Static touchscreens can be compared on dimensions like pixel density, screen size, or refresh rate, but no such vocabulary exists for shape-changing devices, Roudaut said. One of the goals of the Morphees project was to create metrics to describe flexible devices and their ability to change shape. Having these “shape resolution” descriptors will help the construction of devices to fit the services they are designed to support. Roudaut cites the example of a stress ball: downloading the app would cause the device to collapse into a sphere that the user could squeeze.

Right now, the Morphee prototypes need external help to change shape, like wires, springs, and actuators, but in the future, the flexible material, touch sensor, and actuator will be merged. “All the layers will be made of flexible material,” says Roudaut. “My work is to make that happen faster, with new prototypes, and pushing the vision so companies [become] interested in making higher fidelity devices.”

Roudaut and colleagues experimented with six different Morphees — made of materials like wood, dielectric electroactive polymers, and smart memory alloys — and measured their shape resolution along dimensions like speed (how fast can it deform) and ability to curve. They wanted to get a sense of what kinds of materials are functional — and safe. “The electroactive polymer requires a huge voltage. We had to figure out how to use it without electrocuting ourselves,” says Roudaut.

A tiled touchscreen made of wood and smart memory alloy wires (above) seemed the most promising of the prototypes. It was able to hold its shape and could quickly curve. Another prototype using a two millimeter-thick E-ink display could roll into a cylinder, but could achieve greater flexibility if it was even thinner, according to Roudaut.

These concepts are already being brought to life by companies like Fremont, Calif.-based Tactus. Its shape-changing display layer takes the place of the front glass on a smartphone and creates a physical keyboard with inflatable buttons that can appear and recede. The challenges in this space, according to Roudaut, remain finding suitably heat-resistant materials that can create sufficient force – after all, having your stress ball phone crumble when you squeeze it would be decidedly stress-inducing.

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Clickable mockups

Most teams think they need to build an interface that functions and looks real before showing it to customers to get feedback. Nope. It turns out that if you string together a few simple mockups with clickable hot-spots, you can still get great feedback in a fraction of the time. We’ve done this with companies like HomeAway, AVOS, and Duo Security by designing a few screens in a flow and then building a clickable version, using basic consumer software tools like InVision or Apple’s Keynote.

At first I thought these prototypes would be too rough to be useful. But time after time I’ve seen customers engage with click-throughs like they’re real products, and that helps you learn if the designs are working. It’s a great method to use before engineering starts to build a design.

Customer interviews

Instead of working in a vacuum, gather data to use as fuel for designing your product. Specifically, go out and find the people you think will use your product and talk with them about the problem(s) you’re aiming to solve. I know you’ve heard this a hundred times. Customer interviews are like flossing — everyone agrees it’s good for you, but it’s hard to build the habit.

It’s easy to get hung up on the details: How do you find people who will talk with you? What do you talk about? Relax. User researchers have been doing this stuff for decades, and there’s a wealth of knowledge about how to do it quickly and accurately. For starters, you can write a short survey called a screener to help you recruit the right people to talk to. Then, create an interview script to help guide the conversation.

If you want to know more, we created a research guide with plenty of tactical tips for finding and interviewing customers. Now you have no excuse. Get out of the building! (Then come back — there’s more good stuff below.)

Fake doors

You can quickly see whether customers will engage with a new feature by launching just the first part of it. We did this with CustomMade, a startup that lets people order custom-built products. Our idea was to let visitors save others’ projects for inspiration. But instead of laboriously building the whole feature, we just launched the first button. When we observed a huge number of visitors clicking the button to access that function, we knew we were onto something and built the rest of the feature. After a few changes like that, we saw a 3x increase in engagement. For more on fake doors, see Jess Lee’s excellent talk.

Recon

When teams design a new product, they come to the table with all sorts of assumptions about the competition. It’s easy to look at another product and have an opinion about which parts are valuable and which parts are broken. But if you guess wrong, you might just copy a bunch of functionality that your customers don’t actually need.

