Welcome to NDC Oslo 2014. So on behalf of the NDC team, I would like to take a big thank you to all the delegates, sponsors and speakers for coming. And instead of doing a 20 minutes introduction, let me welcome to the big stage, this year's keynote speaker, Mr. Luke Wroblewski.

Hi guys, welcome. Hopefully you can find your way amongst all the great vendors and great food here.

This is a pretty nice setup. It's kind of maybe the way all conferences should go. You can do three things at once, right? Sort of like we can do today on our computers and our phones. But I'm not here to talk about conference setups. I'm here to talk about what's happening with the internet and the web and mobile

and the implications that has on the kinds of experiences we create. So, since it's early in the morning, let me see if I can wake you guys up a little bit here. Let's see if this works. Kind of? No? Okay. We'll see.

So, the sound effect is flying phones. But I also have another sound effect and I have to explain this one to you. So this sound effect is how traveling across space and time very quickly feels. Because I want to take you guys away from Oslo for a little bit and bring you over to where I live. So let's see if we can do the sound of temporal travel here. Here we go.

Did it work? Do you feel like you're in California? The weather outside doesn't seem to indicate. But this is California. In particular, it's a little area called Silicon Valley.

And I live right there. I would have you guys all over, but in California our houses are quite small. So I don't think you guys will fit. So it's just sort of a vague area of where I live. Now it turns out in California there's some pretty interesting folks that live near me. I have some pretty interesting neighbors, if you will. So right up here by the old Sun campus is a little company called Facebook.

And they essentially took over Sun's old Megaplex and they rebuilt this new Facebook campus. And it's fascinating to see how the culture of each company is reflected in their buildings. Because Facebook is all locked off. It's this circle.

And Mark Zuckerberg has built a concrete sign in the middle that says the word hack and is visible from space. So CEO or James Bond super villain? You tell me. It's unclear. Down the road a little bit here, right next to the water. And you can see everybody gets their headquarters near the water because the land is cheaper there.

So this is where Yahoo was. And I made this commute for four and a half years. I worked at Yahoo. And Yahoo is actually right on a landfill. So when I was working at Yahoo we would walk outside and do our talks while going around this landfill. And you tell me whether or not that had any influence on the current state of Yahoo and their products or not.

It's unclear if that's causation or correlation. But, you know, really close to Facebook here. Right in between in Palo Alto, AOL, which maybe some of you still remember AOL. But they have their west coast offices. It's this big startup-y, very fancy looking thing.

In fact, they painted all the walls, about 90% of the walls with whiteboard marker. So you can just draw and have ideas everywhere. Except for that 10% of walls that isn't whiteboard and people drew all over and now it's sort of permanently etched in the memory of AOL.

Kind of like legacy code, right? It just always stays there. And then in between AOL and Yahoo is Google and YouTube. Right there inside of Mountain View. And they're just growing like crazy, too, taking up all kinds of different buildings. So on the one hand it may seem the only thing these companies have in common is that they all sort of sit along here on 101 in Silicon Valley.

But it turns out they actually have some more things in common. Looking at where people spend their time, where I live in the United States, where people spend time on the internet. These are the top five places where people hang out the most. If you actually look at the number of hours spent per month,

something like seven hours per month spent on Facebook. Believe it or not, people still spend time on Yahoo and AOL. It's this thing called email. You may be familiar with it? The dirty secret about Yahoo is the whole front page and all the properties are just a diversion on your way to email.

You're like, oh, I'll check my email. What happened? Same business model for AOL. So these are the top sites in the United States. So they're close by neighbors. They're where people spend the most time. But that may seem where the similarities end. Because what's Facebook? Facebook is a social network. What's Yahoo? As I said, it's email.

It used to be a big messaging service. AOL is the same kind of thing. Google is search. YouTube is video. So very different kinds of properties, even though they're all digital experiences and software. When you pull back the covers, you actually find they have something else in common, which is they really don't work unless people contribute things to them,

unless people don't just consume content but create content. They make things. They put up a social networking profile. They put a photo of their dog up or their baby or their dog on a baby on Facebook. That will probably get the most likes, right? Dog on baby on cat. That will blow up the Internet.

Or they send emails. They type messages. They put keywords in the search and then click on the things that are relevant to those keywords. With YouTube, they upload video, thousands of hours of video, every single minute, if not a couple seconds. So all these things don't work unless people are writing content.

So I describe them really as write-read experiences. They're not just about the output side of the coin. They're very much about input. And I actually find the fact that these are the places where people spend their most time. Even though you may not like Facebook or some of you may not like Google,

I actually find it to be a very positive thing because it matches the original vision of the Web that Sir Tim Berners-Lee had, which is he wanted it to be a place where people not only went to get information but also contributed, right? A place to read and write. Now you may say, okay, Luke, you come from America

where all Americans want to do is talk about themselves, right? Which is why they're posting baby on dog on cat photos all the time. How does this play out around the rest of the world? Where if we look at the top sites, the top destinations on the Web by audience, we find a similar list. Some of the same players but then also other sites pop up.

And again, on the surface you might say these things are different. These are search, these are social networks, these are video sites, these are Wikis, these are marketplaces. Looking a little bit deeper, you'll see things like Blogger and LinkedIn and eBay and WordPress. But once again, whether it's eBay, which is built up by people listing items,

by creating a marketplace, or it's Wikipedia, which is created by this mysterious class of people called Wikipedians. I don't know if you've ever encountered one of these creatures. They seem human but it's not 100% sure if they are or not.

So even all these things are created. Twitter, same story, definitely LinkedIn, blogs, Blogger and all that. So once again, we see read-write experiences. Things don't work unless people are contributing. And again, I found this to be a positive sort of insight because it speaks to the interactive nature of the things that we make.

