Zero, One, or N, and Interface Familiarity

It is an axiom of database design that these are the only 3 numbers that matter. It also explains why the Romans didn't come up with SQL - no Roman numeral zero!
From time-to-time I'll find myself in an elevator that only serves two floors. One time, up at Xerox's campus on Hillview in Palo Alto, I got in one and faced the buttons: 1 and 2. But because of the hill and the fact that I was unfamiliar with that part of the building I didn't know what floor I was currently on. Fortunately it only took me one of two possible tries to guess the right one but it made me wonder why such an elevator would need both a 1 and a 2 button. Wouldn't just an Other floor button suffice? Or would that confuse users even more? What does other mean? How many floors does this elevator service? Which floor am I on? This in spite of the fact that an Other button would be fool proof.

Of course the reason a two story elevator has a 1 and a 2 button is that it's just a diminutive case of many elevator buttons. Elevator users are used to facing a series of buttons in one or more columns. The sheet metal worker making the panel only cut two holes in this case. But he or she just followed the pattern.
Which brings me to another story about how conditioned we are to certain interfaces. Many years ago I landed at Heathrow (T3 I believe) on my way to a friend's wedding in France. It happened to be the same terminal where flights were landing from Saudi Arabia.

As I was walking through the terminal I approached the top of an escalator heading down. At the top of the escalator were 3 Saudi women, one a bit younger and two older ones. They were having an animated discussion and pointing at the escalator. It quickly became clear that they had never been on an escalator in their lives! At that point I just had to stand back and watch. What would they do? There were no nearby alternatives to get to baggage claim. After awhile the two older women encouraged the younger one to proceed. She stepped cautiously on to the escalator but was thrown slightly off balance as her feet moved unexpectedly (how I wish I'd had a video camera at the time, this would have been YouTube gold!). So she sat down and proceeded downwards. After a couple seconds, realizing that she was safe, she motioned to her two companions to join her. They both proceeded to get on the escalator and sit down.

Which brings me to thinking about interfaces that assume a cultural history and experience. The escalator interface was completely standard, no surprises. But the designers would have been shocked to think that a potential passenger might never have seen one before. I witnessed this again more recently when my parents were staying with me. My mom loves to read so I bought her a couple iBooks on my iPad. Watching her, I was disturbed at how many problems she had with the iPad interface. She was pushing really hard with her fingers instead of swiping and was often accidentally hitting the main button. Her lack of grace with the interface was surprising because she's normally quite good with computers. She's used Macs for decades, is familiar with many applications, very familiar with the web, all over her grandchildren's facebook pages, she even has a Kindle! But, she had never used an iPhone. The iPad interface itself basically assumes that you've been exposed to iPhones! No big deal for most people but the iPad's designers hadn't tested it against my mom!

A Conversation with my Cell Phone, circa 2020

At dinner the other night about 6 people had their iPhones out at some point. I know Android now has more market share than iPhone but not at this particular dinner. It got me to thinking about what the future of mobile phones will bring. As brilliant as the iPhone is, was it really a surprising innovation? We already had touch screens (on PCs) before the iPhone appeared; that by itself wasn't a surprise. Perhaps what was surprising was how well Apple executed, from iTunes integration to apps to the completely natural feeling UI.

We live in an age of exponential innovation. As Ray Kurzweil is fond to point out, extrapolating the future based on the current (linear) rate of progress will result in a dramatic underestimate. So what's next for phones?
What have we seen since the original iPhone? Bigger and better screens. Better cameras. More apps of course. The next phase of mobile looks to be focused on NFC (near field communication) and mobile payments. Cool, but also not entirely surprising. Mobile payments are already a hot space. But 9-10 years from now, then what? The following is an excerpt from a conversation I will be having with my mobile phone sometime in 2010.

Hal. What are we doing tonight?

You're invited to a party for Tom in the city at 7. You need to leave by 6 because it's Friday and traffic is heavy going into the city. Your Tesla is fully charged.

What should I bring?

I suggest a bottle of Pinot, Tom's wife loved the last bottle you brought.

...Later, leaving the house...

You should take 280, 101 is backed up from San Mateo to Burlingame.

OK Hal.

You're running late, should I text Tom to let him know when to expect you?

Yes Hal.
By the way, Tom recently tweeted that his father is going in for surgery next week so be aware of that.

....

iPhones and Androids are fantastic devices but in their current incarnation they require tremendous concentration to use. While driving I often turn to Heather to ask her to look up a destination, find a restaurant along our current itinerary, or call a friend to let them know what time to expect us. Google Voice is wonderful as a voice-driven interface for search but it's blithely unaware of the context of my life. It knows where I am thanks to GPS at least but it doesn't look at my calendar to see what I'm doing or where I'm headed. There's really no reason it couldn't.

