Making Location more Social

Published June 15, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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GoogleMapsLatitude

I’ve enjoyed playing around with Latitude, Google’s mobile location threadware, and the potential directions they could take it for the Android mobile platform.  Currently Latitude is accessable on the Android Maps application. (this demo is from the first release and doesn’t show the Latitude functionality). But there are so many ways they could  Latitude it with some of their other Google / Android apps & services, it’s a fun multidimensional design problem.  User needs, friends in space, plans in time.

Yesterday Google announced some additional features for the Android Maps app including adding more overt social communication (err, “shout out”) to your friends on a map in Latitude – is the first real step I’ve seen of Google making it more explicitly social, though unfortunately not (yet?) integrated with your phone contacts.

You may also notice a new experimental feature called Updates that lets you communicate with friends and post messages. Start Latitude and click the “Updates” tab to shout out updates at friends when they’re at interesting locations, start a conversation when you’re at your favorite restaurant, or just add more details to your Latitude location for your friends to see. Your friends will also need to download this new version of Google Maps for Android in order to use this experimental Updates feature — they will not get your messages otherwise.

via Official Google Mobile Blog: Search by voice and transit directions come to Google Maps on Android.

Why this matters: Integrating location with social network / buddy lists (towards a true ‘presence’ for those who want to share and manage who sees what) is soon to come.  Who will do it first, what pieces are in place and what needs to be added?  How do users today find out where their friends are, and common tasks related to them?  More importantly, are designers and engineers asking what do users actually WANT to do?   How to bridge from existing behavior to new features and functionality on the go? How broad could this appeal be if you need to always open a Maps app to do it from?  Answers to these questions will shape the emergent-yet-rapidly-maturing space of mobile social location expereinces.

Apple “Apps Wall” Visualization

Published June 10, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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How do you visually communicate realtime activity across millions of tiny applications, seeing micro-interactions across an entire install base of smartphones? And create a marketing/brand statement about your (real or perceived) dominance of the smartphone application space?

You make one of these, and let the faithful come worship at the wailing wall ;)

From:
AppleInsider | Apple stuns WWDC crowd with pulsating App Store hyperwall.

Why this matters: visualization counts, it creates understanding. There’s an emotional element of this that is connecting with the attendees, beyond what slides or a list, or even an overwhelming statistic can create.

Quantifying the Mobile Apps Revolution – NYTimes.com

Published June 9, 2009 context awareness , mobile Leave a Comment
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NYT Bits Blog article on the mobile apps explosion (and Chicago product innovation firm GravityTank who did the research)  -   importantly some eye-opening real-world data on how these ubiquitous Apps have changed existing user behavior in a significant way.

Gravity Tank, a Chicago-based creative consulting firm, surveyed over a thousand iPhone and Android G1 users in April and May. Both devices, unlike older smartphones, have easy access to a range of free or low-cost applications. Through research firms, the firm contacted people with smartphones who had agreed to participate in such surveys.

The results from the study, called “Apps Get Real,” show the different ways in which these programs are changing the way people use their phones, spend their time and organize their lives.

Among some of the findings from the report: respondents have downloaded an average of 23.6 applications to their phone and use an average of 6.8 apps every day.

Nearly half 48 percent of phone owners report shopping for apps more than once a week. About the same number 49 percent report using apps on their phone for more than 30 minutes a day.

The survey shows apps are also using up lots of people’s time — to the detriment of other technologies and types of media. Thirty-two percent said they used portable gaming devices less because of their app-enabled phones. Other technologies and media also suffered; 31 percent said they read newspapers less; 28 percent use GPS devices less; 28 percent use their MP3 players less; and 24 percent are watching less television.

Full Article.

Why this matters:  more existing media behaviors and products are and will continue to be disrupted as a result.  How can your product, service or differentiated experience benefit from a mobile app, the absence of one, or partership with an existing app that amps up it’s value in new way?  How can it take into account location, context awareness that can pre-empt pain points, or learn ubiquitous social network status from a friend that influences your decision? The best mobile apps provide that “sixth sense” that makes the complex simpler.

Google Wave- Threaded Multidimensional Communication – post Email

Published May 28, 2009 Conferences , open platforms , product experience Leave a Comment
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Google_Wave_snapshots_inbox

Watching the Google Wave Demo  at Google I/O – all about integration and rethinking online communication across IM, Email, and shareds spaces.  Wow.  And it’s all open to others extending it.

