Adaptive Path Blog

There were lots of poster sessions at Ubicomp – but I have to give props to my friend, Mirjana Spasojevic of the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto for presenting my favorite demo/poster.

Nokia has developed an image recognition technology called Point and Find. Using the camera functionality on a mobile phone, Point and Find identifies objects through image recognition and provides users with associated information.

Similar in functionality to QR codes, Point and Find is a technology I believe has a lot of promise in unlocking the potential of the mobile web. It epitomizes the “Uniquely Mobile” design principle – it’s quick, easy, and can provide internet information without the hassle of text entry through the keypad and maneuvering internet content based on the PC search interaction model.

As with any emerging technology, Point and Find is a little buggy and identifying and enabling the actions people want to take after they identify and image will be essential in refining this technology. Nonetheless – it’s exciting stuff!

Scott Davidoff of CMU gave an interesting presentation today at Ubicomp on a design method for rapidly exploring application design – Speed Dating.

He and his colleagues had conducted ethnographic studies on families and their children. Like many ethnographic studies – theirs uncovered many needs. Their main finding was that managing kids activities is stressful for dual-income families.

Scott and his team were interested in how ubiquitous technologies in the home could help activity management for these families. He explained that they came up with countless concepts. How do you know which concept to make?

He continued that the common approach might be: Why not build it and see? There were several key reasons why this was not the best approach, namely:
- Timing. His team was uncomfortable deploying technologies at such an early stage in the development process.
- Immature design patterns. Unlike more established technology applications, ubiquitous computing does not have established design patterns to leverage.
- High cost of failure
- Unpredictable consequence: Scott and his team were conscious that they were introducing technologies in social contexts and didn’t know what the consequences of that might be.

So he explained that he looked in the design toolbox for some tools of the trade to help. There are a lot of tools designers use – such as sketching and prototyping – for getting the idea right. But not a lot of tools for getting the right idea.

What are the design tools to help designers find focus and strategy?

Speed Dating Design Method
Speed dating was a dating strategy born out of a need for busy professionals to optimize the time they spent… well, dating. The theory goes that if you’re going to invest an hour of your life to romance, why meet just one person… why not meet 2, 3, 4…

While arguably speed dating may not be a sound strategy for finding love, the one can’t deny the logic: experience with more people will at the very least give you a better understanding of what you want.

Scott’s speed dating concept simply replaces potential romantic partners with concepts. His theory is that multiple low-cost engagements with a wide variety of concepts allows a broader perspective to emerge.

Scott’s Speed Dating design process employs two methods
- need validation
- user enactment

Principles the method embodies are:

Ubundance brings perspective
Easier to compare something relative to other things.

Cross boundaries to find them
How do you ask users how they feel about a technology?
Easier for users to tell you about a boundary is once it’s been crossed than predict.

Need validation:
Scott then described how the next step in their process was to show the families in their study concepts like the ones shown here:

Lots of concepts…22 concepts in 2 hours!
He praised paper is a wonderful media to show concepts because it is cheap and stressed that scenarios should be engaging.

He then talked us his teams process for getting the right idea:
Observations = Kids’ activities cause stress -> Strategy: this is a problem, so fix it.

But what should they fix? What should be the focus?
Scott’s team realized that while they identified there was stress around kids activities, the team didn’t have a clear understanding of what was causing the stress.

He then explained user enactments:
Scenarios that people liked were made more tangible through low-fidelity prototypes in order to test and identify boundaries in acceptable behavior.

He showed a common scenario that had raised questions with the families from the study.

A father is suppose to pick up his kids from an activity. His car breaks down. Features of the ubiquitous home coordinate this task and finds a new person to pick up the kids.

Several families didn’t like this example – something about the home just pro-actively coordinating the activity didn’t sit well with people.

The question then became: are there levels of home’s pro-activity that are acceptable? The suggestion of the home coordinating an activity was a boundary that had been crossed – people were able to talk about what levels of pro-activity in the system were acceptable “because the crossed boundary gave them a point of reference from which they could talk about.”

He then talked about interactions with risk factors and how his handy matrix helped.

He explained how a matrix can show lessons about individual themes but can also reveal large themes.

Scott then used his study as an example to illustrate the larger themes that emerged, such as:
- Kid’s activities not “problems”
- Kid’s are in activities to learn lessons about life
- Actions have consequences
- Parents want to protect their kids
- Also want kids to learn responsibilities

Implications for design of their system were:
- can’t approach activities to “fix” problems
- systems need to help kids learn to help themselves
- kids have to learn about consequences and responsibility
- in some places, assistance in inappropriate
- parent must be part of the loop

Understanding of the right idea from his project was that they needed to change their design strategy.

