, I tap on my gigabit-wireless-connected tablet, to pull up a 3D movie on the razor-thin HDTV hanging on the wall. A media server streams the film via a superspeedy USB connection to a wireless HD transmitter, which then beams it to the TV.

That actor–who was he? My augmented-reality contact lenses pick up the unique eye motion I make when I have a query, which I then enter on a virtual keyboard that appears in the space in front of me. Suddenly my field of vision is covered with a Web page showing a list of the actor’s movies, along with some embedded video clips.

These technologies will come to life in the distant future, right? Future, yes. Distant, no.

Speed and content (much of it video) will be paired consistently across mobile, laptop, desktop, and home-entertainment systems. New ways of using video–including adding 3D depth or artificial visual overlays–will require more speed, storage, and computational power.

In our preview of technologies that are well on their way to reality, we look at the connective tissue of USB 3.0, 802.11ac, and 802.11ad for moving media–especially video–faster; at HTML5 for displaying video and content of all kinds consistently across all our devices; at augmented reality to see how the digital world will stretch into our physical reality by overlaying what we see with graphics and text; and at 3D TV, which will add image depth and believability to the experience of watching TV.

USB3

USB may be one of the least-sexy technologies built into present-day computers and mobile devices, but speed it up tenfold, and it begins to sizzle. Cut most of the other cables to your computer, and the standard ignites. Bring in the potential of uncompressed video transfer, and you have a raging fire.

Any task that involves transferring data between your PC and a peripheral device–scanning, printing, or transferring files, among others–will be far faster with USB 3.0. In many cases, the transfer will be complete before you realize it has started.

The 3.0 revision of USB, dubbed SuperSpeed by the folks who control testing and licensing at the USB Implementors Forum (USB-IF), is on track to deliver more than 3.2 gigabits per second (gbps) of actual throughput. That transfer rate will make USB 3.0 five to ten times faster than other standard desktop peripheral standards, except some flavors of DisplayPort and the increasingly out-of-favor eSATA.

In addition, USB 3.0 can shoot full-speed data in both directions at the same time, an upgrade from 2.0′s “half duplex” (one direction at a time) rates. USB 3.0 jacks will accept 1.0 and 2.0 plug ends for backward compatibility, but 3.0 cables will work only with 3.0 jacks.

This technology could be a game-changer for device connectivity. A modern desktop computer today may include jacks to accommodate ethernet, USB 2.0, FireWire 400 or 800 (IEEE 1394a or 1394b) or both, DVI or DisplayPort or both, and–on some–eSATA. USB 3.0 could eliminate all of these except ethernet. In their place, a computer may have several USB 3.0 ports, delivering data to monitors, retrieving it from scanners, and exchanging it with hard drives. The improved speed comes at a good time, as much-faster flash memory drives are in the pipeline.

USB 3.0 is fast enough to allow uncompressed 1080p video (currently our highest-definition video format) at 60 frames per second, says Jeff Ravencraft, president and chair of the USB-IF. That would enable a camcorder to forgo video compression hardware and patent licensing fees for MPEG-4. The user could either stream video live from a simple camcorder (with no video processing required) or store it on an internal drive for later rapid transfer; neither of these methods is feasible today without heavy compression. Citing 3.0′s versatility, some analysts see the standard as a possible complement–or even alternative–to the consumer HDMI connection found on today’s Blu-ray players.

The new USB flavor could also turn computers into real charging stations. Whereas USB 2.0 can produce 100 milliamperes (mA) of trickle charge for each port, USB 3.0 ups that quantity to 150mA per device. USB 2.0 tops out at 500mA for a hub; the maximum for USB 3.0 is 900mA.

With mobile phones moving to support USB as the standard plug for charging and syncing (the movement is well underway in Europe and Asia), and with U.S. carriers having recently committed to doing the same, the increased amperage of USB 3.0 might let you do away with wall warts (AC adapters) of all kinds.

