Agnieska Walorska: Anticipatory experiences

Agnieska Walorska was talking about from responsive to anticipatory at Mobilism, these are my notes from her talk.

The first gen iPhone was like a BlackBerry that was hard to type on, however, it did have a lot of sensors.

2013 was the year of responsive web design. Responsive means that it responds or reacts to something - its passive, not active. Anticipatory design takes into account the past, present and future of the interaction.

Connected devices throughout your life - house, car, wearables - will learn how you interact and will predict what you will need. Articfical intelligence is getting smarter and faster. IBM's Watson passed the Turing test and won Jeopardy. The iPhone 6 has more processing power than Deep Blue.

Mobile, social, data, sensors and location drive this. Technology is not just a productivity tool, it's about living. Mobile isn't about phones any more, it's also wearables too. Even digestables. The data generated by this is enormous, 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years.

The future is now. The only question is how far we will take it and how fast.

Anticipatory experiences

User experience design that thinks along with the user and predicts what the user will want. Like a best friend. Context is key to these, it's hard for systems to interpret things in the correct context - the meaning of the same words can be completely inverted based on context.

Google Now tries to anticipate things, knows where you are and where you need to be so will tell you when to leave.

Anticipatory shipping sends items to logistic centres based on where they think it will be needed most. (Similar to just in time delivery/stock management for production lines.)

The consequences need to be thought out. For example Target knew someone was pregnant before they did based on their shopping patterns. Need to avoid the uncanny valley. A great anticipatory experience is a local maximum between the troughs of: "how the hell did you know this!" & "that's not what I wanted." Need to be efficient without going into remote control.

Relevant but not uncanny; assistance but not patronising; friend not a stalker; satisfaction not frustration.

Getting it wrong is noticed much more than getting it right.