September 2005 Archives
Momentum, Underground
Sep 29, 2005 | 1 Comment
Study is picking up pace - all the prep work is paying off. Finally spending some time on the streets and underground - Seoul is very much a city that moves by subway. It feels good to be surrounded by people - listening to, and adjusting footsteps to the local rhythm. I sometimes wonder what its like to follow our team for a day. We could be hustlers, pickpockets, undercover somethings maybe? Always trying to see things from a different angle. Getting ahead of people, falling behind, moving from carriage to carriage. Engaging, disengaging. A visit to the main railway station - signage and infrastructure noted. What is the real user experience of doing y? Did I really see what I think I saw? Double takes. And the occasional surprise when the footage is reviewed.
Yes it all looks good online and in the brochure - what would you expect? And the reality? The pre-home out of the box experience, the niggles, the set-up, the broken promises. We start with dumb questions (well they were smart in an earlier iteration). Progress is asking less dumb questions. And we still have a few days to move up the smart-question-scale, then our opportunity for asking is gone.
To be closer to collaboration partners staying in guesthouse rather than downtown hotel. Room comes with American Forces Network which appears to be aimed at 16 year olds. Oh - it is? Upside of staying here? After 3 days of an ear & throat infection, finally getting energy back. Tomorrow should start with a pre-breakfast hike to the summit of an admittedly modest hill for the local view of the Seoul skyline.
Shortening the path
Sep 28, 2005
Coffee cup includes search term on local search engine. Less to type and presumably easier to remember than a URL. Any other benefits, drawbacks? Apart from AOL Keywords haven't seen much keyword advertising - any other examples you can point me to?
Sublime happiness
Sep 23, 2005 | 2 Comments
The person who takes you the last leg of the journey often turns into the first local subject of the day. Sit in the front of the taxi - I can't verbally communicate with the driver (my Korean is non-existent) but there's more to explore. When did glove boxes stop containing gloves? Is this an extended battery option, or a regular part of the design?
On arrival the hotel suite slowly turns into mission control. Don't need full sized fridge. Do need more table and wall hanging space. Do need 10 more power sockets to charge the equipment. And do need to set everything up before we head out for our first excursion in the city.
Happiness is a timezone close to home
Sublime happiness would be somewhere decent to swim/run in the morning.
Captive, wanting to be free
Sep 23, 2005 | 1 Comment
If there isn't a law about advertising to captive audiences there should be - one hour waiting to clear customs watching an endless loop of Samsung Mobile and Korea Tourist Board advertising. Perhaps this is what augmented reality could come in - overlaying advertising spots with white walls and calm? But if Samsung made the head mounted display that you used to augment reality would it have a built in non-filter to still allow Samsung adverts? Sometimes it all comes down to money and what the consumer is willing to pay, or not pay as the case may be.
Spending just over a week in Korea to run the first half of a user study, then tag with a colleague who will take over and debrief a week later. I know what I know, but have a day or so to figure out some of what I don't yet know. Takes a fair bit of energy to understand how to work in and gather appropriate data from a new environment. Where do people hang out? What are conducive environments for observing xyz? What will interest the folks back home? The primary study is all set to go, the side studies - typically the stuff that becomes the value-added will emerge after a few days. Value added can be anything from a blinder of an off-topic interview to stumbling on a sub-culture that intentionally or otherwise relates to stuff happening in other parts of the world. Joining up the global dots. One of my favourites side themes is asking about what people lose or leave behind in an environment, the implications of that loss and how they recover if at all.
Hearts, Minds, Wallets, Address Book Entries
Sep 20, 2005 | 1 Comment
Some industries are more cut-throat than others. To my mind the male and female escort service industries in Kabukichou, Tokyo must be somewhere at the top of the competition list. Slap down a couple of hundred Euro and their silky smooth conversation skills plus whatever else you can negotiate will presumably be yours for the night. Given the money floating around and the intense competition for that money it makes sense that they'll do what they can to have a presence in the minds, wallets and mobile phone address books of prospective clients.