We're not just feeding things one way like we did with television or with radio. We're actually allowing people to be part of it and interact. That's sort of the interactive part of interactive software. There's input and there's output. So we have all these really big sites, whether they're where people spend time in the U.S. or where the biggest audiences are worldwide.

And all of them right now, pretty much every single one, is shaking in their boots and trying to figure out one thing. And that one thing that they're all trying to figure out is mobile. Right now in the U.S., 78% of monthly active users on Facebook are on mobile.

In the U.K., it's 85% of their audience. That's swung drastically over a period of perhaps less than three years. Twitter, 75% of their audiences are on mobile. Even things that people assume no one would do on mobile. Nobody's going to watch video on a tiny little screen.

Forty percent, bless you, of YouTube's views are on mobile now. That's two out of every five videos viewed, and they're going to cross 50% in the next few months here. And that crossing of 50% I think is actually a very significant moment. So let me point you to Facebook's monthly active users. And I like to use Facebook's data because, frankly, they're just so darn big,

they kind of start to look like the Internet after a while. Again, you may not like that. Some people might be anti-Facebook. But it's such a big site that what happens to them starts to look like the Internet in general. And over the past about two and a half years, this is what Facebook's monthly active users look like.

Not impressed, are you? How did they do an IPO during this time? Aren't they supposed to be this huge success story? Well, that's because I've actually removed the line, which is the mobile line. And that moment where these two lines cross

is what I call the mobile moment. Whether it's sales of devices, whether it's traffic to your service, whether it's revenue, whatever it happens to be, very quickly, organization after organization is having these two lines cross. And when those two lines cross, really big change happens.

We have to start thinking differently. We have to change our processes. We have to change the kinds of things we make. I also ignored another line here, which I should probably show. This is the mobile only line. And the mobile only line at Facebook is actually the fastest growing line they have, period. In fact, there's a whole third of users in India and Facebook

are mobile only users. And you may say, oh, mobile only, that's people who are coming online the first time, right? They have these crappy devices. Even back in 2009, 60% of new internet connections, of people new to the net, were coming online with a mobile device.

So this is a trend that's been around for a long time. It's just the fancy, sexy devices have brought us to our perspective. And people also say, oh, mobile only, that's not in my country. Well, in the U.S., many of our banks, the stodgiest, most slow-moving institutions we have, they have a huge number of mobile only users,

this big growth in mobile only users. And it's not lower income people that can't afford a laptop. It's people sitting at the office who don't want to put their bank info on their desktop PC. So they do it on their phone. And they find it easier on their phone. So the way people use mobile is really shifting and changing lots of dynamics,

not just in new markets. And this shift, this switch over to the mobile dominant traffic and mobile only growth has caused Mark Zuckerberg. Remember him? He's either the James Bond villain or the internet company CEO. We're not sure. He bought like 3D glasses recently and a messaging app.

So you find out what he's... I think they're buying drones too. The next step is sharks with lasers on their heads. If they buy that, then I win. He's a Bond super villain. I called it here. But he makes this proclamation, which is Facebook used to be a web company. Used to build things for the web.

Now we are a mobile company. And they may sound like CEOs speak, but if you've watched what's happened to this company over the past couple years, it's a very bumpy ride. It's a big transition. And it's something that has had impact on pretty much everyone at that company and how they work. And again, I think this trend is going to continue

and many people are going to go through this shift because if you look at global sales of personal computers, I see Microsoft over here. I see .net rocks over there. I see HTML over here. All this stuff has really been built on top of the personal computer for probably about the past 30 years or so

because personal computers were on a tear. This is growth of personal computer sales, laptops and desktops worldwide since 1995 when kind of the first web browser, graphical web browser came about until about 2013. And you may say, well, that doesn't look that good. That was like a little flat line, right?

But this thing went from 50 million to about 350 million and it drove many of the companies that we see here, many of the jobs that we have, many of the products we work on. Now the reason why it doesn't look so sexy is because I again excluded a line here and this time I didn't show the growth of smartphones and tablets.

And when you start to look at the computing space like this, again, this is device sales in the world, these kinds of devices, then you start to realize why this is such a big shift and why it's such a big deal for Facebook and why it's such a big deal for all of us, right? Imagine all the things that we've done so far

with the personal computer over the past 20 to 30 years, all the things we've made and the services we've enabled and the things we've allowed people to do and you look at that and you just see how this opportunity dwarfs the one we've had before. And it's a reason to get super excited but it's also a reason to kind of get scared, right?

It's kind of a new, scary, changing thing. And just to hammer this point home one more time, I'm going to go look at the entire population of the planet. And if you look at the entire population of the planet, we've got about 7 billion people here. Over the next three years, we'll add a couple, so we'll make some babies. It'll be good.

Here's how many people are literate adults so they can actually go out and buy the stuff that we make, can actually go spend money and purchase things. Here's how many people have mobile devices and all this line is essentially getting replaced by smartphones over the next few years. That means pretty much all the literate adults very soon

will have highly capable networked devices on them, always on, always connected to any information up in the cloud or whatever you want to call it. And PCs, frankly, aren't going anywhere. They're just sort of sitting flat. Tablets, not big at all, but a lot of growth in this area still to this day.

And you may say, okay, look, that's great. So there's lots of these devices, but what are people really doing on it? They're not doing the things that they do on PCs on their phones. When you're on your phone, you're looking at cat photos on Facebook, watching cat videos on YouTube,

and tweeting about cats on Twitter. That's pretty much all there is to it. The mobile device and touch and all these things, they're just not good for making stuff. So all this write-read stuff that you were describing before, that doesn't apply here to mobile. Our goal here is to give people content to consume in snack-like bits.