In light of the increased importance and use of USB in its 3.0 version, future desktop computers may very well have two internal hubs, with several ports easily accessible in the front to act as a charging station. Each hub could have up to six ports and support the full amperage. Meanwhile, laptop machines could multiply USB ports for better charging and access on the road. (Apple’s Mac Mini already includes five USB 2.0 ports on its back.)

The higher speed of 3.0 will accelerate data transfers, of course, moving more than 20GB of data per minute. This will make performing backups (and maintaining offsite backups) of increasingly large collections of images, movies, and downloaded media a much easier job.

Possible new applications for the technology include on-the-fly syncs and downloads (as described in the case study above). The USB-IF’s Ravencraft notes that customers could download movies at the gas pump at of a filling station. “With high-speed USB [2.0], you couldn’t have people waiting in line at 15 minutes a crack to download a movie,” Ravencraft says.

Manufacturers are poised to take advantage of USB 3.0, and analysts predict mass adoption of the standard on computers within a couple of years. The format will be popular in mobile devices and consumer electronics, as well. Ravencraft says that manufacturers currently sell more than 2 billion devices with built-in USB each year, so there’s plenty of potential for getting the new standard out fast.

Video Streaming Over Wi-Fi

Wired ethernet has consistently achieved higher data speeds than Wi-Fi, but wireless standards groups are constantly trying to figure out ways to help Wi-Fi catch up. By 2012, two new protocols–802.11ac and 802.11ad–should be handling over-the-air data transmission at 1 gbps or faster.

As a result, future users can have multiple high-definition video streams and gaming streams active across a house and within a room. Central media servers, Blu-ray players, and other set-top boxes can sit anywhere in the home, streaming content to end devices in any location. For example, an HD video display, plugged in with just a power cord, can stand across the room from a Blu-ray player, satellite receiver, or computer–no need for expensive, unsightly cables.

The 802.11ac and 802.11ad standards should be well suited for home use, though their applications will certainly extend far beyond the home. The names reflect the internal method of numbering that the engineering group IEEE uses: 802 for networking, 11 for wireless, and one or more letters in sequence for specific task groups (that’s how we got 802.11a, b, g, h, n, and others).

The 802.11ac standard will update 802.11n, the latest and greatest of a decade’s worth of wireless local area networking (WLAN) technology that began with 802.11b. With 802.11ac, wireless networking performance will leap from a theoretical top speed of 600 mbps to a nominal maximum of more than 1 gbps. In practice, the net data carried by 802.11ac will be likely be between 300 mbps and 400 mbps–more than enough capacity to carry multiple compressed video streams over a single channel simultaneously. Or users may assign individual streams running on unique frequencies to a number of separate channels. Like 802.11n, 802.11ac will use many antennas for receiving and sending data wirelessly.

The 802.11ac flavor still won’t have the capacity to carry lossless high-definition video (video that retains the full fidelity and quality of the raw source), however. Today, lossless video is common over wired connections after decompression or decoding of a data stream from a satellite, cable, or disc. The right hardware will be able to take the 802.11ac compressed data stream and send it directly to a decoder in an HDTV set; some HD sets already have this capability today. But when uncompressed video has to stream at a rate faster than 1 gbps, a speedier format must be used.

That’s where 802.11ad comes in. It abandons the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands of the spectrum (where today’s Wi-Fi works) to the newly available 60GHz spectrum. Because the 60GHz spectrum has an ocean of frequencies available in most countries–including in the United States–you’ll be able to use multiple distinct channels to carry more than 1 gbps of uncompressed video each.

Unfortunately, the millimeter-long waves that make up 60GHz signals penetrate walls and furniture poorly, and oxygen readily absorbs the waves’ energy. So 802.11ad is best suited for moving data across short distances between devices in the same room. Apart from supporting fast video transfers, 802.11ad will permit you to move files or sync data between devices at speeds approaching that of USB 3.0–and 1000 times faster than Bluetooth 2.