Tbe “brief” of the project is especially cool, challenging today’s assumptions about communication norms. From the official Google blog post about wave:

  • Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
  • Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
  • What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

Here’s a good overview from Tim O’Reilly:

Google Wave. As Lars describes it, “We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?”

That is exactly the right question, and one that every developer should be asking him or herself. The world of computing has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our applications bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the tools we take for granted. It’s perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Google’s Sydney office over the past two years, had the code name Walkabout. That’s the Australian aboriginal tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the songlines and learn the world anew.

In answering the question, Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.

via Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today? – O’Reilly Radar.

Design Eyes at Google I/O Developer’s Conference

Published May 26, 2009 Conferences , Experience Design , mobile , open platforms Leave a Comment
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GoogIO

In San Francisco for the rest of this week, attending, as a user experience / interaction DESIGNER, yes, Google’s largest developer conference. While this may sound puzzling to some designers, I enjoy working with mobile app engineers (well, the good ones don’t bite ;) and more importantly knowing what’s possible and coming down the road.  Some of the topics are specifically mobile about the Android platform, or relating to the Social apps, API’s, and Gadgets/UI design.  Yes as a designer you have to listen with a different set of ears, so to speak (and most of the coding/debugging snippets less valuable to me), but I’ll try to post here some of the sessions I’ve found valuable, or what inspires me as an Experience Planner working on Android mobile smartphone experiences.

The sessions I’m most interested in are How to Marry Interaction and Visual Design the Android Way with interaction design lead Chris Nesladek.  I always enjoy designers speaking to rooms with hundreds of developers, helping them understand a user experience point of view.  Here’s the ‘trailer’ for his talk -

Could be basic for designers but good to hear the philosophy and hear some good questions and tools I’m sure will come up.  Without a Google “official” published UI style guide yet, we’ll take what we can get and I’m sure there will be a lot of Q&A.

I plan to check out the Mobile and Social tracks, jumping in and out if it gets too pure code.  Looking for inspiration of ‘what can be’ with regard to user experience, what what limitations to avoid.

Best mobile topics, maybe:

Pixel Perfect Code: How to Marry Interaction and Visual Design the Android Way

Mastering the Android Media Framework

Looking Beyond the Screen: Text-To-Speech and Eyes-Free Interaction on Android

Turbo-charge your UI: How to Make your Android UI Fast and Efficient

Social topics, they are really evolving Friend Connect and moving OpenSocial forward:

Google Friend Connect Gadgets: Best Practices in Code and Interaction Design

Google and the Social Web

Powering Mobile Apps with Social Data

I really wish there were some more dedicated Geolocation / LBS / Google Latitude sessions.  The ones I see seem extremely technical.  This is a great topic for UX designers and important to get this right on mobile devices.  It’s a fine line between fun, social, location-based and relevant… and creepy.  Thoughtful UX strategy and design can really help make this great. I’m sure they’ll be a huddle or more demos somewhere.  It’s such a natural extension of the mobile experience….

Plants vs. Zombies Game: Less Is More {fun}

Published May 22, 2009 Experience Design , Gaming , culture , emotion , simplicity Leave a Comment
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zomb_game

Games and having fun with interfaces is a trend only accelerating, how nuances of gaming and physical gesture UI’s are coming to smartphones and console tasks for non-game type activities.   There is much to be learned from how game designers play with experience, emotion, set-up for play/fun, and then stage it carefully so you always want more.  Sometimes it’s the simplest concepts and experiences, reduced to the most basic units of fun and interactivity that are the most rewarding in a great game.

I’ve been trying out some casual games on my phone lately, seeing what elements of that experience  create that “gotta play it” twist that keeps you coming back for more.   The magic formula is something simple and easy to learn, hard to master.  (Tetris, anyone?).   Randomly, I’ve stumbled into a category of strategy games known as “tower defense”, where you set up various towers that try to slow/stop your oncoming opponents siege, wave by wave.  Retro Defense from Larva Labs is one game for Android phones I like, and actually worth the few bucks I paid for it.  The sound design details are great too.

Talking to a friend who also likes this style of game, he tipped me to this review of George Fan’s “Plants vs. Zombies” – a twist on the old tower defense formula.  Looks fun, DIY / independent game developer, and the irreverence and use of humor in a game that battles the hyper-cute vs. undead is a great juxtoposition.

Zomb_pool

via WIRED | GameLife:  Review: Masterful Plants vs. Zombies Proves Less Is More.

