All posts tagged as "Context"

Even in the seemingly remote burg of Lawrence, KS, I am all over the place.

I could be at home, at the office, the coffeeshop, en route to Kansas City, at a show, restaurant, art gallery, or bar. I could be at the park with the kids, I could be at my folks’ house in Leavenworth. I could be at the antique store, the scooter shop, or getting my guitar repaired. Maybe I’m getting my haircut, or an oil change for my car.

So, what if I tweeted or sent a status update to any of my social networks stating something like the following:

“I can’t believe I just witnessed such a heinous misstep of personal grooming.”

Great (even brilliant) content, posted all over the ethers. But….so what? It’s a bon mot that doesn’t amount to much, and is an opinion shouted to a crowded room with almost guaranteed irrelevance. I may have thousands of people “hearing” it, but… so what? It’s gone, and it’s voice filled over by the thousands of other great one-liners filling your friends list.

Well, how do I change that? How do I create some relevance, some context, some social understanding of the “where” to my “what”? Would it convey more, to more people, for more reasons? Would a simple identifier of place give my shout-out more gravity?

I could do this: “I’m at the barber shop and I can’t believe I just witnessed such a heinous misstep of personal grooming.”

Ok, I had to type out “I’m at the barber shop and” just to make it contextual. Eh. Should be an easier way, right? I mean, there’s a shorthand paradigm for updates, for referring to other people, for mentioning that it’s a forward of someone else’s thought (re-tweet), there’s tagging for relevance (hashtags). Why isn’t there something like a location tag?

So, we were talking at Little Springs about this very idea. I think it was Barbara who brought up the observation that on my personal status updates, different “spheres” of people (friends, acquaintances, family, coworkers, etc.), could all read my content differently if they made any assumptions about the context, and more importantly, the relevance of that content based on their understanding of our relationship. This was very similar to the point made in a talk by Jared Benson at D4M 2008.

It’s a great point: Personally, I have multiple layers of audience that can construe my content with whatever filter they have that is most prominent in our relation. Even time of day or day of week cause us to make assumptions that aren’t always fair, and even presumptive in a manner that can often cause a lot of miscommunication issues. For example:

“Oh, I thought you were at work today when you mentioned in your status update that you wanted to kill someone. Is everything ok at the office?”

Well, no, I was actually at the store, during what would normally be a work hour.

Again, why update at all, why have a window into your world, if you don’t even have enough information for your audience to understand why you’re even saying it? I mean, really, are my status updates, tweets, text messages all just “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”?

Nope. So let’s fix that. Like this:

^MyBarbershop – I can’t believe I just witnessed such a heinous misstep of personal grooming.

Ahhh, that’s better. The cognitive dissonance has been dissipated. I can see clearly now, the pain of trying to understand the context is gone.

Plus, it’s kinda funny.

So, we’ve outlined the details here about this whole deal. Basically, we need SOMETHING to set the stage for the context. Following the precedent of #subject and @identity, respectively, we’ve chosen to follow suit with ^location.

And, it works! @shoobe01, @barbaraballard and I have been using it for the past few days, figuring out the variables and rules, the refinements and usages. People from all my different “audience spheres” have let me know that using this tagging system actually creates more relevance and understanding of what i’m posting about. It seems pretty obvious to me, actually, but just like Marcel DuChamp, someone just needed to do it first.

So go try it. Read the article we’ve created about it in our design patterns wiki. See if you find that it makes a difference to how you post, and how your audience responds to it. And if you have more thoughts, references or suggestions, it’s a wiki. Add it in.

Yes, this whole thing again. Sorta. Bear with me.

The definition of a smartphone (vs. featurephone) is... well it has varied over time. Mobile phones used to be pretty much restricted to making and receiving calls, with a tiny address book to support it. A few had some sort of paging, and eventually real text messaging came about pretty universally.

Then these PDA-phones came out. Which were, well, PDA phones. They added:

• Calendar
• Contacts list (larger and with more fields than a phone address book)
• The ability to synch these to a computer

Sure, some of them had additional features. The one shown above was a Palm, with the ability to take (as I recall) any old Palm III software. But others were sold right alongside with locked feature sets, in proprietary software. And hardly anyone seemed to care.

