Arthur C. Clarke predicts that we will be able to work efficiently from anywhere. Basically predicting our mobile internet. I’m sure it sounded absurd back then. Now it’s just part of everyday life.

Here is a nice BBC video on Steve Jobs the visionary. It makes a great point about Apple not inventing devices but they did focus on making devices easier to use and increased the quality of the experience through well crafted design.

All my Web design projects are tested on mobile devices and clients now ask for iPad compatibility regularly. We’ve seen rapid acceptance of mobile tablet design in our corporate clients where technology changes typically trailed 5 to 8 years. Even a year ago I had a client require Internet Explorer 6 compatibility because it’s what they all had to use internally. Today they are all iPad users and talk of IE is long gone.

The biggest change I see in designing for the Internet since this move to mobile devices is it’s usage. We use the internet differently depending on where we are. When we design interfaces the first thing we figure out is what do users want from the site and how are they going to use it to get what they want. It’s what sets the basic goal for knowing if the design is effective. This is more difficult now since you have to imagine users not just in front of a desktop or in a coffee shop on a laptop but also on a phone in a busy store or on an iPad in a sales meeting.

Hardware difference between desktop and mobile make the designers task more difficult. For instance almost all smart phones have GPS and cameras built in where desktops sometimes have cameras and no GPS. There are so many more differences between hardware that I don’t have time to list them. All these options and differences in delivery cause us to shape our designs differently than if the final hardware platform was just different sizes of monitors or what browser they have installed.

The future will probably continue to be more complex and design will be forced to be hardware specific unless some kind of common hardware standard is set and followed.

I am curious to see how users react to Augmented Reality and if it takes off. I think it’s going to have to find it’s niche application for normal users to become attached to receiving informaition in this manner. My testing using AR browsers and applications feels like we still have some hardware and software advancments before we see a truely amazing AR experience.

I’m going to be posting all visions of the future videos that I find.

Old or new they are worth watching and will be available here for inspiration.

For more info you might want to check out Microsofts Office Labs site.

Online media, interfaces, technologies, software, hardware and inventive thinking inspire me to believe in the impact that I can have on the future of the internet. I’m tasked daily with helping businesses to live, work and play in non-physical space. That space has constant technological evolution and innovation is a must for survival. I view the team I work with as a great collection of thinkers and producers. Innovation must be imagined and executed to have and real impact.

My hope for this site is to help foster change through sparking ideas for innovation and being a reference for those creating the always changing future of the internet.

Thank you,

Alex Ogle