One of the iPad apps that most people think is inevitable is some kind of remote control for home entertainment systems, but I think the conventional wisdom on this isn’t thinking big enough because we just can’t shake the idea of a “remote controller”.

The basic idea is that you’d throw away all your remote controls and have the most fabulous remote control of all time, with the ability to manipulate multiple hardware devices and systems, of all kinds and from different manufacturers, even some devices that enable viewing internet videos such as from YouTube or Netflix, all using a single awesome iPad graphical UI. You could preview what’s on other channels while watching a show on the big screen, scroll through TV schedules on the little screen without changing what’s on the big one, finger-tap on show titles to add them to your DVR queue, etc.

To do all this, there would need to be some additional device to translate the iPad’s output — which is basically WiFi — to what most set-top devices need for input — infrared light (IR). This “Universal Remote” iPad app would also need to be programmed to know the IR codes for most set-top devices, just like thousands of other so-called “universal remotes” do.

Here’s what this system might look like:

Of course, some more visionary people predict the death of these multiple devices and envision them all being replaced with a single multi-purpose device for streaming video from the internet, recording cable programming, playing discs, browsing a personal media collection, and more. Devices like Apple TV and Boxee. In fact, many Apple observers already suspect that the iPad will become the killer remote control for the next version of Apple TV.

This is obviously a much simpler configuration, and looks something like this:

But what if we take this just one step further, and take the expensive devices out of the loop completely? Imagine a system like this:

The iPad uses WiFi to pull content off the Internet (or from its own library), and then uses WiFi to push video to the big ass display, possibly with the help of a cheap WiFi video “receiver” unit (which, come to think of it would be trivial to build directly into monitors).

In this model, the iPad itself replaces all of the set-top devices. While the iPad cannot play Blu-ray disks, it can certainly do everything else in this list. Why should Apple bother making another version of Apple TV when they could build all of the functionality of Apple TV into the iPad itself? All the storage, all the video, audio, and picture playback, all the online video browsing, all of it built into the iPad.

All the games, too. So long Xbox, Playstation, and Wii.

In this model, your “home entertainment center” is all contained in software. The only hardware you need is that big screen. Or select from multiple screens around the house, using only software to determine which screen you want to “project” on to.

Obviously there are technology constraints here, but they are all the usual constraints that inevitably fall aside faster than we generally imagine: network speed, processing power, and memory. HD digital video is a lot of bits to go over a wireless connection. But if you imagine all of these technologies being even only a little better than they are now, we’re basically there.

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Whenever news of an earthquake hits, we are told that the quake had a magnitude of, say, 3.2 or 5.0. Or 7.0, as was the case yesterday in Haiti. We all understand that 7 is worse than 5, of course, but I fear that few of us really understand or appreciate the degree of that difference.

Popularly (but inacurately) called the Richter scale, today’s seismologists measure an earthquake’s energy according to what is technically called the moment magnitude scale.

The magnitude scale is logarithmic: Each increase in the magnitude number actually represents more than 30 times the magnitude of energy released. A 7.0 magnitude quake is 32 megatons of seismic energy, where a 6.0 is only 1 megaton of seismic energy.

I imagine Mr. Richter and his successors prefer to use such a logarithmic scale because it permits them to communicate a quake’s magnitude extremely efficiently. They’re mathematicians, they intuitively understand that 5.4 is actually 5 times bigger than 5.0.

But for the rest of us, even those of us who are numerically literate, the logarithmic scale isn’t something we use every day. To most of us, 5.4 is only a little more than 5. Indeed, 7 isn’t that much more than 5 for us, either — yet in earthquake terms, 7.0 is one thousand times as destructive as 5.0.

I appreciate that the media thinks enough of us, the public, to report using the same technical jargon that scientists use. But in this case, I suspect they are doing the public — and the victims — a disservice. What if, instead of simply calling Haiti the victim of a “7.0 earthquake”, they called it a “32 megaton earthquake”? Or a “32,000 kiloton earthquake”? This would permit people who understand what a 4.0 earthquake feels like (and lots of people do understand this) understand that Haiti is today the victim of an experience thirty-two thousand times worse.

