All posts tagged as "Context"

In Rachel Hinman’s ongoing thought series, she points out how we disengage with the world:

Lately I have been thinking of a sad sight I see often – a person, walking around utterly disengaged with the world around them, head buried in a mobile phone. It’s evidence of an incredibly unfortunate relationship that we humans have established with technology objects. They demand we disengage from the world and focus on the object – give deference to it, instead of the world.

This is a problem that we as the mobile industry tend to exacerbate. Cool highly interactive experiences, like much of the iPhone’s UI and many touch interactions, require the user to stop and exclude the world. Fine for games, not so good for music players. Despite my iPod Touch, I still use my iPod Shuffle for being out in the world. I’ll use the Touch only when I have the freedom of some guaranteed uninterrupted time. I like to be able to interact with the world with only one second’s delay.

The iPod Shuffle is far less likely to engage its wearer so much that she crosses the street without looking. The Touch and iPhone require more interaction. Perhaps if I were listening to music and I could just pull the earpieces out without missing much, I’d feel differently. As we frequently discuss, a good design is optimized for the context in which it will be used.

The takeaway: decide whether you need to design for users immersed or emersed in your product, or perhaps facilitate both behaviors. Then do it. But don’t assume.

Last week Maj. Mark Sullivan, Deputy Chief of my local police department showed me the way their patrol cars are set up with communications and computer interactive systems. I gather the older versions, before they were based around ruggedized laptops, were called Mobile Data Terminals, so you'll see the "MDT" terminology still.

They are, in many ways, a dream of location services, context and data availability:

• A computer allows the officer in the field to look up licenses, take reports and do other tasks without paper or slow voice communications back to the dispatcher.
• The location is constantly broadcast over a data network, right to the dispatchers' screens. No more "anyone in the area" calls; the closest available vehicle can be sent to a call.
• The dispatcher can send data to the cabin terminal; not everything is sent over voice, so there is less chance of garbled communications, less clutter on the voice channel, and some data will be much more speedily delivered.
• When the car pulls into the police department parking lot, say at the end of the shift, it comes into range of a dedicated high-speed wireless network. The video filmed during the shift is automatically downloaded and indexed to location and other data known or recorded.

I run a plate on my MDT and I can have a photo of the registered owner of the car in about 5 seconds. I'm typing on one right this moment, these things are awesome.

–Cleveland area police officer

But could all this access to information, and communications be a hazard? While the risk of distracted driving while talking on mobiles is apparently very low, the danger from actually looking down at screens is much more immediate and obvious.

Entering license plate information – and reading the response – while still moving may improve safety by presenting the officer with critical information (it's wanted in connection with an armed robbery!), but it's also a risk since the officer cannot be paying as much attention to driving, what is happening in the vehicle being stopped, or the rest of their surroundings, like other traffic.

And what about writing reports in the car?

A thirty-year-old officer was sitting in his patrol car in the middle of a busy shopping center parking lot, under a bright light. He was catching up on a couple of reports, using the patrol car's computer. Unfortunately, he lost awareness of the peripheral area.

Another vehicle pulled along side the passenger side of his patrol car. The dirtbag driver leveled a shotgun at the unassuming officer and slaughtered him. The cop's report ended abruptly, mid-sentence. The cop never saw the danger coming.

This is from an article entitled Is your Patrol Car Computer Going to Kill You? by Jim Donahue. He's a police officer in Florida, who has started training programs for mobile computers.

He teaches a class on "technology and tactics." Much like firearms training teaches officers not just the skills of hitting a target but when to use appropriate force, these classes are about how to use your technology as a tactical item. How it influences your work and the implications of using computers, phones, radios and other technology for the job.

While I am leery of training to overcome design issues, this is training to avoid procedural errors. And fixing the procedures can certainly help. The trend, as in all industries, is to get more and more out of your workers, so it is typical for patrol officers to spend their downtime in the field writing reports. As Major Sullivan says, "To write a good, cohesive report you gotta be focused; you can't be looking up every thirty seconds to see what's around you, which you should do if you are out." So it's not even just an issue of safety, but of getting good output from all facets of the officer. To that end, some departments do specifically encourage only note-taking in the field; reports are written after the shift, in the office.

Jim Donahue teaches his students that when they do have to perform paperwork in their car, there are ways to alleviate the awareness issues: find a quiet spot, back the car against a wall or other obstruction, roll the windows down and turn down the radios. And park on gravel if at all possible. You cannot be surprised by anyone walking up, and ought to have time to react if anything interesting happens.

Of course, some of these issues, and solutions, did exist in paper-report days. But shouldn't interactive systems be able to assist better, and be able to improve the situation? They certainly should not hurt, but even maintaining a flawed status quo aggravates the designer in me.