Changed strategy:
Managing activity and parenting are inseparable – teach kids responsibility, function as a safety net

Tradeoffs for adding his process to your design pricess?
- It adds an extra step.

Scott then stressed that he doesn’t expect speed dating to replace prototyping. Once you’ve found your idea, it’s important to get it right.

In summary:
- Finding the right concept + strategy is important but largely unsupported
- His Speed Dating concept is a possible process that can be added to the design toolbox between sketching and prototyping
- Speed Dating is Low-cost + engaging
- It allows you to learn about unpredictable consequences
- Can help you evolve your application
- Can help you focus on what matters most.

Sunday I lead a workshop with my friend and former Yahoo! colleague, Mirjana Spasojevic – currently at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto - at the Ubicomp conference in Innsbruck, Austria. We had a good turnout of people (14 total) with a mix of folk from both academic and industry backgrounds

The goal of the workshop was to harness the collective mobile wisdom of the group and create 4-6 mobile user experience design principles. We started out the day with short introductions and launched into discussing possible themes from which we could base the principles.

The themes that emerged were:
- Mobile phones and changing social rules
- Where does the data live?
- Relevance: Personalization and location-based services
- Divided attention
- New mobile interaction models

Next, we divided into groups of 3-4 people and spent the afternoon discussing the theme and shaping it into a design principle. Here are the themes and accompanying design principles. Admittedly, these discussions are reflective of some wandering conversations and may read a little “wonky” – but there is some really good stuff in there.

Theme 1: Mobile Phones and Changing Social Rules
Examples of changing social rules with regard to mobile phones:
- acceptable to talk to yourself on the street (when using a Bluetooth headset or speaker feature on the mobile phone.
- addictive “Crackberry behavior”
- always perceived to be available now that you have a mobile phone
- busy button doesn’t help – negative connotations

The lion’s share of the conversation for this group focused on the theme of expectations. Social rules are based on our understanding of expectations - expectations about ourselves and how we want people to engage with us, and expectations of others and how we want them to engage with us.

We talked about how there are different expectations for the various communication channels. When you call someone, you expect them to answer. If they don’t, you leave a voicemail and expect them to get back to you. The rules for email and text messaging are slightly different – often the social rules are personal and reflective of the relationship the sender and receiver have – or the social contract they share.

There is an interesting tension between inference and plausible deniability. When someone doesn’t answer their phone, there are a set of likely explanations: the receiver is busy, not within reach of their phone, etc…

Conflict seems to occur when expectations are not in alignment. Technology such as gps location or IM status message of “busy” adds a layer of complexity – the sender can know more about the receiver’s state and adjust their expectations accordingly.

Design Principle 1:
Design an appropriate level of ambiguity – tell users something about state, but not everything. Allow for “states” that are not fully revealed so that people can manage expectations.
- Allow people to do what they need to do to retain social contracts
- Knowing is not everything. Sometimes white lies are necessary and desired.
- Systems should support different levels of profiles and different levels of engagement to reflect the variety of expectations people have for various relationships.

Theme: Personalization and location-based services
This group’s discussion started off with a comparison of camera phones and the mobile web. Why did camera phones become a mainstream feature on phones while the mobile web continues to struggle to find a widespread audience. Sure, there are technology constraints that could be the cause. However, the group also added that we’re not that good at predicting and understanding people’s relationship to information.

How do we better predict what people will want? How do we do it without being pushy and invasive. The building blocks of these location-based services are context/location, state of mind, and user motivation. We can use the technology to predict location – but we need to find ways of understanding motivation and state of mind.

The group then discussed how these new mobile location-based services are like a new friendship – tenuous. You can’t be too pushy too soon. Then Dean interjected: Being annoying is sometimes okay… if it works. Pushy people are good at getting what hey want. If the goal is compliance in the short term, pushy can good. Point taken - i see where he is coming from, but disagree. Annoyance is yucky and should be avoided.

Next, the team discussed the idea of enhancement. We discussed the Starbuck’s – iPhone – iTunes service. interesting:
- Being in a Starbuck’s infers state of mind
- The value to the user is in the distillation of large amounts of information into a simple interaction and fulfillment of a need/desire.

Ultimately, the group felt the real value is in enhancing existing experience, not hijacking the experience.

