On 2009 and What Felt Important

Gentle Readers, I've been astoundingly neglectful of this blog in the past month or so. It's outright shameful. Still, there is a new year on the horizon, and as is tradition, I'm making a resolution to be more mindful. If only so you won't forget me completely, and also to keep my mind relatively sharp.

So this is my vaguely half-hazard year in review. I've decided to do my own HCI spin on a top ten list, although I'm opting to restrain myself to a top five. Do not consider this anything like a real, honest heavily researched and counter-checked listing of 2009's hot trends. What this is instead will be a list of the five topics and trends that I, just myself, found significant. This is my blog after all, and I shall do with it as I please.

So, in no particular order.

Number Five: Social Networking and Blogging Simplify and Expand

Those of us who grew up clicking at keyboards and learning HTML had perhaps grown used to an online world that was populated by people exactly like us. In a way it was a comforting thing, but the world seemed to explode this year thanks in large part to efforts to simplify how we interact on the internet. The biggest arena where we saw this at play was Twitter. Demographic studies showed us in no uncertain terms that Twitter was a comfortable place for older users less familiar with technology. Why? Because it is absolutely simple to use. 

Traditional blogging too, has become so simple to set up with sites like Blogger and Typepad making it so easy to set up a blog that your grandmother could swing it. In the old days, blogs required a certain amount of html knowledge and for optimum results probably some PHP to get set up. Not so anymore. Even everyone's favorite love it or hate it social networking site, Facebook, started trying to simplify its overly complex UI this year with one massive, if ill-received redesign and a new streamlined way of handling privacy settings.  I anticipate that we'll see this trend continue for awhile before it reaches a crest and complexity starts to weave its way back in again a few years down the line. 

Number Four: Collaboration is Hot, Wave is not

In the enterprise space, collaboration has been a hot topic for several years. When a company spreads itself out across the country and across the world, it becomes critical to find technology that will lessen the burden of that distance. Microsoft's Sharepoint platform has been a go to solution for a long time, but other players are always raring to get into this race. So entered Google into the arena with a lengthy video preview of a system they were billing as a true collaboration solution: Wave. There was a lot of excitement surrounding that video and people were salivating for invites for months. Then, we had it in our hands and the general reaction was a confused "what do I do with this?" from the public. 

Note, if you are one of the 2 people left in the world still looking for a wave invite, I have a ton. Comment or shoot me an email if you'd like one.

Number Three: The Smart Phone Battles

I feel like this is the year that we all universally decided we needed smart phones. Credit for this probably lies heavily at the feet of the iPhone, who brought elegant usability and smart marketing to the consumer side of the phone business. Before, while some folks used Blackberries for personal use, the market for smart phones was really centered in the business market. Now, the hottest market for these devices is personal usage, and it is an all out battle for dominance amongst the big players. We saw RIM put out the Storm in an effort to crush the iPhone's dominance, Sprint offered up the Palm Pre and later Google's Android mobile OS started to infiltrate the marketplace. 

Part of what makes this fight interesting to me is how the UIs of these different systems were handled in marketing efforts. It's safe to say, I think, that the iPhone puts a lot of effort into making the interface simple and fun to use, and in it's advertising for the phone it focuses directly on that aspect of the phone.

It's pretty different than the more functionality focused or in some cases plain esoteric approach of ads for other smart phone offerings:

Number Two: Innovative Input Devices

It all started a few years back with the Wii and its tremendous success. This year we saw rival gaming companies Sony and Microsoft announce plans to release their own radical departures from traditional control systems. The full body input system Natal is probably the most cutting edge, and it's natural that these experiments tend to happen in gaming first, but when you look at it, we are seeing some pretty impressive work done in more traditional spaces as well. Microsoft's touchscreen table Surface has been used to great effect recently and by now with our iPhones, iPods and various other devices we are all familiar with touchscreen interfaces. It wasn't that long ago that the usual way to interact with your phone was with a clunky physical keypad of numbers. 

These newer input and interaction methods will eventually find their way onto your desktop as well. Just take a look at the work being done at 10/GUI on multi-touch for the desktop, and be amazed at what the future of your office desk might look like:

Number One: Games for Everybody

Before the Wii, video games were the property of an admittedly diverse, but all relatively hard core group of enthusiasts. The term "casual game" or "casual gamer" was not much used, and if it was, there was a bit of derision to it. On the opposite side of the fence, a group of people continued to view video games as tools of the devil and murder simulators. It's relatively amazing that in this atmosphere Nintendo was able to conceptualize a system like the Wii that brought video games a new, more warm and fuzzy, appeal. In the end this is good for both sides, and the popularity of video games has continued to increase as the years since the Wii roll by. In fact, this year it seemed that so called "hard core" gaming systems were starting to embrace the casual gamer more than ever. In particular, I'll call out the newest Prince of Persia game. In some circles this ubisoft offering got a lot of flack for reportedly being "too easy". And yet, the game still performed exceedingly well, because while it might have been easy, that lack of frustration meant that a lot of folks who are newer to games and haven't been training with their controllers for 15 years were able to jump right in and really experience and enjoy the game. 

This is a trend that, I dearly hope and believe, will continue. The way for the game industry to stay ahead is to continue to broaden the market share, and the way to do that is at heart a usability issue. There needs to be a way to let everybody enjoy video games. A good friend sums up the accessibility problem in video games much more thoroughly, and engagingly over at Pixel Poppers.

Conclusions and Wrap Up

All in all, it's been a busy and interesting year online and everywhere. Usability continues to be a huge influence all over the map. It isn't just something affecting our work on the computer, it touches just about every piece of our day as technology becomes more and more ubiquitous. Here's looking forward to what 2010 has to bring to the table. 

Best wishes to you and yours!