Adaptive Path Blog

Last weekend while waiting for a flight in Chicago O’Hare airport, I caught a BBC news segment on the devastating earthquake that struck Sichuan province in China on May 12th. The segment relayed the story of people across China using microblogging services to broadcast the tremor, update friends and family about their well-being and report stories of life on the ground. I found similar articles online and the report echoed much of how people used Twitter during the San Diego fires in October 2007.

What I find particularly inspiring about these microblogging examples is their insight into how I think we should be approaching mobile services - by focusing on human needs.

I’ve seen a fair share of mobile services – and quite honestly many make about as much sense to me as putting beans up your nose. Most are either awkward attempts at forcing PC-based services into a tiny device or so obviously designed from a market-segment perspective they completely miss the boat on serving convincing human needs. To be fair, not all mobile services fit these descriptions, but many do. Few seem to be getting it right and enjoying widespread adoption.

Traditionally, products and services designed for emergency situations have proven boons for innovation because they approach the problem from a non-market-centric mindset. Designing for emergency contexts frees us from typical drivers such as market segmentation and economics and forces a focus on human needs. Many technologies we use today such as walkie-talkies, the Internet, even the original landline telephone started out as products designed for emergency situations and found their way to the consumer space and widespread adoption.

At some point, any of us could receive a reverse 911 call and become a refugee. Natural disasters, political upheaval, or even war could force us to leave our homes, our possessions… everything we know behind. The only piece of technology we will probably be able to take with us is a mobile device. How might we want to use a mobile device to begin rebuilding our lives? What services will we need?

Photo courtesy of Qian Wang

Last Christmas, Adaptive Path participated in the OLPC program. Today, fifteen OLPC laptops sit in a storage room here in San Francisco and with the recent panning in the press, I’m not all together sure what we are gonna do with those little computers.

While I agree with a lot of what is being written about OLPC’s shortcomings, I can’t help but feel it’s going to the easy “pot-shot” place. Sure, OLPC’s goal of providing technology access to impoverished children was lofty and probably unattainable. Yes, it was a product designed from a cultural perspective misaligned to the culture and context of the people it was designed for and ultimately failed to meet it’s own creative brief. Yes, it’s difficult to avoid getting a little irritated by the arrogance of the perspective from which this product was made, especially when it won so many design awards.

OLPC was a failure - but don’t products fail all the time?

In light of all the discourse on the shortcomings of the product, there seems to be little said on the things that OLPC accomplished that were interesting. It’s not often that one sees a product that reframes the conceptual model of the operating system. If anything, Sugar was gutsy and interesting in that regard. OLPC also made it out into the world into people’s hands – it wasn’t a pet project cooked up in a research lab, whose only outputs were a couple academic papers and patent filings. Most of all, I believe OLPC at heart had a virtuous Buddha nature. It was created on the belief that people can improve their lives with technology and the desire to increase access to technology throughout the world.

Failure is part of the creative process and yet when we scathe each other on our individual failings, we make it difficult for people in our industry to take the creative risks necessary to push design and technology forward. By focusing so firmly on failure, we aren’t able to see the beautiful by-product failure brings – learning. OLPC was a failure, but there were some cool things about it… and most importantly, it succeeded in giving us something concrete to learn from.

If we head for the ash heap of history, there are countless examples of failures that were necessary in order to realize a dream in the areas of science, transportation and technology. We wouldn’t get on airplanes today if Orville and Wilbur wouldn’t have had the courage to continually fail at Kitty Hawk. Without Apple Newton’s failure, we probably wouldn’t have had the Palm Pilot or the iPhone. Perhaps like the Apple Newton and the Wright Brother’s early flyers, OLPC will be remembered as one of the colossal failures necessary to bridge the digital divide.

It’s a sad but common sight in modern society – a person walking around in the world, utterly disengaged, head buried in a mobile device – a victim of the visually greedy mobile interface.

Sure, one might argue there’s more to blame than the interface, like our growing Pavlovian response to phone calls and messages and the “always on” expectation, or our strange and ravenous human need to consume more and more information and media.

But as designers, how much control do we really have over those issues?

What we do have some semblance of control over are interfaces and it is curious that we rely so heavily on the sense of sight to guide users through technology experiences. Ask anybody with a vision impairment who uses a computer or a mobile phone, visually-driven interfaces dominate the technology landscape.