Has anybody heard this term, snack-like content? Like all of a sudden everybody became a pigeon because their computer got smaller. We can only peck at things now. And if you look at the data, this isn't true. Three hours of video are uploaded per second on YouTube mobile.

Three hours of video a second. eBay did 22 billion in just mobile commerce last year. Alibaba does that much in a quarter on mobile. And by the way, two years before that, eBay was only doing 4 billion on mobile. So the amount that this is happening is growing tremendously. And then the other excuse for not really thinking about creation

and contribution and the right aspect of things on mobile is, well, you know, mobile's just for games, right? It's not really for serious software. That's where people fart around on games and where they do social networking or they entertain themselves. And it's true, apps used to really be dominated by these categories.

And there's still a lot of that happening. So you may say, hey, mobile is entertainment. But the fastest growing categories in the mobile space are not these. In fact, games and social networking are actually down year over year. The fastest growing stuff is this category called utilities. That is allowing people to find things, buy stuff,

manage their health, manage their finances, plan things, travel, do preparation, accomplish stuff. All the things that we do today on the web and on the Internet are now available to us anywhere and everywhere. And so whereas mobile may have started out as an entertainment system

or as a way to be entertained and kill some time, it's now really anything. So if you buy into this argument that I've laid out, I've kind of said a couple things. The right aspect of the Internet and of the web is a really big deal. It drives where people spend the most time,

where the biggest audiences are, and it continues to create value and lets people interact and contribute. All these services are now moving over to mobile, and so I think the question really becomes, as people who make software, how do we enable creation? How do we enable this right side of things on the mobile space?

And so I've got a couple things that I've learned over the past few years. I've done a couple startups. I've worked at Yahoo. I've worked at eBay. I've done a lot of stuff trying to push this issue forward, and I've learned a bunch of things, and so what I want to share with you guys is some of the things I figured out by basically flopping and failing

so that you don't have to do that. You can just get to the good stuff and skip over all the other things. So the first one of these things is, again, we're talking about improving and designing for this right-read mobile web. The first one is this idea of one-handed use, and the best way I can describe one-handed use

is by showing you a video I recorded of a woman without her knowing. Okay, that sounds like the perfect Internet thing to do, right? Before you kick me off the stage, let me show you what I mean. So I'm sitting on an airplane, and I notice this woman in front of me is using her phone, and so she's sort of holding it in one hand, scrolling with the thumb, and it's Facebook.

You can tell because of the way it looks, and then she's going to try and, oh, she's, tap it. What is that? Can I tap, tap? Tap, tap it, tap it, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Ah, hell, forget it. She has very slender, beautiful hands, right?

Much more precise and accurate than my French fry-eating finger is when I have my digits on the phone. And we observe two things by seeing this behavior. One, she's very much in this one-handed mode where she's just sort of flicking around with her screen. And then Facebook is clinging to these, like, website link standards inside their text that she,

with her tiny, I would say, compared to my big thumbs, right, she can't even tap the things. The touch targets are too small. Though Facebook's audience in the U.S. is 78% on mobile, people can't even click on the links inside of there to go see those cat and dog videos.

And it turns out this is a reality, this sort of one hand, one thumb kind of use. It turns out it's actually a really big deal, and you can design for it. So let me show you how you can design for it for a second, and then I'll come back and show you some stats to explain why you should design for it. So I have my second startup company now, and this time what we decided to do is try to create an interface

that works entirely with one hand and one thumb on the screen. And so what we would literally do is we would time people using this interface with only one thumb. So our testing looked something like this. We would put a timer behind our design, and we would give you only one thumb to interact with it.

And it's a service where you can pick one of two sides. There's a bunch of these kind of interfaces out there now, but you can weigh in on what kind of wine is the best, what grapes work, and which Decepticon's more awesome, which ultimately assembled Decepticon is more awesome, things like this. And so the idea was how many of these things

can we get people to do in about 30 seconds using a single thumb on the screen? And within 26 seconds, you can actually collect 10 of these things. Now, it's not just this input of voting on stuff. We actually allow people to create things. So let's say you want to figure out what the best Twitter client is. You can just start typing in here. Again, all one thumb held from the side of the screen.

So you can say best Twitter client. Go ahead and search for a term. Back comes a pile of pictures. You can grab one, position it how you like, and note where that plus sign was, was right in that comfortable, easy-to-hit thumb zone. Then you go and do another Twitter client, Twitterrific, grab that, move things around with your thumb,

set it, and you're done. So within 36 seconds, you can actually single thumb create things. Now, this may sound like design nerdery, right? But I want to point out that in Apple's most recent keynote here, they actually brought up this feature as well.

So you can see here, Craig Feridelli is modeling this idea that from the side of the screen with one hand, you can sort of make your way back to a previous message, switch between screens, whatever, and he's doing the exact same behavior. In fact, when he goes and gives this talk, you'll note that people applaud, and Steve Wozniak even looks mildly amused.

So something's going on here, right? Woz is like, oh, not sure exactly what's going on in his head, but hey, there he is. So again, it's not just design esoteric. This is one of the biggest computing companies, period, right now,

highlighting this sort of modality, this kind of use, and talking about how their entire operating system is being built this way. And so why are they doing this? Well, if you actually go and look at how people use their mobile devices, how people interact with these kinds of screens, you'll see that there's this one-hand, one-thumb use I observed on that poor woman on the plane.