The 802.11ad spec is one of three competing ideas for using the 60GHz band of the spectrum. The Wireless HD trade group, a consortium of consumer electronics firms, is focusing on video use of the 60GHz band, while the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) is looking at networking and consumer uses. Membership in the various groups overlaps, making an interoperable and perhaps unified spec possible. Though 802.11ad doesn’t specifically address video, it will be a generic technology that can accommodate many kinds of data. At a minimum, each group will work to prevent interference with one another’s purposes.

The combination of 802.11ac and 802.11ad, coupled with USB 3.0, will allow you to position clusters of computer equipment and entertainment hardware around your home. USB 3.0 and gigabit ethernet might connect devices located in a cabinet or on a desk; 802.11ac will link clusters across a home; and 802.11ad will carry data to mobile devices, displays, and other gear within a room.

Allen Huotari, the technical leader at Cisco Consumer Products (which now includes Linksys products and ships millions of Wi-Fi and ethernet devices each year) says that the change in home networks won’t result from “any one single technology in the home, but rather a pairing of technologies or a trio of technologies–wired and/or wireless–for the backbone and the wireless on the edges.”

This means fewer wires and cables, better speeds, and higher-quality video playback than anything possible today. By 2012, both specifications should be readily available.

3D TV

When television makers introduced HDTVs, it was inevitable that they would figure out a way to render the technology obsolete not long after everyone bought a set. And they have. The next wave in home viewing is 3DTV–a 2D picture with some stereoscopic depth.

As 3D filmmaking and film projection technology have improved, Hollywood has begun building a (still small) library of depth-enhanced movies. The potential to synthesize 2D movies into 3D could feed demand, however–the way colorizing technology increased interest in black-and-white films in some circles in the 1980s. For movies based on computer animation–such as Toy Story 3D, a newly rendered version of the first two movies in the series–it’s already happening.

The promise of 3D is a more immersive, more true-to-life experience, and substantively different from almost anything you’ve watched before. In commercial theaters, 3D projection typically involves superimposing polarized or distinctly colored images on each frame and then having viewers wear so-called “passive” glasses that reveal different images to each eye. The brain synthesizes the two images into a generally convincing notion of depth.

In contrast, 3D at home will almost certainly rely on alternating left and right views for successive frames. HDTVs that operate at 120Hz (that is, 120 cycles of refresh per second) are broadly available, so the ability to alternate left and right eye images far faster than the human eye can follow already exists. Fundamental industry standards are in place to allow such recording, says Alfred Poor, an analyst with GigaOm and the author of the Web site HDTV Almanac.

Viewing 3DTV displays will require “active” glasses that use rapidly firing shutters to alternate the view into each eye. Active glasses are expensive today, but their price will drop as 3D rolls out. Meanwhile, designers are in the development phase of producing a 3D set that doesn’t require the glasses.

Sony and Panasonic have announced plans to produce 3D-capable displays, and Panasonic recently demonstrated a large-screen version that the company expects to ship in 2010. As happened when HDTVs rolled out, premium 3DTVs will appear first, followed by progressively more-affordable models.

Creating and distributing enough 3D content to feed consumers’ interest may be more of an challenge. Poor noted that filmmakers are currently making or adapting only a handful of features each year for 3D. But techniques to create “synthetic 3D” versions of existing films (using various tracking, focus, and pattern cues for splitting images) could fill the gap.

Existing terrestrial cable and IPTV networks should be able to distribute 3D content. The bandwidth that such networks use to deliver typical HD broadcasts will be adequate for delivering 3D video once the networks upgrade to newer video compression techniques. Satellite may face a more difficult road, since such systems already use the best levels of compression.

For physical media playback, Blu-ray can store the data needed, and 3D Blu-ray players are already on the drawing board. No fundamental changes in Blu-ray will be necessary, so the trade group that created the standard is focusing compatibility–such as ensuring that a 2D TV can play a 3D disc.

Standards issues might not end up being very troublesome, so long as the 3DTVs are flexible enough. An industry group is working on setting some general parameters, much as digital TV was broken up into 480, 720, and 1080 formats, along with progressive and interlaced versions. A 3DTV may need to support multiple formats, but all will involve alternating images and a pair of shutter-based glasses.