Some of this does seem to be happening. The Mission, KS police will be moving to a new system when their next vehicles arrive, with a smaller touchscreen and keyboard, mounted just below eye level. They are on movable arms to provide access to the vehicle stereo and climate controls, as well as to make the typing position more comfortable, while staying well away from airbags and the driver's body in case of an accident. Officers in other departments with systems like this to tend to say it brings ergonomics, usefulness and visibility up past any pre-computer systems.

These sorts of improvements seem to be moving into the mainstream slowly. The software, and device interaction in general, is an entirely different field, also with wildly variable results. Most of the software started life as desktop data entry systems. Many are simply compressed to fit the smaller screens, and are therefore quite difficult to use. Important functions of the software, or the computer system itself (dimming, or night modes) are often difficult to access, or impossible to decipher without training, which may not be available or comprehensive enough.

All of these are failures of basic mobile principles. Despite being vehicle mounted systems (mostly), the core concepts are the same:

• Glanceable
• Contextually presents information
• Contextually prepared for input
• Personalized
• Always on and always ready
• Obvious and predictable interface

These systems do some of this wonderfully, but generally fail on at least one critical area.

Since I don't think most of our readers don't build life/health/safety devices, you might wonder how this applies to you? Well, this is an excellent case study of a possible future of mobility in many ways. First, the hardware gives capabilities not far from many consumer mobiles. Multiple radios, location services, video, text communications. To get to this level of contextual behavior only takes a dream and some software. Why shouldn't my phone be able to recognize when it is within range of my desktop computer, and automatically use the bluetooth connection to download video to the correct folder?

Risks of heads-down behavior are, as I mentioned already, obvious for consumers on mobiles, and promise to get worse with increasing use of data services (and to my surprise still no voice-xml accompanying the text and graphic output).

But even aside from safety, simply missing out on meetings or family christmases, angering your boss or grandma and generally not engaging with the world is whole new class of risk that is almost the opposite of how mobile devices should be helping users interact with their world

And if you do work on public safety, communications, telematics or military systems, please do try to make them the best interfaces you can.

I have been watching the long unavailable The Machine That Changed the World series. It’s probably the best thing I have seen about the development of the computer, and addresses social and business/marketing concerns better than most of these. Everyone reading this must watch it immediately (now he also has an H.264 version for download).

There is a general story arc (so far, I have only completed episode 3) that computers are about number processing. To talk to the first ones, you had to understand math and electronics, then just the intricacies of unforgiving early programming, and so on. The GUI, supposedly, works because it emulates existing principles where people know how to look, point, touch, drag, stack and group, etc.

From this, we are told the next inevitable step is virtual reality, or some sort of – probably immersive – 3D environment. Because that’s even closer to what people know and manipulate naturally. So I ask why have such environments made practically no headway (in adoption at least) in the past decade or so?

Well, I just thought, it is actually here. We have solved this, inadvertently, by approaching it from the other end. Instead of building a reality into the computer, we moved computers into reality. Mobile computing (and robust networks) lets us access information sources from anywhere, and look up information about the environment. Some sort of ad hoc ubicomp will make this much more so, and much more useful, eventually.

Earlier today I went and talked to the local police department about the technology in their cars (much more about this soon enough). It’s a dream of mobile communications and context; location is used to dispatch automatically, videos are uploaded (and intelligently tagged) automatically as soon as the car pulls into the parking lot at the end of a shift, and much more.

While this takes up several cubic feet in a car, much of the same stuff is available now in much tinier – even handheld – formats.

And then I read about people loosing their faith, to one degree or another, and wonder why it’s not that obvious or clear. What can we do to make everyone understand that the future is in the palm of their hands? Just keep writing blog posts?

Well, as I have said before, the operators have the best opportunity, so maybe it is an uphill battle. But on the other hand, much of the technology is available. Get out there and design an app, evangelize on the value of mobile, push for that extra bit of good experience, make the products you work on useful /and/ usable. Make the boss, the marketing guy, the client, understand there is no point in waiting for the next big thing, now is the time to bring those ideas forward.

As usual, I have no magic solution (and while it’s not the iPhone, it’s not not the iPhone either), but have to believe that some day all these small steps we’re experiencing, and developing, will reach a critical mass and everyone will suddenly wonder how they got along assuming these little devices were just phones.

AdWeek just posted this interesting article on companies creating interactive experiences for moviegoers. I think this is a set of great examples of breaking down the barrier between physical and virtual worlds. As always, the mobile is involved because it is the device actually in everybody’s pockets.

Briefly, the article talks about a couple of companies making interactive software (and I think hardware in one case) to be installed at movie theaters. Audiences can participate in crowd games, can vote on surveys, and so on. Results are displayed on the big screen.

