The introduction of “Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone” by Lindholm, Keinonen and Kiljander features this interesting excerpt:

“the only way to get a working assumption of what the technology enable us to do and how they are likely to be used is to be involved in these projects long enough. Even then, educated guesses and developed intuitions are only approximate. Something that was supposed to be easy to implement turns out to be practically impossible. Sometimes, the opposite occurs. Solutions that were originally postponed to allow technology to catch up are suddenly realized in unexpected ways“

Why do I blog this? This quote is an interesting summary of what I believe as it covers different aspects:

• The importance to have a long-term involvement in an organization which design something: I personally work with a french video game studio for 7 years and it strikes me how much I learn in the long run and not through short gigs on their projects. For example, it’s been almost from the beginning that we discuss the usability test and user experience field study ideas. It took us approximately 4 years to turn what was “user research as a R&D project” into “user research in the production pipe-line”. The time to convince people, to show the value of user research, the importance to insert it in the production process, and finally to get some funding to make it accepted…
• The notion of “educated guess” and “developed intuitions” is important. For that matter, I like how Jan Chipchase frame the results form his work: not facts but “informed opinions”. Although the quote does not refer to user research, I find an interesting pattern here in the sense that knowledge construction about the evolution of technology is rarely absolute. There are contingencies and idiosyncrasies that plays an important role.
• The difficulty in forecasting results because the world is a complex system.
• The importance of time: innovation is slow, change takes time and as foresight researchers say, we always tend to overestimate the short term and minimize the long term (tail).

Once in a while the Harvard Business Review tackles topics close to my field. Sometimes it’s about foresight, today it’s about design with this article by Tim Brown called “Design Thinking” (in the june 2008 edition).

Starting an insightful model in R&D/innovation, namely Thomas Edison, Brown describes design thinking as a descendant of that tradition of a “blended art, craft, science, business savvy, and an astute understanding of customers and markets“. He simply defines it as:

“it is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.“

In these days of desperate need of innovation as “a source of differentiation and competitive advantage”, design thinking is literally more and more invited to the business table (hence a publication in HBR). Brown definitely make clear that design evolved from

“put a beautiful wrapper around the idea (…) making new products and technologies aesthetically attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or by enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising and communication strategies”

to

“Now, however, rather than asking designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, companies are asking them to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value.

Giving some examples, he also enters in more detail in the process itself, discussing the role of prototypes and “tools for design thinking”. As well as an interesting deconstruction of the myth of the creative genius, Brown shows how it’s not about ideas popping up out from the blue, but instead the results of an hardworking process with human-discovery and iterations.

Why do I blog this? it’s a decent overview of what is design, to be kept up handy for upcoming teaching gigs. The good thing here (for designers) is the acknowledgement of the strategic value of design and the intrinsical importance of adopting a user-centred approach. The sidebar about designers’ profile and the non-importance of black clothes is also a good start.

As a side-note, I find intriguing that the term “behavioral scientists/researchers” is more and more used. It sorts of echoes with the NYT piece about Jan Chipchase. Working in that domain and having troubles to define in 2 words what I am doing, I am always intrigued by the terms employed by different stakeholders: behavioral researcher seems to be the term for the press lately, whereas consultants and companies use “user experience” (I know there are nuances though).

Simpler than ARG but surely along the same line, this sort of street game (spotted yesterday in Lyon, France) always makes me wondering about Jane Jacobs and the importance to have people/eyes/activity on the street.

Taken today while visiting a big industrial factory. The left sticker says: “touch screen: no BEWARE: don’t touch the screen… except me: I am the operator” and the right one says “Don’t touch my screen”. It reads like a Kraftwerk song.

I found interesting the existence of these stickers which gives order about ownership of touch-screen. There aren’t any sticker about keyboard ownwership but in that factory, it seems that touch screens make me people willing to touch/interacti with the device.

