There’s been a lot of talk lately about multitouch interfaces.  There have been a bunch of tasty bites of information coming out of Microsoft about Windows 7.  Combine that with the user experience of the iPhone and OS X and I’m starting to see a trend emerge.

If you take a close look at Seadragon or DeepZoom, you’ll see a very powerful metaphor and technology that may be able to solve a problem that has perplexed UI / UX people from the beginning.    How can I make my users experience the same but more functional from one platform to another?  Many hours and a whole lot of money is spent every time a new piece of hardware comes out to create the user interface.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a design language that worked under ever situation from the very small screen to the largest.

When it comes to displaying an image on a screen often designers will have to spend time optimizing the images for the available resolution.  Technology like Seadragon actually takes care of this for you on the fly.  It looks at how many pixels it has to work with and displays the best quality image it can from the source.  This is fantastic and just starts to scratch the surface of why this is important.

The Exploring Interface

I’m going to go off on a little side track here for a moment.  While I was working at a certain start-up that was making a game console, I spent a lot of time thinking about the 3D user interface.  The concept was based on a real-time 3D game engine that was powering our UI.  It was DirectX based and offered us a ton of sophisticated capabilities.  One of which was distance texture maps.    We had high resolution texture maps being used for the box art of the retail games.  We had either scanned in or used supplied source images to then wrap a simple 3D polygon box.  The box could then be displayed all over the place at different angles or even rotated.  The 3D engine didn’t slow down or choke on the high res texture maps because the engine support multiple textures to be loaded based on how close it was to the camera.  As this new realm was explored we kept coming back to a simple but new way to show the information to the user.

I was calling this the “Explore” mode since it allowed a user to just start clicking away on objects that were adjacent to the primary information.   For example let’s say a specific game box was being shown front and center.  Surrounding the box would be other visual pieces of information.

• Game publisher
• Rating
• small cluster of popular titles’ boxes that are similar to the current selection.
• Reviews
• Screen shots
• etc

The user could click on one of the peripheral objects to bring it in to focus.

Once the new item takes focus the peripheral options will adapt dynamically based on the user behavior and content.

Let’s say for example out user selects the screen shots then it would shift to the center focus and the related information would  move and shift as well.

So take the above concept and add mutlitouch’s natural interface of zooming in and out.

if the user was to zoom out then they could get a high level view of their exploration

A dynamic map is created.  This map can help a user always find their place in the rich amount of information being displayed to them.

The same could be true for zooming in while exploring information.  Which would extend the panning and expanding metaphor with even richer levels of information.

In the above example my focus is on the product image control.  If I was to zoom in by pulling the image wider or double clicking then the product image control could expand to take over the screen real estate.

On the Desktop

I think the same behavior could exist as my OS.  I like the idea of moving the actual OS desktop to be more social and data in nature.  One that grows dynamical based on what I’m doing.

I think the biggest strength to this concept is that it could work well under any screen size.  Since the experience is scalable the user has the choice of how much information they want on the screen at any given time by zooming in our out.

I will plan on exploring this more in future postings so stay tuned!