There are a lot of Twitter clients out there for smartphones, some better than others. A lot of them give you some nice eye candy but after a while you find their UI can actually get in the way of information and context. Finnish UX specialty company, Fluid Interaction, seeks to redesign information and present it in useful, visually appealing way. Originally created for the Ovi store, Different Tack presents tweets in an interactive sector diagram that lets you quickly scroll along a wheel of tweets and find information about the traction they’re getting from retweets and more, as shown by the more central blue bar. The Twitter client is currently being updated and ported to the iPhone and Android platforms, with the iPhone app expected to drop in April.
Fluid Interactions have more up their sleeves; they’ve also created another app for the Ovi platform called AI:KA, which combines a clock and a calendar in one analogue timepiece. This allows a user to get all information about time and schedule in just one glance, either broken up by day, week, month, or year.
Last year the company won the Nokia Innovators Conference for showcasing how information can be presented in a new way. They received €150k in prize money, which provided a nice boost for the team of five to finance its growth. I spoke to Kalle Määttä from Fluid Interaction, who says they will also soon be taking on other areas in their quest to fight against information overload. Judging from the novelty of their past couple apps, it should be interesting to see what to come up with next, especially as they expand to the larger iPhone and Android platforms.
Here’s a video showing more of the Different Tack:
