One project that's kept us extremely busy for the last 3 weeks or so has been an Enterprise Search app with EMC / Microsoft FAST. I'm pleased to say that it has just been demonstrated in the Tuesday keynote at FASTForward.

As with the Tesco demo at PDC, the UX was the brainchild of the EMC Consulting guys and gals, who have done a fabulous job - sufficiently fabulous to win an award for best search UX at the show.

I just wanted to post a couple of thoughts about developing multi-touch interfaces, as embodied in the Microsoft Surface technology (and Windows 7, if you've got the necessary hardware).

Losing the mouse, and thinking about many people collaborating in the use of the same application changes the way you think about developing software. You have to find compact ways of displaying large amounts of information so that you can have multiple "centers of focus" for the different users; but equally, you need large target areas so that my fat fingers stand a chance of manipulating the information. Text has to take a back seat, and sound becomes an important part of the experience.

Given a blank sheet, there's plenty you can do, but should you do it? Will people realize that a two finger contact might be different from a single finger, for example? (Answer: no!)

The mouse is a proxy for your eyes: users tend to move it where they are looking, and you can deploy all sorts of clever hover effects when they do so, to enhance the information content. With touch, on the other hand, your eyes are your eyes (amazing!), and you don't make contact with an object until you are ready to action something; more like the "real world".

In fact, there's a lot more interaction with the physical world, and that brings up new questions: how could/should objects like your cellphone and business card interoperate with the virtual environment? How does security work in a public space like this?

We had three weeks of discovery and experiment, and although we're a long way from fully exploiting the possibilities of this platform, I think we're starting to find new and exciting ways of approaching old problems.