The Tomorrow Button
The big button should do what I want…
A drunken UX challenge
“OK, Mr. User Experience Designer, I have a challenge for you…” It was clear the afternoon of wine may have spawned whatever my friend was about to say, but I encouraged him to continue.
“By all means, what do ya got?”
My friend gestured to his wife, who was sipping wine beside him. “I have determined that my wife has the same expectation of most every interface:
She expects the Big Button to do whatever it is she wants… at THAT moment in time!”
She laughed along with us but then looked at me with a touch of seriousness. “Well it just should do what I want it to! I don’t understand what is so difficult about that.”
My friend smiled as he poured me more wine. “So, can you design a user interface for that one, smart guy?”
Maybe that’s not as crazy as it sounds
There was something about this challenge that made me stop. My mind became clear, crisp, alert as if a wild animal was about to pounce on me. I knew this was one of those moments to pay attention.
What was lurking in this friendly banter, was a Big Idea. I soon found myself obsessed with something I called the Tomorrow Button.
It may not be easy, but it isn’t impossible
The flight computer aboard the first space shuttle has less than one percent of the power of an Xbox 360 game console.
Many of us carry, in our pockets, a device with more processing power than the #1 fanboy of 1998 (first in line for his iMac) would even dare imagine.
Why couldn’t a button know what it was we were likely to want, at any given time?
So yes, it does create some issues
When a user expects one thing and something else happens, you can have some pretty serious side effects. If you really want whipped cream and instead you launch a nuclear strike, well… dessert is cancelled.
But let’s look at a possible Tomorrow Button.
My smartphone knows a lot about me. For example, it knows what apps I use and when I use them. If I pressed the Tomorrow Button at 1:30pm on a Friday, a set of apps could appear: two mobile games, facebook, and twitter.
In this example, my smartphone doesn’t need to know that I have lunch around 12:30 most Friday’s. It doesn’t need to know that after eating a sandwich I will take about 15 minutes at the end of lunch to do something mindless before going back to work. It doesn’t need to know how I am feeling that particular Friday.
All it needs is a pattern of behavior that it translates into a simple dataset. Based on this pattern, it is predictable that I will either check facebook, tweet something, or play one of two mobile games at that time.
By offering up a few options and allowing the user to choose, the device can not just come up with “the answer” but rather with a method for learning. Every time I accept or decline what the Tomorrow Button offers, it gets smarter. Its learning doesn’t have to ever stop. It can forever adapt as often as I change my mind.
Beyond simple to extraordinary
The use case I just laid out is about as simple as it gets, pushing out likely options based on time of day and use patterns, but the robust datasets we carry around in our pockets give the Tomorrow Button much more intriguing possibilities.
Every datapoint you add does, of course, add a new level of exponential complexity, but let’s suspend our inner critic for a moment and dream of what the Tomorrow Button could use to deliver to us new, adaptive experiences.
You phone knows you are in a major metropolitan city.
If your phone knows you are moving faster than a person can walk, it can assume you are in a vehicle. If you are in a vehicle, you are likely to want directions… or restaurants in the area… These strings of base logic could be merged with the user’s behavior patterns to shape the intelligence of the Tomorrow Button.
A user in a rural area with different behavior patterns would have a button that would match their life and tastes. Moments of delight and technically assisted magic could occur when our rural user takes a trip to the city and finds she suddenly has options only the locals are used to.
A city boy could also have a magic experience when he travelled to the country.
The mental model users have of the Tomorrow Button would be key. It would require a shift in the way we think, from instant gratification to a willingness for discovery.
Time, Sequence & Knowing Too Much
As the Tomorrow Button got to know you better, it could start to predict what you would like based on your patterns of use (what sequence you predictably do things in) cross referenced with the time & location.
This could be very cool… and could also introduce a new set of problems.
Say you are in a committed relationship and you partner pushes your Tomorrow Button at 2:00am while seated on your couch… only to have it launch a text chat with someone they didn’t know about… you get the idea.
Morally questionable conduct aside, here we run into one of the fundamental problems I think we humans have with any sort of learning machine:
We don’t like to think we are predictable.
I mean we really don’t like it. People raised here in the US even more so. There is something offensive about being second guessed by a machine.
We don’t like to think that our truly extraordinary self could be boiled down into a very predictable set of data points. It flies in the face of our culture of uniqueness to be easily placed in a demographic… with a million others just like us.
The Tomorrow Button would have to deliver personalization without crossing the invisible line that has Geeks start to quote Asimov’s three laws of robotics.
Bending the Second Law
As a bit of a Geek myself, this concept does seem to bend the second law of robotics a bit.
To save you a Google search, here are Asimov’s three laws of robotics:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
In essence, the Tomorrow Button would allow the A.I. (primitive though it may be) to take a guess on what the orders given may be.
The biggest problem may not be that the guess will be wrong. The problem may be how many times it could guess correctly.
Here we might find ourselves facing an unfortunate mirror. Sure we love when a Google auto-complete can finish our thought and save us some typing. We can all laugh at the weird options.
But there is something more disturbing that happens internally when the ads on your facebook news feed are at first an insult to your ego… and then, sadly, very relevant to you.
Perhaps we are not ready for the twisted reflections this mythical interface could bring to us. I guess we will see.
Talk to you tomorrow.