Blending the classic image of the rotting, ambulatory dead with adorably irreverent humor, Plants vs. Zombies is a textbook example of how to hook a wide swath of gamers with easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master gameplay. [...]

One part chess, one part “tower defense” and one part World of Warcraft, the latest creative stunner from PopCap Games is an addictive whole that’s much more than the sum of its parts. Corpses are rising from their graves, and your army of militant plants is the only line of defense between the unholy mob and the delicious brains to be found inside your suburban home. Peashooters fire deadly legumes. Cherry bombs explode. You get the idea.

It is a very funny game. You’d think that slaying hundreds of reanimated bodies would be somber or terrifying, but every level of the game offers something to laugh about, like hilarious commentary from the game’s eccentric cast: During one level, the zombies themselves send you a crudely scrawled note offering a “midnight znack” of “ice cream and brains.”   By Earnest Cavalli

Why this matters:  Experience designers constantly wrestle with this question: How can you keep a user experience utterly simple, yet still differentiated in a crowded market?  This game works all the angles, cuteness, zombie meme (still raging), and a simple formula of fun and addictive game mechanics — but with a completely new twist visually and theme. Sometimes it comes down to a creative execution, transitions/animation, and the overall feel that’s so much greater than any single piece.   It’s the little details, the ones everyone else looked over in a rush to be bigger, more powerful or “fully featured”.  Catching those details, and carefully editing your offering, making people chuckle with delight – that’s the secret sauce of experience design.

Anyone played it yet?

Update: recently found a nice talk from Marcos Weskamp and Remon Tijssen  at Adobe XD group on the topic of Playful Design, a thoughtful and fun presentation about exploring what makes a design fun, what are the ways to play and get an emotional response in an interface.

Nokia, Ovi services, and User Experience

Published May 18, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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ovi_logo

Ovi means “door” in Finnish, and is Nokia’s services bet for mobile social media sharing. These are a few of my thoughts on it’s rise and fall, and possible morph of the service into something new (and probably better?).

In the heyday of Web2.0 and during the rise of iPhone as the new standard of a mobile web experience, many phone manufactures sought to build, buy or bolt-on apps and services that enabled social media and content sharing.  These services help enable experiences beyond the device. This may seem elementary for those coming from the Web2.0 world, but the world of device manufacturing is a little slower to move on big software and services bets.  Well, Nokia’s goal is to bring in functionally that is habit forming for users on the web/PC, but now extending this experience to mobile.  Some network operators formed closed partnerships, some handset manufacturers wrote 2nd party API’s to access various social networks, and some bought or built their OWN branded services.  Like Nokia.

However aspirational it is, I’ve always admired their desire to become an internet services company, always aware of where the industry is being commodittized, and seeking differentiation by moving one notch up the proverbial value chain.  There was a lot of analysis written about this step being a natural progression of their business at the time, in some ways a re-try of their “Club Nokia” strategy a few  years earlier.  And they have a lot of money to try it.  They bought NAVTEQ for location based service integration.  They were taking control of their own destiny in the brave new services-oriented world — all very admirable strategies!

Well, sometimes actual user preferences can throw a wrench in those kind of plans. Nokia created their own social network and sharing properties on the web, highly integrated with their device software. Even normally restrictive network operators (notably Vodafone and T-Mobile) agreed to work with Ovi, which is a tremendous accomplishment just by itself.  One small problem: user’s already have in mind where they want to do their social networking, mapping, and media sharing: the same places they all their friends already do (Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Picasa, Google/Yahoo Maps,  Photobucket, and wherever else they are free to choose.)

Users did not rushing to play in Nokia’s own branded sandbox, and shop only from their Nokia music store and Nokia game store – at least not in the US market.  It was a business goal that didn’t have enough overlap with existing (or even desired) user behavior.   Yes, media-savvy youth using mobile devices love to share content and comment on their friends.  But at different destinations. So it’s a logical conclusion that Nokia will be re-thinking what Ovi becomes in the future, and seems to be taking a pause to figure it out:

Reuters: Nokia halts investment in media-sharing site:

Halts future development into own sharing service to focus on integrating other services.  Nokia built the service — seen as one of the cornerstones of its services strategy — on the acquisition of U.S. firm Twango in 2007. “It seems like an admission of failure — which is healthy at this point,” said GC Research analyst Tero Kuittinen. [...]  “They definitely need to collaborate with Facebook instead of trying to replace it. Same thing with Twitter and Flickr,” Kuittinen said.

