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the future is awesome -- but cluttered
August 6, 2008By Abby CovertThis morning, my aggregator had a headline that I could not ignore. Coming from 4 different RSS feeds that I frequent and mentioning one of the fathers’ of information architecture didn’t hurt in getting my attention, but it was really mentioning “the future of browsers” that intrigued me most.
Jesse James Garrett (maybe best known for coining the term AJAX and writing the User Experience Bible) and the team at Adaptive Path have partnered with the folks at Mozilla to create one in a series of concept demos highlighting where browsers could go in the future of computing. By now, I hope you are as excited to see what they came up with as I was. Watch the video here.
I launched the video, and to my surprise, was kind of under-whelmed. In fact, what they came up with highlights what I call the “facebook-itis” that we all potentially face in the very near future. As of today, I belong to 5 social networks with an average of 70 connections each (overlaps — I am not that popular), 3 instant messenger clients, a twitter account I can’t keep up with, 150 RSS subscriptions, 4 email accounts with about 100 emails a day (spam — once again, not that popular) countless subscriptions and logins for websites and services – anyways you get my point, it’s a lot to keep track of.
The concept of Aurora is to visually depict everything you do online around the edges of the screen in an “easy to access” launch area. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like I would need a screen the size of a Buick to show everything that I interact with on a daily basis. As for the other idea, that of transferring it all to a mobile device the size of a Pop tart, no way.
I was also perplexed by the “edge case” personas they chose to represent the concept. Maybe I am off base here, but farmers discussing rain fall online and then transferring news to a handheld device to “browse on the tractor” seems absurd – and maybe dangerous. All-in-all, I was intrigued by their presentation, I think it highlights a lot of issues we will see more and more as computing becomes more pervasive. And I think it does a good job of conceptualizing life online in the future. I guess I am just left wondering – how much is that Buick size screen going to set me back, and I should start saving now?
3 Comments
Copyright ©2008 closerlook, inc.
If you want a browser that helps bring together your social networking sites, you should try Flock. http://flock.com/ It’s not nearly as “Minority Report” as the Aurora concept, but it actually exists today.
The whole cloud/cluster concept only appeals to designers and techies, and I don’t think radial menus appeal to anyone. They’re all incredibly unintuitive. Successful websites work like all desktop apps and OSs currently do-with navigation and scrolling that resembles print publications. That’s because everyone immediately understands an alphabetical list or a hierarchical menu.
And as for juggling your many apps – you can aggregate all your IM clients (even Google Chat, Facebook Chat, and Twitter) into one interface with Pidgin.
The cloud/cluster concept only applies to people who don’t like the Swiss Grid. I get angry when someone’s desktop documents aren’t lined up – this would drive me insane.