Hey folks, so welcome to the platforms and context module of course three here. To give you some background for this particular module, I wanted to go back in the time machine here, back to all the way to 1983. Coincidentally, the year of my birth and in 1973, if you were a user interface designer. Actually, that world probably didn't really even exist then but if you were someone who designed user interfaces, your job was in some ways harder but, in other ways pretty easy. And let me tell you why, it was easy because almost always if you were designing a piece of technology, software, hardware. You're designing that technology for a person interacting with a big fat desktop computer. That was it, there were no other situations that you needed to design for. The situation was basically the same actually in 1995, a full 12 years later, right? You're still dealing with just a person interacting with a desktop computer. Maybe the desktop computer's a little bit smaller, they're more widespread, these types of things. But still basically the same, person interacting with computer. Well, flash forward to roughly today here, and things are a lot more complex. User interface designers have to deal with smart phones, we have to deal with tablets, we have to deal with smart watches. We have to deal with of coming here, virtual reality systems. We have to deal with, if I haven't already said it, smart watches and even smart things, right? Like smart lightbulbs, smart door locks, smart cameras for the front door. If you listen to podcasts these days, it seems like every single advertisement is about some new smart thing. And those things are things that designers, our user interface designers have to design for. So, let's summarize, what does all these mean for interface designers? Well, basically, it mean we have to be ready to design for a large variety of devices. And critically, we have to be ready to design for a people who use multiple devices at the same time or in serial, right? So, I go from my smart watch, to my smart phone, to my desktop, etc., etc. We have to be really aware of the benefits and limitations of each device type or platform. We have to make sure that when we're designing, we're aware of those benefits and limitations and implementing our knowledge into the product that we design. We have to make sure that we're designing to take advantage of the benefits and to work around the limitations. And then finally, failure to be very platform aware can lead to the failure of a product. And we will see some examples of some problematic interphase as we move forward in this class videos. So, one thing I want to cover at a high level before jumping into specific platforms, you'll notice that the rest of the videos are generally speaking dedicated to a specific type of platform. Say for instance in car or wearables, or in other words smart watches on these types of things. But I want to cover some higher level things here and one thing that is very important to cover prior to going into those specific platforms is response of design. Broadly speaking, I sort of came up with this definition of this sort of amorphous and a new idea, so this is the best short definition I could come up for you guys. Responsive Design is a newly and very wide spread design paradigm. In which the designer puts supporting multiple platform types at the top of the priority list. I sort of notice this transition in myself, right? When I was making websites or making an app for instance five, ten years ago. I would think specifically about just about a desktop, right? Very few people accessed the mobile web and then a little later maybe I would be writing an app but I would only be thinking about that app being on a smart phone. I would never think about that app being on a tablet or a smartphones of a huge variety of sizes, these types of things. That's now shifted. When I'm designing something, I'm thinking about it being used on many, many different platforms and that is at the top of my priority list. The immediate thing that then follows from that being at the top of the priority list, right? Is that the interface needs to fluidly adapt to the screen size and the context of each platform. This has to be a very straightforward process, very understandable to someone who goes from a tablet to a smartphone, back to a desktop, these types of things. Just to give you a sense of how important responsive design has become, in this day and age. You'll see if you look at Google's design, documents, it talks about responsive design all over the place. And responsive design is also advocated by many other major tech companies. So just to give you a grounded idea of how responsive design sort of looks and feels, this is a great example from the Boston Globe's website. You can see here, if you're looking at the Boston Globe's website, at least at the time these screenshots were taken. The desktop site has three columns, right? It takes advantage of the fact that desktop screens tend to be pretty wide, and long actually, so a very large screen size. It takes advantage of that screen size, and largely fills it. If you were to make this window smaller or look at the website from a tablet, which has a smaller effective resolution. You can see here that it's gone down to two columns, right? And things have sort of smartly adjusted their placement, so the ad is down here, right? The image got a little bit bigger and you can see that the ordering of these articles is roughly the same, right? The prominence of each article is roughly the same but in order to maintain that consistency in the hierarchy of the articles, they had to be laid out somewhat differently, right? And then this is a phone width here, this is very different. If you look very closely up at the top here, you can see there are three elements of this tab here but this has been reduced to two. The two most important ones and then everything has been fully linearized, right? So the most important article or the lead stories up top, the secondary lead story, the tertiary one, quarternary one and so on and so forth. Some other things to point out here is the image sizes have changed once again and the advertisement has gone away. And that's an interesting problem that exists for mobile devices and making money on content using mobile devices. But we'll leave that to another day. Hopefully, this should give you a sense of how one goes about responsive design. When the designer laid out this web page, my expectation is that designer did not just look at the desktop first, and then sort of hack around with tablet and phone. The designer looked at everything altogether, and implemented a design that was consistent. You'll recall from earlier videos how important consistency is and you'll see again how important consistency is in the next course in specialization. But this is consistent but it also adapts right to the specific screen size that the user is looking at, the webpage width. So that should give you a sense of responsive design. So that sort of segues nicely into the learning objectives, I'd like you to think about for this module, so our goals for this module. The first is to understand the design requirements for a variety of platforms. So for instance, how do I know that using that linear, the fully linearized view for smart phones, whereas the wider view for desktops. How do I know that's the right decision? And we'll be doing this for smartphones, for smart watches, for smart things, for smart cars and so on and so forth. So each of these platforms has it's own design requirements in the language I used earlier, benefits and limitations and you'll be learning about those in some detail. And then we'll also talk about how to integrate all of these into a cohesive cross platform experience. So before I end this video, I want to point out that responsive design and multiplatform design. In general, goes back a lot longer than say 2012, 2013 the dates you'll mostly hear about this big new idea coming out if you look at some of the articles on the web about these issues. It goes all the way back to at least 1991 and a little earlier than that. And this gentleman, Dr Mark Weiser, who unfortunately passed away before he could see a lot of his ideas come to fruition. He has a very famous article, an article so famous when I was putting together this slide I looked at how many citations it had on Google Scholar. It was something on the order of 13,000 and many faculty members don't ever have 13,000 citations across all of their articles in their entire career. So this is just one article by this one very forward thinking researcher, researcher in human-computer interaction. What this guy did, what Dr. Weiser did, was he sort of established a framework for three types of devices, three platforms that he called tabs, pads and boards. And this was in 1991, and as it turns out, tabs are basically what has come to be smartphones, pads, or tablets, and boards are sort of wall-sized displays or large desktop displays like we're seeing now. It's very cool to see Mark Weiser's vision sort of come to fruition and the especially exciting part of this is there's a second part of this vision. And that is that as we get better design and as we get better at designing better platforms. What Mark Weiser expected to happen is that computing would sort of dissolve into the environment. So we wouldn't really remember that we're using a computer, we just would be going about our daily business, doing our work. The spending time with our families using computing devices but not thinking about them as computing devices, not thinking about them as smartphones or computers. But just thinking about them as things that help you get the job done along the lines of a hammer, or something like this, right? So I can see this actually happening, when it does, it will be a tremendous success for user interface design, but it's going to be a persistent challenge for user interface design. So, I'm excited to see that happen. All right, here's a couple of readings if you're more interested in Mark Weiser's vision, or in designing for different and multiple platforms in general. And I'll be seeing you in a video or two.
