We all know that users don’t like to stray far away from their default settings. Gmail recently introduced the themes tab to their web service but not only did they advertise it, they actually showed you by changing the colors of your default view. If you are annoyed by the new color scheme then inevitably you’re going to go and play around with the themes. By playing around with the themes you are made aware of them and therein lies the genius. Whether you are annoyed by the change or not, you are aware that you can modify themes. This is a great strategy to think of when introducing new features to your product. How can you subtlety integrate a new feature with your service so that the user is made aware without interrupting their regular flow?

Google also introduced their new SearchWiki that allows you to promote and mark-up links through Google search. The promotion only affects your account but you can see the mark-up of other users. It’s a great feature if you do repeated searches and always gravitate to similar links. The issue I’m wondering about is if the natural ranking ever influences your search after you’ve promoted something. I.e. will you ever see any new links or do all of your promoted links always dominate the search now? I guess the simple answer is to log out and you’ll have the regular Google ranking.

Now this is just awesome:

I can easily see this being a great collaborative tool, probably not practical for the home quite yet. But think about collaborating in a space, saving it to a device near by or the podium and distributing the work you’ve done together. I really love the Z axis manipulation, which I’ve yet to see to this degree. I wonder if there is a keyboard interface that maps to the gloves?

Brings me to another great point. What should agencies do with your staff’s downtime? Start an innovation lab. It needs to have structured goals and outcomes of course but the results are 2 fold:

A: Great Marketing Tool
B: Aspirational/Inspirational work for the team

Minority report was a movie but it’s pretty much become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If nothing else these efforts can push the boundaries of what is possible and provide the team an novel look at the future.

I remember a few years back getting excited at the prospects with using a webcam as an input device. I wasn’t sure how much fidelity of movement it would be able to understand but it was promising when I saw the Minority Cube a few years ago. Now a MS Research practitioner has created an algorithm that looks at the topology of an imagine, recognizes the foreground and background shapes, and maps interaction to the shape of the hand and its movement. Say goodbye to the mouse?

A very interesting scalable multi-touch product has been created. You basically purchase modules and can stack them to provide more touch/screen space. I think the coolest part was how the product can understand the hand and fingers as a discrete object and track it along the screen. Definitely affords a lot of interesting interaction.

Last week it was BumpTop. This week it’s Liquid Browsing. Hmm… I think I’ll stick with solid browsing. It’s interesting to see how many people I’ve spoken to who think these UIs are amazing.

To me it only fortifies the reason why you don’t get your audience to design for you. (Not that this is what BumpTop/Liquid did to create their UIs) But often people will say they want something which is very different from what they really require.

Perceived need vs Latent need