Some ideas on how to help the victims in Haiti:

• Help Haiti with your mobile phone: text “HAITI” to 90999 and a $10 donation to the American Red Cross will be charged to your phone bill. It takes no time at all.
• Nearly half of Haiti is under the age of 18. Make a donation to UNICEF to help.
• Donate to Doctors Without Borders

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The graphic novel Persepolis, in addition to being a gripping emotional story and the only comic book to ever bring me to tears, is a masterpiece of comic art and a testimony to what you can accomplish through repetition of basic forms. What Persepolis writer/artist Marjane Satrapi can accomplish with a few simple pen strokes is simply astonishing. When the comic was made into an animated movie, Satrapi’s graphic virtuosity survived and indeed thrived in the translation.

Look at these nine faces of girls listening to a political speech from their schoolteacher in Iran, shortly after the 1979 revolution. All of these faces use exactly the same set of design elements: four curved lines (eyebrows, nose, mouth), a pair of football-shaped ovals and dots (eyes), and an amorphous black shape (hairline). And yet each of these girls doesn’t just look completely unique, each has a unique and distinctive personality — earnest, distracted, doubtful.

I was reminded of a book currently on my desk, Bruno Munari’s Design as Art.

In the book’s second section, Munari argues that images can and should have a deliberate “character” in order to be meaningful and memorable to viewers, and that that character is encapsulated in the subtle and not-so-subtle details of a design’s implementation. The design’s style, if you will. What’s more, it doesn’t take much to achieve this character.

To illustrate this, he includes almost 150 simple pen drawings of faces, each one radically different from the last, and each one clearly drawn in only a matter of a few seconds. The illustrator (or illustrators — it doesn’t matter, really) draws on many cultural drawing styles, but even when those seem exhausted new ideas seem to emerge between the stylizations.

It’s a remarkable illustration of the power of small multiples to help push the boundaries of how one thinks about even the simplest design challenge.

It doesn’t take much to make something unique and different. As Munari’s collection of faces shows, simply focusing on variety at the expense of detail and perfection can give rise to some small but powerful and unexpected new ideas.

This is the point of sketching, of course: ingenuity is an emergent property that is more easily produced by turning your attention away from perfecting a single vision.

Satrapi’s faces, of course, are not sketches — their uniqueness is carefully and tenderly crafted through economy of form and the subtlest lines. But they compellingly illustrate that both character and diversity can be found among things whose basic ingredients are essentially identical, whether by accident and spontaneity or through deliberate craft.

As designers, we should be inspired by Munari’s demonstration of how the same question has a thousand solutions, and Satrapi’s revelation that almost the same solution can solve a thousand different problems.

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What do you do with a video camera? You video.

I’ve always wanted to coin a phrase or invent a word, to have a term of my own invention be spoken by thousands or even millions of people every day. An astonishingly large number of my friends and peers have done exactly this, some spectacularly so. From ambient intimacy to ajax, blogs to folksonomies, topless meetings to everyware, veterans of the Information Architecture scene have been a prolific lot.

I’ll admit that while I don’t spend a lot of time trying to invent catchy and useful new additions to the lexicon, I do harbor a hope of someday joining this group with a worthwhile word of my own.

For now, then, I wish to formally submit for peer review a humble nomination (so to speak) in the rough vicinity of true coinages. It’s not exactly a real neologism, as the word itself as a string of letters already exists. It’s more like a newly permissible usage:

• video (verb) to record motion pictures to a medium other than film, such as video tape or digital media, whether recorded directly from life with a camera or transferring from one motion picture medium to another non-film medium.

The word’s current definition doesn’t include a verb form. I think we need one. Examples:

• I will video my daughter in her school play tonight.
• Make sure you set the DVR to video the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica next weekend.