Engadget: Nokia responds to Ovi Share rumors, service effectively on ice.

Nokia’s preferring to drop time, energy, and cash into building out its third-party APIs that allow more established sharing services to plug into Ovi rather than trying to pimp its own service; makes sense, really, since there are plenty already in the game and there’s not much sense in Nokia trying to win. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, as they say.

As Ovi realizes the need to (re)align more to mass-adoption user goals, they’ll see that playing and integrating well with other services, and playing it more open, will likey yield far better results:  add the connective value, not just the endpoint.  Nokia has spent huge sums to build awareness for the Ovi brand, it’s unlikely they’ll just shutter it.  The design and build team (and I do believe they are talented -  the site is well designed, simple to use) can carry forward in a more universal direction aligned with the ultimate judge of a new service: the end user.

Android Smartphone Shipments to Grow 900 Percent in 2009

Published May 11, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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android-3d

Android with 900%  predicted growth — is that it??  Actually it’s great to see the momentum and feel like you’re a part of designing something on the upswing.  As Feature Phones die out along the long tail, finally we get more mainstreaming of hardware, software and services that make the design of some amazingly cool – AND OPEN – experiences possible.

Tom Kang, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics, said, “We forecast global Android smartphone shipments to grow an impressive 900 percent annually during 2009. The Android mobile operating system from Google gained early traction in the United States in the second half of 2008 and it is gradually spreading its presence into Europe and Asia during 2009. Android is expanding from a low base and it is consequently outgrowing the iPhone OS from Apple, which we estimate will grow at a relatively lower 79 percent annually in 2009.”

Neil Mawston, Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “”Android has fast been winning healthy support among operators, vendors and developers. A relatively low-cost licensing model, its semi-open-source structure and Google’s support for cloud services have encouraged companies such as HTC, Motorola, Samsung, T Mobile, Vodafone and others to support the Android operating system. Android is now in a good position to become a top-tier player in smartphones over the next two to three years.”

via STRATEGY ANALYTICS: Android Smartphone Shipments to Grow 900 Percent in 2009
(Android guy rendering by richd.org)

Rest in Peace, RSS ?

Published May 6, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Rest in Peace, RSS.  A purposefully antagonistic point of view from Steve Gillmor meant to provoke thought… I can’t agree wholesale, but argree about people moving up the ‘feed chain’ to the article idea/influencers, not just the end content.  And how to manage it all?  Just dip into the stream or what?  the client-side mechanisims on Twitter to parse and sensemake are still too crude if you’ve got a lot of people you’re following.  What’s the sensemaker aide?

Some Twitter users I follow for their expertise, but not so interested in how their snow cone tasted.  It’s multidimensional, the blessing and curse.

here’s a fun bit:

Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed – whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime CMS for the emerging media. Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS’ lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party.

Today, RSS is a shell of its former self, casually subsumed as the transport for 140+ content into the social stream. There, RSS items are fed into aggregators and husked for their behavioral signals, packaged as Tweets and sold for pennies on the whuffie dollar. The mainstream media, once cowed by the fulltexters, now masquerades as blog sites and competes for shortened URLs alongside the bloggers they deride under their breath.

I thought I’d miss RSS once Twitter took over, remembering how powerful a wave of innovation it triggered. Certainly it’s still here, burned into the circuits of the network, the memes coursing through its veins. But in the age of abundance it fostered, the core value has shifted from inspiration to the inspired, to the people behind the ideas.

The race for realtime is already won. Like the long shot in the Kentucky Derby, realtime has swept past the field as though the rest were sleep-walking. Realtime is the time for artists, for interpreting the stream and sending deeply nuanced signals with humor, music, respect for the dialogue but none for the chattering of the false debates of the cable networks.

The whole article:  Rest in Peace, RSS.

USB: your put your drum machine in my computer!

Published May 5, 2009 culture , emotion , hardware Leave a Comment
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Technology and personalization, let nothing tear apart…  more retro-techno gadget lust.  When the new replaces the old, we find a way to re-wire the memories back together.  Watch for Brick Phone comebacks next.

Here’s a chance for producers and beatmakers to carry around two of hip-hop’s most history laden sequencers in their pocket at all times.

The 4GB flash drives feature Toshiba memory with casing constructed from PVC rubber fashioned in near exact detail of the original Akai MPC 2000XL and EMU SP1200 samplers.

via MPC 2000XL and SP1200 USB Flash Drive.

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