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Everything Just In Time
As we descend into Beijng the mental preparation for arrival kicks in. Leaving the plane's cocoon can be jarring and music is my way to ease into a new location, to regulate energy.
Literally 20 minutes to get from the plane through customs pick up luggage and clear the airport. Pre-filled forms is the biggest time saver - 3 forms to enter, 2 forms to leave. Taxi touts here are mild here compared to some cultures, but I enjoy seeing people hustle and they belong in this space. Beijing covered in a hazy fog. Ask the driver just to drive and on the way call colleague to figure out where the hotel is. Colleague speaks to driver. Arrive. Check-in, tune-out, good night.
Writing from Beijing | November 30, 2005 | Permalink
Physical Manifestations
Print club stickers from Seoul.
What other spaces are adorned by the content they help create?
If you could embed additional information in each of these images what would you want to embed?
And vice versa - as someone coming across these photos what questions would you want answered?
What are the different needs between the user(s), the provider, and the consumer(s) of this information?
If these photos were all digital what would the service/space it look like?
Given that all this can be digital why isn't it?
Writing from Seoul | November 28, 2005 | Comments (2) | Permalink
Custom No. Super Custom Yes
The photo above from a customer of Bowery Kitchen, Komazawa.
The super-customisation of mobile phones is gaining some traction here in Tokyo. Various shops in Shibuya will adorn your mobile phone (or iPod or digital camera) with rhinestones charging anything from 7,000 yen (50 Euro) for a pre-designed P900i cover to around 50,000 yen (350 Euro) for the full front and back design-to-order bling. Mostly but not exclusively for female clientel - men are starting to order quite gothic designs.
Jewel encrusting services can be found as an annex of some phone shops in popular shopping areas of Tokyo. Now nail shops are extending their offering to include mobile phone customisation - it's possible to order matching nail and phone designs.
(In my mind this is somehow all a logical progression from an analysis of 6447 used mobile phone covers and quick and dirty customisation)
I started out a sceptic but I have to admit some of the funkier pixel-art designs have started to grow on me.
Writing from Shibuya | | Permalink
Space & Learning
36 hours to go before the next trip - almost a full month on the road, in the skies and if things work out according to current loose plans - spending time at altitude in cold climes.
It all starts this week with a day of street research in Beijing. To be followed up by a couple of workshops - opportunities to catch up with colleagues, discuss past collaborations, learn, share, debate and then plan activites for next year. Maybe write the framework to a paper or two, or maybe something more.
After that it's anyone's guess. A ton of stuff to read, ideas to filter, write, spending time in places with people with strange faces, and along the way pushing to see what gives.
The interesting part will be to see what gives.
Writing from Tokyo | November 27, 2005 | Permalink
Learning to Push, Learning to Talk
Drumming up interest in the new push to talk services outside the teen girls shopping mecca - the 109 Building Shibuya. Step into a booth and have a pushing and talking walkthrough.
I'm intrigued to see how push to talk takes off in Japan and for that matter other new markets where it is rolled out. How use and perception of the service differs from the established service in the US? The push to talk use case is relatively easy to understand, but mainstream consumers will have relatively little cultural reference points other than movies, cop shows or occasionally from mountain rescue teams (Japan is covered in mountains so if you've ever been up one coming across walky-talky outfitted mountain-guides is not wholly uncommon). But this is a culture where people spend more time on crowded trains than in cars and where talking on the train is (still) largely socially unacceptable.
From a point of view of a foreigner the DoCoMo 902 series handsets are remarkable in their un-push-to-talk-esque - pretty much looking like every other handset out there. No chunky hand grips to support pushing and well, talking.
These forms are not following this function. What does that tell us?
When you're selling products into a global marketplace - how best to demonstrate new products, services and features to markets with relatively few cultural reference points?
Writing from Shibuya | November 26, 2005 | Permalink
Context, Understanding, Risk & Consequences
This photo taken last year from a street market in Bangalore. For me it highlights the importance of context in understanding.
Lets imagine you are wandering around the street market and are looking for a toilet - you see this building and being non-literate you don't understand any of the words written in Hindi or English on its walls (the issue is not this straight forward but bear with me).
Relying on what you see before you, ask yourself:
How sure are you that this is indeed a toilet?