We already have one-word verbs for most technological communications: mail, film, photograph, record, tape, phone, and fax. We email, IM, Google, and tweet. We even used to use the one-word verb videotape when video was recorded on whirring VHS, Hi-8, and DV cameras. Why must we bend over backwards linguistically to say “shoot video” (as if cameras were guns) or “record with my digital video recorder” just to avoid the anachronistic “videotape” — when “video” does the job so succinctly?

Interestingly, the Latin origin of the word is a verb: “video” means “(I) see”. And in the future “nadsat” vocabulary of A Clockwork Orange, the word “viddy” is used as a verb, meaning both “to see” and at another level “to understand” or even “to dream”. Perhaps we need to go that far and start using a whole new word for recorded visual experiences as we enter an era where the line between fantasy and reality, truth and fiction, media and life itself, is becoming blurred.

We can always viddy later. For now, however, we need to video.

Finally, I will confess that one of the main reasons for writing this post is to shamelessly and selfishly lay claim to this usage call for making this usage acceptable in the new official history of early 21st century humanity (i.e. Google’s index). Yoo hoo, Google? Guess what? “Video” is now a verb.

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I have two pieces of advice for user experience design professionals visiting their families over the traditional end-of-year holiday season.

First, take this opportunity to do some intimate, informal usability testing with your family and loved ones. I’ve written about this before, but I am encouraging it again: There’s a good chance that many of those you will spend time with over the next few weeks will be, when it comes to using interfaces, “regular people”. Perfect test subjects.

What’s more, when you observe user testing in a lab, chances are you know next to nothing about the people behind the glass. But when you’re home with your family, you know your subjects deeply. You know their idiosyncrasies and interests, their weaknesses and strengths.

So that big web site you’ve been working on all year? Don’t just show it to Mom and Dad. Make them sign up for it and use it. And watch them.

I also suggest something new: Interview them. Video them.* Especially the older ones.

For the last decade of her father’s life, my wife would interview him for an hour or more almost every time we visited her parents, videotaping each interview. For his funeral, she edited all the tapes into a single 45-minute movie where he tells stories from his incredible life. It’s hard to understate how happy this video made a lot of people.

More and more people are collecting stories from their families and sharing them with their families and even the public. So this holiday season, why not kill two birds with one stone: video your family but in particular talk to them about what is important to you, trying to find out the historical roots of your own life and interests. You might, for example, ask about user experiences and interaction design in their younger lives. You could ask what using computers, phones, or other machines was like when your parents or grandparents were young.

Lots of people shoot video of their families. But not many really step back and approach it as a formal interview by having some questions and topics in mind when the conversation begins, letting the subject know that what they say serves a purpose.

You’ll learn a lot about history and design — but most importantly about yourself and your family. And you’ll have a recording you’ll treasure forever.

[* Yes, I am using the word “video” as a verb. The word “videotape” is already in common usage as a verb, but it’s ludicrous to use it to describe tape-less video. Hell, “tape” is a verb, too. The phrase “shoot a video” is unwieldy when a single word will do just fine and when “shoot” is, er, a loaded word… as the title of this post demonstrates. Besides, it’s kinda cute to say “video” as a verb. Trust me. Just say “video”.]

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It looks like big-name real-world celebrities are getting into the Twittering business. In addition to the presidential candidates, lately I’ve seen Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Britney Spears, and many more.

Whenever one of these new Twitter celebs crosses your path, I don’t think you should necessarily accept it at face value. Ask yourself: What is really going on here? What kind of twitterer is this?

