Forget Smartphones: It’s Time For Our Phones to Interact With Us
I’ve just a built a new desk for myself. It’s made of light wood and it has a soothing desk lamp, a plant, a photo of my kids plus a comfy felt wrist pad. Having set it up I carefully placed my screen, my iPad and my phone in their new homes and sat down to write at the desk for the first time.
But instead I had a revelation.
My nice, pseudo-minimalist, sort-of-organic desk was now covered in dark, shiny computer screens. And without me doing anything to them in any way they were merely sitting there inert. Black. Dead. Bereft of life. Not “pushing up the daisies” dead, of course, more dormant and perhaps darkly menacing.
Why was this so, I wondered? There was enough computer power sitting on my desk to make a 1960s-era NASA moon rocket engineer suffer a stroke through pure excitement, and it was just…well, it was all just sitting there doing absolutely nothing interesting unless I first did something to it. To push a button, click a switch, or even holler a “hey Siri!” in order to elicit a response — how old fashioned, how quaint I thought! At that precise point in time, of course, my phone lit up since my friend was calling me. But this surprise didn’t derail my train of thought. My phone’s screen only came to life and did something because my friend first did something to her phone a thousand miles away. “Surely,” I reasoned, “surely this can’t be the way it’s got to be?” My friend was a little confused that I answered her not with a “Hello!” or even an authentic “Ahoy!” but with such a vaguely threatening sentence… though when I explained, she did get my point. Which was this: Surely it’s time for Apple, Google, Samsung or whoever to take these smooth black slabs of high tech smartphone wizardry and inject some life into them.
Isn’t it time for our phones to stop lazily loafing around on our desks and in our pockets doing nothing and instead start working to anticipate our needs instead of waiting around, only stirring themselves into action when prodded?
The smarter phone
The modern smartphone is a technological wonder. It does the job of a thousand thousand other devices in one neat, friendly-sized electronic monolith. You can write essays on it, read the news on it, share photos of your dinner to Instagram from it, make Tik-tok videos on it, play games on it, attend Zoom meetings at work from it and even, if it’s still got enough battery left, make actual phone calls from it.
I was exaggerating above…our smart phones do light up by themselves nowadays, when one app or another receives some new information from the cloud and pops a notification on your screen or a little red spot on the corner of the app’s logo. Plus it’s nice that our phones are now home to digital voice assistants like Siri. But I think the next big revolution in smartphone tech will move it far beyond these little flourishes of interactivity.
I think that our future smarter “interactivephone” screens will stop being mainly inert black sheets of glass, and instead they will become an ever-shifting window into a mass of useful data.
Picture your phone’s screen as it is now, peppered with mostly static icons that only appear when we activate the phone, and only come to life when we care to poke at them.
Now picture instead a constantly-changing mix of information, colorfully glowing, moving on the screen. Text, photos, videos, slowly shuffling around as the situation changes, taking up different amounts of screen real estate as their importance shifts, with each snippet of info shared at the appropriate time when it’s important, as determined by your habits or by the app that you are most likely to use next.
For example, imagine you’re in the habit of going for coffee with Jo from Finance every work day at around 3pm and you chat about the latest news: Your phone will automatically surface the sort of headline you like to browse into a window at the top of the screen at about 2:50pm, sprinkling in a few topics that you don’t tend to read just to spice things up. Below it a red alert box will slowly flash to remind you that today you can’t linger over coffee because you have that big design meeting at 3:45. Imagine that the meeting went well but later, as you’re about to leave the building and walk home at your usual time, your phone chirps up with a little audio alert warning you there’s about to be a big thunderstorm— and when you fish the phone out of your pocket, the icon for your favourite rideshare app is centred on the screen.
Imagine that because you’d given it permission to, your phone would choose different backdrop photos at different times through the day, subtly selecting the kind of image you like (perhaps even a photo that matches your mood or the colour of your room, the kind of weather outside, the tone of voice of your last text message to your partner…) and maybe even coordinating colour schemes with your smart watch.