What is the cost of walking into this building if it is not a toilet?
Indeed, what is cost of not trying?
In this context the cost may range from nothing, to some social embarrassment, to perhaps walking into the offices of the mustachioed local political candidate - whose wonderful mural is on the building. There may also be a cost in not going to the toilet, and there may be viable alternatives like peeing on a nearby tree. It all boils down to risk and the consequences of making the wrong decision.
The real world contains wonderfully rich cues that can be drawn upon to make the decision whether to go in, or not. In this context these cues include: the fact that there is a stream of men going in and out of the building alone; that there is a similar building with a picture of a woman next door; your sense of smell (trust me on this); perhaps even that you've used this kind of building before. You could even ask someone in the proximity.
For mobile phone user's the challenge is that the phone user interface lacks many of these rich cues. For non-literate users in particular the consequence of not being 100% confident of what will happen next can be too high to just experiment and explore. Choosing that right soft key may start the game application. But equally it could delete the application. Or maybe it makes an expensive phone call. Or changes the carrier settings. How do you know? And are you willing to take the risk to find out?
As mobile phones are held in the hands of the next billion users, with their very different cultural backgrounds, language skills, education, mental models and (user) experiences designers need to work hard to understand the issues of context, risk & consequences of these new users.
Writing from Back of Ebisu | November 25, 2005 | Comments (3) | Permalink
Wayfinding
Mobile with GPS and map application. So you want to make a map reference in a hurry?
"It's easier to just ask someone"
In many instances so it is.
Writing from Daikanyama | November 23, 2005 | Comments (3) | Permalink
Enriching the Purchasing Experience
Beyond practicality - the role of the calculator plays in enriching the purchasing experience - visualising the variations of cost, allowing the discount (or perceived discount) to be presented with a flourish. Is there room for this in the relatively sterile digital realm?
Writing from Kanda | November 22, 2005 | Permalink
Registered Personalisation
Personalisation of cash register, snowboard shop, Kanda.
Writing from Kanda | | Comments (1) | Permalink
Non-Literate Mobile Phone Communication
To communicate with someone outside your immediate proximity requires at least 4 things: something to communicate; tools to create what you want to communicate; an infrastructure to carry the communication; and a means of identifying with whom to communicate. There are an estimated 799 million non-literate peoples world wide. If you can't read and write how do you manage your contacts?
This simple observation was the starting point to conduct a series of (ongoing) exploratory research studies in India, China and Nepal - our aim to understand the communication needs of non-literate users. For mobile phone manufacturers who wish to address these needs: How does the inability to read and write affect the ability of mobile phone users to make effective use of mobile phones? Making and receiving calls? Creating and managing contact information? Text messaging? Using time management features? How can we design communication tools that draw on the knowledge and experiences that these users do have?
If your interest is piqued then you might enjoy the following essay entitled Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication which explores these issues and proposes a number of possible design solutions. As with a lot of our work the original projects included a fair amount of concept development that is only touched on in this essay.
In the studies we spent time with non-literate users exploring, mapping and understanding the things they used and the tasks they wanted to achieve - from using washing machines to weighing scales to running motorbikes to re-tuning TVs to paying for things. How did they interact with objects with textual and numeric interfaces? What problems did they encounter? What strategies did they adopt to overcome these problems? Were these strategies successful? If not, why not? And how can we bring the knowledge from this research and apply it to create communication devices that are more in tune with our non-literate users?
Researching non-literate communication practices has been rewarding: it touches on a very basic human desire - to communicate across time and space; the potential payback for the research is obvious and non-trivial; and the study participants, collaboration partners and environments in which the research took place have been quite simply inspiring.
Photos taken from street research in Mumbia, Bangalore, 2004 & 2005.
Writing from Tokyo | November 20, 2005 | Comments (1) | Permalink
Balanced
Scissors and material used to wrap purchases used together, stored together. The properties of the funnel condusive to being a scissor holder.
From behind the check-out of one of Tokyo's more interesting furniture stores.