Voice recognition will improve and the integration between search, social networks, your personal calendar, time, and space is going to get much much better. Your smart phone will actually become smart, not just cool. Oh yes, and the batteries will last a week between charges. I can dream can't I?

There are now over 250,000 apps in the iTunes store. By 2010 there will be millions. Your phone should even be able to help you find the one that solves your immediate problem.

Hal: I need a wine that goes with tuna tartare from the wine list in this restaurant.

I'll need to get a wine pairing app, it's on the AppStore for €3.99, ok?

Sure Hal. Hey, when did the US move to the Euro?

It's not Rocket Science
But it is the name of this blog - 0RocketScience. Why? I am after all a rocket scientist. I got my degrees in Aero/Astro at MIT and my first job was as Senior Research Engineer at Integrated Systems Inc (from '84 to 91'). In my early days at ISI I worked on the control system for a telescope that was going to be mounted in the front of a 767 and would look out at the horizon, scanning for incoming Russian RVs (as in re-entry vehicles, not Winnebagos). That was in the heyday of the Star Wars project and the DoD was spending money like water on all sorts of crazy concepts. The wild thing about this telescope is that to get a clear view of the horizon (and to be able to accurately direct terminal stage interceptors) it had to have a cutout in the side of the airplane. So there was several hundred miles an hour of wind going past it at all times. The noise and vibration environment was insane. As was the project.

Later my boss sent me over to work on Lockheed's space station proposal team, specifically on the guidance and control section. Lockheed's proposal team was holed up in a window-less building at the Lazy L, the nickname for Lockheed Sunnyvale. I realized then that the space station could easily be a career-long project. I could work on it for 10-15 years until it got put up in orbit and then support it for the rest of my career. All from a window-less building. I wanted a bit more variety.

Fortunately ISI gave that to me as we morphed from an engineering services company into a software company, building tools for other control engineers to use in designing real-time control systems for satellites, airplanes, missiles, cars, hard disk drives (the servo that controls the head), and even exotic things like vapor deposition systems. I was the power-user of the company's flagship MATRIXx software and I soon became the product manager for it. That got me a lot of variety at the tender young age of 25. Next thing I knew I was flying all over the place demonstrating it for customers, training users, setting up booths at trade shows. And I was writing a really geeky column for the product newsletter titled Ask Dr. Control (that had been one of my nicknames back at MIT). All things I was specifically not trained to do in my doctoral program.

Later I became the development manager for our mathematical and simulation apps. Then we went public which was a lot of fun. Then we bought a real-time OS company (pSOS) and became a pretty boring company. Within a couple years the entire middle-management and technical leadership layer had left, along with most of the execs except the CEO. He eventually sold the company to WindRiver. I was one of the early ones to leave, having been there for 7 years and having pissed off the CEO enough by standing up to him that I was never going to get promoted.

The Berlin Wall had come down by then, we had beat the Russians without using any of our fancy weaponry, just our economy. Well, I guess those stingers in Afghanistan helped but those were darn cheap compared to the trillions we spent on weapons that are now scrap. I could have gone to work for another aerospace company but I certainly wasn't interested in a Lockheed or Boeing (ironically, now one and the same) and there wasn't an obvious other interesting small company at the time. Had I been patient SpaceX or Virgin Galactic might have beckoned. I could have gone to work for the Mathworks I suppose but that would have just been jumping to the only other viable software company in the space. I had competed too hard with them for too long to go to the other side.

So I went off and joined a pure software company, working on Mac applications no less. And I stopped being a rocket scientist every day and was just a "tech guy."

That's been a lot of fun for the past 20 years but the ironic thing that always seems to come up in software (and now research) companies is discussions that I'm involved in where someone will blurt out "This isn't rocket science!" At that point I have a tendency to interject with "Well why do you need me then?" But I do still get excited when I come across a problem that looks like a closed-loop control problem. This happens more often than one might think! In fact we're working on a tough one right now.

So this brings me back to the raison d'être for this blog which is to talk about things which will typically not involve rocket science. That should be broad enough to cover me. But I do reserve the right to go full-geek at anytime, so beware.

Happy New Year!


If you're here it's probably because you got our holiday card which pointed you here. I wonder if this is the first recorded use of a bit.ly link in a Christmas card?

Why something so geeky? Well to wish you a happy new year of course, but also so you can add comments!!

Love,

Michel, Heather, Jessica Renée, Danielle, and Lucky
Redwood City, CA