Seven Things We Should Fix

It’s time to complain about the world’s imperfections.

7. Finding Parking: I’d rather have my car’s navigation system just tell my where the next parking spot is, instead of spending 20 minutes hunting for one.

6. Taxi Fleets: In Germany, your average taxi is a largish Mercedes. In the US, it’s a Crown Victoria. The city gas mileage for both is horrible. The incentives for cab operators to switch to hybrids are there: The cars cost the same, but the gas mileage is much better. Why aren’t we seeing faster adoption?

5. Different power plugs: Why does almost every country need to have a different type of power plug? Instead of carrying around an assortment of adapters, the countries of the world should sit together and agree on a global standard.

4. Power adapter bonanza: Why does each device need a different power adapter? If all electronics manufacturers sat down and agreed on a few common types, you’d never need to ask "does anyone else here own a Nokia"?

3. Power lines: Those huge masts are an ugly distraction in the landscape. Can't we dig holes and put it all underground?

2. Tickets: In the age of e-tickets, why do we still need physical tickets to concerts and public transportation?

1. Cash: Coins and bank notes? You have to carry them around and refill supplies when you run out. The fact that cash even exists creates opportunities for counterfeiting, money laundering, and other unwanted side-effects. We’re actually pretty far on this one, but some last rebel holdouts still refuse to take MasterCard or Visa.

The World of Work in 2012

While this post mentions a number of Google products, the opinions expressed here are mine, not those of my employer! I do not work on any of the products mentioned in this article.

I believe that how we work and collaborate will fundamentally change over the next 5 years. This is no far-fetched vision, but pretty obvious stuff, and I'm even not the first to connect the dots and point it out. In the space of five years, most technically inclined consumers will see:

• their lightweight communication and collaboration move almost entirely to the mobile phone,


• most document editing and heavyweight collaboration move to the browser,


• with just a few heavyweight applications remaining on the desktop.

Last weekend, I went to visit Lucerne, Switzerland, with friends. Among them was Fabian, who is a strong believer in using the cell phone solely for calling and sending text messages. He still owns a trusty old Nokia 6210 . We had no city map, and I had only a vague idea of the city's layout, so I whipped up Google Maps Mobile on my 6280 and searched for Lucerne. Fabian was hooked. (The only thing he's worried about now is data fees.)

Back in my student days, there used to be these group assignments: Each group had to come up with some form of document and hand it in. This is where the world split into nerds and normal people. The nerds used Latex files or HTML pages checked them into CVS. The normal people used Word documents that were mailed around and eventually unified into one by the last person. Today, the obvious choice is to put this into Google Documents.

These two examples illustrate how we'll see user behaviors change on cell phones, in browsers, and on the desktop.

The World of Cell Phones

There are many possible killer apps on cell phones:

• maps, directions, traffic information, timetables,
  
• shopping comparisons,
  
• fact lookups on Wikipedia,
  
• email

Some of these are already available, but are either unusable or usable only on a few devices, such as BlackBerries (CrackBerries?). This will change.

Have you seen the iPhone keynote? When I heard the announcement, I was a bit skeptical at first, since my current cell phone does almost everything theiPhone can do: It doesn't have WiFi access, but matches Apple's product on all other counts. But the iPhone's goal is not to introduce new functionality: Its goal is to make existing functionality usable. If you make something 10x more usable, 1000x more people will use it. But Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson aren't stupid - in a year or so, expect their phones to get significantly better, too.

In the next few years, the average cell phone user's device will have a great email client, a decent browser that displays the same version Internet as a desktop browser, and access to her online documents with lightweight editing. Some of this software won't come from the phone vendor.

In 2012, the most important part of your cell phone plan will be the price per transferred megabyte, not call minutes. You'll leave your house without a timetable printout, a clear idea of what gift you want to buy for your girlfriend, or even where the shop you want to visit is. You'll read all your email on your cell phone first, and only use a computer when the response needs to be more than a couple of lines.

