Your phone can be a camera. It can also be a compass, or a satnav. Or it can just be a phone. Ben Foxall explores devices in the modern age
When camera phones first appeared, I didn’t want one. I liked having a camera and a phone – but to mix the two seemed to the detriment of both (rubbish picture quality and rubbish-er battery life). Camera phones are pretty common now and have subsumed even more things: portable music players, satnavs, pagers, calculators, camcorders, pagers and alarm clocks to name a few.
With all our old devices being rolled into one, something interesting has happened: we’re using a bunch of new ones. We now communicate with the rest of the world (my original reason for having a phone) through more devices than ever before. As well as phones, we use laptops, tablets, TVs and watches to interact with other people.
What gives me comfort is that apps and web content have replaced our physical objects. When I visit a web page that has a timer, my device becomes a stopwatch. When I open a page that can record audio, I’m now holding a dictaphone. I’ve got my camera back ... it just looks like my phone.
Virtual objects
As well as the physical form, these objects have something different – they’re able to communicate with each other. Your compass can tell your map which way to point. Your watch can tell your calendar that your meeting is about to start.
Our objects have become virtual, and can be moved between devices. You can write a shopping list on your laptop and cross off the items on your phone. You can even interact with the same object from two devices at the same time (we’ll get to that later).
The web is a perfect platform for our world of many objects. It’s fundamentally geared towards sharing content between and across devices, which allows us to think on a higher level about the object we are interacting with, and not be tied down to thinking of it as a single device.
Frontend web technologies are pretty great for this too. Responsive web design and media queries enable us to adapt our content to suit a particular device. It’s more than just making things fit; we can make our content more appropriate for people browsing on a particular device. Using browser APIs, we can also detect and make use of a device’s unique capabilities.
Rules of Interaction
When someone visits a website, they might switch devices during their interaction. In fact, it’s kind of awesome when they do. A user might visit an online shop on their phone, find an item they like, and come back on a desktop computer to complete the purchase. In that scenario, we’ve supported the casual browsing when the user is on the move, and allowed them to do the more time-consuming interaction when they’ve sat down properly. Go us.
From a practical point of view, you can help users transition between devices by allowing more, smaller interactions with your site and avoiding too much information being tied to a particular device. Users should be able to pick up where they left off (hint: URLs are pretty handy for this).
Functionality doesn’t have to be entirely consistent across devices either. A user can’t reorder Spotify playlists with the mobile app, which is totally fine – they can switch to a desktop machine and do it there. We should keep in mind what goal a user is trying to achieve when they use a particular device, and work out from there how we can best support that.
Another awesome thing that can happen is that several devices can be part of the same interaction at the same time. When someone visits youtube.com/tv their browser changes mode; it becomes a TV (it could actually already be a TV, but that’s a different matter). On a second device they can visit youtube.com/pair, and now that becomes a remote control. In this scenario the user can take advantage of the properties of each device. The ‘TV’ might have a big screen but be awkward for finding videos, and the ‘remote’ might be relatively small but be more effective at searching for content. By sharing the interaction across both devices we’ve overcome the limitations of each.
This is becoming all the more relevant with the ever-increasing number of web-enabled devices that we interact with today. There’s great potential for utilising the physical properties of our multiple devices by considering their part in our broader interaction with the world. Having said that, I’m still a little tempted to switch back to film.