So it is unsurprising to find a business card shop in the heart of Kabukichou offering to print QR (2D) bar codes onto otherwise standard business cards. (The photo above shows the mockup/advert from that shop). I'm not particularly enamoured with QR bar codes, but they seem to pop up with increasing regularity here in Japan - in magazines advertising mobile phone services, on receipts, on collectables. My gripe with the design is that the barcode graphic is by and large damn ugly, and tends to dominate whatever they are printed on. However, with camera phones from all the Japanese carriers equipped with software to capture and interpret the information from the bar codes they are one fairly ubiquitous way to provide short cuts to information. Don't want to type in that URL? Switch on the camera, point and click and its transferred to your phone. Don't want to enter the details of a contact? Names, URLs, email addresses, phone numbers, mail addresses can all be embedded and saved to the phone.
I'm given a lot of business cards and have only ever come across the use of QR bar codes printed on the business cards twice - both times from people working in the mobile phone industry. For most people the effort involved with generating a personal bar code and having it upset the balance of the card design are two barriers too many compared to the potential benefit to the person whom receives the card.
The task of exchanging contact information typically involves effort from both the giver and receiver of the information. With QR barcode reading software already installed on the receiver's camera phone a suitably motivated giver of the information can take over some of the task-burden from the receiver. On business cards its seems this currently equates to escorts, and mobile phone geeks.
Sunday Pop-Quiz
Sep 18, 2005 | 13 CommentsSharpen pencils, today we have a short quiz....
This is a 'what would happen if I lost my phone' scenario:
1. Without looking at your phone address book how many phone numbers can you remember from memory?
2. Do you have a paper/digital backup of phone numbers somewhere?
3. Assuming your backup is out of sync... How many contacts would you lose if you lost your phone?
4. You are in a foriegn city with no money, who would you call in this emergency situation?
5. How sure are you that the 'emergency' phone number is accurate?
6. Any significant phone numbers you can't remember?
Post answers in the comments please.
Designing Outside Human Limitations
Sep 17, 2005 | 2 Comments
Spent yesterday with a colleague refining the goals of our next user study and discussing where we should focus our research energies next year. Talking through what to research is one of the more pleasurable aspects of this job - there's typically some scope to decide where to conduct user studies, you don't need to lug 26kg of equipment through rush-hour Tokyo to get there, assistants always turn up on time, the printer always works, you don't every run out of quarters for the launderette, and the deadlines have yet to be set.
At some point in the day we cycled over to Shimo Kitazawa to be surrounded by people and to reflect on whether what we had planned was feasible. There can be a jarring moment in user studies where you realise you were well off the mark 'of course people are going to react in that way when you do xyz!?' and being surrounded by people going about their business is a good reality check before even running a pilot study. At some point in our wander through the neighbourhood we ended up in a Vietnamese restaurant, and seated on the counter watching the chef prepare the food and continued our discussion. In front of us, on the counter was a bowl of small, brass spinning tops for sale. I picked one up and spun it on the flat wooden counter.
This spinning top had two properties that made it special. Being pure brass with no decoration and perfect symmetry it looked identical when it was spinning compared to when it was stationary. In addition it was so finely balanced and the table surface so condusive to spinning that it seemingly spun for minutes. The only time you could tell it was moving was at the beginning of the spin cycle - when it slowly orbited an imaginary planet before settling in one place, and at the very end when it lost its momentum and spun out. After being spun it quickly became a background activity, since it required no further interaction and other tasks like tucking into the food and continuing conversations took over.
There was a moment when our attention returned to the top which because it was so long since it was last spun appears totally stationary seemingly balanced upright on its tip and somehow defying gravity. There were no cues to it spinning, and the affect was simply indistinguishable from magic. Do magicians have a word or phrase to describe the affect of tricking human perception? (not closure, but something similar?)
A lot of the time we think about designing to and within human limitations - think usability, think ergonomics. There's a world out there that is beyond human perception (and to extrapolate this, there is a world out there that is beyond the perception of the tools we can perceivable design). Increasingly however the objects we carry are able to extend our human capabilities: cameras can record more accurately or, shown in the example below - can record differently to (my) falable human memory; mobile phones enable you to shout further; text messaging is nothing less than shifting time and space.
What human capabilities will be extended or dampened by what tools next? Why?
Quiet Before the Storm
Sep 13, 2005 | 2 Comments
10 days before the next in-depth user study starts, 240 hours of relative calm before the storm.