There's the two-handed use like this, and then there's what we affectionately call the Crackberry Prayer. You guys know this? You're usually in a meeting, trying to type an email to the boss. So my friend Steven Huber did a bunch of research. What are the most common positions? And he found 50% of the time,

people are holding their phone with the one thumb. About 36% of the time, they need another hand to get in there, probably to get up to the corners of it, especially on these big monster phones, right, like the Galaxy Note Mega Mega Ultimate Tab 7 3 or whatever the heck they call it. And then 15% of the time, people were texting

or writing an email to the boss, if you will. That's kind of what that position is. And he looked at about 1,300 observations. And the other interesting thing is, when you actually break down this two-handed use, you find it comes in two flavors, one with a thumb, one with an index finger. And there, 72% of the time, it's a thumb.

The other 30% or so is with the other finger. That means three-fourths of the time people are interacting with these devices, they are essentially one thumb on the screen, which is why this becomes an important consideration when you're creating this kind of software. It's the majority use case, if you will.

And you may say, well, you know, that seems like extreme. Making software to be used with one thumb really sounds like an extreme design exercise, which, yeah, it sort of is. I mean, even if those stats didn't line up, I would still advocate doing something like this because what we do in design, and this is a quote from Dan Formosa, who works on physical objects at Smart Design.

And what he says is when we design a pair of garden shears, what we'll do is we'll actually go and test it on people with severe arthritis. Because if somebody with severe arthritis and restricted movement can trim a shrubbery, then imagine what an able-bodied knight could do to a shrubbery.

By designing for... Only three people got that joke. That's good. You three people are my people. So imagine what people who can have full dexterity can do with those, right? So if you design for the extremes, you actually find out that the middle works itself out.

And so in those chances where I have five fingers on the screen, I'm going to be able to go way faster and better than when I have just a single one. And then the other critique about this idea is, well, aren't you just assuming that people using mobile or distracted guy on streets doing business thing, right?

There's this notion that mobile context is man on road going like this all the time. Of course, he's actually on Facebook, right? Trying to figure out how to party for the weekend. Note, he's got the hat for leisure mode. So this isn't how people use mobile devices. In fact, it turns out there's a ton of use of mobile devices

on the couch while the TV's on. People use smartphones and TVs all the time, right? 20% of use of mobile time is not mobile at all. It's sitting on your butt on a couch. And this stat, which I just dug up from Google, 68% of smartphone use happens in the home. So how mobile really is it?

It turns out we're just too lazy to go and get the laptop, which is a foot away, but the phone's in your pocket. I might as well use the phone. So mobile uses are really anywhere and everywhere. And even when you're on the couch watching the TV, it's still this kind of gesture, right?

So how do we design and build for this kind of gesture? We can do small things like trying to avoid typing. Typing's painful on mobile, right? Especially with one thumb. We don't have really great tools for it. So if you sort of push this idea of trying to make typing easier, you may pre-fill fields for people, like creating a guide. How to is already there.

And then you have these input tags, which is a little pattern. And you can just say install. And now you've made about 50 percent of that title without any typing. And when you design and build these things, if you force yourself to do stuff like don't let the keyboard come up, keep the keyboard away as long as possible, you actually end up with really creative solutions.

Now obviously at some point the keyboard has to come up. But if you say, hey, I'm designing for this one thumb use, let me work as hard as I can to keep the keyboard at bay. You can actually do very creative things. So this is flight search for Google in a web browser on mobile. And they're doing a bunch of things here to keep the keyboard away and design for this one thumb use.

So the first thing that they do is they set a default based on your location. So we know you're in San Jose. Most people fly out of the airport closest to them. So we'll be right most of the time here. No typing required. Then they use this thing Google has called algorithms. You know what that is? It's the thing that tells you which Google Plus notification

you should ignore. I don't know if you've heard of that. So they make these suggestions on where you should travel to based on the most popular destinations from there. So again, even if they're only right 20 or 30% of the time, that's 20 or 30% time where you don't have to type again. Now if you want to change the location you're leaving from,

you just tap that icon to the right. And again, it uses location detection to go and find airports near you. So that's the third thing it's doing to keep you off the keyboard. Now surely if you want to pick a two destination you have to type, right? Well, no, they actually enable this scrolling and panning map interface.

So you can just sort of zoom and make your way through here. No typing required. And let's say you want to fly to Denver. You just tap Denver and see who's flying there, how much it costs, and now you've entered your two destination. So now there's four things they're doing to keep the keyboard away

in this tiny, what started out as a two input field form. Now what they've done is they've got these two fields so they added a third one, the dates. And you might again expect dates to bring up this little calendar, widget kind of thing. But what Google actually does is bring up this scrolling, very flickable, touch-friendly interface.

It looks something like this. So if you touch dates here, what you're going to get is this big panel that you can scroll through very smoothly with one thumb, or you can flick really quickly, and you can set a start date and an end date, and you're done. You just entered two fields right there, start and come back date, all really simply.

Contrast this to what happens on Kayak where you have to set your departure date, and then they bring up a very standard desktop widget where you move between the months. You guys have probably built a bunch of these. You move to the next one, you set a departure date, then you have to go and set a return date, and then you come to return date, and you move between the months, and then you pick the date that you want to come back, and then you're done, and then you get back. And now what happens is you are, once you set that,

leaving March 20th and coming back February 21st. I think Elon Musk is behind Kayak because this sounds a lot like the Hyperloop system. I don't know if you've kept up with that. But not only did we get into an error state, that was a lot of work, right? So I tap this, come over here, pick that, move between this.

It's really trying to squeeze these desktop, these PC mouse interactions into something where people are using it like so. So Google's taken the time to rethink all these widgets, including the date widget, for this kind of usage. But they don't stop there with the date usage.

They also have, now that you've picked dates, you can go and filter by price or duration, and when you do that, you find that they're actually using sliders for price and duration. Sliders can be problematic, they can work well, but here's seven things in a tiny, what started out as two input field form that they're doing to keep the keyboard away.

