Google have recently published some interesting research into how people are increasingly “multi-screening” – that is, using more than one device to be able to complete particular tasks and activities.
Some headlines:
– 90% of all media interactions are now screen-based
– on average “we” (the survey was of US folk in LA, Austin and Boston) spend 4.4 hours of leisure time in front of screens
– time is spent split between Smartphones, Tablets, PCs and TVs
– the average time per interaction goes up as the screen gets bigger (smartphone -17 minutes; tablet – 30 minutes; PCs – 39 minutes; TV – 43 minutes)
Putting aside the interesting paradox that it appears we “interact” for longest with the least interactive device we have (the TV), the thing above everything else that comes home for me in all of this is that we are splitting our time between devices, and so the management of “state” – that is, the where we are at and what we are doing in any particular app – across devices and platforms is going to become something that has the potential to differentiate services in the future.
What do I mean? Well let’s take a fictional example…
You are on the train home. You’re idling away the time looking for somewhere to go on holiday. Searching the internet you find a potential destination, and then you go into a travel booking app to investigate further. You find a few potential flights, and a few potential places to stay, and note them for investigation later. You arrive at your home station, put your phone into your pocket, and then walk home.
Once at home, you start to prepare dinner, and flick on a tablet computer. You start the travel booking app, and your potential lodgings are there, and with the bigger screen you are better able to look at photos of the facilities, and also explore maps of the surrounding areas. You make your final selection, but hold off booking until you have had a chance to look at flight prices in more detail.
After dinner, you have some work to catch up on, so open up your laptop. In the good solid tradition of diverting one’s attention away from the work you should be doing, you go to the website of the travel agents whose app you were using later. You can see the hotel that you selected earlier, and can now bring up details of potential flights; selecting the best priced flights you can find, you book both travel and accommodation.
For transactional services like travel agents, it’s quite common to be able to have a flow of activity like this. As I flit between devices and apps and websites, though, I’m getting increasingly frustrated when I find that state and activity isn’t being managed across those devices and service. The Guardian is a case in point: I love their journalism, I think their website is great, and their Windows Phone and Android apps are both fantastic to use. The fact that none of them remember my preferences, though, is simply annoying. I have to duplicate my settings manually across my two phones, my tablet and my use of the website. I put up with the annoyance because the content is worth enough to me, but in other cases I might not be as forgiving.
I think that we are probably only just starting to scratch the surface of the way in which people will use different devices and services at different times and in different locations to do things using technology. I’m fairly certain that being able to get underlying services to be able to have a memory of activity that is independent of how it’s being accessed is going to be crucial to providing a great service in the future.
mmitII 