Two sides of one feature:
That was Locale for Android.
And this is Mobot.
Users of both applications can build scripts that react to the situation their phone is in. Switch to silent when in a court room. Deny calls, reply with a standard SMS when in a disco.
This is what phones do in the future. The interesting thing will be how to set up the scripts, and to which extent we’ll share them.
My sister just sent me this photo in celebrating that she got her mobile data plan working on her MTN phone.
The ad shows what an estimated 17 million people do almost every day - transfer money from mobile phone to mobile phone, mostly from a major city to family members in a village. The currency is airtime, and it can be sold for cash.
In the Western world we’ve had mobile phones and banks for ages. We can’t transfer money with our mobile phones.
We had a lively and inspiring session at the IT University Thursday. Here are some of the links and book titles i promised to pass on to you.
Links
Getting started, the reading way
I highly recommend these tutorials in this order
If you prefer books, take a look at the not-so-boring Head First series written keep your brain active as you learn(!) (PHP and MySQL, HTML and CSS.
The viewing way (or monkey see, monkey do)
If you’re the TV kind of person, make sure you check out Lynda.com. Here’s a PHP and MySQL video tutorial. It’s not free, but once you’ve paid the monthly fee of 25 dollars (three pizzas), you get access to more than 500 tutorials including Flash, Photoshop, and the list goes on.
Slides and cards
I use this when I get that “quick, show me something cool” feeling. Since this actually works, I should warn you that it is addictive.
1. Add your Delicious network to your Google Reader
2. Give it a name
Could be anything as long as you’re able to remember it for 45 seconds.
3. Go to settings > Goodies > Put reader in a bookmark
Pick the second option that allows you to create a next bookmark for a specific tag. Find the tag you made. Select it.
4. Drag the link to your browser’s toolbar
5. Click it when you want to see something your friends think is cool.
If your friends are boring, try the popular links or Digg. Or put them all in one folder.
A few weeks ago signed up Denmark’s biggest radio station, P3, for Last.fm. That mans every time the old Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s pop music channel plays a song, Last.fm will make a note in its database.
That opens up for a few interesting activities.
1 Take the P3 compatibility test
Mine is high. Log in to last.fm, then go to P3’s profile to check yours.
2 Like the song? See them live
Have the visual track displayer running on an idle screen near you and look out for the next concert tag. Note that it defaults to my account, so click the person icon to change the current user to “drp3″
3 Listen to P3 - without the hosts, the spots and the news
Go to the personal station player for uninterrupted music.
4 See what’s hot on up-to-the-minute charts
For the full top 400, go to the charts page
Done? Try the other channels
DR Electronica, DR Jazz and DR Barometer are currently under surveillance by my little Last.fm robots.
What do you do?
“I figure out what a web site or application needs to do, and why, and then design how people will perform those tasks.”
Robert Hoekman
“Remember the last time you were yelling at your insert device here? Interaction Designers are being brought in to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Shaun Bergman
“UX folks create the underlying framework and skeleton and logic of a site, and work very closely with the designers, to make it not only beautiful, but usable, too.”
Joanne Weaver
it’s like a normal architect, but instead of buildings, I plan websites.
Jane Mountain
I just pull out my iPhone. Seriously. Works every time!
Uday Gajendar
“I design software and websites that people don’t hate.”
Michael Micheletti
“I make computers more human so that humans can act less like computers.”
Michael Williamson
A few posts ago I argued that users should not be the only ones profiled by persona archetypes.
Philip wrote an interesting comment. He has been designing telephone voice interfaces (”press the # sign..”) for more than ten years, and has in fact used personas for his applications. Look for his experience based advice in his comment.
Amazon: Voice user interface (look inside - Google Books)
Here it is!
Googling a bit further I found exactly what I was talking about. In a four years old discussion thread on IxDA, Ben Hunt describes his process, with the “conversation” between the user persona and the site persona.
I have a pet SP called Pierre, who’s a concierge in a high-class hotel. There are several aspects of Pierre’s style that I find really useful in designing web sites, including:
His brevity: he only communicates the minimum information required to communicate what needs to be communicated.
His low demand: he only asks for the minimum of input and information; he makes up the rest through intelligence, memory, note-taking and experience.
His modesty: he doesn’t draw glory to himself; his satisfaction comes solely from helping his clients achieve their goals.
His proactivity: he’s always anticipating what customers may want next even before they’ve thought of it themselves.
Good stuff. Another point coming across in both the voice and site parts mentioned here, is that the application (or site) persona would be able to act as a proxy for the sometimes abstract brand values.
Quite often you need something you don’t want to own. A projector for a Kill Bill marathon night. An XBox. A munk costume (don’t ask). A bike.
You ask friends, and most often they don’t want to admit that they have it, or they don’t answer their phones, which of course you shouldn’t take personally.
Rent-alore is Ebay for renting, and so far most of the items are in Copenhagen, so get ready for financial crisis and rent out your stuff.
Projector, 1100 Lumens 20 DKK / day
Monk costume, one size 20 DKK / day
Xbox and two games 19 DKK / day
Pilen bike 10 DKK / day
Bonus tip: A user lets you rent his bike for 10 DKK a day. It’s a 4000 kroner bike, meaning you would have spent the full amount after 400 days. If you’re careful, that’s exactly how long you get to keep your bike before it gets stolen, so make sure you return it before that happens.
