Institute For The Future

Interface Overload

 

One key strategy for making feedback more persuasive is to use real-time, contextually appropriate feedback. In other words, don't tell me that, in general, it's a good idea to drink water to improve my health; give me a reminder to drink water when my body is starting to get dehydrated. Which, oddly, is the concept behind a new water bottle highlighted by the excellent Crave blog on cnet. Called i-dration, the bottle uses sensors to track how much water the user is drinking, at what pace, and uses those measurements to dispense advice on how the athlete could improve her water intake. It works as follows:

 

 

 

 

The bottle's sensors monitor not only fluid quantity but also temperature and drinking frequency.

 

The corresponding smartphone app, in turn, uses the phone's built-in accelerometer and gyroscope to measure exercise levels, and then fuses data from a heart-rate chest band with pre-entered details (i.e. height, age, weight) to assess the user's hydration levels. If it determines the user is dehydrated, the i-dration bottle flashes a blue light.

 

"We believe that in the next 12 to 18 months we will see a plethora of new dedicated 'hardware apps'--such as the i-dration drinks bottle--that will work in tandem with a smartphone to enhance a range of consumer products and services," says Rachel Harker of Cambridge Consultants in a news release. "Inexpensive wireless hardware apps have the potential to increase the versatility of smartphones."

 

 

 

 

And, in fact, this blending of pedestrian objects and high-tech computing power does seem to be popping up everywhere--and not just products that work in concert with smart phones. Just scrolling through the Crave blog on cnet from the past couple of months, I encountered a pen that measures stress levels to provide real-time feedback on how to manage stress. Another initiative involves a type of toothpaste that changes its taste based on the weather forecast. According to Crave, it works as follows:

 

 

 

In this case, toothpaste is modified to dispense one of three flavors depending on the weather. If it's mint, you know it's colder out than yesterday. Cinnamon means it's hotter. Blue stripes indicate... precipitation.

 

The prototype is currently hooked up to a small Linux computer that pulls forecasts, using custom software to compare previous and current temperatures and divvy up the flavors.

 

Then, linear actuators squeeze out the proper variety of toothpaste through a heavily modded Mentadent dispenser.

 

Eventually, the technology could be pared down so "Tastes Like Rain" shows up on store shelves alongside the Colgate and Crest. Minus the computer, Carr hints it could be powered on a low-cell battery.

 

 

 

 

It's this last invention that struck me as simultaneously amazing and a tad absurd. It is, to be sure, pretty incredible to imagine that in the next decade, consumer goods could change their flavor or smell to help a person figure out whether to wear a sweater or a heavy coat. But do we really need that sort of guidance? Can't a person just look out the window to understand the weather?

 

But even if the individual taste changing toothpaste seems handy, the idea of having lots and lots of real-time feedback from self-adjusting products seems a bit overwhelming. Some things are valuable precisely because we don't notice them, or because they're so familiar that we can use them without thinking about it.

 

In this sense, I think one of the key design questions that many consumer goods companies will face in the next decade is to understand what sort of feedback makes sense to integrate into their products. In other words, flavor changing toothpaste may be an amazing concept that also happens to be a really bad idea.