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If all that you have is a hammer, everything looks like a browser.
John Robb says that he's fond of Rajesh Jain's digital dashboard. The concept is compelling: We all feel, intuitively, as though we're overwhelmed by an inflow of information, notifications, requests, solicitations. We're involved in online conversations, transactions, and workflows. We need to stay on top of things: if only it could all be aggregated in one place, life would be better. Only one problem, with all due respect: Unless you do very little work online, the concept of weaving all of your activity into a single web page couldn't be more misguided - from an efficiency and effectiveness standpoint. It's not that I don't believe in portals: quite the contrary. I'm a huge believer in using powerful "digital dashboard" technology to create customized interfaces that deliver a concise set of information to targeted groups of individuals through browsers. Team portals, partner portals, enterprise portals: they're all great ways of both broadcasting and narrowcasting, and providing groups with access to documents and applications that they need. But Rajesh isn't talking about that: he's talking about a "personal dashboard", and history has shown that most every attempt to combine different modes of interaction into a single interface has failed. When the modalities are complementary, it succeeds; when they're dissonant, it fails. (By "modalities", I mean things like what senses - eyes, ears, mouth - we employ to interact, or the tempo of interaction, or the mobility of interaction, or the symmetry or asymmetry of interaction, etc.) Think about what works: The address book, calendar, and mobile phone make a great trio because their modalities are highly complementary. You need a person's phone number when you call them, or you might want to call when you're late for an appointment, etc. Gratuitously throw a WAP browser in there, or a media player, or a game, and ... well ... sometimes more is just more. Think about what doesn't work: The universal inbox was supposed to have merged email and voicemail by now, but such products remain niche. Hard as it is for technologists to believe, people actually like dealing with these separate modalities separately. It's a feature, not a bug, that people are in a multi-tasking "phone mode" - frequently walking or driving - when they deal with their phones and voicemail, and more focused "read/respond" mode when dealing with email. Why hasn't fax died off? In part because sometimes it's more natural to visualize something, to circle and scribble in the margin, and send it back. Paper, whiteboards, blackboards, napkins, tablets: scribbling is very "touch" oriented; it's a very human thing, and it's a great UI. Back to the dashboard. I am a very strong believer in molding and leveraging technology to customize it for the task at hand. And that means leveraging the fact that people have eyes, ears, fingers, a mouth, and a brain that is capable of "juggling" multiple activities. I LOVE the fact that Instant Messaging is this funky little window that flashes when peoples' states change, and pops up, and flashes in the taskbar, and makes noises. It's tickling my senses, semi- and subconsciously delivering information - enabling me to multi-task more effectively. I LOVE the fact that Groove has three different notification types, depending upon how I've "tagged" the different tools in the different shared spaces. When new information appears from others in some spaces, it makes noises and briefly flashes a little message. When from others, it just shows a new little icon, or if I'm not all that interested in changes until I choose to be in "pull" mode, it doesn't bother me at all. I LOVE the fact that eMail is separate from the browser, even if it can be implemented there. The specialization and oddities and quirks of my eMail UI, and the different look-and-feel of the UI, and the way that I see the new entries turn red in the semi-occluded window, is what helps me as a human keep track of when I'm in "email mode". When I'm interacting with people in a "live" manner in IM or Groove, I sit forward and put both hands on the keyboard, and my attention is wicked-focused and I'm thinking of that person or those people. Visualizing them. When I'm in a "messaging" interface such as that in eMail or offline in Groove, my attentiveness is different: I'm more open to interruption; I'm more analytical and I'm looking to see what's relevant, what to skim, and how to respond; I'm a Message Processing Machine. When I'm in the browser, scanning RSS feeds or reading news, I put my right hand on the mouse, my right finger on the scroll wheel, slouch in my seat, click Radio Paradise, and click scroll click click scroll absorb absorb click scroll absorb. In an era where we do more and more and more of our communications and work with others online, we need tools that help us to get that work done faster and more effectively. That means creative, innovative software, hardware, and systems. That means leveraging the power of technology with effective human and inter-human interface as the #1 goal. Different interfaces for different activities on the PC, different devices as appropriate if not. Best-of-breed, and highly-tuned.
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