Today, the definition of smartphone seems to be:

• Identifiable operating system
• Ability to add applications

Which strikes me as awfully technical all of a sudden. I have always been somewhat leery of defining devices by technical features when we're really talking about how consumers use the item. So I wonder how this happened, and do end users really care?

And some recent data reminded me if all this. Some percentage of iPhone users (though 7% sounds low) never install any applications. A huge number download only one. If a key definition of smartphone is downloads, then I ask if those users are really even carrying a smartphone? Sounds like they are perfectly happy with their feature-phones, however hi-falutin' the feature-set is.

The other the stuff that's made me think of this is that I've been observing (and hearing on the radio, and seeing on TV) about what makes a cool phone. When you get past technical (and especially mobile) blogs, magazines and so on, what makes something cool are specific features, or even specific media.

My phone does essentially everything that can be done by a phone (but touch, or have a QWERTY keyboard, if that's really a feature), but one of the few things that makes people go "wow, that's cool" (and then some of them want one) is that when NPR gets lame in the evenings and weekends, I use internet radio to listen to the BBC World Service (and plug it into the car through the lame cassette tape thingy. It involves cables and is semi-kludgy (not sure it would be sillier if I got a shortwave radio and plugged it into the car instead.

And, they don't necessarily want one of my phones. They want: that feature. On their phone, or on something else that meets the rest of their needs, but also has this extra feature. I even did much the same with other devices, some of which had radio transmitters so did it without cables. And they were featurephones. Locked down operating systems, that maybe you can add a J2ME app on top of. If you'd bother to.

A similar focus on features bears out in studies of, say, iPhone users, "the ability to add applications is only the #4 priority for iPhone users, below browsing, e-mail, and 3G capability." (Quote). Browsing, email and "speed" are features. Adding apps is something to enable more features, and not a feature in itself.

While users might get more and more used to downloading to add functions their phones, it will always be an enabling technology. Aside from us phone nerds, who cares about technology and tweaking the UI? Users want performance, utility, value. They want features and functions, and I see that continuing no matter what the future looks like.

Yes, this should be obvious. Design for users. But I am not seeing a lot of it lately. Mobile seems very focused on targeting the experience to the device. Additional cleverness around some device repositories will help with this.

But I wonder if – aside from using screen size to display the best image, and so on – I care very much. Can I really divine anything about a user's context, needs, intent, values, desires, or anything else from device detection?

Of course not. Oh, maybe a tiny bit in aggregate, but whenever I see data there's a lot more correlation between access to this site or that, or through this entry point or the other, than there is for device type. And so I say we need to remember users again. Step back, think hard, and if you have made assumptions about users based on handsets, consider stopping that.

Even if it ends up being true, because you have a limited user base (e.g. a corporate site where executives are issued Blackberries) start with the user. Crack open those UCD books, and come up with at least a few quick and dirty personas. Do task inventories and other things to make sure you are focusing your technical team efforts on the right areas.

As always, keeping the user in mind throughout the design process should help bring you one step closer to success.

The whole concept of the long tail, and personalized interfaces and even much of the contextually-sensitive network that I rant about regularly is getting targeted, relevant information to individuals at the right time.

But who says it’s the right information?

It’s been hip for years (at least among a certain slice of the population) to dis the media elites. We’ll all be better off making up our own minds. But how do we know?

This all came up while driving this morning. A local radio show interviewed Brian Kelly, the editor of U.S. News & World Report, specifically about how they have moved from weekly to monthly publication, and how their content (and readership) varies on the internet. At one point it came up how useful it was (is, I guess, but readership is so low anymore) to simply read the whole newspaper; you would learn about stuff that you didn’t even know you needed to know.

Now that I think of it, I fear we’re moving towards a world where everyone is only reading information sources that hew to their pre-established world view, interacting with others hardly at all.

So, that’s a call to arms for me. How do I square my desire for contextually-relevant content, delivered on time and personalized to the individual, with this need for a broader understanding? How do I avoid enabling a more tribal, polarized world by accident? Specifically, how do I do it on a personalized interactive device?