During your normal work hours, maybe the centre of your phone screen would show a summary of the three most recent emails to your work account, or recent Slack activity. When you’re out with friends, maybe a third of your phone’s screen would show a slideshow of images of your kids, recent holidays and so on. When you’re at home later, maybe the screen would simplify, showing fewer pieces of information and morph its display at a slower pace. Maybe the top of the screen would fill with a message about a new podcast that covers a topic that you’ve been interested in before, and at bed time, knowing you finished a previous book, it could suggest a new audio book based on your likes and dislikes.
Don’t be alerted or alarmed
I know, of course, that today’s phones do some of this in the form of pop-up notifications in the form of alerts and alarms. And I know that Android has widgets and Google’s “Now” system tries to be a little anticipatory of your needs and wants thanks to the way it sniffs through your emails and other data. And yes, I remember that Microsoft’s Windows Phone used to have a neat feature called “live tiles” that meant your phone’s screen was much more interactive than is the case for Androids or iPhones (even if, to my tastes, the user experience was sacrificed a little too much for the design).
But I’m not just talking about alerts or alarms or notifications. These usually only occur when you’ve done something to your phone — like set a regular alarm, or enable a particular style of alert from an app.
I’m suggesting it’s time that our phones’ interfaces adapt themselves to how we use the devices, how we consume data from them, how we input information into them. Instead of a dead slab that only reacts, I think our phones should choose to cause actions all by themselves.
There are technicalities, technically
A design for a “smarter phone” interface like this will have to be very carefully thought out so that it doesn’t become overwhelming or annoying. There will be privacy issues depending on exactly what gets shown on your screen — information that maybe you don’t want to or can’t show to others. Curation of what you get to see will have to be thought about, since you wouldn’t want your phone to accidentally bury an alert from someone important, or maybe you wouldn’t want the social mores of an American company to decide to influence or censor the things your phone shows you if you were, say, a Swede or a South African.
There will be technical issues too, because constantly having to think about and anticipate what you need will burn up some of your device’s battery, and having the screen lit more often will burn through still more.
But none of this is really too far-fetched to be impossible. The technology more or less exists already, and our attitudes to what constitues privacy are shifting. We also already trust our devices with precious personal information, for example sensitive health data, so a move to trusting them to tell us information on a whim — on screen, or with a voice prompt from Siri, or however — may not be a difficult one.
Springing to life
Essentially I want my phone to say, out loud perhaps, “Hey! You’ve been typing solidly for a good half hour. Stand up!” I want it to randomly display a compliment for me as I get ready for a morning’s work. I want it to interrupt my gaming session with a breaking news headline that it thinks is important for me to know. I would love it to help with my dreadful memory and organise my calendar for me.
Am I being fanciful? Of course. Is this the way everyone wants their personal smart tech to go? Not likely. Are there a million other incredible ways that this sort of technology will evolve that I’ve not even grazed across here? Certainly.
In my mind the “smartphone”, while incredibly useful, is at a crossroads in terms of its function and design — think of it as equivalent to the boundary between old-fashioned “dumb” computer terminals, and the modern interconnected, always-changing Internet experience…but more dramatic! Today’s smartphones really are flat slabs that spend most of their time dark, doing little despite the amazing “smart” opportunities their Net connectivity brings. But if the phone became more of an interactive companion device, carefully shepherding our data and alerts in a more anticipatory way, they would deliver more value to our lives. It’s even possible we may spend less time staring at those screens — because we don’t have to jab at them (and get distracted by other apps) to find the things we need.
And when all this happens, perhaps the word “phone” itself will be obsolete.
Excuse me now, please. My digital butler has suggested I make a call to my friend again to carry on our interrupted chat. It also thinks I should complete the “Don’t call me Shirley!” joke I forgot to finish earlier.
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Images: Edited photo by Flickr user kuhnmi under CC, B&W photo by me, photo by Flickr user Justin Dolske under CC, colour photo by me.