• An Imposter: A fan (or maybe an enemy) Twitter-squatter who has claimed the celebrity’s identity and has not yet been shut down or replaced by the real celeb.
• An Agent: A public relations agency has been hired by the celebrity to use Twitter to publicize their activities. The celeb has little to no knowledge whatsoever about what the hell is going on in their name on Twitter, or for that matter even have a foggy idea of what Twitter is. I suspect a large number of celebrity twitterers are of this type, and of course their fans either fall for the ruse or don’t care (in the age of professional wrestling “sports entertainment”, is there any difference?)
• An Assistant: The celebrity has an aide, perhaps their secretary or personal assistant, who writes the tweets for the celeb. When I first started using Twitter I imagined a corporate CEO fatcat barking orders to their beleaguered secretary — in the same voice they would have used in the 1950’s to say “Judy! Take a memo!” to get their secretary to grab a pen and paper and ready themselves for dictation — shouting “Take a tweet!”
• The Real Deal: The celebrity who writes themselves, with their own bare hands, using a real computer or mobile phone to tell their fans and followers what they are really doing.

I also wonder about the emergence of another, parallel phenomenon: the dual-identity Twitter celeb. This is where a celebrity holds two Twitter accounts. One serves as a public-relations communication channel for the celebrity’s “brand”, letting the celebrity reach out to thousands of followers just as a business would. The other account, though, is a personal account and is kept secret. It may even have an false name, a nom-de-tweet. This account is used for the same thing Twitter is used for by most other people — as a way to keep informally in touch with their real friends and loved ones.

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What if someone paid you thousands of dollars to design a user interface or an application for just one person?

Most design work is done for audiences: whether designing mass market products or niche objects of desire, we seldom have a single, real person in mind when we work. We think of audiences as groups of people with diverse needs and expectations. Even highly specialized equipment like NASA space suits are designed to fit a range of individual needs.

In the world of design very few endeavors revolve around a single person. Interior design and architecture are exceptions that come to mind, where often the final product is a private space for an individual, such as an office or a bedroom. And fashion design, too, where tailored suits and “bespoke” garments can still be custom-commissioned as an expensive alternative to the standard prêt-à-porter options we find on department store racks in sizes S, M, and L.

But very few other design practices, from graphic design to industrial design, ever require such a narrow focus. This is especially true for user interface design.

Perhaps, however, this is changing. Perhaps a new sort of interaction design client is emerging, users who desire and are willing to pay for bespoke user interfaces, interactive products designed for the exclusive use of one person.

John King and his “magic wall” at CNN is the de facto case study of the bespoke user interface. As any political buff knows, CNN has been flying high in the ratings for election-specific coverage, no doubt due in part to King’s compelling and dazzling maps. It’s hard to watch more than a few minutes of CNN’s prime time election coverage without seeing John King zooming in and out of the map, manipulating voting projections and simulating election outcomes, all with a few swipes of his fingers.

The magic wall emerged in the beginning of the 2008 primary season. Built by Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel, the magic wall has over the past 10 months introduced dozens of new features, allowing King to do more and more complex simulations, present deeper examinations of polling numbers, and reference encyclopedic historical data going back many decades.

And every time a new feature is introduced, King is already a master of it. Rarely does he tap the wrong state or switch to the wrong page. The map was made for King, and clearly he “trains” on it for each new feature. Now that’s user-centered design!

Extending the User Base

Actually, there is a second user. Last week Perceptive Pixel created a “remixed” version of King’s magic wall for Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen. The results: pure comic genius.

I should point out, however, that there are several kinds of bespoke design philosophies even among designers who design for larger audiences. For one thing, user personas permit designers to envision their target audience more narrowly, to view the user experience challenges on an individual basis rather than imagining their design being used by an amorphous faceless demographic group.

But there’s another kind of bespoke design approach.

The One True User

There is a single user that we all design for all the time. Some of us try hard to avoid talking about or even thinking about this user. Others, however, openly admit or even embrace discussions of how important this user’s opinions are.

I am speaking, of course, about “designing for yourself”.

Sun’s Tim Bray recently wrote:

Everything I’ve done over the years that’s worked out well—software, standards, writing—everything, without exception, was something I did for myself. I’ve done the other thing too: built things based on guesses about what people out there might want or need. Never worked, not once.