Of course every game is sponsored (this is AdWeek, after all) and the advertisers are improving brand recall. But it’s also a win for the theaters, the filmmakers, and the audience.

I believe that a major area of growth for retail stores and other spaces is creating extra levels of customer engagement via digital services, accessed by the mobile. Examples can include

• interactive store directories, so you can figure out whether they have what you are looking for


• projects for home improvement stores or recipes for grocery stores, letting you figure out what could be done with the Sputnik-looking vegetable in front of you, and where to find all of that stuff in the store


• user and critic reviews, similar items, back ordering, and more at book and music stores


• increasing interactivity and audience engagement at theaters


• storing my preference for large mocha at my coffee shop, and letting me buy it without standing in line


• airport information interaction – when is my flight boarding, can I change seats, where was my luggage the last time it was scanned, etc.


• information, beer ordering, statistics, small-screen replays, photos to save as memories at sporting events

There are more ideas, but this is a start. Each is, essentially, the sort of interactivity you might put on a well-designed web site selling the same services, except accessible in the physical environment.

Oh, and don’t forget that every one of these has a location component. And many have a phone-as-wallet component.

The latest release of google maps added in location for all of us with GPS-free devices. This works just fine for me, as I know how to navigate so don’t go much for routing software anyway. I often pull out the maps when I am somewhere different from last time, so if I want to drive somewhere, now it gets me to the ballpark, at least. And for my other use case – search an area for restaurants, or tires or stencil ink – it’s perfect.

Except when it’s not. Saturday my wife and I took some bunnies orphaned from someone else’s lawnmower accident out to the woods to be released. They did fine. But getting there was too difficult. I popped open the map to remind myself how to get there. G-maps had an issue getting location, probably because we were down in the low-lands along the river, but I was fine and just used it like always, as a scrolling map. Found the location, then the app decided it knows where I am… and moves me over there.

Yeah, it was inaccurate by several miles. But regardless, I had manually scrolled and zoomed to someplace, and therefore I probably care about it. What possessed Google to disregard user input, and scroll me over to where they think I should be looking?

Similar things happen all too often on mobiles. While typing a text message, a full-screen alert interrupts you to say a new message has arrived, maybe destroying the current composition. It’s almost impossible to type web addresses on most phones, because the useful symbols are hidden away. It takes six keypresses to find out what call you just missed because you couldn’t get to the phone on time. It’s easier to accidentally completely delete a new MMS than to send it.

Not all of these happen to everyone, every day, but they are typical issues. These are the sorts of things I have to listen to when I tell people I am a mobile designer. And they are not just bad in some vague way because they annoy users, but because the device is ignoring context.

Yes, context again. Any time now, as we keep saying, context awareness is going to cause all sorts of neat things to be possible, but there is already some of it available, just by looking at the design of the software and interaction:

• Keep in mind the likely tasks of your application or function; feature all the important tasks, downgrade less-important ones, eliminate (or add barriers to) dangerous ones


• Focus on the important information. Show me the search results, or the map, or the incoming message. Advertising, upgrade messages, meta-data, network details, tips & tricks or almost anything else needs to be delayed, pushed towards the edge or hidden entirely.


• Help the user perform their tasks. When entering numbers, don’t let them type words. Limits are good, if they assist the user in completing a task. (We look forward to seeing robust input management return to most mobile browsers).


• Trust user data above all. If text has been entered, an address selected or an item scrolled to, that is more important than most anything offered by software.

And always remember, it’s a connecting device. The user on the other end of the connection has data as well, and it’s usually more valid than the best guess of your application.

User context can be derived from several sources; in the future many devices will support Near Field Communications (NFC). The Touch project is dedicated to understanding these interactions.

Recently, they posted a thoughtful discussion on recent Nokia NFC devices and interactions. These are design issues that go beyond small screen/limited device, and incorporate the idea of the mobile phone as personal communications device, as our always-available connection to our digital selves and community.

The mobile phone has emerged as the one device that you will have with you, even if you have no other devices. New services (such as phone-as-wallet) simply make this fact even more true, more relevant. We thus have to expect that new services, if they want to be available to the largest number of people for the largest percentage of their day, will be available on the mobile phone.

Context technologies such as NFC can facilitate our use of this ever increasing, ever more complex set of capabilities. Our job as designers is to make it all work smoothly, pleasurably, and intuitively; to make it seem as if there are fewer functions; to occasionally argue for fewer functions. Even the Japanese find too many features to be too complex, even if that has not yet affected their buying patterns.

Remember, Design For Mobile speakers Liselott Brunnberg and C. Enrique Ortiz will be talking about working with mobile context.