August 2005 Archives

Where You Might Learn the Most

Aug 21, 2005 | 5 Comments

Running a user study in the US. The next in-depth interviews are scheduled for lunchtime tomorrow. Between now and then the aim is to conduct ad-hoc interviews whereever we are most likely to encounter relevant and interesting people.

My options tonight are looking for suitable local subject's on a Saturday night out in one of New Orleans many (non Bourbon St. clubs), or tracking down Louisiana church goers on Sunday morning. Not enough energy to do them both. The deciding factors are: personal energy levels - still a bit lagged; where we are most likley to learn the most; and what the other team members want to do.

Update: I took the clubz, and BG/IT are going for the Sunday morning soul food. 4 interview subjects said something along the lines of 'when you get out this cluurb, you go straight home, this city is dangerous'. Sweet. Real.

Location: United States » New Orleans / United States

Writing/Texting

Aug 18, 2005

Tonight trying to conduct interviews in a cafe in Louisville, Kentucky. Particular challenges are: bad lighting conditions meaning either long exposures or having to use night vision; the cafe is hosting 4 rather loud bands so interviews occur between live sessions or outside on the back porch with the smokers; and the team is starting to flake from 4 straight days on the road.

Found some rather sweet messages written on a scrap of paper on the counter...
"blah blah blah"
"yada yada"
"boobs!"
"YES!"
etc etc

Not to dissimilar from some text message conversations, briefly fun to read and accessible to all.

Are there contexts where it's desirable to visualise text message conversations away from the mobile phone? Or are messages destined to remain in in-boxes and folders?

Location: United States » Louiseville / United States

Steal Me

Aug 16, 2005

Night light from hotel bathroom in Cleveland. Of sufficient value to be stolen, cheap enough to give away - a subtle way of getting advertising in the home. Another example - salt and pepper shakers inscribed with 'Stolen from Virgin Atlantic'.

Location: United States » Cleveland / United States

Thank-you for shopping with us, thief

Aug 10, 2005 | 6 Comments

My pet hate in Japan is the little stickers that are applied to your purchases if you decline to to put the goods in a plastic bag. Since I usually carry my own bag I always get the stickers, on everything.

That sticker encapsulates a negative aspect of the retailer/customer experience: "Thank-you for shopping at our store, but we don't trust you enough to walk out without stealing goods. So we apply this sticker to make you think it's easier for us to know what you've bought, and easier to identify you've just attempted to steal. Have a great day". Presumably the reason the sticker is applied is that it is an effective deterrent against theft, because it is highly visible and obvious what it applies to i.e. the object it is stuck on. (The sticker roll is ripe for a subversive makeover - drum roll designers...)

With increased purchases of digital goods content providers are looking to Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions to limit where and how content is played. For me a fair DRM solution assumes people know what they own, and know the rights for what they own. With competing DRM solutions this is not going to be an easy task. Ask yourself this question:

Are there limits to how and where songs downloaded from the iTunes store can be played?

In my mind if you answer 'yes' you are already in the niche that is technology orientated consumers. Next question:

How many of you can list any use-boundaries of songs downloaded from the iTunes store?

If you can answer 'yes' you're otaku. Most people have a life where technology or the design and application of technology are not a central driver. It's a wonderful world out there, and it's got nothing to do with computer screens, keyboards and mice (I'm sitting here tapping out this article, looking forward to my morning cycle ride through Tokyo to get to the office).

If you are a P2P network user - how many times have you downloaded the same song? Looking at my (paid for) physical and digital music collection I frequently find duplicates - songs that I've paid for more than once. We used not to get a choice - you bought the album even it contained two songs identical to that other album you bought. Even on digital stores it's easier to select all the songs from an album than figure out the one or two you may have already, and (for this consumer) the cost of checking multiple devices where my the music is stored is more that the cost of buying a few duplicates.

I'm looking forward to the day when N million iTunes users start hitting use-boundaries and start looking for ways and perhaps demanding ways to free what they consider to be 'their music'. Maybe the delay between the time of purchase and the hitting of boundaries will be sufficiently long - 3 years? 5 years?, that the impact will be met with a resounding silence. Each consumer older and wiser?

Returning to the sticker... physical objects have presence, and although I dislike the sticker on the Coke bottle at least it noticeable enough to have feelings about.

Location: Japan / Japan » Tokyo

Public Phone Recharging Services

Aug 08, 2005 | 7 Comments

You are out and about and your phone runs out of power - what are your options?

Something you see a lot in Asia but not yet in Europe or the US is public alternatives for charging mobile phones. These photos are taken from a waiting room near Hodaka - a popular hiking/climbing in Japan's Northern Alps. I watched as a potential customer struggled to operate the machine to charge his phone - 100 Yen (0.70 Euro) for 10 minutes.

In many ways the context of this room made it a perfect place for locating a charging station: a train station waiting room with accurate information on when the train is going to leave; a reason to wait and kill time; seating in proximity of the charging station to make it easier to remember when it comes time to leave and to enable checking that no-one will steal the phone. The last point may seem moot because the phone goes into a drawer and the door is locked - however the casing is pretty flimsy and would not deter a dedicated thief if no-one was around. Do you have any data stored on your phone worth stealing? Even if you don't now, this question will become more relevant as phones are used to complete a wider range of tasks e.g. mobile payments, and due to the options provided by increased memory space. The context should also provide a steady stream of customers: there was no cellular coverage on the mountain so a mobile phone left switched on the battery rapidly drains as it constantly tries to find the nearest base station; most people were on overnight trips so to keep their weight down they're not going to carry chargers; there was no where to plug in a charger anyway.

There are a number of other options available in Japan. Most convenience stores stock 'top-up' batteries that plug into the phones power socket. This is a practical alternative in Japan where to a large extent the carrier specifies the power connector - all DoCoMo PDC phones are able to take the same charging/data cable. (Actually the connectors are all slightly different but they are specified to share enough similarities to be able to charge from the same cable. Some enterprising students I met used a knife to shave off the design differences so they could share a power & data cable).

A few solar chargers are for sale in Tokyo Hands, but these are still in the realm of gimmick than a practical alternative.

Other examples I've come across in my travels - convenience stores, restaurants and airports in China having charging stations where you clamp a positive and negative charge onto the battery. I've never seen anyone actually using these, but I presume that because someone has paid to roll the infrastructure out that its revenue generating.

Fast food restaurants in Delhi supply charging services behind the counter whilst you eat - from recollection they offered 3 x Nokia, 1 x Samsung, 1 x Motorola and one I can't remember. A colleagues told me about longer distance buses in India offering charging services to passengers. Any other places you've seen?

Location: India » Delhi / Japan » Hodaka / India / Japan