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Knowing Which Way the Wind Blows
Writing from Shimo Kitazawa | October 30, 2005 | Comments (2) | Permalink
Pre-determining Use
Anticipation of use, contexts of use.
Writing from Tokyo | | Permalink
False Hope
Writing from Shimo Kitazawa | October 29, 2005 | Permalink
Cultural Bearings - Recycling Plants
Like train stations I use recycling plants to get my cultural bearings. What you see, do not see being recycled as an indicator of attitudes in society. A surprising amount of non-fixable electronics end up as landfill even in places like China (above) and Kathmandu (below). One downside is that recycling plants seem to have a penchant for attracting some rather noisy and nasty dogs.
Some thoughtful comments on digital recycling.
Writing from Tokyo | October 25, 2005 | Comments (1) | Permalink
Listening Station
Very busy Saturday afternoon in Shibuya's HMV. User creates a comfortable and private bubble for listening to music. By squatting her bag just touches the ground taking most of the weight off her shoulder.
Writing from Shibuya | October 23, 2005 | Permalink
Discarding Content
Is there a digital equivalent to this?
How and why will people want to discard very personal media?
Writing from Sakura Shinmachi | | Comments (5) | Permalink
Mobile Phone as Personal Shrine
What can you learn from products about to be recycled?
When I first moved to Japan one of the first exploratory studies I carried out was to try and figure out how and why people customise their phone cover. It's fairly common in Japan, Korea and to a lesser extent China to see phones adorned with stickers as well as the more usual phone straps. I was looking for inspiration for new applications and services and this seemed a good a place to start as any.
On a hot summer's day I traveled down to a mobile phone recycling plant on the edge of Tokyo and with the help of a number of friendly factory workers spent a few hours sorted through over 6,000 used phone covers, documenting all and any physical customisation that was evident. The result was several hundred photos of stickers of designs, logos, decorations and puri kura - the print club stickers that are still relatively popular in Japan and some Asian cultures.
Only 11% of the 6447 covers had some form of physical customisation. I was expecting this to be more based on ad-hoc observations from the street, though this reflects the places and people I hang out with. The range of physical customisation can be categorized into: stickers of logos; print club photos; telephone numbers; and illustrations/decorations. There were also a few examples of 'super customisation' where people had obviously put in a lot of time and effort detailling paint jobs, tagging, graffiti covering the whole device.
Why do people physically customize their phones with stickers?
Putting a sticker of a brand on a phone is an obvious and easy way to project lifestyle choices, peer group affiliations and aspirations - for example 'I'm into surfing' or 'my crew wear's Gravis'. It's socially acceptable, though in some environments a little dangerous, to have the phone out on display and at the very least answering a call and text messaging provide opportunties for others to see. Print club photos adorning the phone cover both confirm and project to others who the owner is connected with, in some regards a physical manifestation of the phone book. Customisation can also send the signal that 'this is mine, hands off'. Lastly, on a practical level it solves the problem of knowing widget is yours when all the widgets look alike. This was evident in a different study where we discovered the motivation behind walkie talkie customization by San Francisco bike messengers and of school calculators by Shanghai school kids was the same - to figure out which device belonged to them. If a company bought its workers the same mobile phone model, I would expect a large % of owners to add some small physical customisation for this same reason.
One of the surprise findings from the Tokyo recycling plant research was the use of the inside back cover as a form of 'mobile personal shrine' a place for storing photos/memories. Unless the back cover was removed from the phone no-one else would see or would know the photo was there so my assumption is that the photos were for personal consumption, or at the owner's discretion for sharing with someone else. A number of the photos appeared quite intimate - a couple hugging, a child, friends doing things in privacy of a photo booth.
There are of course limits to what you can learn through the documenting used products. Many of the best insights come from talking with people about why and how, whereas the recycling plant data just shows what. I had no way of knowing, for example whether the phones were for work or personal use or whether the owner was male or female.
More and more data can be embedded in and on objects - QR bar codes printed on the back of a sticker, RFID tags embedded in a device. A visit to a recycling plant in 2010 will probably yield much more about the product and its owners than we can ever know today. Interesting from the research point of view, by today's standards a major privacy issue for pretty much everyone else.
Writing from Tokyo | October 22, 2005 | Permalink
Side Effects of Transparency
Seoul central station has transparent waste bins.
I presume, like in Tokyo it is part of government 'anti-terrorist' measures. Any readers from South Korea know whether the bins in Seoul station have always been like this? Anyway, a side effect is it makes it easier to identify what categories of objects are recycled in which bin by seeing what others have thrown away. But it presumably makes it less likely to throw socially sensitive objects - such as personal correspondence, adult literature or things that should be recycled elsewhere.
