Remote Work and Play The Most Important UX Challenge

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 done 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 hour, for an hour or sit on the British Rail for an hour or something like that to get to the office. You can work from home. And 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 hadn’t really designed very well for it. I think the tools are still pretty primitive.

Also, the the base technologies, 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 true truly high definition and high definition. I don’t mean like no Blu ray quality. I mean like at the minimum for K I really Malek’s say a. 16 K is the video we would want because participants in a meeting or discussion to really it’s going to it should look like they’re just looking through a window and the person is actually there. And for that to happen you need like at least 60 frames per second, maybe 120 frames per second, at least eight k sixteen K resolution quality. And those technical things which which is not all feel to invent that or to draw all those fiber cables out to the, you know, Orkney Islands, the most remote place. But I mean, if that’s what we actually need and then and which then becomes more our area is like, well, how do you we then design interfaces to support various types of remote collaboration and remote work and also not just a collaboration, but also various types of enjoyment, various types of culture and education and so forth and so forth. So that’s a variety of things. Right, because if you’ve read any of these just kind of discussions about is it’s going to be a long term trend for people to be remote and not go to the office. So one thing that some people often say is, yeah, but, you know, you really want to live in London or some other place. We have the Opera House and you have the many pubs and you have the various many, many, many things. And they’re not going to go and live out in the Orkney Islands, even though they have beautiful nature, I’m sure. But so you need so need to have ways of having them 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 on the Orkney Islands, it’s going to be the same, but we need to go much beyond that. So actually, during this current crisis as a Metropolitan Opera in New York had its there was a fundraising event, but they did a very nice kind of remote event where they had both their careers and they had their orchestra kind of each sitting in their own apartments. But they were still kind of playing together and singing together. And they also had like various opera stars beaming 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 that’s those are some of the things we need to try to work on them. How can we make the remote experience a fuller and more productive, you know, for for work more productive and more enjoyable for for our private lives? And that’s long as a research agenda develop an agenda that’s going to be many, many years. But in the short term, I think that we can definitely improve over what what we’re seeing now.

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