ENTREVUE – Aza Raskin est le fils du créateur du Mac, Jeff Raskin, qui a passé sa vie à militer pour l’humanisation des interfaces (notamment dans son livre The Humane Interface).

Tel père, tel fils. Aza poursuit son oeuvre avec brio au sein du Raskin Center et de sa compagnie Humanized, basée à Chicago. Je l’ai rencontré à South by Southwest en mars, alors qu’il présentait son concept d’interface « desktop-killer », le Zoom (voir le démo en Flash ici / voir mes explications dans cet autre post).

Nous avons eu la conversation suivante au téléphone la semaine dernière, dans le cadre de mes recherches sur l’inutile complexité des cellulaires.

Every time I borrow a phone I don’t know from a friend, it can take me several minutes to understand where I have to enter the phone number. Why are cell phone interfaces still so complex in 2007?

The problem of innovation in the field is due to the politics of design. I did some work with a manufacturer doing a new cell phone, and you have 6 months to prototype and get the product out to market, which doesn’t give you too much time. And they often have to bow to service providers. We get this thing called feature-creep, with lots of functions most people don’t even use or know exist. It’s a big part of why it’s the way it is.

How could we fix cell phones once and for all?

There are two routes to go. There is a huge field entirely untapped to make a really simple phone. I’m thinking of a phone I’ve got hired to develop : I first pitched the idea of a phone with huge text, a phone book, a big screen, and that’s it. Something so simple that anybody can use it. A slider interface, you just pick it up and go. They didn’t like it at all. They didn’t think it would sell.

If you look at the elderly or people who just need a phone, I think there’s a huge market unexplored, which is a nice counterpoint to horribly complex phones that exist just now. The phones are becoming full of functionalities and complex interfaces.

Where do you think cell phones should go in the future? We don’t want to sacrifice functionality to simplicity. How could we find the balance?

There’s work to be done on the interface. Pointing anything on the phone is really difficult; touch screens disrupts the screen and don’t work very well. If you take the Zoom concept, it can be the size of a cell phone and it works. It could be associated with gaze tracking technologies. You can just say to a person, that’s where you need to go, and the rest is self-explanatory.

Did you create the Zoom interface?

I’d like to say I came up with it, but actually it’s a concept that’s been around for a long time. My father talked a little bit about it in its book, and other people.

Are phone manufacturers open to the idea?

The people who make the cell phones really like adding features, which really complicate the whole interface. The problem is that they started by compressing the window of a computer, taking the same paradigm into the small screen of a cell phone when there’s much better ways to do.

I’ve tried to propose the Zoom paradigm, but it has a lot of difficulties because it’s different. It’s hard to convince phone coimpanies to do something radically different, because they’re afraid there’s no market for easier-to-use phones, as opposed to phones with mp3, cameras and so on. I think more is less. Make it enjoyable to use first, because that’s what captures people imagination and loyalty.

Where are these gaze-tracking technologies you mentioned?

Gaze-catching tools don’t exist yet for phones but they could exist right now in the form of little cameras that can track your eyes. They’re like thousands of dollars but some people are trying to break it down.

Are these tools going to be reliable? Or will they end up like predictive text and speech recognition?

The first person who’s gonna make that technology reliable, that’s where you should invest your money. It’s not there yet but it’s technically feasible. It’s gonna be a huge thing when it’s ready. I guess it’s gonna come first on videogames, where you won’t even have to use a controller anymore. You’ll just look. I got to play with a gaze tracker associated to the Zoom concept when I was in Denmark, and I never felt anything better.

I think there are two major problems with cell phones: one is typing (entering text is difficult, keyboard is too small, predictive text is horrible), and the second problem is moving around. I’m looking forward for the solution to that. There is currently and analog device that is waiting to be used on every cell phone, and that’s the camera. Imagine that you move around Google Maps by moving your camera up or down.

I think in the short term future navigation around the web is gonna be easier by simply moving the phone. Imagine if the phone was like a Nintendo Wii controller. If you move your phone up, you essentially move the screen with you. The camera could be used to track movement.

It could be another tool than the camera; how you do it doesn’t really matter as much as the importance of having this kind of technology around to help with the small screen / small buttons problem. When you solve those two problems of typing and moving around, cells are gonna be a lot nicer to use.