As discussed by David R. Millen in Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research

“Even the terminology used to describe the research sample belies different research perspectives. For example, psychologists refer to subjects, HCI researchers talk about users, market researchers refer to consumers or segments, and anthropologists refer to informants. “

Stack overflow?

Definitely a fan of Antonin Fourneau’s Overloaded Joystick (here):

A short excerpt of the text written by Douglas-Edric Stanley about the artist and the exhibit shed some more light about it:

“When I look at some twenty-odd buttons of all sizes joyfully scattered about a controller, I can only read in it a boyish call to the gaming industry: “please someone, come and bring some joy back into this stick”. In this way, Antonin has stolen that ladybeard and placed it on top of his own, thereby redefining his own — very French, and very devilish — form of a wink, which is both innocent and sophisticated, all at the same time.” (Douglas-Edric Stanley)

There’s this interesting post by Paul Graham on distractions and time sinks (tv-then-internet):

“Something that used to be safe, using the Internet, gradually became more and more dangerous. Some days I’d wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn’t gotten any real work done. And this started to happen more and more often.
(…)
The problem is a hard one to solve because most people still need the Internet for some things.“

So what to do?

“At first I tried rules. For example, I’d tell myself I was only going to use the Internet twice a day. But these schemes never worked for long. Eventually something would come up that required me to use it more than that. And then I’d gradually slip back into my old ways.
(…)
The key seems to be visibility. The biggest ingredient in most bad habits is denial. So you have to make it so that you can’t merely slip into doing the thing you’re trying to avoid. It has to set off alarms.

Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internet distractions will be software that watches and controls them. But in the meantime I’ve found a more drastic solution that definitely works: to set up a separate computer for using the Internet. (…) If you try this trick, you’ll probably be struck by how different it feels when your computer is disconnected from the Internet.
“

Why do I blog this? interesting hint about work practices. It reminds me of a friend working in a big aerospace company where no personal computers are connected to the Internet (for security reasons) and where people have to go to an Internet computer (yes, in 2008).

Although I agree with the time-sink problem and suffer from it myself, I am still wondering about the definition of “work” Graham have. There are indeed different definition of work:
- need to be connected to newsfeeds.
- looking for intelligence, reports, material, hints, stats, etc. This requires first-hand sources or second-hand sources, search engines, tagging systems…
- …

(Picture taken from my temporary office in a swiss train)

And there are of course different recombination of work allowed by networks:
- look things up on the google even for crazy things such as checking grammar (google fight), looking for a reference in a paper, etc.
- need to access definition (wikipedia or urban dictionary!)
- share and work on documents: Google Docs/Spreadsheet for example
- use of certain websites to “compute” things, for example, I have few urls like that one to compute statistic things on-lines
- communicate with people using Skype/Google Talk, etc.
- update agenda
- find picture on Flickr to illustrate a talk

Of course, all of this results from the choice I made (with colleagues) to use on-line tools. Personally I find more efficient to split my time between different moments/activities and places:

1. browsing/having a glance at stuff (daily read of my RSS feeds, websites, quick glance at magazine at news shops every day…), generally after breakfast. This is about news, people blogging about their activities or what they are doing. It’s then a sort of ambient awareness of lots of things.
2. selecting few “signals” and turning them into something more concrete (a blogpost, in delicious, a note in a .txt file that corresponds to a specific project, and email to myself or friends), generally while/after browsing (morning)
3. reading “seriously” (on paper or on the computer), generally in a disconnected place (like trains!)
4. talking to people (whenever), eating with people (whenever), chatting (generally in the afternoon)
5. be on the field (observations) or in a work meetings (mid-morning/afternoon)
6. analyzing data coming from the field or writing seriously on a document (in a disconnected place sometimes) or with email/browser switched off.

All of this separated by breaks (walking, jogging, dreaming, taking weird pictures).