Presuming that we cannot simply say “read the newspaper” or otherwise change what users are asking for, I guess one way is to consider context and environment in a broader sense.

You read articles that are filtered by interest (via keywords), by your location, and so on. They may originate from any source and location but that is where it ends. While each individual bit of data lives in it’s own part of the world, there is no clear way to dive deeper or see relations between them or to other information.

Though I continue using news as an example, almost anything can be though of the same way. Manufacturing and consumer products are drawn from widely separated suppliers; the prices on items you buy, and their ingredients, and their safety are related to things that happen on the other side of the country or the world. For something less scary, music is somewhat insular in distribution, but musicians are influenced by those in far off places, cultures and times; you might very much care about this, so how do we get that information about the next level deeper?

One way is to rely on professionals. Writers and editors can not just create content but group and relate it. To a certain degree I like this method, as it’s deeply related to the information design processes I so love (and explain in my book). There are some sources of curated content now in new media methods, and I am sure some will continue to exist, and be created in different ways.

Another is to rethink crowdsourcing. The way many aggregation services work (google, and google news for one) is more or less a popularity contest. Clicks equal relevance. But this tends to emphasize commonality, and mass over depth. What if outliers were analyzed and promoted more. What if those edge case readers who like to tenuously related stories, music, ingredients, pricing, etc. were able to be employed in exciting ways. Nothing has to dead end, and cross-references bring not more information about the same, but deeper, different information.

Of course another good model mixes the two, with specific individuals paid little or nothing to add a manual touch to the data manually or automatically generated by the user base.

I don’t know what will actually happen, and can only influence so much myself.

I sometimes want to use the word “environment” to replace “context.” I avoid it to prevent confusion with the ecological context (the way it’s now hard to use “chauvinist” to mean “fanatically patriotic”). But I do like what it implies; that each of us, and each bit of data is tied inextricably to others. Tugging on one should reveal the web of information, and let us explore that environment and our place in it more thoroughly.

With all of the work on the conference, I’ve not been able to keep up on things like blogging very much. That’s not because not much is happening in the mobile design world; quite the contrary. In fact, Adaptive Path’s Rachel Hinman had webinar for mobile web design during our conference + webinar, and Mobile Design UK had their monthly meeting.

So you get a tour of recent mobile design articles:

From Point & Do, 5 Questions To Ask When Planning Multitouch Interfaces is good for those working on sophisticated iPhone apps and future multi-touch displays.

John Keith of Cloud Four gives us Mobile Device Detection Results comparing four cheap or free device detection mechanisms. Good reading to improve your mobile users’ experience.

Roger, Wilco responded in a comment about my Mobile SEO post (better yet, see the wiki SEO page) with a link to Mobile Search and SEO Considerations for Mobile; he’s updated the wiki page as well.

You can vote on entries in the MEX Mobile User Experience conference mobile design contest. Perhaps more interestingly, conference organizer Marek Pawlowski asked 20 mobile entrepreneurs what the startup community could do to improve the mobile user experience. I think it’s really worthwhile to see what business folks want to do here.

And of course the UI-as-business article from Fierce Wireless caught my eye, Eye on the UI: The need to differentiate. In particular, this paragraph caught my eye:

In general, Wugofski said that the user experience needs to align with the device that it’s on and around how that device operates. “Users use lots of different applications,” he said. “For your app to be successful on that phone, it generally has to follow the same paradigms [of the phone].”

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about this over the years, and this year I’m making it one of my speaking themes. You can check out the first of the presentations in the series at SlideShare: A Foolish Consistency.

Object-oriented design is something we’ve practiced for years, even before it was “invented” in 2005. It’s also explicitly discussed in Steven’s recent book, Designing by Drawing. It’s still useful to understand and discuss, even more so now with the numerous screen size & device capability variations found in mobile, and more and more different internet-enabled devices.

In a more design-theory vein, check out A Framework for Gesture Generation and Interpretation which is a fascinating analysis of gesture recognition.

Michael Mace of Rubicon Consulting brings us Smartphones as appliances: Different phones for different usages, with the great takeaway that users of different devices value different things from their devices. Blackberry users value email more; iPhone users value web more. It suggests design directions for several services.

