Author: John Cartan, Design Architect - Oracle Applications User Experience
Editor s note: The author attended Oracle OpenWorld at San Francisco's Moscone Center the week of November 11, 2007. This is the second in a series of four reports from the show floor.
For years, user experience mostly meant using a keyboard, a mouse, and a desktop monitor. But we are now on the cusp of significant changes in the way humans and computers interact, changes which will require us to develop new ways of communicating, and new user interface (UI) standards.
Some of these new forms of interaction were on display at Oracle OpenWorld in Intel's Inside Innovation pavilion. I saw and played with small mobile devices, giant touch screens, and virtual realities. I even used a wine bottle as an input device.
Some of the most interesting work was shown by Oracle's own Asia Research and Development in a display called From Grapes to Glass . At this display, Oracle Asia demonstrated how customers in a wine shop could interact with a retail application projected onto a large sheet of glass. By dragging photos of wine bottles, customers could use their fingers to drill into embedded analytics about harvest size and quality over time for each vintage.
Oracle Asia's From Grapes to Glass display
Customers could also pick up a wine bottle and wave it near an RFID scanner to retrieve information about that specific bottle. Customers with commonly-available software could point their cell phone cameras at bar codes on the screen to retrieve detailed data about the wine. And they could provide delivery information for a wine purchase by simply pointing to a location on a projected map.
In another display at the pavilion, I encountered a small mobile device called the Mobile Clinical Assistant, a sturdy, white, plastic console with a built-in handle intended for nurses on the go. Nurses or other medical personnel could use the device to enter patient data with a stylus, scan bar codes, sense RFID and Bluetooth signals, display Web pages, read fingerprints, or take pictures of a wounded foot. I found it interesting that you could enter data into fields using handwriting recognition or scrawl digital ink across and around those same fields.
The Mobile Clinical Assistant
There were a number of touch screens scattered throughout the pavilion, either projected onto ordinary glass (like Oracle Asia s demo) or built around wall-sized flat screen monitors (like the Interactive Smartboard shown below). Colored styli enabled Smartboard users in multiple locations to collaborate on a shared whiteboard. People were gesturing with their fingers to drag and drop images, scrawl over video, and switch and share screenshots from any laptop in range.
Smart Board interactive whiteboard
In many of these new forms of user interaction, there are still a few usability problems to work out. Some interface buttons are too small. Some interactive screens looked great from ten feet away, but became pixelated when viewed closer. I also noticed that dragging in 3D can be disorienting. GE s Healthcare software solved this problem by displaying a cube with letters on each face ( a for anterior, p for posterior, etc.) that rotated along with the brain scan.
All of these forms of user interaction expand on trends that we at Oracle are already pursuing in our enterprise 2.0 applications. The interactions are immediate, fully in context, require less typing, and require little or no training. They are also more information-rich and are often more social and collaborative as well.
As these new mobile devices and flat screens become cheaper and more ubiquitous, they are already generating an explosion of new applications and a growing need for UI standards, guidelines, and design patterns. In my next entry I will discuss what s beyond the next ridge: enterprise virtual realities.