John Gruber (who provided the link above) agrees:

The most successful thing I’ve ever made is Markdown, and the one and only user I had in mind for it was me.

Jason Fried, too:

Designing for ourselves first yields better initial results because it lets us design what we know. It lets us assess quality quickly and directly, instead of by proxy. And it lets us fall in love with our products and feel passionate about what we make. There’s simply no substitute for that.

We’re like chefs. We make food that we think tastes good and that we believe in. We make it for customers who have the same sensibilities that we do. It might not be for everyone. That’s ok. But for people who think the way we do, and appreciate the things we appreciate, it’s perfect.

And if enough customers tell us our food is too salty or too hot, we may adjust the salt and the heat. But if some customers tell us to add bananas to our lasagna, we’re not going to make them happy at the expense of ruining the dish for everyone else. That doesn’t make us selfish. We’re just looking out for the greater good.

I find both perspectives rewarding: When designing for a client whose users are pretty different from me, I firmly believe that user research helps us design for the user-who-is-not-me. On the other hand, when designing for those users who are like me I definitely have a lot to bring to the table. What’s more, I would argue that the best interaction designers possess a great deal of self-knowledge about how they behave, react, and feel during user experiences, self-knowledge that improves their design abilities.

Put it this way: it’s better to have a designer with deep self-awareness and no end-user knowledge than a designer with no self-awareness and mountains of user research.

The two approaches can and of course should co-exist in any healthy project. It is, in fact, inevitable: No matter how much user research you do, there will be thousands of little design decisions for which you have no user to reference but yourself.

In the future, I can see bespoke user interfaces happening more and more. Wealthy executives will want personalized “dashboards” for their desktops. Presenters seeking dynamic displays for board meetings and public speaking. As design tools become simpler and more cost effective, this might be financially reasonable for reasonably successful individuals in business and in their personal environments.

It’s Already Happening

Finally, I thought I’d throw in this little case study on bespoke user interfaces.

You don’t have to be a celebrity to have a customized user interface built for you. Back when Behavior first started, we worked on a project for a successful former colleague who was spending some of his dot-com spoils on a new house. Part of his domestic vision was a home automation system — a system of touchscreens installed throughout the house to control the temperature, the lighting, and the audio on a room by room basis. A “smart home”, if you will.

Because our client was a designer himself, he found the out-of-the-box interface design for his new home automation system appalling to his good taste. Like many remote control devices, it was a manifest usability atrocity. But it was also a graphic design nightmare: beveled faux-marble textures, Times New Roman everywhere, and those ancient Windows 3.1 green check and red X icons we still occasionally see on shareware apps.

So he hired Behavior to redesign the UI, just for his house. We researched the technology behind the system, and working with the installation team we provided a new set of stylish screen assets that could replace the ugly default set. It wasn’t a huge job in time or dollars, but the results were, for him, profound: If you’ve can afford it, why not spend some of those interior decor dollars on a domestic user experience you are likely to use many times a day?

In fact, we’ve done a few other similar jobs. We did an animated (though linear) Flash presentation for a single P. Diddy press conference. We’ve done interactive Flash presentations for executives at IAC and Allen and Company to present data in a compelling way to management and investor meetings. In short, there already is a market for this kind of work.

I’ll put up screenshots if I can dig them up. They’re here!

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We love sending video clips to each other. Links to YouTube videos of cute animals, spectacular accidents, inspiring speeches, nostalgic memories, and music videos fly back and forth through our email inboxes all day long. We gather around each others desks and call family members to our laptops to spend a few minutes watching a cool clip we just found.

It occurred to me that finding and sharing these videos is, or can be, an art form: creating curated mixes of many shorter video clips is, to me, analogous to the existing form of the DJ mix tape (or, in today’s digital terms, a playlist).

In fact, I love making mix tapes. And mix CDs. Making video mixes would be a natural fit for me.

