This is the third instalment of my predictions for big tech trends in 2011. Read prediction 1 and prediction 2 as well …
3. The Rise of Multi-user, Multi-device Tablet Applications
Multi-user games and apps are not new (just look at World of Warcraft), but alongside the rise of the new multi-touch tablets, a new type of user experience is possible: co-located, multi-user applications. In other words, apps which allow two or more people to simulatenously interact together over the same device.
What does this mean in UX terms? It has the potential to fundamentally change the way that we collaborate. Traditionally, if we want to work together on the same document at the same time, we would need to either gather around the same laptop, with one person ‘driving’ and the other watching. Or – the more likely option – is to print it out and then transfer it back to digital afterwards. Multitouch tablets has the potential to allow us to do this on the same screen together but with the added bonus of having the computer do some of the computational work.
More importantly, if seamless sharing experiences can be realised (particularly across mobile devices), it opens up two possibilities: one is putting multiple iPhones and iPads together to create a single ‘screen’. For instance, in PadRacer, there is a single track which is split across two iPads:
Then there is the other possibility of using multiple iPhones and iPads in a ‘Master-Slaves’ configuration – just like Scrabble for the iPad/iPhone that uses the iPad as the board in the middle, and each person has their individual rack on their phone. There have been many jokes about this:
But Scrabble was the 5th highest grossing iPad app for the 2010 – so there is clearly a market of people willing to pay 10 dollars for it.
If 2010 is the year of the tablets, then 2011 could be the year that we see even further seamless interactions across devices.
Tune in for the next instalment: 4. A Re-Focus on Non-Smartphones
Kate – another very insightful post. And another set of predictions that I completely agree with you about and really excite me because I’m working on technology that makes this possible and more easily accessible. For multi-user games and collaborative applications the information about a player move, new document update or chat notification generally needs to be instantly sent to all other users. Even where real-time is not absolutely essential to the application a push notification is still more beneficial (UX and resource usage) than notification via polling.
During the last year we started to see, or at least notice, a lot more real-time collaboration applications and games which used the Internet as the network for the messages. In this post I wrote for Programmable Web on real-time client push services the first screenshot is of a web-based scrabble-like game (http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/09/14/client-push-services-open-up-real-time-to-everyone/).
Some other well know examples are Google Docs documents, drawing and spreadsheets real-time collaboration (http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44680), Google Wave, PBWorks and real-time chat services such as Nurph (http://nurph.com – although they currently use polling). I also think that services such as Balsamiq (http://balsamiq.com/), a UI mocking app, plan to introduce real-time collaboration functionality.
The user experience side of things is also very interesting. When real-time data delivery becomes a possibility the application developer really needs to consider how this impacts the UX. Just because you can stream 1000’s of tweets a minute into an application it doesn’t mean you should. search.twitter.com is a good example of this; they’ve chose to just show a notification that new tweets are available rather than actually push them into view. These two examples also show notifications being pushed into view:
* http://www.twitterfall.com/
* http://kwwika.com/Standalone/Demos/javascript-examples/simple-twitter-subscriber/ (click on NOWPLAYING)
I’d love to know what people think about this and hear any idea about how we can solve this real-time notification UX problem.
During 2011 I absolutely believe that we will start to see a lot more real-time and cross platform collaborative applications and games where one user may be on a smartphone, another on a PC running in a web browser and another on a native iPad app. These applications will be powered by real-time technologies either hosted by the game or application developers or using one of the real-time push notification and messaging services that started up last year.
My hope is that people will choose to use a service for that infrastructure and that Kwwika is well placed to fill that role by having a foundation of technology developed over 10 years and APIs for the majority of technologies (JavaScript [Web], Objective-C [iPhone/iPad], C, Java, .NET, Flash, Silverlight).
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