Writing from Seoul | | Comments (3) | Permalink
Touch Interaction
Poster extolling the virtues of proximity touch interaction.
Writing from Harajuku | October 20, 2005 | Permalink
22 And Counting
30 minutes to kill before the embassy opens... Omotesando window shopping.
Stripped down cordless phone from + - 0. Despite its functional minimalism there are still 22 visible buttons, including separate on / off. Design trade offs: desire for symmetry vs. visible UI complexity vs. desire to map 1 function to 1 button?
Are separate on / off buttons easier or more satifying than combined in one button?
Writing from Omotesando | October 19, 2005 | Comments (2) | Permalink
To Trust or Not To Trust?
On Saturday Apple advertising smurfs were plastering selected posters around Tokyo with peel-off plastic iPod Nanos. They were as popular as the real thing* pretty much being removed by passing punters as soon as they went up. The back of the Plastic Nano included a QR Bar Code linking to blurb and downloads related to the product. Anyone can create a QR bar code using a tool such as the solid online Pukupi Codeatron.
Scams are and will be possible with every medium - for example premium rate phone numbers, text messages, falsified email headers, URLs that are not what they seem. A question to the more technologically minded of you - just how hackable is what happens once you read a QR bar code with a phone? Anyone know of real world examples of malicious, or mis-representative QR bar codes?
* and currently about as useful as the real thing
Writing from Shibuya, Parco | October 18, 2005 | Comments (6) | Permalink
Custom Covers
For 3,400 Yen (24 Euro or so) in downtown Tokyo you can get yourself a custom phone cover design completed in 30 minutes. Choose any number of truly tasteful designs from samples on the shelf or from a booklet most are simple patterns, a scary number of cigarette company logos, fake Gucci, YSL, whales a-jumping, cats a-lookin cute that kind of thing. He prints the design on sticky film, carefully folds it onto the phone. 20 seconds with a hair dryer then spends the next 15 minutes cutting holes for the display, buttons and removing access film.
The quality of the final result is not particular inspiring - though this is due the resolution and colour caperbilities of the printer rather than the process itself.
The bling-my-fone option looks like being more interesting.
... and if you're wondering about the lightly clothed punters, these photos were taken about a month ago. You'll be happy to hear that today it's raining hard in Tokyo and I forgot my bike rain gear. Whoopy do.
Writing from Harajuku | October 17, 2005 | Comments (3) | Permalink
Everything-I-Touch, Everything-U-Touch
How to capture meaningful user data remotely?
As much as I'd love to spend a month on location (cough, in Hawaii) to run a user study the reality is compressing it into up to two weeks (and more likely to be Hackney or Hangzhou than Hawaii, damn). Well before the team touches down in a new location we will have screened the study participants so one option is to ask them to self-gather data prior to our arrival. A typical self-gathering tool is asking them to keep some form of written, photo and/or video diary.
At best diary methods provide insights into people's context that can be followed up in interviews, and primes the user and the research team for the next stages of the study. At worst they are a waste of time - with participants mis-interpreting or re-interpreting the diary brief, unable to use the tools provided, consider the whole thing one big hassle, and only note down indecipherable comments.
One diary method which has a higher success rate than most I've tried is the eponymous Everything-I-Touch Photo Diary. Using a digital camera the participant is asked to take a photo of everything they touch for at least half a day sometimes from the moment they get up. The method was originally tried in 2001 as an attempt to understand the range and properties of objects/things that a person comes in contact with during the course of a day and was followed up as part of user exploration to develop concepts around Magic Touch / Near Field Communications. What objects and things do we interact with? What range of user interfaces, user experiences do we encounter? What enables or forces us to interact with the same things in different ways? For example turning a light switch on with your hand, but with both hands engaged in carrying turning the same switch off using your nose. How often do you flick that light switch on or off? Open that door? What does your alarm clock, shower knob, front door, fridge, breakfast, key-ring look like? What brands do you use? What interaction experiences are unique to those brands? When is the last time you had a novel tactile experience? Is it possible to go through the day without touching any objects that you haven't touched before?
If you like user research data, the results are a rich orgy of the mundane.
The method was successful enough in achieving its original aims, but also yielded other interesting data such as highlighting the flow of the day, the order in which tasks were completed - people likely to pee before checking the weather in the mornings, and understanding the range of contexts where the user spends time. A sufficient number of photos included enough perspective to show what else was happening, what other things the user could be doing.
Making the photos ready for use in the study is relatively easy. If the camera's time & date is accurately set up then it is easy to import the photos into a software programme such as LifeBlog, view the photos as a time line and add comments. Most of the things we do involve touching something or another and by capturing the touch moment it is possible to gain insights into that context. The time line can be printed and presented to the user for additional comments or as an interview guide. Some of the pilot subjects (Juergen, Matt) kept a diary and posted them to their blogs, though the final format of the photos from study participants tended to be more first person shooter than on these sites.
