Exploring Tablet Interfaces

In 2010 and 2011 there will be a device explosion in the Tablet space. We can expect to see a wide variety of new devices ranging from 5 to 12 inches on operative systems such as MeeGo, Android and Windows 7. What kind of user experiences will these devices offer? How do you design astonishing tablet interfaces?

On one hand we have companies that scale phone UIs to tablets. On the other hand we have companies offering the full blown desktop experience scaled down to tablet size. We believe that both of these approaches will result in crippled user experiences. For example, the tablet form factor is perfect for media consumption and this could be manifested in the UI. TAT recognizes tablets as a radically different type of device - personal and mobile yet powerful and creative. We are now on a quest to design fantastic UIs that are optimized for this device space.




Follow the link to check out Velvet - a playful concept UI for MeeGo tablets by TAT and Wind River. With full support for 3D graphics and shaders, TAT Cascades enables astonishing UIs on MeeGo, Android and other tablet OSs.

TAT makes business apps useful on Android

Making a complex desktop internet application useful on a mobile phone is not easy.

QlikView knows this and have turned to TAT for the design and technology expertise required to meet their high demands on usefulness when mobilizing their popular business intelligence application QlikView. The Android version will be their first implementation using TAT Cascades, and it seems QlikView may in turn be the first ever business intelligence application to launch on Android.



Using TAT Cascades on top of Android makes it possible to implement an application design that does not compromise, neither on QlikView’s brand values nor on the application functionality or usefulness. And after implementation on Android, scaling to other operating systems or form factors is made easy by the functionality provided in TAT Cascades.

Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you

Desktop widgets have reached hundreds of millions of users in recent years - OS X Dashboard, Windows Gadgets, Yahoo Widgets and tons of web widgets have all helped the uptake of lightweight, single purpose applications that run in a limited screen estate.

The mobile space has - as many times before - been inspired by the desktop and a number of widget standards are out there; JIL, W3C, Android to name a few.

From a design point of view, widgets are often fun to create. They should do one thing very well, compared to full blown apps that have tons of edge cases that take months to design and specify. Designing a widget is a perfect mobile interaction design 101 task, a bit like when architecture students design a chair during their first semester.

So how come there are so many badly designed widgets out there?

Consider the OS X Dashboard weather widget. It looks great and tells you the weather right now, but most people are able to look out the window to see if it's sunny. Sure, knowing the outside temperature in the morning helps you decide what to wear, but should it cover a majority of the widget area?

Wouldn't it be wiser to spend more on the upcoming weather and less on the current weather? You can expand the OS X widget to show the upcoming weather as well, but it’s still using half the widget area to show the current conditions. And that’s still using numbers instead of graphics ot show the temperatures.

Doesn’t Apple know that an analogue (bars) representation rather than a digital one (digits) makes it easier to compare temperature between days?

In a mobile context, spending a lot of screen estate on the current weather is even worse because
a) Screens are small and every pixel counts

You’re more likely to be outside and thus don’t need a widget to tell you it’s too cold

We really love what HTC has done with Hero and their awesome Sense UI. The visual design is flawless and they have really taken Android beyond vanilla. But still, we never use the weather widgets. The small one doesn’t show any forecast, and the big one steals too much space.

We are currently in the midst of designing a suite of Android widgets and have put some thought into the ultimate weather widget, that according to us should:


• Emphasize upcoming weather rather than current
• Offer short term forecasts at a glance (should I bring an umbrella today?)
• Offer long term forecasts with minimum effort (what's the best day this week to go mountainbiking?)
• Stay compact unless specifically interacted with
• Be beautiful and give an aha/wow/smile

Here’s what we came up with:

A compact mode that shows the current and upcoming weather with the same priority. Temperature is color coded to give information at a glance:

An extended mode that shows the weather with a bar representation so that you can easily see how it’s going to vary the following days:

How do you get between these modes?

The widget is 3D so you can swipe to rotate between the modes.For some extra love we’ve added physics, making it even more playful:

Another thing we’re experimenting with is more exotic input methods. Here you blow into the microphone to switch from temperature to wind information:

How to build a coverflow on Android in just 5 minutes

Using TAT Cascades for Android, Fredrik Berglund shows how easy it is to build an attractive coverflow UI on Android in just five minutes, and have it running on a device.


NOTE: Programming section is five minutes, but fast forwarded to 3 minutes

With TAT Cascades for Android and TAT Motion Lab, Fredrik has a really flexible toolset that allows him to check performance directly on target, change design direction at anytime and create a prototype that shows a UI concept with great performance. Working with TAT Cascades makes it possible to actually sketch on device.

Why create a concept movie when you can create a working prototype in the same amount of time?


Did you know this about TAT Cascades for Android?

• TAT Cascades enables the Android framework to be a modern architecture not only to come on par with today's high end UI’s but also to go beyond.

• TAT Cascades provides next generation UI driven approach rather than the programmatic UI in Android

Benefits:
• CTS compliant pre-integration on Android
• Using hardware acceleration to its full extent
• Bleeding-edge user experience, with full support 3D in the UI
• Rapidly scale your Android implementation across other operating systems, such as Windows Mobile, Symbian etc.

Google shows Android

A new fresh video from the west coast and the Google HQs