Poor expects that 3DTV will be but a minor upgrade to existing HDTV sets. The upgraded sets will need a modified display controller that alternates images 60 per second for each eye, as well as an infrared or wireless transmitter to send synchronization information to the 3D glasses.

“Augmented Reality” in Mobile Devices

In Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash, “gargoyles” are freelance intelligence gatherers who have wired themselves to see (through goggles that annotate all of their experiences) a permanent overlay of data on top of the physical world. In less immersive fashion, we may all become gargoyles as “augmented reality” becomes an everyday experience.

Augmented reality is a catchall term for overlaying what we see with computer-generated contextual data or visual substitutions. The point of the technology is to enhance our ability to interact with things around us by providing us with information immediately relevant to those things.

At work, you might walk around the office and see the name and department of each person you pass painted on them–along with a graphical indicator showing what tasks you owe them or they owe you. Though many case scenarios involve “heads-up” displays embedded in windshields or inside eyeglasses, the augmented reality we have today exists primarily on the “heads-down” screens of smartphones.

Several companies have released programs that overlay position- and context-based data onto a continuous video camera feed. The data comes from various radios and sensors built into modern smartphones, including GPS radios (for identifying position by satellite data), accelerometers (for measuring changes in speed and orientation), and magnetometers (for finding position relative to magnetic north).

In an application called Nearest Places, the names and locations of subway stops, parks, museums, restaurants, and other places of interest are shown on top of an iPhone’s video feed. As you walk or turn, the information changes to overlay your surroundings.

“Smartphones and the related apps are the trailblazers for augmented reality,” says Babak Parviz, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in nanotechnology. “In the short to medium term, my guess is that they will dominate the field.”

Other prototype applications display information dropped at particular coordinates as 3D models that the user can walk around, or as animations whose details update in 3D relative to the user’s position. But the technology for those apps isn’t ripe yet; handhelds require a more-precise positioning mechanism in order to handle that kind of data insertion. Fortunately, each smartphone generation seems to include more and better sensors.

In other realms, augmented reality may serve to provide not just additional information, but enhanced vision. One day, infrared cameras mounted on the front of a car will illuminate a far-away object represented as a bright-as-day image on an in-windshield display. Radar signals and wireless receivers will detect and display cars that are out of sight; and one piece of glass will host GPS and traffic reporting.

Leaping past displays, Parviz and his team are working on ways to put the display directly on the eyeball. They’re trying to develop a technology for embedding video circuitry into wearable contact lenses. While wearing such contact lenses, you would see a continuous, context-based data feed overlaid on your field of vision.

Before Parviz’s lenses become a reality, augmented reality is likely to become a routine navigation and interaction aid on mobile devices. In addition, game developers may use the technology to overlay complete digital game environments over the reality that gamers see around them.

HTML5

Hulk VI was great, but w  hat should you watch this evening? Before heading off to work in the morning, you click to some trailers on a movie Website, but you don’t have time to watch many. So you use your mobile phone to snap a picture of the 2D barcode on one of the videos; the phone’s browser then takes you to the same site. On the commuter train to the office, you watch the previews over a 4G cell phone connection. A few of the movies have associated games that you try out on your phone, too.

Remember when every Website had a badge that read “optimized for Netscape Navigator” or “requires Internet Explorer 4″? In the old days, people made Web pages that worked best with–or only with–certain browsers. To some extent, they still do.

The new flavor of the HTML–the standard program for writing Web pages–is called HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language version 5); and HTML5 aims to put that practice to bed for good.

Specifically, HTML5 may do away with the need for audio, video, and interactive plug-ins. It will allow designers to create Websites that work essentially the same on every browser–whether on a desktop, a laptop, or a mobile device–and it will give users a better, faster, richer Web experience.

Instead of leaving each browser maker to rely on a combination of its in-house technology and third-party plug-ins for multimedia, HTML5 requires that the browser have built-in methods for audio, video, and 2D graphics display. Patent and licensing issues cloud the question of which audio and video formats will achieve universal support, but companies have plenty of motivation to work out those details.

