Some time ago I bought an iPhone and I must say I love the user interface. It all feels very slick, every function does what you think it should do and looks very nice.
However, I recently downloaded an iPhone app from the NOS that shows you teletekst directly on you iPhone. very convenient.
However, I was wondering myself that it is quite a remarkable that this application for the iPhone is that popular. It is a user interface designed for TV’s with minimal interaction and minimum use of graphics. Of course the original idea was that through this simple view and interface it was easy to use and easy on the hardware. All reasons that are completely not valid on the iPhone platform.
I wonder where the popularity comes from. Is it because people are used for so long to this interface or are minimal interfaces more powerful than we think anyhow? Amazing..
Transparancy in politics
I recently came across this website that is dedicated to fact checking on political statements in the USA. If you listen to the candidates for US president it is often very hard to know if they are talking the truth, bending the truth in their direction or lying outright. Interesting to see that this website (and there are several other ones like this one) are increasing the transparancy a lot. It is shocking to see how much “distorted truths” are being told by these politicians.
The power of sites like these is that it will be getting harder and harder to stretch the truth once very white lie is monitored..
MobileHCI
Last days I was present at the MobileHCI conference. I was involved in this conference as sponsor chair. This conference deals with how to design and use mobile devices and experiences. There have been two issues that I found remarkable.
The first is the fact that two research projects dealing with the design of user interfaces showed that people preferred to use the slower interface. In one example they had developed an interface with special icons to use in the address book of the phone, targeted at illiterate people. Research showed that although people were faster through the visual interface they still preferred the alphanumerical one. Maybe they just did not want to be branded illiterate?
The second project dealt with research on the amount of air pollution children are exposed to by their route to school. This Lancaster project gave GPS equipped phones to 12 year old children and had them make pictures and blog their route to school, through all seasons. These routes were compared to the known air pollution throughout the city. Also the children got asked questions on how they felt and on their health. Through this research they could show the children that they would have less air pollution by taking another route. But reality is much more complex than we think. Many of those routes were banned by their parents because they are thought not be safe (e.g. a route through the park).
Both projects show that reality is much more complex than we think when designing products and services. This complexity is I think growing with the digitization of our society.
This conference was also the formal start of the Amsterdam Living Lab, a large research program I am involved in where the focus is in helping designers design products that people really want, not the ones designers think they want. I will publish more on this soon.
A last example how reality can be unexpected also came from the Lancaster project. The children all came from a very poor neighborhood. It turned out that some of them could not recharge their phone during the evening because their parents had pre-paid electricity …
And a final fact during the conference in another presentation: more than 60% of the mobile searches are for adult content: why does it not surprise me anymore …
Durability 2.0
We all know we have to be very careful with energy due to the warming up of our planet, dependency on energy from areas in the world you do not want to be dependant on and other reasons. But we also know that it is very hard to find the incentives to stimulate people to save energy here and now. Problem is that there is too much of a time lag between the action to save energy and the advantages acquired.
Recently I held a key note presentation at the conference “Greening the enterprise 2.0“, focused on how to save energy in office environments. Especially in offices it is hard to stimulate people to save energy because they do not have to pay the energy bill themselves. Automatic systems are usually circumvented (people open windows in completely controlled buildings because the intelligent control mechanism for temperature is less intelligent than the maker thought) and therefore seldom delivers the result that we think of beforehand.
And people are lazy. The picture on this post is from my own re-chargers in my office. I once placed a switch there to switch of the electricity. But after two cases of dead batteries that I needed at that moment I always have it switched on.
Focus of my presentation was how to use social networking aspects to stimulate people to save energy. By sharing best practices but also by more direct feedback on individual actions and results (and some peer pressure maybe …).
Here are the sheets.
Concentration
While scanning through some of the articles I missed during the holiday season (you really do not need a computer on a terras in Barcelona eating Tapas and drinking wine) I came across this Article from Nicholas Carr (Is Google making us stupid). Central them of the article is that due to jumpy way we read on the Internet (following another link after some paragraphs of reading) our way of thinking may be changing. More and more it is becoming difficult for a lot of people to concentrate on long texts, let alone long books like war and peace.
I do think this is a risk we are facing at the moment. In workplace research there is something that is called Attention Deficit Disorder. What it means is that people are so accustomed to browsing and wandering of a subject, checking mail all the time, reacting to chat and other disruptions that in the end they are not capable anymore of creating things that need concentration for a longer time. They are reacting instead of acting. I myself can sometimes feel this way: you have to force yourself to stay away from email and chat for several hours do finish something that you really have to think about.
A lot of our philosophical heritage is coming from people that were accustomed to do a lot of thinking without interruption. Of course, Plato and Socrates had little choice without broadband Internet available to them… What does this fragmented way of collecting information and maybe the resulting fragmented way of thinking lead us to in the future?
There definitely are positive aspects too. Now it is much easier to connect different information parts because they are all easy to find, or somebody else already connected them for you.
At the least this new way of reading and its consequences for our way of thinking is something we need to take into careful consideration when designing our new tools for the workplace.