Design Principle 2:
“I’m not in the mood”: Services should enhance the experience and provide added value. The phone can determine location, but mood and motivation are key

Mood and motivation are hard to predict. Location can give some insights into mood (Starbuck’s example). Status (location+emotion+motivation) is everything.

Theme 3: Mobile applications as interventions
This team took on the theme of attention resources. They discussed that a user’s attention is often divided when using mobile applications and services. Therefore, they framed the discussion around mobile applications as interventions.

Next, the team discussed that there are three basic phases to consider in when designing a mobile “intervention applications”:
- Sensing, (data collection and context)
- Delivery notification
- User response

When thinking about the sensing phase, consider the value of the application to a user – is there personal and/or global benefit? This may give insight into how much attention and energy the use is willing to give during this phase.

Users ultimately need to have control over the notifications. Users will ultimately want to be able to override the notifications. Deliver notification data that is contextually appropriate as possible. Consider the environmental and social contexts. Interventions should not be like your annoying friends.

Design Principle 3:
Mobility implies changing contexts and changing interruptability. Consider the three phases of mobile “intervention” applications:
- Sensing, data collection and context
- Delivery notification
- User response

Theme 4: New mobile interaction models
This team discussed the importance of effort and time when considering interaction models. Context is king; it determines cost (to use) and user value. The challenge and opportunity of mobile is that context is highly variable and hard to predict.

There was then some debate as to who ultimately bears responsibility in managing attention and intention? Producer (sender) or receiver. Notification is also a question. For example: is it socially appropriate for me to expect that you know my blog posts?

The conversation then turned to a discussion around broadcasting services such as Twitter, Radar, Flickr, microbloogging and lifecasting and the power of mobile as a capture device.

It was also discussed that it is easy in such cases to get too much information on a mobile device and the Twitter + SXSW example was cited. People signed up, chose to follow lots of friends, but then eventually turned off the service because they were inundated with “tweets” from too many friends. Was the problem a flaw in the design of Twitter or that people didn’t fundamentally understand the “rules” of social networks on mobile.

Francis felt that users should have no barrier and that ultimately the burden for providing controls should be embedded in the system. Dean disagreed (slightly) and explained that it is often difficult to predict what will happen and design appropriately.

Design Principle 4:
It’s not just about designing for a user: it’s about designing for a user embedded in a context. It’s about recognizing the different roles that people have.

Think multiple channels. The mobile platform is sms, mobile web, voice, applications. Depending on the context of your application, expectations are different.

Thanks to all the participants for a day of engaging conversation and contributions to the mobile UX principles.
Daniel Harris
Tony Lee
Fu Yu
Jaejoon Hwang
Taejin Jeong
Alexander Meschtscherjakov
Tim Sohn
Paul Aoki
Francis Li
Mattias Rost
Dean Eckles

I had the fortune of interviewing Mark Jones, who heads up IDEO’s service innovation group. Mark will be speaking at MX East (Oct 21-23, Philadelphia). Read the full interview here. (Don’t forget, when you register for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off).

Rachel Hinman [RH]: Welcome, Mark. Tell us a little about the work you are doing over at IDEO.

Mark Jones [MJ]: Thank you, Rachel. I lead the service innovation group at IDEO Chicago and right now there’s a lot of attention on service design and service innovation.

RH: That was something I was curious about: People have been doing [service design] for a long time but it’s getting more attention. Are people coming to you guys and asking for specifically for service design? Or is it something you have to explain?

MJ: People are definitely coming to us. I think that many service companies are finding that their services have been commoditized and are realizing they have to differentiate themselves. Companies are realizing that they actually have to pay attention to what their customers want. Expectations are higher and the competitive landscape is much tighter than it used to be. Companies have to innovate. And so they are coming to us.

Again, read the full interview here.

While doing some research on design and emotion, I found myself on design-emotion.com. I was struck that only men appeared in the list of interviews, which I found curious. If we are to go with stereotypes, you might assume women would be more interested in the emotional aspects of design.

I wrote about it on my blog, and the site owner of design-emotion.com responded, saying he never realized that all the interviews were with men, but confirmed I was indeed right. He also mentioned that most of the reactions he gets by email are from men. I also got a response from a psychologist that alleged that men and women are drawn to different aspects of particular fields, and perhaps men are drawn to the emotional aspects of design more than women.

I’m not sure what to make of it. What do you think? Does gender affect your interests within design? As a corollary, what draws you to design?

