Creating Content of Professional Quality
Today, smartphones have much greater computer power and internet capabilities than in the past. Ease of use is such an important issue on a smartphone, however, that standard smartphone GUIs have concentrated on showing only a single application at a time. Even as the number of pixels on a smartphone screen has grown, the physical size has not grown much. The emphasis has been to support one application very well, but to keep the user interface as simple and convenient as possible. This is exactly the right trade-off for viewing content, or even for creating informal content.
Most cellphone conversations are informal, since they involve friends and colleagues, and may be very short, but other cellphone conversations are very important, especially if they are to customers, supervisors, or employees. Similarly, this same range of informality or importance applies to email communications that may be sent from smartphones. Current smartphones are optimized for creating informal content, such as emails, text messages, or photos, but they also work well for creating slideshows, memos, and reports. Professionals create slideshows, memos, and reports frequently. These documents are expected to be created with professional quality.
When professional workers create content of professional quality, however, they often need to refer to reference materials of some sort in order to be reminded of some of the details that they wish to include in the content they are creating. On current smartphones, this requires the following sequence of steps:
- saving the email or other content they are working on,
- switching to the application that gives them access to the reference material they need,
- copying the relevant information from the new application,
- switching back to their content creation application,
- pasting the information into their email or other content, and then
- editing it into the form that is needed in the content being created.
In some cases, applications make it difficult to copy multiple data items from a reference page, thus requiring the user to move back and forth between these two applications several times before the needed reference information has been moved into the application that is being used to create the new content.
On a laptop computer, this entire process is much easier. The user simply opens a new window, accesses the reference information, makes both the content creation window and the reference window visible at the same time on the large display, and continues to create content while reading the reference window as needed to create the new content. Often the reference material should not even be copied by computer, since it may need to be paraphrased in order to increase the professional quality of the content being created.
On a smartphone with an optionally deployable second screen, this task is almost as easy to perform as on a laptop computer, since it is done in much the same way. The user deploys the second screen, opens the reference application, and then is able to create his or her new content while reading the reference material on the second screen. Once the second application is no longer needed, the second screen can be stowed, and the user can continue creating content until he or she discovers additional reference material he or she would like to refer to while creating additional content.
One Optional Screen Is Enough
It is interesting to note that this way of creating content makes it quite easy to create content of professional quality that makes use of many different pieces of reference information. Ultimately, there are some very complex tasks that will require more than two windows at once, but workers who routinely do this kind of work often have unusually large screens on their laptop computers, or may even have multiple displays on a static workstation that they use to perform this work. Although one could imagine wanting to do such work while mobile, such workers will typically make notes about what ideas have occurred to them while traveling that they will be able to refer to once they return to their laptop computers or static workstations where they may create the content that takes full advantage of the ability of such computers to be used to do such complex work.
Once we realize that laptop computers and static workstations still have utility for many professional workers, we can further see that the main need on a smartphone is to create content like the informal content that is usually created on smartphones, but to also be able to create such content that needs to be of professional quality. For professional smartphone users, this is an important need. A single optional screen makes a big difference in ease of use when creating such content, but a third screen only becomes important when the content creation task reaches the next level of complexity for which a laptop computer is really the appropriate tool to use.