So we like to think of competing products as free prototypes. We watch customers use these products and learn very quickly which features are loved, unusable, ignored, or hated. With this knowledge, we can make better decisions in product design, marketing, and sales.

Micro-surveys

Surveys are a tempting way to learn from the comfort and safety of your office chair. But designing a good survey is surprisingly tough. Whenever I talk with survey scientists, I’m overwhelmed by all the ways you can screw up a survey design and unknowingly get bad (read: useless) data. So when we run surveys, we stick to a pattern we know works well.

We put the survey as close as possible to the behavior we’re trying to study. For instance, if we’re interested in why a customer picked one of our pricing plans, we’ll ask them with a small pop-up survey in the moment, not an email that might get read days later.

And we rely on open-response questions that let us hear directly from customers. You’ll learn more from reading 100 short responses than knowing that 32 percent of users chose option B in your survey. Here’s more on micro-surveys.

Prototype with real data

Clickable mockups are a good first step, but you can learn even more when you build a prototype that integrates real data. You might be tempted to start building the actual product at this point. You might even call that work-in-progress a prototype. But it’s not. Building a real product always takes longer than you think. If you really want to learn fast, build a true prototype – one that you’re not afraid to throw away.

When we were designing coupon pages with RetailMeNot, we needed real coupon data in order to evaluate our designs. So we built a prototype in two days. It was buggy and didn’t have many features, but it was just enough to get useful feedback from customers. And it was good we did, because it turned out that half our ideas weren’t working.

We iterated three more times, building prototypes and showing to customers, and were able to get to a design that improved both usability and click-through rates. Few startups build true prototypes, but it’s an immensely useful way to learn fast.

Site visits

Go to wherever your customers are, and watch them actually use your product. I know that sounds like common sense (or it should). But it’s too easy to think we know our customers from all the meetings, phone calls, and reports we’ve read about them. To deeply understand how people actually use our products we need to go to where they work, where they play, and where they live.

Recently, we were working with Foundation Medicine to improve their clinical cancer genomics reports. So we decided to visit oncology centers, watch how doctors used the reports, and see what we could learn. We were surprised to discover that the reports we’d worked so hard to design were often received by fax. Tiny text was hard to read and all color information was lost. It was an easy problem to fix, but we only noticed it through a site visit.

Being a lean startup means that we should first consider all these ways to learn, and then pick the fastest, cheapest method. I’ve listed seven methods that we’ve found work well at startups, but there are plenty more out there. Once you start looking, you’ll be surprised at the variety of ways you can learn incredibly fast, saving you and your team precious time and money (and heartache).

Braden Kowitz leads Google Ventures Design Studio. Follow him on Twitter@kowitz or through his team’s blog Design Staff.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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You may also know that Apple has asked for its return, which Gizmodo (and many others, myself included) are taking as evidence confirming that it is indeed the next iPhone. The story of how it was lost reads like something out of a movie in the Gizmodo account, even though many of us drunkenly lose our phones everyday and it obviously isn’t that dramatic of an experience.

Then again, we aren’t losing the prototype of a highly coveted device built by an incredibly secretive company. Which brings me to my next point. Is anyone buying that this guy (Gary Powell, an iPhone engineer working on the Baseband technology) actually just got drunk and forgot the thing on his bar stool?

I’m not an engineer working for Apple, and my phone is just a widely available 3GS and not the yet-to-be-released iPhone 4 or whatever it’ll be called, but that phone is also the last thing I’m likely to misplace. I’d sooner lose my wallet or my keys, in fact. But if it’s a plant, why go to such lengths to engineer a simple leak?

I think it may be as simple as the ante-upping nature of Apple’s hype machine. After the year or more lead up to the iPad’s unveiling, including photographic and video leaks, first-hand accounts from all kinds of sources, and the will-they or won’t-they ballet that went on for months and months, building a good head of buzz up around the next iPhone in the time remaining would be rather challenging using Apple’s conventional tactics. Many eyes are stuck firmly on the iPad and what’s next for it, and won’t be distracted by the usual grainy photographs.