In turn, Website designers and Web app developers won’t have to deal with multiple incompatible formats and workarounds in their efforts to create the same user experience in every browser.

This is an especially valuable advance for mobile devices, as their browsers today typically have only limited multimedia support. The iPhone’s Safari browser, for example, doesn’t handle Adobe Flash–even though Flash is a prime method of delivering video content across platforms and browsers.

“It’ll take a couple of years to roll out, but if all the browser companies are supporting video display with no JavaScript [for compatibility handling], just the video tag and no plug-in, then there’s no downside to using a mobile device,” says Jeffrey Zeldman, a Web designer and leading Web standards guru. “Less and less expert users will have better and better experiences.”

Makers of operating systems and browsers appear to be falling into line behind HTML5. Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, and WebKit (the development package that underlies many mobile and desktop programs), among others, are all moving toward HTML5 support.

For its part, Microsoft says that Internet Explorer 8 will support only parts of HTML5. But Microsoft may not want to risk having its Internet Explorer browser lose more market share by resisting HTML5 in the face of consensus among the other OS and browser makers.

HTML5 is now completing its last march toward a final draft and official support by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Bumptop, after being presented in TED 2007, dived into serious technological improvements until recently they came up with their 13th beta version which is stable and working perfectly with some of the coolest features available. Bumptop is a 3D desktop application which is meant to make your desktop operations (dragging, resizing, dropping, e-mailing, printing etc) fun and intuitive. It is unlike anything you have seen before. Gone are the days of style XP, talismans, Vista inspirat themes. it not just brings in entertainment but its quite useful too. Here are some cool and not-so-cool features of Bumptop as we found out.

We thought, a picture says a thousand words so we will let our keyboards rest and the images tell you the full story. I hope you will love watching the pictures we are sharing.

BumpTop Unveiled

Right Click on any file on bumptop and you get three options – Shrink, Grow and More (that has other Windows options)

Drag an arc over the files you want to select and drag the mouse pointer to the center, you will find the above options.

Draw an arc over set of icons you want to pile up, You will see a highlighted centre point, drag them there and it gets piled. Wow!

Just double- click on the stack pile of files and you will see a very convenient grid view as above

Right click on the pile and select ‘Fan Out’ and drag the files wherever you want, in whichever trajectory. They will still be in queue. Look at the photo.

You can just scroll through the pile and they will show you file after file as if you are flipping through the pages of a book

You can just drag data or image files on a printer icon and it will start printing. Amazing no?

Just drag the files you want to attach to your mail client and drop them on the icon (say MS Outlook) and it will get attached! whoa!

See as I had told. Here is the proof. look at the attachment tag

Right click on the desktop and see there is a search option. It searches for the keyword you put in. I put in PDF and got the result. You can also drag any one of them and others will come in group. Very useful.

This is where the irony lies. If you don’t use Bumptop you won’t know how well they manage the aero keys, slideshows and photo frame features in bumptop. I have tried to give you a picture

Select any number of files by drawing an arc over them, and then go to the centre to get the option as before. Click ‘create pile by types’ and here is the result. Fantastic.

Go to taskbar -> bumptop -> settings. And then change themes and options as you like. Yes its fully customizable. Enjoy. Below you have my experiment result.

After a theme change!

You can also create your own bumptop photo frames with photos of your choice. You can see the photos changing constantly at the ‘wall’

Not only desktop. You can also bump a folder of your choice. you will see a button at the top-right as ‘bump this folder’

Here is what you get after bumping the folder.

The Final Destination

I just went to settings at the end and chose ‘always bump’ option. And after some child’s play, here was my ‘organized’ desktop.

Many of the usability issues I discover nowadays can be very subtle indeed, difficult to describe even, let alone write guidelines for, but I’ve collected together a list of 10 of the most common usability issues I find so that you can see how your site measures up.

