The Changing User Interface

Finding Consistency
Between the cavernous convention halls, gussied-up cold cuts for lunch, and hours of meet-and-greet, the last thing most of us want to do at a conference is lug around a laptop. But that makes it hard to trade information with colleagues and new contacts. Most of us rely on exchanging business cards, then making a mental note to send a paper or PowerPoint presentation to someone when we get back to our hotel rooms.

Georgia Tech's Pierce is exploring a better solution. His computer-science research group, called "personal information environments," recently developed a system called Serefe for exchanging large computer files using nothing bigger than a cell phone. In a paper to be published at the Mobile Human Computer Interaction conference this month in Salzburg, Austria, Pierce describes Serefe (which is short for serendipitous file exchange) as a way for users to dispense with anticipating what information they'll want to share while on the road. That's a drawback of E-mail and portable storage devices, Pierce says.

With Serefe, Pierce assigns a user's PC and cell phone each its own instant-message address. Pierce wrote his own IM software, since the policies of commercial instant-messaging services don't let one person have more than one address. If Bob and Alice meet at a conference, and Alice wants to send Bob a draft of her latest paper, she launches Serefe on her mobile phone, which searches for the document by sending an instant message from her cell phone to her PC. Alice then peruses a list of the 10 files she has most recently sent or types in a search term, and Serefe, which is running on the cell phone, locates the file, then fires off another instant message to Bob's phone that asks him what format he wants the paper in: E-mail, FTP, or IM. When he chooses and confirms that he wants the file, Alice's phone picks the IM address of Bob's PC from a buddy list, then sends the file there. It can also post the file to an FTP server.

If the PC or laptop where the file lives is shut down, Serefe creates a reminder for the user to go back and send it later. The system works by using instant messaging to get around the fact that a device's IP address can change each time it connects to the Internet.

Information sharing across PCs, cell phones, and PDAs today consists of little more than synchronizing address books and calendars. "That's sufficient if all you want to do is have your phone numbers everywhere you go," Pierce says. In personal information environments, he says, users' devices would work together as a team.

Pierce's group has also built user interfaces that span devices. At an IBM conference on user interfaces in July, Pierce showed a way to view a presentation on a Tablet PC and a desktop at the same time, zooming in on the tablet and showing the macro view on the full monitor.

In some ways, that kind of flexibility is a mark of new thinking in user-centric design. People should be able to choose where and when they want their information, and computers should bend to those choices. Getting there will mean rethinking some technical standards and traditional approaches. And it could mean an end to our pile-up of machines.