A hands-on exclusive that conveniently makes its way to one of the most prominent and widely-read tech blogs operating on the web today is definitely one way to wrest the spotlight away from the iPad and back onto the iPhone, where Apple needs consumer attention to be come June. It may seem elaborate, but when you consider the cost of such a plan versus a widespread marketing campaign, and that Apple’s secretive-chocolate-factory reputation remains intact, it starts to seem very reasonable indeed.

Whatever the case, it looks like we know what the next iPhone will have in store. Here’s a quick rundown of the highlights in case you missed them:

• Front-facing camera (almost certainly for video chat)
• Separate volume buttons
• Micro-SIM (like the iPad)
• Better back camera and camera flash
• Aluminum border with metallic buttons
• Optical glass or ceramic back for improved signal reception
• Slightly smaller, higher resolution screen
• Secondary mic for noise cancellation
• 16 percent larger battery

Gizmodo tore the phone down, too, and found out that the internals are all Apple production parts, which makes it incredibly unlikely that this isn’t the real thing. It remains to be seen whether or not the final production units that ship this summer will look exactly like this, but I think it’s safe to say we’ll see something pretty darn close.

The best part of the new design in my opinion? Not the industrial styling that brings it more in line with the current iMac and MacBook offerings, though that’s pretty awesome. No, it’s all the phone-oriented improvements Apple seems to be making. I’d never trade my iPhone in for anything, but I have to say that it hasn’t been the greatest cell phone I’ve ever had, in terms of strict telecommunications functions.

The new back for improved signal transmission, the second, noise-canceling mic, the larger battery and the front facing camera all point to this being the best iPhone yet for actual real-time communication, which is definitely something worth getting excited about.

That evidence takes multiple forms, the first being photographic proof an Engadget editor spotted in a much earlier, and much more reliable image. The picture in question was the one that surfaced just prior to the unveiling of the iPad, which seemed to show that device in a protective or pre-production case. It ended up being an accurate representation of what the iPad would look like, leading many to believe the photo came from inside Apple’s hardware testing labs.

The photo not only shows the pre-release iPad, the editor noted, but also a device which looks exactly like the supposed prototype iPhone 4G that was supposedly just a Japanese knock-off. Without context, the device in the image could be anything, but in light of the new photos, it seems a pretty strong indicator that at least some of Apple’s iPhone 4G designs resemble the new, boxier style found in the latest pictures.

Engadget has also received word from a source (who remains nameless, as per usual), that it is indeed the next iteration of the iPhone, and that the device will boast a number of improvements, from a higher resolution screen and camera with flash, to a front-facing camera and a shift to the new MicroSIM card standard Apple is using with the 3G version of the iPad.

On top of that, Chinese site WeiPhone recently posted a new series of images that purport to be the insides of the newest iPhone incarnation. The images definitely agree with what is known about the next iPhone, and even included the flat side bezel we’ve seen in the photos leaked last week.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new prototype Engadget’s found is the reported glass backing for the device. John Gruber of Daring Fireball thinks this is in fact true, since he’s not only heard it from multiple sources, but he’s also dug up a patent application for high-durability ceramic enclosures that would avoid the pitfalls of having an all-glass device, while allowing for unprecedented radio signal transparency. That would go a long way to resolving some of the signal issues many iPhone owners complain about.

If these rumors are true, the iPhone is shaping up to be much more than an incremental improvement on the previous version. In fact, I’m getting much more excited about the iPhone 4G than I am about the iPad, which, thanks to delays internationally and at home, I may never get my hands on anyway.

Well, it has been almost nine years since Apple got into the retail store game and with Microsoft blatantly copying Apple with their recent move into retail, it’s time for a change. As last week drew to a close, clues emerged suggesting Apple is looking to reinvent its retail store design, and once again it’s developing a prototype. This time, however, it’s not tucked away in an aircraft hangar at Area 51, but can be found at 340 University Ave, Palo Alto.

On Friday SiliconValley.com reported:

[Apple] will build an Apple Store that project developers referred to in planning documents as “a new prototype for the company.” The facade will be entirely transparent at ground level, vast skylights will flood the store with natural light, and trees will grow inside, fed by the sunlight from above.

