SensoryMetrics

I’ve long been a fan of the quadrant as a navigation scheme: take all your “stuff” and divide it into four piles. Each quadrant can have a specific theme that allows the optimal organization of that stuff. Let’s take a standard contact (phone, email, IM etc) application – I might choose to assign all my work related contacts to one quadrant. I’ll then customize that quadrant to have certain behaviors – like organizing the information in a hierarchy similar to the corporate org chart. I could use a different quadrant to organize family contacts – organized in clusters – (or clans, depending on how your family sees itself…) The magic of quadrants is the use of screen real estate to help organize and access information. This approach lends itself especially well to products with small displays – mobile phones and PDAs. Another benefit is that the user doesn’t have to assign characteristics to every individual contact (or data element)… Simply by assigning a contact to a particular cluster, the communication events of that contact assumes the behavior of the overall quadrant. Hassle-free communication management!

This is an idea that Jobe and I investigated and prototyped a few years ago. Some of the details of the idea are buried in US Patent # 6,738,809 – Network presence indicator for communications management.

Unfortunately for the UI to be usable on a mobile device, it requires an apprropriate physical input mechanism – such as the Touc Strip described in an earlier post.

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