this is totally gonna work…

This week I tripped across Edward Tufte’s review of the iPhone interface. His focus in the video, as it is in his workshops and books, is on data density and high resolution. In short, when you have a high resolution surface, you should take advantage of it by providing high data density.

In this vein, I had a small epiphany yesterday around this very feature of the iPhone. I had a paired-programming interview with a candidate yesterday who needed ‘net access. At work, we have a public access-point for this very situation. However to get on the network requires credentials which were posted on the wall in a different room. So I walked over to the other meeting room and tried to take a mental snapshot of the information that was posted on the wall. Uh-oh, the password was all in l33t-speak and I was not going to be able to retain that in my short-term buffer on the walk back to the other room.

So I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket to write the SSID and password down. But then I thought to myself, “Wait a sec. Why go through that many layers of translation?” What I really wanted was to take the paper off the wall and back to the other room, but then I’d have to carefully pull the tape off the wall and then remember to put the paper back. Yuck. Too much effort.

So I took a picture. That’s it. So simple. The most direct translation of the information from one location to another. I snapped the photo, made the twenty-foot journey back to the interview room and just laid the phone down on the table. The interviewee was able to easily read the words off of the iPhones high-res screen and we were off and running.

Perhaps this is an indictment of the poor quality of your typical embedded camera. Perhaps it’s an indictment of our low expectations of that technology. We’ve simply come to expect crappy photos that, at best, outline an image but could never actually provide any detail. This was different. You could actually read the words clearly. It was such a simple thing to transport that information with a picture, but powerful all the same.

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