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Unless you were either under a rock or not a techno-geek last week you've probably heard about IBM's Watson natural language processor and it's spanking of the two best Jeopardy players on the planet. It was amazing to watch the way the computer looked at all the data it had access to (and it was a lot) and found the answers. It wasn't perfect, when Watson was wrong it was hilariously wrong, but it was right more than it was wrong.

Why this is something UX folk need to keep an eye on?

You may be thinking, "Tony, this is a great achievement in computer science and engineering but why should I, the illustrious user experience professional reading your blog, care?" Well, very skilled and attractive reader, I'm glad you asked. Let's play the imagination game for a minute.

Imagine a world where systems like Watson aren't giant, expensive, out of reach systems that exist only in R&D labs. Imagine a world where systems like Watson are commonplace in offices or neighborhoods or households. A world where the computer can take input in natural language and it's hooked up to the Internet.

"Computer, I need a list of all know cultures who believe the colour red means anger."

What does that system look like? What does it sound like? How does it respond or present its answer? Do you have to say "computer," every time? Should these interactions be more like a conversation with another person or still like giving orders to a machine? These are just the experience questions I could think of in a few minutes.

This kind of computing, while it answers many engineering problems, opens a whole new area of HCI that we've only really thought about in Star Trek and other science fiction. Think about the possibilities of a computer that can understand what you're saying to it without using special commands. Think about the frustrations and the usability issues it will bring. Think about the effect a computer that is fluent in your language will have on the psychology of how we interact with computers.

Back to The Future

Like most of the stuff we talk about in the blogosphere, this falls into the category of "The Future of ________" but this future is coming at us faster than a lot of that other “Future Stuff.” IBM is already talking about utilizing Watson to help doctors do differential diagnosis. The possibilities are nearly endless; we just need to start thinking about them. Yay future! (But I still want my hover board.)

Everyone keeps buzzing about how smart phones are little computers, and that's true. They are. So is an iPod touch or your GPS in your car. Those things aren't going to replace your desktop or laptop, now or in the future. And neither is your iPhone / android / windows phone 7 / blackberry / webOS phone. I know, that's contrary to what almost everyone is saying, but it's true.

What phones are good at

A good phone is good at being a phone. Not just in the 135 year old definition of a phone as an electronic voice relay system. At it's core, the telephone is a system that let's us transmit and receive information over long distances almost instantly. That's really all it does. It's a device that enables near instantaneous communication, like the telegraph before it, beyond the sight of the sender. In 1876, the year the first patent was issued for an electric telephone, that information was sending sound over electric lines. Today, in 2011, it's sending bits over radio waves. Even the voice part of your cell phone works this way. The GPS too. At it's core the thing that makes a smart phone really valuable is it's radio(s). It's connected to the world, via the Internet, via radio waves.

What phones are bad at

The main thing smart phones are bad at is being big. (Although many are trying to get bigger.) Big is an important quality they lack if they're going to be the "computers of the future." Small screens, small keyboards don't make for good computers. That's why you can buy a 30" LCD display for your desktop or desk parked laptop. Big screens are good for the things we use computers for, especially if those screens are going to be displaying soft-keyboards too. Phones are also bad at real multi-tasking (this is one of those things we need big screens for.) This is mostly an issue of power consumption and battery limitations, but it also has to do with the small screens. It takes a lot of power to run a high performing CPU, and phone batteries can only be so big, not to mention they also have to power backlights and radios and flash memory and RAM and GPUs and ect, ect. Multi-tasking is near essential part of modern computing, no matter what Steve Jobs and the team working on OS X Lion say. Don't believe me? Spend the next hour only letting your computer run one application at a time and see how futuristic it feels.

So what is the future?

I don't mean to imply that smartphones aren't an important part of the future of computing, quite the contrary, they're a key part. They're just not going to take the place of any real computer. Phones are great at being the gateway to connectivity, and that's their place in the ultra fractured, multi- device future of computing. They're going to keep being phones. Your tablet and your smart watch and your other crazy ubiquitous computing peripherals are all going to need an on ramp to the Internet, and your little smart phone is damn good at that.

It's also pretty good for acting as a quick window into larger, cloud-based applications with multiple points of user interaction. A quick entry into your personal finance application, updating your workout application with your latest gps and hear rate monitor workout info, setting your thermostat or other simple Internet enabled appliance, uploading pictures to your shared albums, etc. The phone is a small window. It's not good for making things, or really for consuming content larger that text messages or tweets or maybe text only emails. It's good at grabbing information from the world around it with it's sensors, (think cameras, microphones, gps) not your keyboard pecking. Its great at displaying small chunks of information, and its great at sending these things along to a more capable platform for any kind of manipulation.

Your tablet will be much better at normal laptop style tasks. It's got a bigger screen, a larger keyboard, stylus input, and a larger battery more capable of running a more powerful CPU. And most importantly, it doesn't have a radio to run. It doesn't need one. None of your future computing accessories do, because that's your phone's job. It's part of being a phone in the future. Sending your bits beyond the horizon via radio waves. And it doesn't care what you used to make those bits. We need to keep this in mind as we're designing and building smartphone apps. Focus on the things the phone does well and stop trying to stuff in features that the phone does poorly.

The future of your phone is not as a laptop killer, it's as your laptops ride.

The UX Implications of Watson

Your phone is not the computer of the future

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