To encourage comprehensive data collection participants were given a comprehensive sample diary from the life of yours truly, that in turn acted as a form of social reward - a case of I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
There are a number of weaknesses with this diary method. The participant needs to be sufficiently motivated take continue to take photos - the novelty of snapping everything wears off after about an hour. Things that are touched multiple times in a short space of time will be only photographed once - though this is easy to follow-up in the interview. If you are trying to understand micro interaction issues you need to consider the user's dominant hand and are probably better off videoing the session. A user may record photos for the diary with their right, dominant hand for example forcing them to unnaturally use their left hand for carrying out tasks. The volume of photos can be overwhelming to process so shooting at a low resolution makes the volume easier to process.
Ultimately the user frames what you end up seeing. Whilst it is possible this will lead to carefully staged/boring this-is-my-life-isn't-it-wonderful photos, keeping the participant in control of the data collection process means being more likely to get photos of personal moments. The photos from one participant in Milan, Italy were so inspiring to be publishable as a stand-alone book.
If anyone wants to try this out get in ahem, touch and Ill send you more information - if you show me yours, I'll show you mine.
Writing from Sakura Shinmachi | October 14, 2005 | Comments (6) | Permalink
Motivations
Two very different motivations for tagging, marking?
Writing from Downtown LA | October 10, 2005 | Comments (2) | Permalink
Attention to Detail
The little details that enhance the purchasing experience.
Writing from Los Angeles | | Permalink
Assumptions About Connectivity
An assumption people often make when thinking about the future is that the wireless technology, whatever it is will have 100% coverage and will have 100% uptime - the seamless 24/7* connected user experience. The current experience is a good lesson in how things will play out. Today in the US one of the major purchasing decisions is the quality of the local cellular coverage - and whether carrier X has good coverage in your home, your route to work, the places you hang out. Signal strength meter watching and negotiating a space to find the best signal is for many part of the cell phone user experience. it's not just the US - the photo below is taken from an involuntary half day spent in the departure lounge of Kathmandu airport . Flights were grounded because the cloud cover at the destinations were too dense to land - a lot of time for people watching. Every time a further flight delay was announced a number of Nepali business men would take out their mobile phones and attempt to make calls. It would surprise me if they calling to inform someone of a new arrival time - given the relatively flexible approach to time keeping, but at the very least they were using the time waiting to get in touch. GSM coverage in Nepal is limited a minimalist version of the Cingular GSM coverage in the US for example.
The cellular coverage in the airport was good but the base-stations were overloaded with people trying to make calls - a common situation in Nepal. Your experience of making a call is probably something like:
1. Select contact
2. Press send call
3. Hold phone to ear and
4. When the person at the other end picks up, talk.
The experience for a Nepali mobile phone user is more like:
1. Check coverage
2. Select contact
3. Press send call
4. Keep looking at screen to check call status message to see if call is connected
5. When disconnected repeat steps 2 to 4. Eventually see that the call has been put through and
6. Put phone to ear, talk.
It's far from seamless but it works.
Sooner or later someone will provide cheaper, faster, richer, more convenient ways to connect so even if this issue is largely solved for cellular it will apply to whatever next the user decides to use. How to accurately inform users what services currently available on their device without them having to take out their phone and look at the signal strength icon(s)? What functionality is available when the device doesn't have connectivity? How to design the user experience to account for involuntary dis-connectivity and downtime?
* In the spirit of utopian connectivity perhaps 24/7 should be extended to 60/60/24/7/356 etc
Writing from Los Angeles | | Comments (1) | Permalink
Branded, Unbranded Experience
Writing from Downtown LA | October 9, 2005 | Permalink
State of Play
Buy 1 get 4 free.
Writing from White Plains | October 7, 2005 | Comments (3) | Permalink
The business traveller's fear of breakfast
Feel strangely OK for a 10 hour time difference. Sometime in the next week the permalag will kick in, presumably just before I present the results of a recent user study. The only fun thing about yawning when you're giving a presentation is watching everyone yawn back at you - the visible manifestation of sleep depreivation.
Spend the morning before breakfast wandering the streets of White Plains - humans aren't designed to spend 12 hours seated and I need the exercise. Its before 6am and manual labourers are already gathered in front of a local deli waiting for a man with a van to say how much labour he needs for the day. Some of the guys have beautifully weathered and photogenic faces. Nods of acknowledgement. Want to stop and listen, and talk and probably eventually document, but there are times the lens cap should stay on.
The hotel bill doesn't include breakfast, and anyway hotel breakfasts are a reminder of shared loneliless of the business traveller. Find a local diner half full of cops coming off shift, pick up a newspaper and flick through the sports scores, and photograph various advertisements. Random thoughts from reading headlines: American football is quaint; this country is still at war with itself; the world stops at the US borders.