On the PC, we can get away with it. But the dominance of visually-driven interfaces become especially problematic in the mobile context. Design principles and conventions like WYSIWYG and GUI become brittle and broken on small devices. The screens are simply too small and the requirements of the mobile context too great to support interfaces that are visually demanding. Even the lauded and successful iPhone demands we disengage with the world and worship it’s visual luster during use.

The thing is, humans are actually pretty good at knowing where things are even when we can’t see them. The sound of the fire truck, the smell of the garbage, the vibration of an earthquake… our senses are tuned to innately tell us about the world around us. Unfortunately, these instincts haven’t been finely tuned with regard to our behaviors around information and technology. We rely heavily on sight.

How do we break this pattern?

Swing for the fences when thinking about senses. Leverage context, gesture, haptics and sound to convey information.

Admittedly, thinking about interfaces that engage our sense of touch, smell, and hearing can feel wonky, weird … preposterous even. It’s largely unchartered territory without the guideposts and maps of the typical, visually-driven approach to interface design.

However, it feels like letting ourselves explore the land of the senses is the only way to start to break the dominance of the greedy, visually-driven interfaces and deliver mobile experiences and interactions that - as Adam Greenfield says - dissolve into behavior.

As I previously posted, I’ll be speaking in Europe soon, first in London at MEX 27-28 May and then in Malmö at From Business to Buttons 12-13 June.

In between I’m arranging meetings with some of our European partners/clients in London, Amsterdam and Copenhagen. I’m also hoping to meet up with folks in the local UX communities to geek-out on our mutual passion: experience design.

If you’d like to get together to talk about possible projects with Adaptive Path or simply to chat about the industry email me at kim at adaptivepath dot com.   

In the spring of 2007, I co-lead a project that explored Internet access on mobile devices. At that time, uptake for mobile Internet content in the U.S. was dismally low. Recruiting participants that engaged with the mobile Internet for more than a few minutes once or twice a week proved extremely challenging. In order to collect the type of data needed to inform the design process and improve the user experience, we designed a PC Internet deprivation research study. Eight lucky participants used only their mobile phone to access the Internet for four days.

I co-wrote this case-study about the project with Mirjana Spasojevic of the Nokia Research Lab in Palo Alto and Pekka Isomursu of Nokia Design and presented it recently at CHI in Florence, Italy. The case study describes details of the research methodology as well as design insights and implications for development of mobile applications and services.

A lot has changed in the year since this study; the release of the iPhone in June of 2007 and Google’s Android platform in November 2007 were watershed moments for the mobile Internet – improving the experience and opening up opportunities for usage that simply didn’t exist before.

Despite these advances, I still believe most Internet experiences on mobile devices are broken and compromised, overburdened by interaction models and metaphors from the PC that simply don’t work on small devices. Yet so much of how we understand the Internet – and computing – is based on the PC legacy.

What has been exciting me most about mobile these days is that exact challenge… figuring out what metaphors and models to keep and what to leave behind as we try to prism Internet content through a myriad of devices.

They Call it Surfing for a Reason: Identifying Mobile Internet Needs Through PC Deprivation (pdf)
Copyright ACM

For a recent project, we analyzed strategies used by sites that thrive on user engagement to encourage people to sign up and get established. We presented our findings, including design and usage guidelines, in this visually-rich report. I’m excited to be able to share it with you, for reference and inspiration!

You can enjoy the preview below (click it for larger version) and download the full report here (FREE to Newsletter subscribers).

 I’m heading to Europe for three weeks for 2 must-attend conferences! The first is MEX, Mobile User Experience conference, 27-28 May in London, UK hosted by PMN who shook up the mobile design industry last year with their fabulously astute and thought provoking 10 point Manifesto for enhancing the mobile user experience. Our host, Marek Pawlowski, has created a different kind of conference format, bringing together 100 of the leading thinkers in mobile and challenging us to define the cutting edge of user experience. At the heart of the event is the 10 point Manifesto, highlighting the major issues facing the mobile industry as it strives to become a more customer-focused, design-led business. Now in its 4th year, MEX is attended by pioneers from the carriers, handset manufacturers, platform providers, software developers and UI designers. 

I will be leading a MEX breakout group exploring the controversial notion that “Fashion is a stronger motivator than functionality”, in the mobile handset business. Conference attendees will work together in a number of small teams to look at this issue from all the angles before re-convening for an open debate. I love this format and cannot wait to dive into deeper discussions about the issues that we face everyday as designers. 