So this idea of designing for the reality of how people use mobile devices, based on how we actually see them, whether it's me stalking that woman on the plane or Steven's research of thousands of people interacting with their devices, understanding how people use these things, how they relate to their body, and building software accordingly.

That's what I mean by this one-handed use. Actually target and design one-handed use. You may think it's this extreme case, but it really helps ease out all of the sections. And when you design for one-handed use, you sort of challenge your assumptions. You say things like, don't let the keyboard come up. Can people do this? Just like so.

Time how long it takes them. And you're also starting to see this idea emerge here of this ergonomics of software design. Before, everybody had the same sort of situation with a computer. It was about two feet away from you. You had a proxy from your hand through a mouse and a keyboard. And so the ergonomics guys were the ones

that built the mice and the keyboards, and the people who made software didn't have to worry about the size of our hands, the distance of the screen away from our face. We never had to think about that. Now you've got devices that are this close to your face, that close to your face, this big away, used directly in the hand. And all of a sudden, the way our hands hold things and the size of our hands and all this matters

to the way we create software. It's not something we can punt to the guys who make the mice anymore. So that's kind of one thing. Let's look at the next one, focused flow. I don't know if Foursquare is popular out here, but for those of you who know it or don't know it, it's a service where you can check in and say, I'm here. I'm here at NDC.

So in order to check in on Foursquare, what you do is you tap the Check In button, which takes you to a Places page, and you find the place you want to check in, and you end up on that page, and then you say Check In Here. And once you've said you want to check in here, you can actually check in. So that's how you check in in order to check in

from the Check In page that you hit Check In on. Now, to Foursquare's credit in their recent redesigns, they've actually been pushing this forward. And they've been taking things that used to take multiple steps and really simplifying it. So now if you just open the app, it says, hey, it looks like you're near here. You tap that once, and all you have to do is actually just check in.

So it's just a one-step process. I think they're just releasing it now. They actually went forward and pushed this further because now they've split Foursquare into two apps, one called Swarm, which is just for checking in. So they're trying to make it even easier. And this is a great example. I love this quote from an Apple CEO,

not the one you're thinking of, but this one. This is Mr. Tim Cook, and he says, creativity is people who care enough about something to keep working at it, keep working at it until they find the easiest way to do this. And this really resonates with me because I'm a design guy.

And this is what I do every day. I just keep trying things, keep trying things until I find the obvious answer. And this is why a lot of times people's critique of design is, oh, that's obvious. No, you don't know it's obvious until you actually work through it and get to that point. It's obvious that Foursquare should have one button to check in or no buttons to check in,

but those aren't the most common solutions out there. So creativity is people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it. And it's not just design fun. This has fundamental business implications as well. I travel a lot, so I get asked all the time to get online by these online service providers.

So here Boingo has created this ability for you to pay them $7 to get on the internet on your phone. And this is steps one, two, and three of that process. In fact, there's 23 inputs just on the first three steps for me to give them $7 to get online. And so I've been ragging on them for a while,

and a marketing manager over there sends me a note every now and then and says, hey, we're getting better. Look at this. We cut down 11 input fields. We made it a lot simpler. We focused. We got creative about how to find the bare essence of this. And when they dropped just 11 fields, conversion went up 34%.

If you're the guy at your company who raises conversion 34% on your core flow for your company, they name a meal for you at the cafeteria. Oh, no, that's Bob's sausage meal. If you're going to order that, you better eat it all. Bob worked real damn hard for that.

And then they talk about nice things like, hey, sign-up times went down. That's cool. And I say, oh, this is great, Boingo, really nice. But you know what? I think you can do better. It can always be simpler because I have a design for your form that is only three input fields. And I will not show it to you now.

If you count the button, it's four input fields. But know that you can keep pushing this further. So let me show you another example of that idea, of this focusing flow, trying to get down to the core essence of something and why it matters. We have this application in the U.S. called Hotel Tonight. And all it does is you open up your phone.

It shows you hotels near you right now that actually have last-minute inventory. So they're cheap. They're good prices. And they only show you hotels that they went and tested to make sure they're good. So you open up the device. Here's some good hotels near you right now that are cheap. That's all it does. And in order to book one of these hotels, you just say, okay, well, that one looks good.

Yeah, I think I want to book a room here. It tells you how much it's going to cost. And then at the end, they ask you to do this strange thing. They ask you to trace their logo in order to buy that hotel. Now, besides the nice brand-building thing, right, why are they asking you to trace your logo through the hotel?

It turned out they had made it so easy to book hotel rooms that cats and babies were booking hotel rooms. And so they actually had, this step didn't exist before. It was only those couple taps. They actually had a high percent of chargebacks of people accidentally booking hotel rooms.

So they needed a step that would confirm you are not a child or a baby or a cat. You are actually a consenting adult who is going to purchase this hotel room. And they stumbled upon the solution. And I've been really into form design for a long time, but I'm a nerd. I wrote a book on form design, so I'm like one of the few people who actually care about this stuff.

So it struck me when I heard the CEO of Hotel Tonight talking when he said, this process, this fact that it takes you three taps and this little swipe gesture to book a hotel room is a competitive advantage. When is the last time you heard a CEO say the design of their form is a competitive advantage to the company?

So I dug into this. I'm like, how can this be? And so I heard Sam Shank walk through this, and he said, look, here's how it goes. On Hotel Tonight, to book a hotel, it's three taps and one swipe, four gestures. It takes about eight seconds to do it. Cats do it, right?