1. No Search Results Found

It can be difficult to “test” the search engine on your site, you enter “apples” and find apples… there.. done. But frequently when I actually try to work out what customers are searching for I end up with the dreaded “No Results Found” page. I would argue that there is no excuse for ever showing no results no matter how odd the search. Go to your web site and really use the search engine for once and see if it ever returns no
results.

Some suggestions

• Given that people are using the search engine, you can assume that people are looking for something
  so why not at least show the last 5 things searched for, or the 5 most popular products or pages?
• Does your internal search engine know what to do with synonyms? Will it find the same items for “ipod”
  and “i-pod”? If not you need to do some work.
• At a presentation a long time ago by the tech guys from BBC search, they showed how they’d implement
  what they call “Best Bets”. It was a great if simple idea in which they’d identified items they’d expect
  people to want if they typed a certain word into a certain section of the web site at a certain time.
  These “best bets” were returned along with the usual search results.
• Make sure you have at your disposal the list of search terms used on your site that returned no search
  results and do something about that.

2. Somewhere To Go Next

When designing web sites, it’s tempting to think of them as a tree structure, with categories being branches or departments and the individual pages being the leaves, but it’s not. The visitors to your web site rarely use it as you designed it, often landing on a page deep in the site missing the home page altogether. Often the page a visitor will not contain the information they need but because this page has been designed as a destination (or leaf) rather than as a step in a journey and have nowhere to go next. It’s then tempting to assume that your site navigation will encourage visitors to explore further, but some recent recent research found that many web users are “navigation blind”, passing as little heed to site navigation as they do banner ads. Having somewhere to go next also usefully avoids the reduction in sales in what Jared Spool amusingly calls “The Back Button of Death”.

Some suggestions

• Create landing pages that meet your customers needs rather than arguing with colleagues about who
  has most prominence on your home page.
• Don’t assume that your site navigation will be used. Think about the linkages between your content
  rather than the categories.
• Design and author the relationships or the “journey” rather than the structure of your site.
• As an exercise, look at your site without the main navigation. Is it still navigable?
• Add extra inline links where appropriate. No content is an island.

3. Facetted Search Results

Search results and product listing pages are often arbitrarily chunked into say 10 or 20 items? It may return 3 or 4 hundred matches or more, too many results to read really. One of the easiest ways you can improve your site is to add search filters or “facets” to your search engine so that when people search, the attributes of the items found can be used to easily further drill down on what they are looking for. The example below from the Delia Smith web site shows how a search for “chicken” can
be easily further filtered using the “Also found in” links at the right hand side.

4. Default Actions

On many sites you have a main task you are trying to achieve, whether it’s finding a present for someone or buying a train ticket. All these sites break down these tasks into separate screens but often fail to make it clear what THE ONE THING you should do on a particular page. Amazon do a great job of designing buttons that are the “Default Action”. There are other buttons on the page, but it is always obvious which is the button you should click next to achieve your task. The Amazon screen below has lots of things I could do (Change quantities, add gift wrapping etc.) but the “Place your order” button really stands out well. Now go to your web site
and see if it is visually clear what you want your visitors to do.

5. The 1, 2, 3 of Design Purpose

So many sites fail on this one. You’d be amazed but often, the owners of a web site haven’t actually even decided what the purpose of their web site is, they have a web site because everyone else has one or because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Given the way we all use the web, I reckon you probably have roughly 3 milliseconds to convince someone that your web site is where they should be. This is how I break down
that precious moment for a first time visitor…

1. Am I in the right place? Does your company name or strap line peripherally assure people that they
   are in the right place? Are the images used helpful?
2. Am I convinced by this site? Does what’s on screen or deeper in the site, reinforce the customers
   credibility of your company as they explore what you have to offer? Visitors are looking to be convinced so are you
   doing all you have to convince them?
3. What should I do now? What is the ONE THING you people to do? Is it to call you, or to buy something
   or to sign up or to remember you or what? Tell them to do that thing. Make it clear how to do that thing. Make
   the design focus on doing that one thing.

