:: mobiface :: next gen mobile interface thoughts

19 March 2007

Timeline UI

Your life consists of series of events. So can be the interface — a single array of events. Events like calls, photos taken, messages sent and received, applications launched, albums listened, birthdays etc. You can view the events from the past and from the future. As every event is no more important than the other, there’s no hierarchy. Needed information is obtained through filtering and sorting like viewing only calls in timeline (recent calls) or alphabetical order (classic phonebook).

Comments

Interesting - the location of the future is a cultural artifact. In European/American UI, the future would be on the right, rather than on the left as in these sketches.

Ditto the call directions. Outgoing calls would be towards the right, rather than towards the left.

I suspect this is rooted in reading direction - so RTL languages like arabic and hebrew would need the bitmaps and layouts flipped to conform to their cultural bias.

Christian Mogensen | March 19, 2007 12:49 PM

I thought we would explore past events more often than future ones and it’s more “natural” (at least for europe) to browse from left to right. I guess for the same reason to read previous entries on a lot of blogs you have to click the arrow in a lower right corner. But the arrows for call directions are wrong, fixed that.
In any case if the device is symmetric (and includes rotation sensor) and you rotate it 180 degrees you’ll have a vice versa past and future.

Eugeniu Clim | March 20, 2007 06:41 AM

I'm having a little trouble with your web site UI. I don't see the links or images that you guys are looking at.

David Beers | March 20, 2007 07:27 AM

strange. here's a direct link to picture
http://mobiface.com/upload/112l.png

Eugeniu Clim | March 20, 2007 07:31 AM

I can see it in the page source. But for some reason it is being replaced with a 10x10 clear.gif. Happens on all three PCs here. Strangely, a quick web search suggests that my software firewall is blocking access. Here's the strange part: at least one source says this can be caused if the site images are in a directory called "upload" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump/January_2004_archive_1)

You might want to use a different directory in the future. I always thought your site was peculiarly reliant on text for one that was about the user interface! ;-) Now I guess I understand why.

David Beers | March 20, 2007 07:53 AM

Yes interesting one, anyway I feel that no so much informations are displayed in this choosen way (only few events or contacts on a single screen), requiring a lot of scrolling. For an agenda the "coming next" feature is great, but you'll always need a "calendar" view to fill the holes.
I like it a lot for "untriggered" or "unplanned" events/datas like note taking (see this great app www.evernote.com, I'm not affiliated, but I'm a huge fan) that has this exact concept of timeline. Same for phone calls, perhaps messages also (mails, etc) and news through RSS (but after all an RSS reader IS already a time line).
This view for Photos would also be nice (see Adobe Elements or Picasa)
=> so the Timeline seems to be an exellent point of view, but it's perhaps difficult to make a whole UI based on this concept, what do you think?
(this comment is long enough to become a full blog post :-))

Thomas Menguy | March 20, 2007 13:31 PM

No, it's not difficult. Almost everything in current phones is or can be displayed as a timeline. And the timeline is an easy understandable concept comparing to hierarchical menus. So why not make it the main interface element? I also like the fact that such UI becomes like a diary of your life. We just need easy filtering, sorting and adding events controls, but I don’t see any problem here.

Eugeniu Clim | March 20, 2007 16:01 PM

Yes I agree with you: Timeline is an intuitive representation ... but only for a certain type of data and can give a different point of view and representation of a data set.
How will you list available services in a timeline? In your example I think they are in fact represented by the tab panel on the left. So a Timeline based UI is perhaps a cross between a "timeline layout" and a way to choose the content of your time line...yes why not! :-).
But I'm still not sure how it will ease your phone day to day use: it's ok to representation of some data, but how to mix it with data creation?(camera application, entering a new message, etc) and other data ad-hoc representation (like week view in your calendar).
Anyway It's a nice concept! that need to be developed further :-)

Thomas Menguy | March 20, 2007 16:21 PM

Nice concept and well done. For communication and calendar management tasks this works very well. I think that a nice addition would a universal in-box approach. That is, there is one timeline for recent calls, recent txt messages and recent email. The Recent Call list on any phone probably contains the people you interact with the most.

I share Thomas Menguy's interest in whether this concept could be extended to include all of a phone's functionality. For example the third screen shot shows a "Switch to Contact View" item in the scrolling list. How does the user switch back to the time line view from there? Does the phone have two UI paradigms (timeline and conventional) with the user switching between them?

Thank you for sharing this work, it's very interesting.

Patrick G. Curran | March 20, 2007 16:37 PM

Let's say you selected the calls tab. If you press "Switch to Contact View" (the control then changes to "Switch to Timeline View") you'll see a classic phonebook (alphabetical view of contacts). But it's just one idea how the switching between different views could be done.

Eugeniu Clim | March 21, 2007 11:33 AM