If you are looking for some inspiration and thought leadership in the mobile user experience arena, I highly recommend attending MEX this year. Marek has also kindly offered a discount for Friends of Adaptive Path (that’s YOU!), so please take advantage of the 15% discount on attendance by registering online with the referral code AP08 or by calling Marek Pawlowski on +44 (0)7767 622957.  

I head over to Malmö, Sweden the 2nd week of June for inUse’s conference From Business to Buttons hosted at Malmö University. The conference is a mixture of strategy, design and facilitated hands-on workshops offering insights and methods of how to bridge the gap between business goals and user needs. They have Don Norman as the keynote speaker as well as other top industry professionals in user experience design including Adaptive Path’s very own Ryan Freitas and Friend of AP Jonathan Grubb, CEO of Rubyred Labs and Co-founder of Get Satisfaction.  

I will be giving my workshop Process Reboot: Change your process to create experience-driven innovations, which I first presented at DUX07 in November last year and most recently at Adaptive Path’s MX conference. I’m always reworking and improving the content each time I present, so the attendees at From Business to Buttons will be experiencing the latest and greatest. 

As designers we are often brought in to simply design a product, but many times the business strategy needs attention before we can clearly define the product we’re designing. From Business to Buttons is a great conference for helping us all find better ways to bring business strategy into the conversation of designing products. I hope you’ll attend From Business to Buttons 12-13 June for insightful presentations, workshops and discussions around business strategy and design. The folks at inUse and Malmö University have extended a discount too, please use FBTB2008 in the “special requests” section of the registration to receive 15% off the regular price. 

Since I’m in Europe for 3 full weeks, I’ll be available for meetings and would love to connect with folks while I’m there. Email me at kim at adaptivepath dot com otherwise, see you at the conference(s)!

Nicholas Chen of the University of Maryland presented an interesting talk on navigation techniques for for dual display e-books. Unlike the Kindle, Nicholas and his colleagues wanted to experiment with a form factor that was similar to a book or magazine. So they built a prototype with dual screens. The form factor allowed them to experiment with embodied interactions, like opening and closing the device (he referred to the interaction as “clapping”) or folding the device so that the cover and back are facing and turning it like we do a magazine (he referred to the interaction as “fanning”). They tested the device with users and came up with some interesting pros and cons.

Some of the benefits of a dual display:
Easy to read the content
Better for assessing length of the content
Helpful for finding new articles

Downside of dual displays:
Clunky - he device was heavy so opening and closing the cover was awkward as an interaction
Confusing - the single screen was simplier and less confusing
Restrictive form factor - grip required to hold device was awkward

Nicholas’s conclusion was that dual displays are better for serious reading but one display is more convenient.

If you’ve ever used a bot like SmarterChild, pause and pay a moment of respect to the late Joseph Weizenbaum who died March 5, the news of which is only now making the rounds. Weizenbaum was the creator (in 1966) of ELIZA (play with the web simulation), the first software program whose purpose was to make the computer seem like a human being, with human-like responses. ELIZA was (and remains) ridiculously seminal in HCI circles, and its influence can be seen in everything from IM to text-based adventure games to Clippy.

Weizenbaum had some wrong-headed, disparaging things to say about the internet (”a garbage dump”), but his caution about the possible evils of computers sounds like he was warning us about SkyNet long before anyone else was. He had a great concern with the ethics of technology and strongly advocated that computers never replace human decision-making.

Another one of the old guard is gone, and we are all lessened for it.

Michael “Rands” Lopp, a senior engineering manager at Apple and the author of the great book Managing Humans, let slip in a talk at SxSW a little about Apple’s design process. Since, up until now, their design process has mostly been such a black box, even this tiny view (as reported by BusinessWeek) is pretty interesting.

What struck me most was this:

10 to 3 to 1
Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good,” which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

While it is standard practice in visual design to come up with three strong concepts to present and choose from, I’ve found that it is rare to do so in interaction design. And especially to the level that Apple seems to do it, down to pixel perfect mockups. For months. This also echos what both Alan Cooper and especially Bill Buxton had to say at Interaction08, with both urging interaction designers to plan to throw several designs away. Obviously, if Apple is any indication, this is sound advice.