And last but not least, fellow mobile design firm Punchcut posted an animation for Design Considerations for Touch UI, following up on a previous blog entry on the same topic.

This morning had fewer technical issues, and in fact we got a gigabit ethernet line attached to some more useful internet, and the webinar is running much better.

Sadly, Christina Brodbeck, scheduled as our first speaker, had to drop out. I was terribly interested in this as I think the YouTube app is a wonderful thing, is terribly sticky and inspired this neat-o discussion of one web on the blog. Overnight I talked with Jeff and he responded to the blog entry, and we’re getting somewhere interesting with it all.

We replaced it at the last minute with a discussion already planned for CTIA (and even with handouts and a Design for Mobile wiki page) on making sticky apps.

Instead of trying to follow the whole discussion, you are probably best off just going to the wiki and seeing what we changed, and maybe scanning through the #des4mo tweets for Wednesday morning. And, please go back and change it yourself if you have thoughts.

After an excessively convoluted switch to his computer, Nader Nejat of Omega Mobile presented about mobile Flash. I was particularly interested in how he said they are doing a lot of work on /three/ screens. Desktop, mobile and TV. A trend worth noticing I still say, that we’ll all have a lot of connected devices, not just one or two.

Flash is important as it’s the standard for rich media. Some crazy percent of advertising is in Flash. Time to market for mobile flash is good, as it’s got a series of neat things, like audio support, built in.

The recently-announced Flash Light Distributable Player
will get us out of the current model where the operator/maker has to install it, and into the desktop model, where anyone can install it. And actually, it’s better: if a user tries to use a Flash lite thing, it will also install Flash automatically.

Better yet, the Open Screens Project means that members don’t have to pay licensing fees, and they have a $10MM fund, to encourage development. So they are pushing it a lot.

He talked about some tactical things then. How you can build mobile mockups quickly, easily and accurately. I like that it’s throwaway, so no one worries about correct coding. He encourages it a lot for presentations, testing (he said “testing” fonts and colors, but I think user testing). The example was 15 man weeks, which is pretty high to me, but maybe my budgets are just too small. Though it was damned cool, as he had live (in the app) changes to type and colors, without loading a new version.

Neat example that demonstrated how Flash can read XML, (and RSS) and of course embedded video files, that worked pretty well. It even did simple mobile things I would have expected them to miss (not having used Flash Lite myself yet) like sending the user to resident dialer and SMS programs.

To move to production development, he suggests you start with the prototyping to build your people, knowledge and processes.

He had a cute list of Mobile Flash urban legends:

• Flash is just for animations – Did start as one, but that was 13 years ago, and now it’s more.
• There are 1-2 million people who can do Flash – Skilled Flash developers are rare. For mobile, they need to be good craftsmen, like be able to spell well. Cowboys are good for prototypers, only.
• Anyone can do Flash – It’s not the easiest thing, so plan ahead.
• One file to rule them all – Technically true, but not practical, and huge. Author for screen size, processor speed, etc. But load the right set per device. This strikes me as very interesting, and maybe some of where pixel-perfect design comes from, where you have to execute in specific ways.
• Silver bullet – Not magic, but if you are doing something it does, it does them very well. Some neat, but non-standard capabilities, like S60s let you see the native address book

Getting started: get a device that works on eBay for like $100. Get CS4. Use bluetooth to load the files. Work on 320×240 devices. Make simple “slideware” to try it.

He was surprised there were not a lot of questions about openness. Some good points about competition, and their “more open” initiative, and I think I am not worried about it as much as I was because it can read normal information sources like his xml/rss demo. Something else to talk about regarding One Web, I suspect.

And then, another panel, started by Paul Atchley, from right up the hill at KU, who spends a lot of time on attention issues and specifically on mobile use while driving, which is what we talked about. And brought slides. He started by, well, pulling up my comments saying “really, how bad is it?” and mostly refuted me point by point.

I disagree. We’re /told/ phone use is evil, evil, evil. But is it worse than any of a dozen other distractions? Research seems all over the place, and much is unreleased, sponsored by interest groups and otherwise suspect. I distrust it all partly because the reaction has been legislation that is demonstrably ineffective against a part of the issue that is irrelevant (handsfree legislation).