But sometimes, you'll still need to sit down in front of a screen.

The World of Browsers

Let's say you're putting together your company's budget for 2013, or maybe you're writing a memo about how your car fleet should move entirely to hybrids. In 2012, you'll be working on this inside the browser.

Creating, editing, and revising documents are the prototypical activities of the office worker. Today, these documents are created in Word or Excel, after which they are emailed around to get feedback and iterate on the original draft.

The reason why Word and Excel are used is because of network effects: If you have the same software as everyone else, you can be sure the document will look the same as on the sender's machine. Most office users have also gotten used to the clumsiness of emailing around documents as just another aspect of drowning in email.

Even today, web office suites such as Google Documents or Microsoft's Office Live get rid of the need to sink thousands of dollars into desktop software. Documents look the same everywhere, and instead of emailing around revisions, all users can edit the same document at the same time, for free. In addition, you have access to these documents from every web browser anywhere in the world, instead of carrying a single copy of them on your laptop.

By 2012, these web applications will have evolved to a point where the default way of dealing with documents is by loading up the web app. But there are some applications that will remain on the desktop for a long time to come.

The World of the Desktop

Aaaah the power of the desktop. If you run applications right on the machine, you lose mobility, but you gain processing power, storage capacity, and the ability to build richUIs . That's why some applications will stay here: They require processing a lot data in real time, or need specialized user interfaces that cannot be replicated in the browser or the mobile phone. Examples are:

• Programming
  
• Desktop publishing
  
• Audio/Video editing
  
• Computer games

Let's take video editing, for example: If you're a video artist in 2012, you'll still be working with Gigabytes of data, and many work steps will still require huge amounts of processing power. It's unlikely that there will ever be enough bandwidth to handle all this data remotely. The same applies to anything from desktop publishing to computer games. Even five years down the road, you'll see these things happen on the desktop.

How to Get There

Plenty of things will have to happen before this becomes reality.

There are technical hurdles: For example, anyone who has worked with Java on Mobile Phones will happily attest that the UIs you can implement with the standard libraries aren't that compelling. On the browser side, there is also room for improvement. For example, making rich editing work right on both IE andFirefox is a nightmare. And then there's the offline problem, which I've written about before: No amount of technical innovation or investment will ensure 100% coverage of the planet. We need to build cell phone and web apps so they can deal with being offline.

Then there are the economic problems: For all this to work out, the price for data communication needs to drop very significantly. In countries where there's healthy competition between network operators, this will happen - all others will lag behind.

In addition, will users need to trust Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al enough to store their documents' data in their datacenters? Corporations in particular are very sensitive about security and privacy issues.

But the greatest hurdle is that non-technically inclined masses tend to stick with what they know, even if something better comes along. (People clinging to the old ways are hardly ever convinced later; they just die out.) If email in Outlook works, why switch? According to Bob Cringley, the masses only switch quickly if something is 10x as good - so these mobile and web apps will have to really kick ass!

So if my prediction doesn't become true, I have plenty of parties to blame. Still, I hope that this works out.

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Thanks to Douwe Osinga, Fabian Siegel, Bálint Miklós, Julia Ferraioli, and Keno Albrecht for their ideas and comments on initial drafts of this.

Academic Lunch Dating

Swiss people are shy by nature. Academics are often a bit reserved. Combine the two and you get what is a common phenomenon at ETH: Entire research groups always go out to lunch together. The same people eat with the same people, every day.

On the other hand, great research always happens at the intersection of two fields. Ideas do not form in a vacuum, but are the result of interaction. To get more ideas, you'd ideally talk to different people every once in a while.

That's why I'd like to propose academic lunch dating. Unlike in traditional online dating, the ultimate goal here would be the exchange of ideas, not gene sequences

We'd make Thursday the designated lunch dating day. We build a website where students, researchers, and professors can sign up. Every Wednesday, they enter what kind of person they want to talk to: Student or researcher, data mining specialist, mathematician or biologist? The system would match up fitting pairs, and send out emails. You'd meet Thursday 12:30 at the cafeteria you agreed on.

