6 May 2009

Surface deployments at Harrah's hotel in Las Vegas infuse technology with Vegas nightlife

Microsoft’s Surface promises to have a huge impact on the way retailers and hoteliers interact with their customers.

Touch is inherent to human relationships, and as such it is also a central part of the customer experience. Whether they are considering a purchase in a shop, or wondering what to order for breakfast in a hotel, it is natural for customers to expect a ‘human touch’ – that is, intuitive service that is sensitive to their individual needs, as well as the ability to help themselves when they want to.

Information technology has played a significant role in striking this balance. From e-commerce to self-service kiosks in-store, from front-of-house information panels to the back-office systems that enable hoteliers and retailers to maintain stock and enhance customer relationships, there can be no doubt that computers have entirely transformed the way the world works. But despite the increasing sophistication of these systems, which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, it can often seem that there is something missing in the human-technology interface – and that’s touch.

Since the punch cards of the 1960s, the typewriter-based keyboard has been the ubiquitous way in which human beings interact with their computers. The emergence of the graphical user interface and its physical partner, the mouse, made the keyboard part of a chain, but it remains a vital part of most computing applications. But keyboards are far from being intuitive devices – for example, not everybody can type well. Touch-screen interfaces go a step further, and indeed they can help to make the user experience more intuitive and straightforward. But there remains an element of passive consumption in many touch-screen systems, where the user is ‘fed’ information and services from a rigidly structured menu. Now, though, Microsoft Surface has brought a new level of human interactivity to the touch-based computer experience, and it promises to revolutionise the experience of customers across a multitude of industries – not least retail and hospitality.

Launched in spring 2008 in the US, and already in commercial use with a number of customers such as Sheraton Hotels and Harrah’s Entertainment, Surface has recently been officially introduced to the EMEA region. It is now available for purchase in 12 EMEA countries, and Microsoft is focused on getting the device in front of as many potential users as possible. “This is an experiential product,” says Matt Champagne, Microsoft’s director of product management for Surface, adding that the company is currently concentrating its efforts on a number of key verticals including retail and hospitality, financial services, healthcare, education and the automotive industry.
Surface has its origins in many years of research. “The product originally came about as a result of a conversation in 2001 between staff from Microsoft Research and our hardware operation,” says Champagne. “That conversation was about creating an innovative, easy-to-use and natural device for computing, and removing some of the barriers to using computers.”

From the start, Champagne says, there were four key tenets driving the Surface project. It had to deliver direct interaction with content, allowing users to grab digital information and interact with it through touch and gesture, as they would with objects in the physical world. It should be a multi-touch device, recognising many simultaneous points of contact with the screen and thus enabling users to do more than just operate it with one finger at a time, as is the case with most touch-screen devices. From this multi-touch strategy came another key aspect: Surface was to be a collaborative device, allowing multiple users to work on the same unit at the same time.

Collaborative computing has become big news in the connected world of today, but such functionality is about virtual collaboration, with each of us at our own individual devices. Surface was to change the way we think about collaboration, focusing on direct interactions between people in the same location. Its interface breaks down the traditional barriers between people and technology, providing simple and instant access to information and entertainment for several users simultaneously. Importantly, the Surface screen has no top or bottom, instead being a full 360-degree user interface: this means that each user can access content oriented towards him or her. And finally, Surface had to blend the physical and virtual worlds in a new way, allowing interaction between digital content and physical objects.

Dave Brown of Microsoft Research, a solutions architect from the UK who has worked extensively on the Surface project, explains that the intuitive nature of the Surface user interface is what makes it so exciting. “The way that basic physics has been brought into Surface makes it a more usable device,” he says. “Being able to spin a globe on the screen, to throw pictures across the table – the interaction of physical and virtual objects. Users can work with physical objects in a very natural way.”

Brown adds that the quality of the touch screen technology is another vital advance. “The fidelity of the touch recognition is really impressive,” he explains. “If you select content, it will appear facing you no matter where you are in relation to the device. The device recognises the shape of your finger and uses that to work out which side of table you are on. This makes working on tasks together much easier, as users aren’t disadvantaged by looking at the user interface from the other side. On a normal computer, multiple users would be competing for the mouse or keyboard. Even with an ordinary touch screen there would be the same problem.”

Radical though it may appear, Surface is a Windows-based computer at heart and, as with many other of Microsoft’s business areas, the company’s huge partner ecosystem is a vital part of the success of the device. “We already have a network of 120 partners in 11 countries developing applications for Surface,” says Champagne. “Some of these are at proof-of-concept stage, some are in full development and others are just starting to come to market. It is very much a partner story. It’s a software platform as well as a hardware one, and we are producing a software development kit just like we would for any other area of our business. Surface runs Windows Vista, and it’s based on the standard Microsoft stack – if you’re a Windows Presentation Foundation developer, you can easily develop applications for Surface.”

Champagne does acknowledge, though, that the unique Surface interface makes developing for the device a different kind of challenge. “The 360-degree user interface provides new problems for developers,” he says. “You have to think about the interaction model, and how you can create applications that work for groups of people collaborating.” Developers and user experience experts, he explains, can’t work separately as they might on other projects: the interface is so central to Surface that making use of it must be at the heart of the development process.

For some, it might be easy to dismiss Surface as a gimmick; something that might prove important in time, but which at the moment is simply a marketing tool for a research and development operation. But the speed at which the device has been picked up by leading organisations in a range of sectors – and not least its momentum in the retail and hospitality industries – gives the lie to that suggestion.

Champagne says that the commercial viability of Surface to potential purchasers has always been at the heart of the project. “Surface is a commercial product,” he says. “We know it is a great user experience, but that experience has to create a return on investment. And it does: for example, it can drive footfall in retail outlets, and it can be used to create greater attachment to a company’s brand among its audience. In addition, it will generate cost savings, for example by using it as a training device, or to demonstrate complex products and thus reduce the requirement to carry inventory.”

This article first appeared in the Summer 2009 edition of Retailspeak magazine.

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