Go to your site and see if you can visually and conceptually recognize the 1, 2, 3 in your design.

6. Chocolate Box Syndrome

Human beings put things in categories, we can’t help it, but categories are also where lots of problems arise. For example, imagine that a web site, like life, was a box of chocolates and categorized thus…

• Soft centres
• Hard centres
• Ones that nobody likes

I wouldn’t want to choose which category to click, but in general I have a very clear idea of which type of chocolate I’d like. Whether or not you should categorize chocolates like this or not is something you’d need to test using card-sorting techniques with your customers but the usability of these categories can be significantly improved by showing some of the items in it.

So, the above example might be changed to look like this…

• Soft centres (23)
• Hard centres (4)
• Ones that nobody likes(4)

..which at least gives us some clue as to what the arbitrary categories contain in terms of
numbers. But it may be better served by showing it’s contents with a fuller description, like
this…

• Soft centres (dark chocolate orange creme, strawberry creme, coffee truffle more
• Hard centres (butterscotch toffee, hazelnut crunch, caramel more
• Ones that nobody likes ( turkish delight, crystallized ginger, praline more

Given that I prefer dark chocolate over milk, I am able to be encouraged into clicking, maybe going straight to the item I’d like (the “dark chocolate orange”) and not wonder if the caramel is one of those nice gooey ones. When a category, such as “Soft Centre” reveals some of its contents, it helps us to better understand the parameters of the category. And given, in most cases, we’d like to know what we are going to get before we get it, because a category (or link) reveals some of it’s contents we are more likely to be tempted into clicking it. Now visit your site and assess whether the categories you use “reveal their contents” or not.

7. The Anxiety Test (why, why, why?)

This is a really easy test to run. It helps if you drink way too much strong coffee first. All you have to do is use your site and imagine worrying nervously and endlessly about every element on every page. For example, in the registration process, you could imagine worrying…

• Why do they want my address? Will they send me junk mail though the post?
• Will you sell my address?
• I wonder if you’ll call round when I haven’t tidied up a bit?
• What if I’m moving house next week? Can I change it later?
• Is this my credit card address or where I’m living now? Will this checkout process break?
• I don’t know my post code yet, does this matter?
• Is “rd” OK or should I type “road”
• Do I really have to fill all these address fields?

Particularly for form items, where possible, it is reasonable to tell people what the implications of giving up some information are, why you need it and in what format you’d ideally like it. This puts people at ease with your site because it…

• calms anxieties and makes people more likely to buy
• reduces the errors people tend to make, creating a better experience
• sets expectations and helps to build trust

8. 404 Page Not Found

This is a simple test too. Add some random characters at the end of your URL and hit return and see what you get. What can you say? Sometimes people will link to you and get the URL completely wrong. It happens. Why not accept that it’s going to happen and design for it. Don’t think of your 404 page as simply an error page, think of it as a page from which people should be able to get to the page they really wanted.

9. Newsletter Honesty

This test is related to both The Anxiety Test and The Chocolate Box Syndrome. Many sites offer the option to sign up for an email newsletter without telling the visitor…

• What the newsletter contains
• How frequent the newsletters are
• What you are going to do with their email address
  Given that most people are precious about their email In Tray. Does your site?
• Show examples of previous newsletters so that people can assess whether or not it is the type of thing
  they’d like to receive. If not why not?
• Is it honest about how often you send out the newsletter? Is it once a day, week, season?
• Do you state clearly what you will do with their email address?

10. Page Titles

I still occasionally find sites where every page share the same title. Not the title as it appear inside the window, but in the window bar. It’s not as common a mistake as it used to be but it’s still happening. Page titles are hugely important to the usability of your customers browser bookmarks but also hugely important with regards to how Google works and how people find you. So, perform the test of …What does your site look like in Google search results? For many people this is the one chance you
have to convince them that your site is worth visiting. They don’t get to see your lovely new design, they don’t get to experience how usable your site is; all they see of your site is the blue, black and green of Google and the titles you have created.