On our competitors, look at our competitors on mobile. Priceline takes them 52 taps, 102 seconds. A little bit more complicated. Hotels.com, 40 taps, 109 seconds, substantially more effort. And you may say, how can it possibly be that two companies doing kind of the exact same thing

have such a drastically different interface? Why aren't they all focusing and simplifying? Well, let's look at Hotels.com. So Hotels.com, right? I go in here, and there's one kind of deal up here. It looks like an ad, so I skip that, so I hit search. And they've conveniently given me my location, San Jose.

It's where I live, San Jose, California. Great. So I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, give me a hotel. Search. At this point, my mind starts to melt a little bit. Because I say to myself, what reality is this? I am, in fact, in San Jose, California,

and I am, in fact, in San Jose, Silicon Valley, California. So which one do I pick? After a few moments of thinking and debating space-time and the continuum of the cosmos and quantum relativity and all these things, I say, okay, well, I must be in one of these two parallel universes. So I pick that one, and I'm back on the search screen.

Can you see how this adds up really darn quickly? And that's just step one. Hotel Tonight does none of this stuff. All they do is, here's hotels right now near you that have a good deal. Nothing. That's it. And I contend that this is actually really hard to do.

It takes very big changes to go small and embrace this kind of experience for mobile. And why do I say that? Because Hotels.com not only has a whole team of engineers and a product manager and half a designer working on that location database and keeping it up to date. And they also have a whole team of 100 engineers

and 50 PMs and half a designer working on their star rating system. And they have one working on their price things, and they have people going through quality and name control and minimum guest rating, right? So they've got to maintain search systems, location databases, they've got to ingest feeds, do QA on it, all this stuff they have to do.

And so when it comes time to go and make the mobile version, the search team's like, yeah, well, you can't really do hotel booking without team search right here. And team rating's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're going to do things without ratings? What about team ratings? And all these organizations and the way these companies have been building things for years

come into play. And it's really, really hard to let go of that. So you end up with stuff that isn't focused enough because it's built off previous models. Another example here is Yelp. So Yelp is a service that allows you to rate local restaurants and services and like this,

and they've been on mobile for a long time, very long time. And the whole time they've been on mobile, which has been five or six years, there's been one request that's been made over and over again. In fact, poor Eric, who runs product over there, had to write this article, why can't I write reviews for mobile? Because everybody wants to write reviews.

And he's like, yeah, I know you guys have been asking about this all the time for five years, but imagine if somebody left reviews that were just crappy SMS. What if they just left like an emoji poo as a review for a restaurant? That would really be bad content. Personally, I would love that. If I saw like four emoji poos for a restaurant, I would know instantly, visually, not to go there.

That would be awesome for me. But they cling to this idea that what a review is is a long-form written bit of text. To Yelp, which originated in the desktop age, where the way you contribute content, the way you create, the way you write to the internet

is in front of a keyboard on a big screen at night when you've settled in with your coffee and your tea, and you start writing your review. It was a Friday morning June when Snuffles and I decided to pack the car and head out for sojourn in the city. We landed at the hotel about noon, and we were a little uncertain of things,

and a small drizzle had started. Shut up and tell me if the hotel is good or not. But their whole model of what a review is is based off the circumstances under which they built their product, and it is very, very hard to let go of that. Hotel Tonight, on the other hand, which started from mobile, says,

okay, here's what we think a review is. No typing. We know you booked the hotel, because you used Hotel Tonight. We know you're in the hotel, because we have your location and the app. And we know you have your phone with you, because you're not going to leave the house without your phone, even if the house is on fire. So in order to leave a review, just take a couple pictures of the room and the lobby.

And they say, instead of typing, just use photos. And actually, I find that to be an awesome review. If you want to see a hotel, there's nothing better than flicking through actual photos of people staying in the room, not the glossy brochureware photos that they put up to make every hotel look amazing. But this is perfect. I just go, flick, flick, flick, flick.

Ah, yeah, it looks pretty good. I'll buy it. Now, back to Yelp. Four years later, when 60% of their search traffic is happening on mobile and 40% of their ad business is now on mobile, they have now created the ability for you to add reviews. But, but, they still say, if it's too short, we're going to remove it.

And it's still clinging to that old notion. And so that's this idea behind focused flows. It may seem like standard device, good design advice. Make things simple, right? You say, oh, that's what Luke's saying, is make things simple. And actually, what I'm saying is if you really care about something,

put in the time and effort to get it to be as fluid, as seamless, as focused as possible. That's the essence of creativity. This process, if you go through this process of getting very creative about your business to make it work well for mobile,

chances are you will make people very uncomfortable. The search team will be like, I don't know about this, guys. The ratings team will be like, oh, this seems weird. If you're not making anybody uncomfortable, you're probably not doing anything different. So it's actually a good sign that you're building the right kind of experience for mobile if you find yourself making people uncomfortable.

So I'm going to cheat for you guys here. And I have this tip called just-in-time interactions. And I can talk through it a little bit and give you a sense of what's going on. But I want to actually switch gears for a second. Super surprise tip. I'm going to change the flow of the deck on you.

So I've been talking about this write-read mobile web. I've been saying, how do we design for mobile creation? How do we take advantage of the fact that the web is driven by contribution and creation? How do we move that experience to mobile? We design for the actual usage of these devices.

We focus our flows and rethink the way our business is structured to deal with new kinds of input and opportunities. And that's great. But when you actually look at mobile, it turns out something also very interesting is happening. Where I live, 50% of people that have a laptop have a smartphone.

30% of people that have a smartphone also have a tablet. And an increasing number have all three. I would bet all of you in this room have a smartphone and a laptop, right? At least, if not many more connected devices. And it turns out not only do people have a lot of these devices, they actually use them together in interesting ways.