Sometimes its possible to plan a year in advance. The minimum stress free lead time is 2 months to draw up a project plan, pull together a team - typically people working in other time zones so expect late nights and early mornings working from home, sync travel plans to the study location, recruit participants, engage subcontractors for the stuff you can't/don't want to do, assess and arrange local assistants and expect to deliver something decent. The actual work load before the study is much less with access to people with the right skills.
A lot of the prep work is simply project management and logistical planning. We have processes to deal with most eventualities and I'm a self-confessed form junkie. Data consent form? Sure, what language you want it in? Probably about 75% to 95% of the plan will go as scheduled and the rest is dealing with the situation you have and getting on with it. I'm not sure how we would have dealt with Katrina though - the team left New Orleans about a week before she arrived.
During the planning phase the creative part comes in figuring out which mix of methods to use to get the data you're after: shadowing, home stay, diary variants, in-depth interviews, observations, street interviews, expert interviews, ...? Who are the most appropriate participants? Where is the most productive place to spend time with them? What data you want to collect? What formats? Why? Really Why? Really really why?
The real creativity and IMHO the value added for clients, comes in figuring out what else the participants, team and location has to offer, and finding a way to bottle and communicate the experience(s). Maybe this part of the job is not user research - but experience bottling?
Sign Painter
Sep 12, 2005
To continue on the thread of choosing whether to have a hand painted mural or not. The fact that we have a choice is our relative luxury. These photos are of a sign painter's shop in Pokara, Nepal. One feature of these individual designs is the ability to customise - I was particularly enamored with the hand painted license plates with the clasped praying hands.
Value From Appreciation of the Process
Sep 11, 2005 | 4 Comments
The walls around Parco Shibuya are updated every two weeks or so with a newly painted mural. You often see the mural crew working late on a friday night, presumably on a deadline to get the material up in time for the saturday shoppers. The last part of the painting process is the detail in the faces - so in adverts containing lots of people you become witness to ghostly versions of what appears in print. The images are quite compelling. Tokyo is full of big screen outdoor displays, garish neon and bright lights which makes hiring mural painters all the more peculiar. What additional value does commissioning advertising in this way bring? There are undoubtedly cheaper and more efficient alternatives in this area of prime real estate and premium advertising space.
My guess that part of the equation of choosing mural painters over JumboTrons is that the audience - in this case the passing shoppers of Shibuya will be at least somewhat interested by the process. Seeing a mural unfold over a period of time like a work of art taking shape, and seeing the end result - close replicas of the print advertising and appreciating the effort that went into the process.
In a world where things seem to be forever becoming faster, smaller, cheaper, and mass produced one thing we can (mostly) all appreciate is the perceived time and effort it takes to do something. Skill is another factor, but it is more subjective. Effort is admittedly a little fuzzy. But time is absolute.
Have you ever received an E-Card? What was the value of that card to you? Now compare it to the value of a digital photo or a hand-written postcard. Receiving an e-card, digital photo or physical postcard you may or may not like the design but can appreciated the time, effort, and sometimes skill that goes into the process of sending it to you. In the case of an E-Card the value is mostly close to zero because that card is available for just about anyone to send.
In the distant future it may be possible to measure the level of sensory engagement that is involved in creating and consuming content and media*. I know you liked that birthday card because it told me how much time you spent handling it, gazing at it and displaying it in your home. Part of the reason you like it so much is that you know I put so much effort into obtaining its composite parts, how long ago I first thought of the idea - 'six months!', and the number of design iterations it went through before it reached you. You know because it told you so. Or at least it told you about the aspects that I let it tell you.
* Of course the way this plays out is that we create agents to simulate the level of sensory engagement on our behalf - to make it appear that we appreciated your gift to me, to make it appear that I spent sleepless months working on my gift to you. Whole side-industries beavering away to create the perception of underlying value. Which sounds like extrapolations of what happens already.
Why You Do, What You Do
Sep 07, 2005
What draws you to get out of bed to go and do whatever it is that you do?
Money? Fear? Apathy? Passion?