On Friday, everything would go back to normal and you could have lunch with your peers in peace.

Offline Mobile Content

Have you tried Google Maps Mobile? It's the most useful application I've ever seen on my cell phone. Still, at least here in Europe, few people are using mobile services. Since telcos are competing on the price per talk minute and price per SMS, they are still charging extremely high fees for GPRS. With my current plan, I pay a whopping CHF 2.50 ($ 2) per MB! Most people don't even know what GPRS costs, so they are hesitant about using it.

Still there is so much content you'd want to have access to on your phone: Aside from the maps, I'd love to have mobile access to tour guides, restaurant reviews, business listings, and movie ratings (for next time I'm at the video rental place without a clue of what to get).

Almost every new mobile phone today comes with a memory card with ample capacity: My Nokia 6280 came with a 64 MB card. Its successor comes with 512 MB.

For the time being, this creates kind of an arbitrage opportunity for content providers: While GPRS data rates remain high, they could offer downloadable packages of offline content instead of a web service. A map of Zurich to download on the web and store on my cell phone via Blueooth? All for CHF 5? I would certainly pay for that.

This model will be viable unless data service becomes practically free: Most would probably rather pay a small flat free than put themselves at the mercy of intransparent price plans. Once data is free, it's better to use the online service as it is more up-to-date. But I doubt this will happen soon: Making data service free endangers the telcos' core business – Mobile Skype, anyone?

Two Social Search Ideas

I'm on a short vacation in the Mediterranean, and as always during trips, I get a bunch of ideas that seem smart when you're chilling on a beach but may be useless when confronted with the real world.

Here are two simple ideas that could make search more useful by accessing your social networks. Both ideas seem pretty obvious. So obvious and trivial, in fact, that I'm pretty sure someone has already tried this. I figured I'd still put them up for discussion.

Click Popularity

A recent article in the Economist points out that people like to follow the herd when confronted with many options. They buy the most popular cereal in a supermarket, and download the most popular songs in an online music store.

What if we extended this concept to search results? If search engines showed click counts for each item on the results page, SEOs would instantly start clicking away, making that measure completely useless.

But what if we integrated search and social networking? We could show just the click counts of your friends. Your friends have little incentive to skew results. They will have similar tastes and preferences as you do, so they will search for similar things and likely click on the same items on a results page. And you could be sure you clicked the "right" result – i.e. the one your friends clicked.

Query Trail Sharing

Search results are seldom perfect on the first try: Even Google can't read your mind. When searching for something specific, users often spend considerable amounts of time refining their queries.

For example, I was recently looking for the name of the Python function that lets me get a class member given a string with its name. The function is called 'getattr', but that had somehow escaped me. Here is the query trail for that day, reconstructed from my Google search history (The first and last queries are unrelated):

• Senator Everett Dirksen
  3:50 pm: Clicked "Everett Dirksen - Wikipedia"
• python classes
  4:11 pm: Clicked "9. Classes"
  4:16 pm: Clicked "7.7 Class definitions"
• python class advanced
  4:19 pm: Clicked "5.7. Advanced Special Class Methods
• python getattr
  4:21 pm: Clicked "4.4. Getting Object References With getattr"
  
• python semaphore
  4:59 pm: Clicked "15.3.4 Semaphore Objects"

By looking at word overlaps and the timestamps, one could now find out that the inner three queries belong together. When a friend searches for the same item, one could now show related queries.

Problems

Implementing both features is fairly straightforward and could likely be done with a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts. But the two huge problems are privacy and the number of friends needed to make this useful.

I doubt that users would dare to use this if they thought that their searches are watched by friends. Therefore, click counts and trail sharing should be anonymous: You don't know which one of your friends clicked where. Plus, it may be useful to filter those Jenna Jameson-related queries.