I have friends who are video artists, combining original video work with found-video editing and collecting techniques. Some even use the term “VJ” to describe the curation and mixing of the videos together, more in the Christian Marclay or DJ Shadow sense than in the MTV sense.

Before digital video became as easy as it is today, and before YouTube made finding millions of source videos possible to anyone with a web browser, creating curating video mixes was solely the purview of these dedicated video artists, who had both expensive video editing equipment and mountains of space-consuming video tapes that they’d painstakingly collected over many years.

But now that the web has rendered both of those constraints moot, I’m surprised that I’ve not seen an easy way for web users to grab a bunch of video clips and create a single sharable curated playlist out of them. Sure you could download videos and use a desktop editor to string them together into a new piece (and, in fact, I’d love to see this sort of art form emerge, too), but a more democratic and reasonable way to do this would be for YouTube to allow users to create mixes on their own.

You would begin by filling out a form with a string of interesting video URLs. Click submit, and then YouTube collects those videos into a single page and a single video player, perhaps with credits or annotations appearing in a subtitle form between the clips. You could then send this new video mix as a single URL to your friends.

So here’s my first mix, minus the single unified player part. Ideally there would be single video player here, and all I would have done to create it was enter these six URLs into a form. For now, just play them one at a time, scrolling down the screen.

This space intentionally left blank!

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Last night was the second U.S. Presidential Debate. One of my favorite new election-based interactive user experiences (in addition to CNN’s approval graphs and CNN’s magic wall) is Twitter’s election.twitter.com. Here’s a sample of what you would have seen during last night’s debate:

TechCrunch reviewed this site last week. Here’s their review in its entirety:

It sounds like a decent idea on paper: take every tweet about the candidates and stream them on a single, constantly updated site. Unfortunately, while it may be fun to look at for a few minutes, election.twitter.com is far too noisy to be worthwhile. There are no cohesive threads of arguments, and every quote that raises an eyebrow gets repeated ad nauseum. Verdict: Vetoed.

I completely disagree with TC’s analysis. It seems focused on extracting actionable, accurate, or even just coherent information. They’re disappointed in the quality of individual posts and the lack of consistent dialogue. It’s just “noise” to them.

Interestingly, the critique is identical to the initial criticism many people have of Twitter, before they actually try it and, hopefully, “get it”. They say it’s “just noise.” They say “who cares about everyone’s mundane, idle thoughts?”

Similarly, the nature and mechanism of election.twitter.com’s social function is, like Twitter itself, ‘ambient‘: It’s about getting an informal, general sense of what’s happening, not about following specific threads and individual thoughts. Just like with ambient music, you’re not supposed to actually listen to it in an attempt to extract something specific (for example a catchy melody, or a telling quote).

The “hot topics” keywords at the top of the page, extracted from the totality of the current twitterstream, are also extremely revealing. If you only look at that part of the page you’re already getting a real feel for the memes currently in circulation. Bite-sized but potent.

Bottom line: the site is not about finding content with immediate, actionable value. It’s about visiting repeatedly, or watching it flow by in your peripheral vision, without paying close attention. The goal is to synchronize with a certain public pulse.

(This is, coincidentally, what the New York Times home page does for me, albeit at a slower pace. I want to see what everyone is seeing and talking about today, and I trust that the Times home page will show that in a single page view, even if I don’t actually click through to any articles. It’s not about diving deep — it’s just about the broad overview of the zeitgeist.)

This new Twitter feature — this “topic-focused channel”, or whatever they call it — is a great new idea that I’d love to see extended to other areas and topics. It’s ideal for live events like debates, election night, live TV, sporting events, etc. Also for conferences, or even for private groups (a much-requested feature Twitter hasn’t yet delivered on). The idea is that you are really paying attention to something else — Twitter is just the back channel, the pulse of the topic. I can’t wait to see future implementations of this simple but powerful view.

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