Somewhere along the line you made choices to get to where you are. My choice has been to make Tokyo my home for the last 5 years. My original calling was user interface design, having attended the inspirational UI Master's course run by Robert Scane at City Polytechnic (London Guildhall University as it's now known). My logic for moving here was - where better to learn the UI trade than the home of electronics companies and a marketplace that is really an experimental product design playground that produces stuff that you simply won't see anywhere else in the world?* In Tokyo every time I step outside the door to my apartment I expect to learn something new, and am rarely disappointed.
The stuff that interests me - new experiences, learning about people and the cultures they inhabit, inventing stuff, sometimes re-arranging old stuff in new ways, and (second)guessing the future has morphed into my current job. These are my reasons for getting out of bed in the morning, and occasionally, if the big idea comes at 3 in the morning, they become my reason for getting up in the middle of the night.
But whatever you're calling at some point you simply need to get your head down and work, and work though what-ever it is you do. In user research there's a point in any in-depth user study when you're unable to absorb new data, so overwhelmed with new experiences that you struggle to maintain perspective. The constant, admittedly self-imposed pressure is to take every opportunity to gather more, delve deeper, go that bit further. On international studies you know when you arrive and you know when you leave, and that's your (usually ambitious) time frame. And if the study includes conducting contextual ad-hoc street interviews there is no next time and there is no tomorrow, only missed chances, so breakfast's, bus rides, flight delays and that night off that you promised yourself quickly become reasons conduct one more interview or go into observation mode. (I sometimes think that if I worked for a toothpaste company there would be easy boundaries to my work, but try researching something as ubiquitous as the mobile phone). Even with the best planning, it's easy to become overwhelmed. For example we have the processes for a research team in the field to affectively deal with incoming photo data as quickly as it can generated, but consider that a research team can end up with 3,000 relevant still photos from a single city 10 day user study. If you like to pick up a camera this job is almost like aversion therapy. To do something so intensely that it's bound to sometimes create an adverse reaction.
The last few days have been good - back home with everything that entails: family, a semblance of a familiar rhythm. Today I managed to pick up the camera through choice and cycled the city to see what grabs. Capturing the world around me just because there's so much still to learn, and for now at least Tokyo is my backyard.
In case you're wondering, I came across the gentleman above tonight on my cycle ride home from a pleasant night out in Ebisu. Non-Japanese often make a big deal of the uniformity of Japanese socieity - group behaviour/harmony and so on. The reality is IMHO somewhat different. Creativity here is hard to explain, but in many, often subtle ways eclipses cities such as London and NYC.
* There's good reason why you don't see many of these product's for sale outside Japan - but thats another story
Pleasantly Imperfect
Sep 04, 2005 | 2 Comments
Life is messy, pleasantly imperfect.
Milk goes sour. Shoe laces come undone. Objects are forgotten. Luggage is lost (thanks FinnAir). Packages don't turn up (thanks DHL, again). A leaking pen. No change for the vending machine. The kid on the bus just won't stop crying. The chewing gum stuck to your new coat. The man in the next urinal unable to aim straight (OK admittedly sometimes it edges to being impleasantly imperfect).
Imperfection is human. Predictability is boring.
I recall a conversation with Adam Greenfield about plausible deniability when it comes to the design of new products and systems. It may be possible to know where someone is 100% of the time for example through presence and GPS but is it desirable? Throw in the possibility of a 1% chance of error and all of a sudden there are many more opportunities for fun for getting away with, well, what-ever you want to get away with.
Ubicomp is coming to Tokyo later this month - I wonder what the delegates will make of our pleasantly imperfect future?
WYS is not WYG
Sep 03, 2005 | 2 Comments
To convince buyers that wrist watches are waterproof this market seller in Kathmandu places them in water - salt water. Punters think they are buying waterproof watches, when in fact they are buying salt-waterproof watches. Photo taken around new year '05.
What you see is not what you get.
Toungue / Key
Sep 01, 2005
The human ability to see faces in everyday objects is well documented. Admittedly this is a little Domokunesque, but face-like none the less. I wonder to what extent this was the result of deliberate design choices? The red of the key makes it a target for grabbing, but could be interpreted as a tongue. Can the design of the keys be stretched into themed tongues?
Most of the hotel room keys in Finland I've come across have been VingCards - plastic, durable, boring. After 3 weeks on the road its pleasant to carry something more natural in my back pocket, even if it is only veneer.
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