Second, you don't want to be the only one signed up for this service: You only profit from the feature if you have lots of friends signed up for it as well. Sure, we could also look at data from friends-of-friends and further layers, but that increases spamming opportunities and decreases privacy. Maybe it would make sense to integrate this with existing social networks, such as Xing or LinkedIn, and have people download a browser plugin. If Google or Yahoo did this in our post-AOL-leak world, there could be an public outcry.

Let me know in case you know a product that already does this.

How Researchers are Reinventing the Mail Client

For the last 10 years, the three-pane has been the standard view of looking at email. A pane for folders, a pane for folder contents, and one showing the selected email. Even though mail clients are highly configurable, this has been the standard view of many users. It isn't likely to change soon: The beta of Microsoft Outlook 2007 – pictured below – sticks with conventions.


Email today has many annoyances. Even though we now seem to have a grip on the spam problem, many users are suffering from email overload: There are just too many emails flooding the inbox. Many are drowning in heaps of emails that aren't even important – it's just a colleague at work Cc-ing everyone evenly remotely connected to his project.

There are plenty of ideas on how to improve the current state of mail clients, and I'll present some of them here. None of this is my work: I'll give references to publications of others. There are literally hundreds of papers on this subject, so I've chosen to present my selection of personal favorites.

Here are the three ideas I'll present:

• task-driven email organization
• smart organization structures
• cool new features

I'll present one example from each category.

Task-Driven E-Mail Organization

People's lives today are organized in their mail client. It's not just communication that takes place here: Meetings are organized, lists of todos and deadlines are exchanged, documents are sent around.

In effect, what you're keeping track of in your email client are tasks. Most emails you get are part of some project, belong to an event you're attending or organizing, or are part of a greater plan, e.g. keeping in touch with a girl.

That's the idea behind TaskMaster [2], a tool developed at PARC in 2003. All your emails, drafts, attachments, and bookmarks are mapped to "thrasks". Emails in the same thread are grouped automatically, but the user still has to assign other mails, links, and deadlines manually.

Thrasks can have associated actions, such as "call this person", and "review this". You can also add deadlines to each task: they are shown as green and red bars as they approach. Documents can be previewed right inside TaskMaster's UI, as seen with the Word document on the bottom.



I think the great advantage of this approach is that items that belong together are displayed together. Instead of using email folders to hold related messages, the central element is the task, with all the associated deadlines, todo items, and documents.

Here's a quip from the paper's usability interviews:

"It's just nice to be able to have the control over mixing [...] related things together, even though they might not be [...] the identical kind of thing."

What if we went a step further and looked at workflow patterns? For example, at a company where you interview candidates in a formal hiring process, you get automatically generated messages reminding you of the interview, requesting feedback after the interview, and a notification of the final decision. In the future, we might be able to automatically identify the structure of such processes [4] and classify email into these activities [5] – both of which goes beyond Taskmaster's model, which requires some manual effort.

Creating Smart Organization Structures

Almost everyone I know keeps incoming email entirely in the Inbox. Newly arriving messages join the 500 messages already marked as unread and are displayed at the top of the pile. Is there a better way to organize this view? Can we sensibly restructure incoming mail?

Bifrost [6], a plug-in originally conceived at Lotus Research, that takes this approach. The idea here is that the people are the main indicators of whether an email is important. After installing Bifrost, you're asked to sort your contacts into five groups: Your own email addresses, "VIP Platinum" (extremely important people, e.g. your manager), "VIP Gold" (important people: friends and family), as well as small and large distribution mailing lists.

Bifrost then reorganizes your inbox and displays your email in a number of predefined categories:

• Timely: Emails that contain today's or tomorrow's date in the subject line. They'll likely be important today, but not next week.
• VIP Platinum: emails from your manager.
• VIP Gold: emails from friends and family.
• Personal: replies to emails you've sent out, emails sent directly and only to you, and any unclassified emails you receive.
• Small distribution: Intended for group messages.
• Large distribution: Large-distribution mailing lists.

