Thanks for the responses to this. Picking up on poomoo's link to the Eric Schmidt video, I thought his observation about teenagers who move 'seamlessly from app to app' was quite interesting.
This is one of the key things we've been looking at for the MEX Manifesto and Conference: is the human mind really capable of genuine multi-tasking, or would it be better to describe this kind of behaviour as a state of 'continuous partial attention'. If you think about what your brain is doing when you're trying to simultaneously talk to someone, read your email and watch TV, you are never actually fully engaged in any of those tasks. Instead, you swap between them very quickly, bringing each one into your primary attention zone, sometimes just for a fraction of a second, and then focusing back on the other tasks you're trying to juggle. That kind of cognitive state has some big implications for multi-platform user experience design - practitioners need to be creating interfaces which take account of reduced attention spans and allow us to easily swap back and forth between multiple points of attention. Very much enjoyed Guillermo and Aynne's presentation on 'multi-target' experiences. If you were having having difficulty accessing the link Guillermo posted, try this one (the original link seemed to have a period attached to end which broke the URL): http://www.slideshare.net/aynne/in-context Initiatives link the Open Screen Project are going to play a significant role in forming the technological underpinnings of multi-platform experiences. I think true progress will be made once these kind of UI layer enhancements are combined with innovations in the information delivery infrastructure (the increased bandwidth highlighted by Eric Schmidt in the video) and improvements in things like smart caching and dynamic transposing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47086 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
