Palms and other PDAs have always been designed around the principle of quick, simple interaction, and they've done quite a good job of living up to that principle. But, as we've learned more about how these devices are used, and as the capabilities of the devices have expanded, opportunities for improvement have become clear. For instance:
- We know that there's an "80/20 rule" regarding
people contacting other people - a small number of our
contacts are involved in a large number of our actions.
Finding common contacts in my Palm should be a lot easier
than finding infrequent contacts, but, right now, it isn't.
- The tasks that can be addressed by a Palm
have expanded with the growing capabilities of the device.
If my Palm has telephony or Internet capabilities,
I'll
want to use the address book not just to get a phone number
or an e-mail address, but to actually do something - to
place a phone call or send an e-mail message. Fortunately,
much of the data in the Palm is implicitly marked by the
user with datatypes, such as proper names, phone numbers,
and e-mail addresses. This gives us the information we
need to make the jump from showing information to acting
on it.
- In a similar way, there is very little integration of information across the application suite. For instance, while the Mail client is able to retrieve e-mail addresses from the Address Book, it currently takes eight taps to create a new e-mail message addressed to a person in the Address Book. It should be possible to tie the Palm's applications much more closely together, and enable much simpler and more efficient uses of the device.
So: This is a design experiment meant to address these opportunities, and to prototype some revisions to the Palm interface that could yield significant improvements in how people use their Palms. These revisions are meant to be incremental; I've tried to change the interface as little as possible, to limit the impact that these changes would have on performance, and to minimize the engineering effort required to implement them. There are no "and then a miracle happens..." boxes in what follows; there are, however, some interesting extensions to the Palm application suite that I believe are worthy of thought.
Clicking here or on the image above will launch a demo of these capabilities, implemented as a Flash movie (114k). It will open in a window of its own; a Flash 5 player (at least) is required.