Below is a mock up of what this looks like in practice. (I had to draw this up myself as the screenshots in the paper were too small).


This structure is helpful in identifying important messages and weeding out the less interesting ones. A quote from their user interviews:

"If I am running through an inbox, I might be tempted to read a title and get sucked in because it is interesting. Whereas if it is in a pile of listserv stuff, I just ignore it altogether. That was a nice thing when I was busy, to not get distracted by unimportant mail."

It's interesting to note that except for differentiating small and large distribution messages, this approach can already be replicated in today's email clients. You can simply create search folders or message filtering rules which simulate the Bifrost behavior. However, this would put emails into folders and wouldn't offer the one-page overview that Bifrost has.

Cool New Features

ReMail [7] was a project at IBM Research that ran from 2001 through 2004. It was basically a reimplementation of an email client from the ground up and had several cool new features. I'll describe two of my favorites below.


Thread Arcs visualize relationships between email messages. Instead of wasting lots of space with a tree view that Thunderbird has, it displays the thread structure in a little image. This feature helps you see where you are in a long conversation. For example, in the picture below, emails B, C, D, E, F, and H are all direct replies to A, while email G is a reply to E.



The advantage of thread arcs is that you can see the position of the email you're viewing in the larger conversation, without having to switch to a tree view: your main inbox pane remains sorted by arrival time.

Contact Maps offer a different view of the address book: Senders from which you have received email are grouped by domain. Each person's name is shown with a different background color, depending on the time of the last email exchange. This offers a better view of your contacts than the traditional non-grouped lists where your least important contact looks just like your most important one.



Many of ReMail's other ideas can be found in today's popular clients: Instant messaging is now integrated with Gmail, which also groups emails by thread. The collection mechanism in ReMail is semantically equivalent to Gmail's labels. Outlook integrates emails and calendaring and has list separators ('today', 'yesterday', 'last month'), just like the ReMail prototype.

Conclusions

It seems like the ideal email organization tool would be like your personal, smart secretary: It knows what's important or interesting, and deals with stuff you don't want to be bothered with. That would be perfect.

Today, we seem to be at a point where it seems like we might be able to solve the spam problem. But the problem of figuring out which of the non-spam emails is important, and what it relates to, still exists.

One solution – the one I presented here – is to add nifty features to the mail client. But would all these features really be understood and used? Users today seem to be using a very basic set of mail client functionality. Anything we add should not only solve a painful problem, but also be easy to use. I'm not even sure this applies to the applications I've shown here: You don't know until you've tried.

What do you think? Are these good ideas? Would normal people who are drowning in email use these features? What features can't you live without? Post a comment and let me know.

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Thanks to Keno Albrecht, Bálint Miklós , Markus Egli, and Fabian Siegel for reviewing drafts of this.

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References

A more thorough and academic overview of the subject:
[1] Steve Whittaker, Victoria Bellotti, Jacek Gwizdka: Email in personal information management, Communications of the ACM, 2006

Examples of task- and activity-based systems:
[2] Victoria Bellotti, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Mark Howard, Ian Smith: Taking email to task., CHI, 2003
[3] Michael J. Muller, Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, Eric Wilcox, David R. Millen: One-hundred days in an activity-centric collaboration environment based on shared objects, CHI, 2004
[4] Nicholas Kushmerick, Tessa Lau: Automated email activity management: an unsupervised learning approach, IUI 2005
[5] Mark Dredze, Tessa Lau, Nicholas Kushmerick: Automatically classifying emails into activities, IUI 2006

Bifrost:
[6] Olle Bälter, L Sidner: Bifrost inbox organizer: giving users control over the inbox, NordiCHI, 2002

ReMail:
[7] ReMail: Reinventing Email Website, Collaborative User Experience, IBM Research, 2003