It seems to me to be a default “blame the object” reaction. And this is doomed to fail. If nothing else, because the value (say, in navigation alone) is high, and perceived to be high. Mobile devices will be used in environments like driving where distraction must be taken into account, and more in the future than today.

First up, he showed the video of the basketball passing and how you don’t notice something else. Then specifically pulled my comment, and focused on the part where I said research seems non-specific. So he showed a bunch of specific issues, that seem to have a 400% increase in accident risk, on several studies. Similar to or a bit worse than drunk driving.

Is it worse than other distractions? Another video, with lots of stuff. And we raise our hands when we notice the 20 story apartment building appearing, or not (like me). We think the brain is this hypercomputer, but really it’s a well programmed 286. Not powerful, but cleverly designed. We have a small window of attention (the size of your fist at arms length) and we move it around.

But that system is shared with the one that talks, and so on, so gets distracted.

Navigation has, he thinks, a net gain in safety, but they do take some effort. Video of switching the person you are talking to while giving directions (funny!) to show how focus on a task takes away your ability to pay attention to other things.

He did, I think, agree legislation is probably not the solution. Design could help somehow, though.

David Heinsohn is an instructor at Flight Safety, so is approaching the attention issue from a training point of view.

He told us how (once you learn) flying is easier than driving. “I am a tenth of a second from dead any time I am going down the turnpike.” The recent birdstrike gave a lot of time actually to get the problem solved.

He can turn on (in simulators) a bright red light 3” above the radio, then has them tune the radio. Without an audio cue, they still miss it. Also, we do not get additional training, unlike aircrew, who have to have training at least every two years.

He does talk and text while driving even though he knows it’s bad in specific ways. Mic’s that are remote (vs. headsets) tend to cause people to look at the device. It’s pointless, but something we are culturally attuned to do.

Adult learning and around integrating learning with what we know now. We often want to know more than the presenter.

And then David told Bob Miller to tie it together. Bob, as Barbara said during the intro, has been vocal through the conference (plus has worked a lot of places and is an HF type anyway) so is a nice point of view with this crowd.

The phone has become the great interruptor. There became places you didn’t put phones, like you never just stuck one in a restaurant. You walk into a business and even though you are standing there, they talk to the person on the phone.

So this momentum sets a bad precedent for things like driving.

How late at night would you call a casual acquaintance, or someone who doesn’t seem to like your calls? Why do we call people who are 4x more likely to die if we call them?

Instead of thinking of the user driving, can we solve it with discouraging this on the other end of the conversation. Almost all “cell phone etiquette” is about the receiver of a call, not the caller.

Is compelling inherently distracting?

Around here it broke into a general discussion, so I am not sure who said what. Mobile use varies by age, of course; 99.8% talk and drive. The others don’t have cars. 78% sms and drive. Adoption age is going down, and usage going up.

So the 6% accident cause rate for mobiles is not high now, but it will be increasing. And Paul argues it’s preventable vs. others (Aging).

David brought up the use of the term “causing accidents” by the device. There is a tendency to want to blame the thing, vs. finding the true cause (you).

It would be hard to measure and enforce aggression, so we legislate the thing.

70% of air accidents are during the 6-7% of flight time (takeoff/landing, etc.) and so during that time there are strict rules about what you should be saying in the cockpit; they don’t have general conversations.

Social communications (even facebook, twitter, not just voice) will disregard safety concerns. “Importance” to them (if I understand this right) will trump safety though.

38% of people in some survey have interrupted sex for a phone call. How can we avoid people picking up the phone when “just driving”?

We are finding something that people love more than their cars, staying connected with each other. Is this a compelling argument for public transit?

There are strata of appropriateness for speeding. Is there a way to categorize mobile use somehow (like when people in the car stop talking to you). I narrate my phone calls (“merging, wait”), and maybe some automated system could be created.

Using paper maps (and similar) Paul is still looking into, but it’s very distracting.

First drunk driving law enacted in 1917. But not till the mid 80s, that it started getting serious. Social norms have followed enforcement, so we cannot imaging letting someone drive drunk. The social norm is that the phone is more important, but there could be a change to that in the future? Is there something socially we could do in the next few years? Movie theaters have moved to the standard of

Bob says currently receiving a call in the car will elicit a “okay, be careful” but then it continues.

