[Maria:] During our Q and A session
at the June virtual UX conference
an attendee asked Jakob Nielsen,
what the most interesting UX problem is at the moment.
Here's what Jakob had to say.
[Jakob:] The most interesting at the moment,
I think is really remote in various ways, right?
And that's of course caused specifically
by the pandemic, COVID pandemic,
but hope this is gone at some point of time,
even then there'll still be much, much more
remote than there was in the past.
Because now people have seen that it actually works,
and there's no reason to sit in your car for an hour
or sit in the British Rail for an hour
or something like that to get to the office.
You can work from home
and that works quite well for a lot of professions,
including certainly ours
and a lot of other knowledge work.
And so I think it's not just a short term problem
for the next year or two, whatever.
It's really something that will be a big issue
for a long time to come.
And we haven't really designed very well for it.
I think the tools are still pretty primitive.
Also the base technology is of course
also still very, very primitive.
I mean, we were just barely able to do it,
like have videos across the internet.
It's not going out in truly high definition.
And when I say high definition
I don't mean like Blu-ray quality.
I mean at the minimum 4K,
I would really more, say 8K, a 16K,
is the video we would want
because participants in a meeting or a discussion,
to really,
it should look like you're just looking through a window
and the person is actually there.
And for that to happen,
you need at least 60 frames per second,
maybe even 120 frames per second,
at least eight 8K, 16K resolution quality
and those technical things,
which is not our field
to invent that or to draw all those fiber cables
out to the Orkney Islands, the most remote place.
But I mean, that's what we actually need.
And then, and which then becomes more our area
is well, how do we then design interfaces
to support various types of remote collaboration
to remote work,
and also not just collaboration,
but also various types of enjoyment,
various types of culture and education,
and so forth and so forth.
So there's a variety of things, right?
Because if you've read any of these kind of discussions
about, is this gonna be a longterm trend
for people to be remote and not go to the office?
So one thing that some people often say is, "Yeah,"
but you really want to live in London
or some other place
where you have the Opera House and you have the many pubs
and you have the various many, many, many things.
And they're not gonna go on and live out
in the Orkney Islands,
even though they have beautiful nature I'm sure.
But so you need to have ways of having
and offering that kind of richness.
And that is a difficult thing.
I mean, sure you have a lot of streaming video
and you can watch exactly the same movies
and YouTube clips and everything,
whether you are in London, or you are in the Orkney Islands,
it's gonna be the same,
but we need to go much beyond that.
So actually during this current crisis,
the Metropolitan Opera in New York
had made,
it was a fundraising event,
but they made a very nice kind of remote event
where they had both their chorus
and they had their orchestra kind of,
they were each sitting in their own apartments,
but they were still kind of playing together
and singing together and they also had various opera stars,
beam in from Moscow and all these places.
So, that was a very, I thought,
a very interesting event that they pulled off.
And that was of course just the first experiment
in doing this.
But those are some of the things we need to work on.
How can we make the remote experience,
fuller and more productive,
for work more productive,
and more enjoyable for our private lives.
And that's a long research agenda, development agenda,
that's gonna be many, many years,
but even the short term,
I think that we can definitely
improve over what we're seeing now.