Only have 122 minutes of battery life to last me a week. Most of the equipment inlcuding the camera chargers are still in Seoul where the user study continues, but grabbed a F828 on the way out. The taxi driver to Incheon airport was a frustrated rally driver and if I'm honest I loved it. The last few months have been a bit of a rush. Looking forward to spending time at home reflecting on what we achieved, what we have learned, revisiting photos, interviews and hopefully getting down to some writing.
Writing from White Plains | October 3, 2005 | Permalink
Vanity, reflected
A while back I was discussing the differences between Japanese, English and Finnish cultures. One superficial difference is the degree to which Japanese people care for and maintain their physical appearance in public. Look at the mobile essentials carried by male or female Tokyo commuter you will find a relatively high proportion of items related tomaintain appearance compared to the equivalent contents from a London or Helsinki commuter - combs, make-up, mirror, deodorants, tissues etc *. Of course the opposite is equally true - the relative lack of appearance maintenance objects in the UK & Finland. I often leave Tokyo feeling like a slob and arrive in Helsinki feeling relatively smartly dressed (feel free not to comment).
There are many ways to explain the differences in volume of appearance-related-objects in terms of what people carry. Relatively long commuting times into Tokyo could mean that people have to carry more of the items they need for later in the day. Alternatively, more socializing takes place outside the home so there are fewer opportunities to use the home space as a status signifier, putting more emphasis on projecting status via dress and accessories. Retail is geared up to support getting the look just-right - in Tokyo you can take it for granted that even if you buy a pair of trousers in a mass-market retailer they will measure, cut and sew to your requirements pretty much within an hour of purchase, whereas in Europe to a large extent people accept what is available off the shelf - and walk around in (badly) fitting clothes.
Carrying the tools for maintaining ones appearance implies the need for ongoing efforts over the course of the day - combing hair or applying make-up on the subway, using the mobile phone display as a mirror or, taking out a compact. Gazing at a mirror for 'too long' in a public space in a city like Berlin and you'll be considered vain. But vanity is a relative thing and as was pointed out - in a city the size of Seoul (10 million) the opinions of people you will never meet again matter less - they might as well be part of the furniture.
During my visit to Ji Lin earlier this year I managed to spend about 5 minutes in the security office of the hotel we were staying at and, looking at the security screens got a sense of where all the close circuit TV cameras were placed around the building. There was a fairly innocuous camera in each of the elevators. You know how when the elevator doors close you look in the mirror and when they re-open you pretend that you were doing something else like fiddling with your watch? Well, that personal moment was not so personal - the security guard and his mates enjoyed your private moment too. Hmm, anyone know of user studies of what people do in elevators?
A ubiquitous manifestation of vanity with Seoul's younger residents is selca = self camera = the taking of photos of oneself typically for placement on a Cyworld homepage. No visit to a cafe or restaurant appears complete without digital cameras and camera phones being taken out to document oneself at the beginning of the event. This is not one or two quickly taken snaps - the camera angles are carefully thought out, results are reviewed, re-taken, hair is re-arranged, again and again and again easily for up to 10 minutes. It's interesting enough when it's just one person. The effect is magnified when all the people sitting around the same table are engaged in this same self-focused activity sometimes with minimal interaction amongst themselves. Camera phones are even marketed as having features that enable good selca - easy to hold and see self portraits whilst taking, and filters to change the photo appearance on the phone. The process is so removed from my reality I feel like I belong to another species. Do the experiences we have not exist if not recorded and displayed in some way? Do we not exist if we are not present in the photos of the event?
Thanks Kim and Younghee for the cultural guidance this past week.
*If you are interested in the whole what-people-carry-why-and-how topic Scott Mainwaring of Intel's People & Practices Group presented a paper at Ubicomp 2005, and I have a paper on a similar topic coming up at DUX 2005.
Writing from Seoul | October 1, 2005 | Comments (2) | Permalink
Simple Pleasures II
This morning's office is a second story coffee shop - empty save for 5 clubbers sobering up after a night out in somewhere between Sinchon-dong and Hasu-dong. They're kicking back, shoes off, feet up on sofas smoking, texting, reading, chatting, Korean mixed with a smattering of English - maybe partly because I'm within earshot, but more likely because that's where the language is coming from. Resisted the temptation to ad-hoc interview.
During yesterday's contextual interview with a high school student the odd English word crept into his dialog - the end result sounds something like chatatahkaikakahtaikakathathaoakat multi-tasking ahataahhagikdkdiggtintgiadagfasdfoiasdfagoig. Appreciate the little things and the big picture takes care of itself.
Writing from Seoul | | Permalink
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