So we've been doing some research. We find multiple people, many people use multiple screens at the same time. And we find multiple people use screens sequentially as well. That is, they'll go from the phone and then later they'll be on their laptop and after that they'll have the TV on and they'll pull out the phone. And they do this many times in the same day.

Not only that, they also use these things simultaneously. So I mentioned before, while the TV's on, the smartphone's in your hand. I talked about the people doing their banking at work with the laptop on their desk and the phone in their hand, essentially becoming mobile-only users. So as we start to see more of these sequential and simultaneous behaviors that take multiple devices into account,

we're finding ourselves not just in a right-read mobile web. Mobile is still the big driver of usage. It's still kind of the, I think, first order screen of business. That's why I've been talking so much about designing for mobile. But we're increasingly finding ourselves trying to connect the dots between our digital experiences.

And so for this last bonus feature here, me changing up the program on you, I want to talk about how do we design for multi-device creation, for things which take into account not just the mobile screen but a variety of screens. How do we make software for that, that bridges the gaps of cross-device usage?

Now, in order to think about this, what I want to do is sort of lay out what kinds of cross-device use are possible. And so I've done some categorization of this over the years based on the kinds of software we've been building. And I've broken it down into a couple verbs. I like these verbs because they map to things people are trying to do.

So the first one is this idea of access. And put simply, access is the ability to view and interact with the same content or features on more than one device. That is, I can get to my stuff that you give me on whatever screen I happen to fire up, as long as it's connected to the network. And this can be something that you actively do

or it can be something that you get forced to do. Because today, I can be on Chrome, right? So I can be on my desktop, browsing around, and I can say, hey, let me see a web page. Let me see another web page. Oh, I'll jump to another web page. And I'm just browsing around. And then later, I pick up my phone, and there, without any effort on my part at all, is my laptop.

And I can click on this link and just start off right where I left off. In fact, if I've done my job right, the back button works, right? I can just go right back to my browsing flow and have a one-to-one match with my URLs. Now, if you're doing things like forking your content and have an m.site or a mobi site

and you have different URL schemes, this breaks. This breaks not just for Chrome, but it breaks for Safari iCloud tabs. It breaks for Firefox tab syncing. All these behaviors of where I can seamlessly move from one device to the other do not work if you don't have URL either redirecting

or responsive design or things like this. Well, this is just access to content. It's not just access to specific pieces of content. It actually could be access to specific bits of content, to where you are within content. So if I'm, again, on my laptop inside of a web browser, I can be reading a book about Node and Chrome or my Kindle reader,

and then I click over and I end up over here about how to display notes on the console. Then later I'm on the couch, the TV's on, I fire up my phone, and right there I pick up exactly where I left off using Amazon's whisper sync technology.

Now, this is about accessing my books on any screen I like, but it also starts to push this idea of access a bit further because it's not just about syncing my content. It's about syncing my process, my workflow. And that's the second use case. We don't want to just seamlessly move content. We actually want to seamlessly move our processes.

So that's flow. And there's simple examples of flow, like I search for an address on the web browser in Google Maps, and then later I open up my phone, and there it is right there, and I can just do it. And the cool thing about this simple example is it's using each device for what it's good for. The big screen, good for seeing the whole map,

good for typing, very easy to enter an address, see the big picture. The phone, portable, GPS, audio directions. So you bring the two things together to create an experience that is better by virtue of having both the devices together. And you can start to do this stuff in more real time,

not just so sequentially. So with Google Docs, to keep talking about Google, because they're very big on this. In fact, the last year's Google I.O., every single presentation was a cross-device presentation. They all had multiple screens. But here in real time, I can edit one document and see that updating on another screen, on another document. In fact, they get crazy enough

to go and build entire games built off of this concept in the web browser of all places. So this racer Chrome experiment, which turns any mobile screen that runs Chrome into a game interface, you just go to a URL, and you can start a race, and you can race on an I.O.S. device, an Android device, a tablet, what have you.

And the cars run across them and interact. Real-time flow of information, content, services, and processes. And by the way, no native apps required here to go and play this. So that's flow. And you can go step-by-step flow, or you can go real-time flow. Another one is control.

And control essentially allows one device to act as an interface to the other. Now, for a long time, I've really hated sign-in forms, because I think they're fundamentally broken. So it pains me when people go to mobile, and what they do is they take their sign-in form and put it on the small screen, and they're like, we're done. Now we've brought all the problems of login to the small screen.

Welcome to the future. So I've hated this for a long time. And even back in 2007, 2008, when I was at Yahoo, we were building these authentication systems that used what each mobile device and what each device does well to allow you to authenticate. So you could just take your phone, point it at a bar code, QR code, enter a code, and now your phone would take over that screen.

It would become the projector. And now today I'm proud to be an advisor for a company called 1ID, and 1ID has taken this concept and essentially gotten rid of usernames and passwords altogether because they have a secure key in the cloud and a secure key on device. And what you can do with that is you can set one device

to only get unlocked if you enter a remote PIN. So I'm going to say this laptop can only be unlocked with a remote PIN. So now when I try to log in here, I say log into this laptop, I get a ping on my phone which says somebody's trying to log in on your Mac. You told us it needs a PIN. So you can go into here, and it'll fire up the ID.

You enter the PIN, and once you enter the PIN, which I'll hide from you guys, it unlocks the laptop instantly. So now we've started to take authentication and turn it into a multi-device experience through this control aspect. We did a project with Microsoft on their Xbox One where we allowed a phone to connect to a web browser

on the Xbox One in split panel mode. And so what you could do here is have the phone act as the control and your actions show up in that web browser that's connected in real time to the phone interface. So whether you're switching votes on here or whether you're scrolling, you can see that this thing controls the interface of this thing.