Almost every day I wonder why I haven’t seen this app before - in my operating system or anywhere: An app that makes sure only one sound source is played at a time: The most recent.
You could imagine a preference panel with tweaks such as prioritizing sound sources, ignoring banner ads, or maybe iTunes would be paused instead of muted. But the basics sketched above would make my sound experience so much better.
So, does it exist? If not, please steal the idea.
Alex, the new voice in Leopard is amazingly natural. But who uses the text-to-speech feature on a daily basis? Me, never. A shame, though, to let such a cool technology alone in the dark (or whatever lightening they have where they use it). I would use it if
Yesterday, when listening to an email from the guy across from my desk, I realised it actually breathes. Complementing the illusion of a professional speaker person reading aloud, it has built-in lung capacity, and it’s quite convincing. Listen (wait for the idiot to finish typing):
In fact, when Alex speaks a long passage, you’ll even hear him breathe. Apple built human lung capacity and human sentence parsing into its speech synthesizer, so Alex would sound more like us when he speaks. The synthesizer inserts a breath based on a variety of factors: appropriateness, the structure of the text being read, the time since the last breath, and the time until Alex finishes speaking.
Steffen found this cool mix of Ruby, Shazam, packet sniffing and last.fm. He then wrote some proof of concept Python scripts to run locally on a jailbreaked iPhone. We agreed it would be pretty neat to rebuild one of my Now Playing screens into a Last.fm one and use that for the project.
So here’s how it works
And here it is, working (the first two songs are demos of the nowplaying screen)
Over the air scrobbling and displaying from Morten Just on Vimeo.
I like to think of software as a person in a service conversation with the user. The user would be a teenage girl ordering concert tickets or a hung over dad figuring out how to turn on his phone. But the software would always be a professional.
Even better, the software acts and makes decisions as if it were among the world’s best in what it is doing. Why shouldn’t it? As interaction designers, we spend hours preparing for a simple five minute conversation.
One way to apply this could be imagining a conversation between this, the software persona, and a user.
Like users get personas, the application should have one, too
If the software persona is a business professional, try a five-star hotel concierge. If he is so smooth in his service, so polite in his behavior and so smart in his mind, what would he say when the user forgets their password or tries to buy 120 Harry Potter books?
- I’ll take 120 copies
- I must inform you that you are buying 120 copies of the same title, sir. Most of our customers buy just one. Are you sure?
Most web 2.0 software personas seem to be surfers in part time jobs, and that’s fine, because most people love relaxed Californians (or at least people from California do).
- I’ll take 120 copies
- Dude, that’s a lot of books! It’ll take you years to finish them, and you’ll know the ending, man. Are you really really sure?
Both software personas seem credible and like someone you’d trust to help you.
- I’ll take 120 copies
- No.
Not very polite, but could work. Consider this one:
- I’ll take 120 copies
- Okay. Your order will be processed like any other order placed on the web. An RFC 822 compliant email will be sent to you shortly. Our fulfilment team will then immediately begin your order. Please be aware that your order contains one or more items or a count of the same item that will delay your order.
(Talking of ”are you sure”, how many times do you hear that question in the supermarket, when removing stuff from your cart?)
(photo: Kecko on Flickr)
Finding inspiration in call center agents
It might be an interesting exercise trying to imagine your software as an 800 customer service number (as long as you pick one known for its high level of service)
As I mentioned in the previous post, I was on a call center software project, and a part of the research we had in our back pockets showed that these call center agents were true experts.
Service as an instinct
They knew several 300-page catalogs by heart. They knew what color went with what pair of what kind of clothes. When testing our design, we found that they did this without paying attention to it. They serviced the faux caller – being the test facilitator – as efficient as they would any other customer. They even tried to upsell him. My guess is that they didn’t know how not to.
Then why should our software? How would these extremely routined and professional agents handle your users after 10 years of experience and quarterly performance reviews?
I just found this list of names for a call center application project I was on last year.
In that period, I had a 1 hour commute. I would be on the train listening to Joanna Newsom’s latest album while reading a short story by Miranda July (in the book with the cool website). However, by accident the protagonist of the wireframe became a fictional person with the name Joanna Newsom, just like the harp-playing singer. Apparently, my colleagues and the customer did not know who that was, and the name spread to other wireframes not done by me.
Now, two months ago, on another project, another continent and another designer, I see that name again. Along with the name of the designer’s cat (took me a while to figure out why they would giggle when I described befriending scenarios with Master Lux).
I have no clue as to how the other names on the list above emerged. There might not be any. The last one is a bit unrealistic, though.
In Imity, we all loved Pelse Hanoi, also quite unrealistic, but lovable, obviously (Pelse’s tags reveal some of our fantasies of his or her metier, which are lovable, too).
For mockups and wireframes I prefer to dream up fictional names myself rather than having them generated. In times of low creativity, why not consult the the list of the 100 best characters in fiction, the list of people who have been claimed to exist, or maybe list of fictional characters sorted by IQ.
Det er hundetasken.
Her er slides fra min præsentation på ITU i sidste uge, hvor jeg talte længe og næsten uden pause om at lave mashups, og hvad jeg kom ud for mens jeg gjorde det.
De understregede ord i præsentationen kan klikkes på, og vil lede dig direkte til det omtalte mashup. Den fulde liste er også her.
digg this
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