Been interviewed recently by Alfons Cornella and Doris Obermair for spanish website Infonomia, the conversation is here. A short excerpt where I make my point (about the near future of urban computing) that the important thing is less about technology than human needs:

“¿Cuál es el futuro en este campo?
Si hablamos de las ciudades del futuro, no debemos pensar en tecnología, sino en las necesidades humanas, en lo que la gente quiere en lugares específicos. ¿Quieren circular mejor, conocer a gente que comparte sus mismos intereses, o, por otro lado, simplemente quieren que se les deje en paz y estar inaccesibles? Se trata de ciudades basadas en los deseos de la gente, más que de ciudades donde la tecnología se lanza sin más y la gente no entiende lo que está pasando.“

Lots of signs on that picture taken in Geneva. Different meanings, some are official (street number), some aren’t (graffitis); some are about navigation (street number), some about making explicit invisible phenomenon (the purple rainbow shows the availability of the wifi signal), some are easy-to-grasp (”COOL”), some are impossible to parse. The weirdest is certainly the black-scotch tape on the right.

“Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See” is a nice little booklet by Andrew Burroughs from IDEO. A bit in the same vein of “Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design” by Jane Fulton Suri, is about all these small things and details that I sometimes blog about: observations about the world, the complexity of assemblage, failures, cracks, misuses, etc. All these small details matter as they tell us about “the thought process behind designed things”.

Compared to Thoughtless Acts, that book is more about the way to see the world in the engineer’s eyes but it’s definitely of interest for anyone interested in design or user experience research.

In addition, this collection of pictures is an invitation to be more “inquisitive” about our environments. As I sometimes try to do with picture I annotate here, the point is rather to ask questions concerning why things are like this or that. And as the author says, it allows to become “better observers”:

“Perhaps we discover a point of failure that is completely counterintuitive, as when corrosion aggressively attacks the most protected part of a steel beam. And we can also see success, when things do go as planned and the end product proves to be a match for everything that is thrown at it. Regardless of whether we find inspiration or not, we owe it to ourselves and those around us to become better observers. Our environment is brimming over with information that can help us with our basic ability to navigate a course. The better we are able to refine our actions and our thoughts based on seeing what has gone before, the fewer mistakes we will make“

The need to put a “bell” arrow sticker to indicate the button position.

Technology as a life-saver? enabler?
Seen in Geneva few months ago

Younghee’s post about surveillance techniques tackle a very important issues wrt to digital traces:

“How would people drop out of, or at least minimize their digital traces and minimize contributing to create others’? We are probably not expecting stickers and badges showing “this person does NOT have cameras” or “this person will NOT use cameras”. One of the memorable Ubicomp conference talks was on the interesting concept of creating capture-resistant environment, preventing camera phones to take photos by overexposing photos attempted in the region covered by this technology. While I am sure there are certain types of places this technology would be very useful, I do have my doubts if there would ever be any technology successfully controlling people’s digital behaviors.“

Why do I blog this? that topic is interesting because it also connects with a phenomenon Genevieve Bell described at LIFT08: the “arms race of digital deception”: for every device that claims to purport to tell the truth (e.g. GPS), there is another service that allows to lie, deceit or create alibi (which is actually coming from James Katz).

So there could be two sorts of behavior:
- using tools to minimize digital traces (Younghee’s argument)
- using tools to create counter-traces (Bell’s argument)

Wandering around Verone last week made me think of various things and the picture below reminded me of Thesis 75 in “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”.

“About all that we can properly ask for is that our technology be designed in such a way that it is conservative of face: that ubiquitous systems must not act in such a manner as would unduly embarrass or humiliate users, or expose them to ridicule or social opprobrium, in the course of normal operations
(…)
But we are not talking about doing away with shame. The issue at hand is preventing ubiquitous computing systems from presenting our actions to one another in too perfect a fidelity - in too high resolution, as it were - and therefore keeping us from maintaining the beneficial illusions that allow us to live as a community.“

Artifacts from the past like those scale on the street (rarely seen now, or they’re often here for ages) is intriguing for that matter.