And it becomes really cool because, again, you can use each device for what it's good for. So the Xbox One up on the wall can play media, and then you can be collaborating or talking to your friends or having this second screen experience about the content on the screen. And you can use this for interaction, or you can use the big screen experience just to sort of lean back

and see what other people are doing and just sort of watch and stay up to date as things happen. So that's control. And last but not least is this idea of push, and push is actually sending stuff between devices. If anybody caught the iOS 8 keynote and Apple's announcements about continuity and some of the other things,

a lot of companies are looking at this seriously. There's always been the idea of mirroring a screen, which many people are aware of but few people use, which means it's a really big upcoming opportunity. And with mirroring your screen, you can take what's on your phone and push it to your TV, push it to your MacBook, push it to your Mac Mini. So you can take it to a desktop, a laptop,

a tablet, anywhere you want. And you don't need to have Apple devices. You can use things like Chromecast to do this. So you can take the content on your mobile Android phone and push it to your TV. Now, this is an example of an experience that's not really taking advantage of what each device does well. Because what happens with this,

you'll note it literally displays the mobile web page on the TV screen. It scales the display to act like a web browser, a tiny mobile web browser, which is, I would say, pretty frustrating. It's not what you want. What you actually want is you want a different experience for things that are 18 inches away or two feet away or, like a TV, 10 feet away.

So when we did that design for Microsoft, we didn't just repackage the mobile interface on the Xbox. We created a very different interface for the same content, one that was designed for D-pads and for 10-foot-away viewing and interactions instead of one designed for one foot away and touch.

And as we start to get more and more into this crazy multi-device stuff, I don't even know what some of these scenarios are going to look like. But I know there's a lot of opportunity there because I'll end on one from eBay. So on eBay, I'm making a listing, and I want a photo. I can say, grab that photo from my mobile device.

A notification pops up on my phone. It launches the eBay app, and it'll jump me from that notification into the camera of the eBay app where I can go grab an image, and now I've got my camera up. And so what I'll do here is actually take a picture of this CD I'm selling, and that's going to be the only picture I take here, so it'll save.

And once it saves, I can go over here and hit Done, and it's saving here, and instantly it'll actually appear on the web browser. Now, when you think about this scenario, think about how painful it is to take a camera, connect it to your laptop, grab the photo off it, take the photo, upload it to the computer,

whereas you got your phone with you all the time, it's awesome at taking pictures. So you just go, bloop, oh, fire up, take a picture, done. Cross-device push scenario. And again, we're using each device for what it's good for. You'll also note that in these examples and in many of the things I've been talking about, I've been showing native apps and the web,

and there's always this, you know, versus, which one will win, fight, right? Native versus web. But in the most interesting designs that I was showing you, the most interesting user experiences, we're using both. Each one, one's good for push, one's good for getting the camera, the other one's good for access anywhere, right?

They do different things well. In fact, there's all kinds of devices and all kinds of operating systems, and they have native apps, but they all have awesome web browsers that can stitch these things together. And the stitching of things together through the web, however you conceive of it, whatever aspects of it matter the most to you, it's only going to get more complicated

as we have things like the iWatch or Google Glass. This isn't actually what Google Glass looks like. It's really close. It's really close to this. The way Google Glass actually works is you kind of put these glasses on, and you tip your head up, and you see this little screen,

this 25-inch HD screen about eight feet away. It's like a little postage stamp-sized screen, Scott. And you can say something like, okay, Glass, get directions to a place I'm going, and they'll give you GPS. You can look at the weather. You can read your email, whatever. And so I got one of these units, and I was like, this is awesome.

We're totally going to build software for this for our startup. And I showed you my startup a few times. It's a service called Polar, where you can pick this or that, right? Sort of hot or not for everything but hot or not. And so we thought it would be awesome to do Google Glass because you could be out in the real world. You have Google Glass on your face, and you see something like this, right?

So what you do is you just sort of look at it. You take a picture, and you're going to be like, who parked worse, right? And so the way to do this on Google Glass, though, you stand in front of these cars. You take the picture, and then you have to do audio because there's no input, no text, right? So you hold on the thing like, who parked worse, question mark. Capital G, capital M, capital C.

Okay, next. Infinity, no backspace, not that kind of infinity. I. And at that point, who's the bigger idiot? You. Or the people who parked like an idiot. Cause you got audio input for this, you got audio input for this, you got audio input for this. And you know, our service is really simple. Our service is a visual thing where you're making a choice between

two things. It's definitively very simplified. And yet, I think it's too complicated for this Google Glass interface. So remember my point about it can always be simpler. Even if we've gone down to the level of making things work well for mobile, we may be forced to go even further as we enter new kinds of devices

and new kinds of opportunities in the future. So, what I want to leave you guys with, it's a right-read mobile web, right? The contribution aspect of things matters just as much if not even more than the read aspect. I would say it matters more. The biggest services, whether it's where people spend their time or whether it's where the biggest

audiences are, they're all built on this right aspect of things. All these guys are moving to a mobile world and very soon we'll also be moved to a multi-device world as well. And there's things that you can do to design for this. Use the real ergonomics of the device. How people hold it, how far away from it, from them it is.

Design software in their way. Focus your flows down. Think about these opportunities to use each device for what it's good for. I gave you a bunch of ways of thinking about this and some things I've learned trying this out over the past however many years. But fundamentally, I think this stuff is still so new and so exciting that we're just

kind of getting started with it. We haven't figured it out. As I showed with a lot of these examples, we're still doing our PC stuff. That line has flattened and gone down. There's a huge new opportunity in front of us and it's sort of just kicking off even today. So I think that's exciting. I think you guys can do awesome things with it and thanks for hearing me out.

And enjoy the rest of the event.