Why do good research efforts fail? Why do good insights fail to make it into the actual design of products and services? Why do the things we learned about users generally disappear at the end of a project? One reason is that, in many organizations, research is done by a department or group that is mostly divorced from the rest of the design and development process. They are given a set of requirements, go do the research, and then pass the findings back over a wall in the form of research reports and power point presentations. Designers, developers, and management read these once then file them away on a shelf or a folder on their computer to be forgotten. The most successful organizations break this cycle. If your company is in the business of creating user-centered products and services then your whole organization should be oriented toward gaining and maintaining customer insights.

It’s become a pet project to diagnose and collect solutions to these kinds of problems. There are lots of approaches to doing this effectively in different organizations. And even small steps can have profound effects. I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned in my session on Day 3 of UX Week on Making Research Effective. My session should make a great complement to the excellent sessions that day by Emily Ulrich on Reserch Methods in the Workplace, Josh Porter on The Psychology of Social Design, Barbara Ballard on Mobile Usability Testing, and AP’s own Rachel Hinman on Mobile Research Techniques.

Totally independent of Dan, I was working on the a similar blog post for the Research day of the UX Intensive workshops. I haven’t had anyone tell me that what we discussed wasn’t really about research. But what I have had is a lot of inquiries about what methods are covered during the day. I am usually greeted with a with a look of surprise (and sometimes dismay) when I say “hardly any.” Let’s face it, there are thousands of methodological approaches one can take to research: quantitative, qualitative, contextual, lab, remote, etc. All of them have their uses depending on the nature of the research questions you need answered. Experienced researchers pick up or create new methods as the need arises. 99% of the writing and discussion about research is about methods, while data gathering actually accounts for at most 50% of the job, especially for senior research practitioners. So, I decided to cover a lot of the things that no one else is talking about but which are essential to making research effective.

The bulk of the workshop day is focused on strategies and approaches to research. We cover research planning, approaches to analysis (particularly interview transcripts), and making research effective in a design process (teams and deliverables stuff). The closest we get to methods are a section on “Creating, choosing, and mixing Methods” (not really about any specific methods) and a section on “The Art of Effective Interviewing,” which is applicable for pretty much any method that has you talking to people. I also have a bit of a theory section at the outset called “Understanding People as People.”

In the same spirit as Dan’s post, I’ll ask what other topics would you like to see covered in an advanced research day?

Over at TechCrunch, Nick Gonzalez does a good job of highlighting some of the primary features from the upcoming relaunch of Plazes. After spending a bunch of time in Berlin over the past few months working with the Plazes team, it’s great to see the product we collaborated on get some pre-release buzz.

In writing up what has changed between versions, Nick points out many of the frustrations that Plazes originally brought Adaptive Path in to help resolve. In pushing to simplify the product, AP helped Plazes build something that was a truer expression of their desire to facilitate interactions between people out there in the real world. We helped them to clean up how people interacted with the platform across channels in the hope of making it useful, consistent, and something that fit in nicely with behaviors their users were already engaged in.

Incidentally, the “simplification” that Adaptive Path and Plazes were able to pull off wound up forming the ideas at the heart of my Future of Web Design presentation from last month. The deck and the podcast are both hosted at the FOWD site.

The Plazes crew has unveiled the new version to a handful of preview users, and is still tightening bolts and touching up paint. I wish them luck with the final pre-launch activities, and look forward to the unveiling.

Carson Systems was kind enough to invite me to speak at their Future of Web Design conference in London last week. I took the opportunity to do some thinking about what trends I think are starting to emerge, and what role experience designers (and UCD principles) will play in what’s about to happen.

During my work on Plazes, what I realized was that a lot of new products out there are finding it necessary to change directions from the goals they had at launch. These are teams like Riya (now Like) and Topix, who are eschewing traditional iterative development in favor of extreme redefinition of their offering and its value to the audience.

The audience for FOWD was very diverse, but the presentation that emerged from my thoughts on product redefinition wound up being pretty warmly received. I framed my thoughts with some parallels to evolutionary biology, and tried to give some helpful tactics for how experience designers might go about preparing their team and their product for the “punctuation” that redefinition can cause.

You can download the slides from the talk, “User-Centered Design Principles for Evolving Products” here. Huge thanks to the Carson folks for the opportunity and the hospitality, and thanks to everyone in the audience for the kind reception.

I used to see Kurt Vonnegut on the street in New York from time to time. He died last night. So it goes.