Interesting read and food for thought. Do not forget to read the whole lengthy(?) article …
Social netWORKing
One of the most fascinating developments there are at the moment at the workplace is I think the use of social networking tools. What can ben seen in several reports is that the use of social networking tools (for example to find the right person for a task) is growing rapidly within companies (Funny thing is that in many cases this is happening completely below the radar of the IT department). The tools are used for example to find the right person with the right expertise as close by in your network as possible. Directly based on previous work done by people like reports they wrote, memberships of communities, questions they answered etc. Maybe even based on the emails you sent to specific people though in this respect there are of course issues on privacy that we have to deal with
IBM is developing some quite interesting applications around lotus connections dealing with social networking. Recently they have developed a tool called Atlas that is capable of showing you your network, how it relates to the subjects you are dealing, with and how to reach people. Important is that this information is also showed in relation to the company structure and (other) communities.
What I especially like about developments like these is that it gives the individuals in an organisation the power to create their own network besides the structure of the organisation. Links are being made that work instead of links that are made to control power (or am I being naive and will it still be used to do that?). I think due to the transparancy it will give the individual more power to reach his goals based on achievement instead of organisational position. People can create their own organisation that supports their work within the overall organisation. This leads to fascinating possibilities.
Of course their are lots of questions on how this will work. How do we deal with privacy, will the organisation not use the transparency to discipline people instead of giving them more freedom. What is the role of management in structures like these?
Personal, very personal
This morning I wrote about social networking and all the good things it may bring us. Stay in contact, meet old friends and things like that. After that I received this email from plaxo. One of my freinds, John will have his birthday on December 14th. Nice to get a reminder (I am terrible at reminding things like that) but where will this bring us? My first idea was: hey we could automate this and send the card by itsel so you will never forget another birthday. I can imagine being called by a friend: He Martijn, thanks for your card. Me: What card, what for?
I wonder where this will lead us …
And John, in case I forget: happy birthday …. 🙂
Context is King
One of the area’s of research from Telematica Instituut is using technology to determine the context of people. For example where you are, who you are with, what is your mood, what are you doing. This context is very usefull input for a lot of other things like recommendation (when you search for a restaurant to dine with you new girlfriend and value my opinion you do not want to use my recommendation of a restaurant I liked because it is so nice for the kids). So context is king for lots of new “social” applications.
For this we have created a new application called IYOUIT (meaning I, You and It). This is an application for mobile phones (Symbian S60) and constantly monitors your context and shares this with your friends. Recently this tool is made available to all. Have a look at it. It uses only the standard phone sensors (GSM signal, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS if available) to determine things like location, who is close and such.
One of the things this also shows is the power of “mashup programming”. The application uses all kinds of readily available applications. Google Maps of course but also weathersites. Why measure local temperature (and be dependent on extra hardware sensors) if you can find the local temperature based on your location data on a existing weather site?
Sticky
It is amazing how fast social networking is growing. Every time I am giving a presentation I always ask my audience how many people use one or more social networking sites like Facebook, MySPace, Hyves, LindedIn or another. Since a year this percentage is growing from 20% to more than 70% nowadays. I think especially business oriented sites like LinkedIn made social networking more “salonfähig” than before.
Social networking is I think an area where the idea of “the rich get richer” is especially true. After all, once you have many customers you tend to have more people sending invitation and there is more chance that people send invitations to you. One would expect that only some big sites remain and that newcomers have a hard time growing.
Therefore it is surprising that a new one, Plaxo, is really flooding my e-mail box. Many contacts have send me an invitation. After 10 invitations I decided to take a look, make an account and start using it too. I was a bit weary for this since using lot’s of sites is awkward, I thought.
But I must say this is a sticky one. Firstly they are very easy to link to your existing social networking site like LinkedIn. Secondly they use something they call “pulse”. On plaxo you can fill in the blogs you write, the photo sites you use and all other exhibitionist’s methods and they are shown in a log to all your contacts. This resulted in several comments on the photo you see above, I did not realize that it would be shown to all (welcome to the world of total transparency). Before I wrote about small world networks. One of the effects I see by using Plaxo is that you can see that lots or your contacts make contact with people you also know (and since you see this in the “pulse” you immediately connect to them too …).
One of the interesting developments in social networking is OpenSocial from Google, used by Plaxo too. Google failed miserable with Orkut and other social tools they developed. So they decided to create an API that makes it possible to integrate all social sites in an easy way. And thereby minimizing the advantage you have by having lots of members since everything integrates easily. And thereby minimizing your disadvantage when you have failed miserably in creatign you own social site. You have to admire them…
Addtention economy
I came acros this interesting article about the value of clicks on adds on the Internet. Since advertising is beginning to look (Seem) like the holy grail to keep the Internet free for use it is amazing how little data there is on how and why people click on adds and what the real effects are. The following result out of the study is interesting:
What did we learn? A lot. We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.
Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.
Seems a lot of research is needed to really understand how the relation between audience, click rate and real economic effects will be clear.