It sounds so beautiful. Quite unlike the building that currently stands at 340 University Avenue;

Not much to look at now, but, give it time... Image from Google Maps

According to the report the architectural review board voted unanimously to approve the plans which, although referred to as a “renovation,” include completely demolishing the facade and roof of the building. It seems the structure has been altered so many times in recent years it doesn’t qualify for historic protection.

The plans credit architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson — the same firm behind Apple’s iconic Fifth Avenue store in New York, whose entrance resembles a giant transparent-cube. SiliconValley.com’s Will Oremus says several sources have told him Apple is behind the project, while Alexander Lew, chair of the arhitectural review board, said:

Apple is pretty secretive… But at the same time, when you look at it, the design is pretty unique. …I think a lot of people have kind of guessed.

The whole design is inside-outside, with everything completely exposed. With the huge skylight, there’s going to be lots of daylight and it will feel more like an atrium inside. … We’re excited about the project.

Naturally, Apple declined to comment on the plans. Shocker, eh? Thankfully, the proposal includes some tantalising descriptive prose detailing the vision for the new store, the beginning of which should sound familiar to anyone who has ever visited an Apple store.

The proposed store is a new prototype for the applicant. Fully half the function of the store serves to provide education and service to business as well as customer patrons in addition to product sales. The store is a commons for the applicant’s community to gather.

[The all-glass store front] dissolves the boundary that traditional store facades create. By not breaking the horizontal ground plane of the sidewalk with opaque wall or landscape element, for example, the street is made part of the store’s interior; the pedestrian is in the store before entering it.

Of course, we don’t know absolutely for sure if Apple is responsible; I suppose this could be Microsoft’s doing. And while we’re at it, Apple’s much-rumoured-tablet might run Windows 7 and feature a hardware keyboard and built-in fax machine.

I’m trying to imagine what makes this “prototype” so special and new. Aside from the interesting aesthetics (Apple does like its glass-walled cathedrals) what will make this store different?

The NYC Upper West Side store has been likened to a Cathedral. Image by Apple, Inc

Are we talking the tried-and-trusted Scandinavian furniture we see today in all other Apple stores, or will we be treated to a complete overhaul? Touch-enabled surfaces everywhere? More room dedicated to iPods and iPhones? A new Tablet Bar?

I’m holding out for a luxurious coffee bar in every Apple Store 2.0. If it did that, I could practically live in my local Apple Store. What would you change in yours? Share your ideas, and coffee-cravings, in the comments below.

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Now they’re at it again, according to leaked prototype designs published yesterday by Gizmodo. The plans describe a machine codenamed Courier, a remarkable concept device that sports dual seven inch gatefold screens, touch-input and stylus-input support, wireless capabilities and a whole lot of awesome to boot.

Gizmodo say it’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet. They add that it started life as a skunkworks project few in Microsoft even knew about, but is now “…a real device, and we’ve heard that it’s in the ‘late prototype’ stage of development.”

Right now everyone is working on a tablet device of one kind or another. The horribly-named and equally-horribly-styled JournE Touch prototype was recently showcased by Toshiba; Arrington’s been talking-up the CrunchPad for what seems like forever, and as we all know, Apple is perhaps maybe possibly (absolutely definitely) working on its very own MacTab.

Poor old Microsoft must feel a little like “Woah! Dude! Didn’t we do this already?”

Despite the ambivalence of consumers, Bill Gates was always dedicated to the Tablet concept, and, I gotta admit, so was I. In 2003 I got my hands on my first very own teeny-tiny Acer hybrid Tablet PC. It was great. A ten inch screen with two pens, digital ink technology, wireless connectivity and — at least for the first few months anyway — decent battery life. There was no internal optical drive but it really didn’t matter, I didn’t miss it (and, as it turns out, getting along without an optical drive was early training for living with my MacBook Air!).

Sadly, the poor little Tablet PC was painfully underpowered. Even with a gigabyte of memory (which, for the time, was an awful lot of RAM for a notebook device!) it was glacier slow. Also, I was constantly worried that the hand-held, ultra-mobile nature of the device would be bad news for its 2.5 inch traditional spinning-plate hard drive; after all, solid state discs were but a rich madman’s dream back then. (As it happens, it did eventually spell doom for the HDD which bravely clung to life until 2006 when it finally clicked its last.)

Fundamentally, Microsoft was right about its vision for tablet computing, but — predictably — got the execution all wrong. For a software publisher famous for developing new platforms at the drop of a hat (I’m still struggling to understand Azure) the boys and girls in Redmond made the bewildering decision to use a modified version of Windows XP as its Tablet OS of choice. And it was unsurprisingly terrible; after all, Windows XP was designed with the desktop computing paradigm in mind. Its designers expected end users to click away with the humble mouse — not wield a pen.

If you ever tried using a Tablet PC on-the-go you’ll know what I mean; hitting those tiny buttons and icons with a fiddly stylus as you cradled an expensive slate in one arm while trying to write with the other was not particularly intuitive or fun. Mind you, it looked impressive.

I think Microsoft’s vision was simply too far removed from the reality of the hardware ecosystem at that time. Tablet PC’s simply weren’t powerful enough, didn’t offer the right storage solutions and couldn’t even stay powered-up for long enough to do anything particularly meaningful.

Learning From Other’s Mistakes

Apple watched where things failed for Microsoft and learned from their shortfalls. The iPhone and iPod Touch benefit from an operating system and user interface designed specifically with touch-control in mind. The hardware is thin and light, there are no spinning discs and, crucially, power consumption, while occasionally mucked-up by inadequately tested firmware, offers hours of reliable, productive use.

The phenomenal success of the iPhone OS proves that — just as Bill Gates believed — there is a huge market for tablet computing. Had the original Tablet PCs not been so insanely expensive they might have enjoyed higher adoption rates than the five or six people who eventually bought one. (I know I bought two. I expect Paul Thurrott bought the others.)

Microsoft has a long, rich history of developing amazing new technologies and showing them off in super-awesome demonstrations at packed conventions only to, ultimately, fail to bring them to market in the same awesome form. The original Zune wasn’t so bad, but Microsoft hobbled its potential by limiting its availability (a mistake it’s still making with the Zune HD). Microsoft Surface was another cool technology that should have been developed into super-cool new products… but today can only be found in a few hotel lobbies and, it turns out, a branch of Barclays Bank in Piccadilly Circus. (I’ve been there; they have a few Surface tables, usually not switched on, upstairs where no customers ever see them. Effective use of new technology, right?)

So what of Courier? Well, I expect Microsoft has built a great prototype. It will likely go to CES and demonstrate a fantastic “new” touch-based platform (no doubt some derivative of Windows 7) and it will get acres of column inches from breathless tech journalists who won’t waste a second branding it the Apple Tablet Killer.

But, in the end, it will do what it always does; it will leave it to its hardware partners to decide whether it’s a technology it wants to produce. And you know, some of those OEM’s might, tentatively, knock-out a few machines that will be both massively expensive and so deeply-flawed only the most ardent early adopters will buy them. (So that’ll be me and Thurrott again, I suppose.)

In the meantime, Apple will dominate with a killer tablet that will prove to Microsoft, yet again, execution really isn’t its strong suit.

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In the 1980s, Frog Design was charged with producing design prototypes for Apple — specifically the Apple IIc and some early models of the Macintosh. 9to5Mac reports that the founder of Frog Design, Harmut Esslinger, has published a book which features many of those early designs.

“A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business” is all about the role “smart” product design plays in the success of a business. As well as gorgeous pictures, the book includes background stories from Esslinger detailing the design and prototype process.

“We worked closely with Steve Jobs and Apple’s developers to innovate computer usability and appearance, resulting in iconic products with no historic precedent.”

My personal favorite is that funky laptop. Can you see elements in these prototypes that have influenced the Apple products we use today? Share your thoughts in the comments, and tell me if you agree those earbuds are just short of being classified as a torture device!

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