There were some technology issues up front, making me snarlyingly unhappy and us a bit late to start, but we finally sorta got there and not too many personal IMs popped up during the conference.

As I did for last year, I’ll try to liveblog the whole conference, and publish when I can at the breaks.

Apparently we selected a great set of people to kick off the morning. A lot of thinking about big issues of social, networking, and understanding. They put everything else we do into context very well.

Shilpa Shah kicked us off with by setting how mobile can change to behave in human ways, not try to change people to work in technological ways. Much of this was, to me, interestingly related to the gesture work we’ve been showing off (and some AR and other stuff we’ve been secretly thinking about) so it was nice to get a higher level, philosophical view of it all.

She talked about a bunch of the social contexts of use I’ve been ranting on more and more lately. I embrace it, but she thinks there is going to be a backlash to technology and people will want to move away from it. I am not sure I buy the backlash per se, but the concepts are still broadly right.

Because of an audio problem in the room, we didn’t all watch this, but she wanted us to see it, so watch this TED video on “antisocial” phone use: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/renny_gleeson_on_antisocial_phone_tricks.html

Some principles to keep in mind for designing like this:
1) Engagement creates a new shared experience
2) Helps people physically connect
3) Physical reality should remain unchanged
4) Does not compete for attention
5) Celebrate the emotional, not the efficient

Judy Breck reminded us that Encarta in 1993 was amazing. Inconceivable that you could get an encyclopedia on a CD. Set to die this year. Encarta had no long tail, no connections, a perfect walled garden.

20th century education has squashed the long tail. Encarta was only in the head, and everything else is around standards, and rote knowledge. Each grade gives you a bit more information about a topic, but that is all. If you are curious about cells in the 3rd grade, too bad for you. The tail should be available as needed for exploring by the precocious.

A good first step is to encourage kids (and even teach them how) to find info on the internet. But more so, we need to make the information /findable/. Make educational systems as SEO-centric as sales types.

There are a lot of neat videos, a cool hyperbolic tree of the human “diseasome” the LANL map of science and so on. Do take the time to play with her presentation. Click the little images in the strip at the top to get from page to page.

Knowledge is a network, as is our brain. These two facts are not coincidental; her “knowledge explorer” example lets you see this aggregated information, and link to museum websites around the world. In the pre-internet era, you could go view this information for real, but never all of them at once. And multiple people, in multiple locations, can do this all together. She can even see schools functionally disappearing, and some entirely other type of social network to support this knowledge/learning/education need will emerge.

Literally boggling my mind. So radical it’s hard to ask the right questions about this, but it all makes sense so I’m gonna keep track of it.

Scott Campbell asked us, what is the message? From the point of view of mobile, and social media today, what does this all mean? Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” is in fact key. Is a marriage proposal the same over email?

The emergence of radio (then television for the next generation) were key defining attributes of their age. Broadcast, in the sense of an institution in a big building sending a narrow range of messages to pretty much everyone. There are drawbacks and benefits, but this is a “mass age” model.

The PC, then the Internet, fostered a shift from the mass age to a networked society. He sees us moving into the personal communication society, as a subset, or evolution from, the networked one.

There are worries about “social privatism,” where people spend all their time on their immediate lives and that of their immediate friends, at the expense of broader communities. This can lead you to disregarding all outside views, and kills healthy debate.

Information exchange on the internet (vs. sociability or recreation) does enable social connectedness and involvement in the community. TV in general correlates to less social engagement, but those who watch more news engage /more/ with their local community. So the content is more important? Studies he did showed a positive correlation between civic and political engagement and recreational use as well though. Why is that?

They are tightly coupled to the size of the network, and the degree to which it is like minded. Larger networks are better for a political life. Network diversity is bad for involvement (avoid conflict, etc.) but good to set your attitude to accept other viewpoints. If you just interact with the same small group all the time, it’s encouraging social privatism and detachment from everything else.

Designers can work on this by tailoring device design, content and the manner in which social networks are designed, to make this all work in a more engaging and socially responsive manner.