Writing from Jyu Gaoka | November 19, 2005 | Comments (0) | Permalink
Summary Spaces
In cultures where people remove shoes at the entrance to the building the shoe removing space provides an easy to digest visual snapshot of the people that are already there. In environments where the people who inhabit the space are largely known - at home for example, not seeing a particular pair of shoes implies the person is not present. It also implies how the space can or cannot be used - 'mother is not yet home so I can get away with using the PlayStation a while'.
Incidentally my old kick-boxing dojo had a wonderful collection of shoes and boots at its entrance. There were usually one or two pairs of dainty high-heels whose owner's somehow transformed from petite Daikanyama shopperholics to grunting gladiators.
The shoes above were from a restaurant off the back of Shinjuku - construction workers on their lunch break.
Writing from Shinjuku, back of | | Permalink
Where People Carry Mobile Phones
Where do you carry your mobile phone? And how will this change if the phone were to adopt some of the functionality associated with other objects that you carry such as money and personal identity? (Both payment and ticketing are already available on handsets in Japan).
We've been conducting a series of studies to understand where people carry mobile phones and other mobile essentials. The original research was driven by a need to know to what extent people notice incoming communication and to what extent this was affected by where the device was carried. After all - the usefulness of a mobile phone is diminished if the user fails to notice that someone is calling. (For the record, we assume that the user wants control over whether or not to be notified in the first place - 24/7 connectivity is a discussion topic for later perhaps?) If you observe customers in a cafe for an hour one of the most frequent behaviours related to mobile phones, especially for women, is checking whether they have missed any incoming communication. User data on device location can support product designers for example helping them decide defaults speaker volume or lanyard placement.
My colleague Fumiko Ichikawa is today presenting the first fruit of this research in a paper entitled Where's the Phone - a Study of Mobile Phone Location in Public Spaces (download pdf) at the Mobility 2005 conference in Guangzhou, China. This paper draws on data from the first 3 studies - Helsinki, New York and Milan. Whilst I was not present in the original study in Helsinki I managed to take part in the follow-ups studies including cultures as diverse as the US, Italy, South Korea, Japan, China and India. In the future we'll be publishing data for these other cultures and explore the issues related to the full range of mobile essentials (the paper above focusses on the mobile phone).
Where people carry things today is interesting enough. The ultimate goal of this design research is to predict how the primary carrying location might change according to issues like new features and form factors. (New form factors will be enabled by technologlical advances such as minaturisation, flexible components or new charging methods). The fun part is figuring how this will collide with and influence future social and cultural trends.
And finally, if you're wondering whether I travel the world just to run these studies the answer is no - the team tends to run the street surveys in conjunction with more in-depth user studies that are already going on - its a good way to utilize assistant down time, meet hundreds of local mobile phone users and get a feel for a culture.
Writing from Tokyo | November 17, 2005 | Comments (2) | Permalink
Counter Intiuitive Experiences
The frame of these Swans goggles forms a perfect seal with the face, doing away with the need for rubber padding. Very comfortable, counter-intuitively so since the padding should make it more comfortable, right?
Any other examples of counter-intuitive experiences you can think of?
An hour to kill before my next meeting starts in the vicinity of Daikanyama pool. What to do?
Writing from Daikanyama | November 15, 2005 | Permalink
Exploratory Exposed
KDDI, the number two carrier here in Japan has obviously invested a large sum of money on their KDDI Designing Studio in Harajuku to show off all things KDDI. The 5 story cylindrical building devotes space to their product line-up, a creation space, a stage for live events, a collaboration studio and on the 5th floor a 'relaxation studio' which is, um, another branch of Wired Cafe. It's unfair to judge from one visit but it was notable how empty the space was, and how little interaction it had and invited from the otherwise teeming Harajuku.
The building devotes some space to future technologies from KDDI R&D Laboratories most memorable of which is the break-dance robot. No that's not it's official name, but the demo from the studio staffer could have come straight out of my highschool playground - only needing a cardboard mat and cheering onlookers to complete the authentic break-dance experience. (Though how much time did the staffer need to have on her hands to hone her bust-a-move-robot-breakdance-skills?)
The serious-fun question in all of this is why and how to engage the public with what's coming out of the research lab?
Wireless watch has a video tour.
Writing from Harajuku | November 14, 2005 | Comments (2) | Permalink
Why do People Carry Mobile Phones?
Why do people carry phones?
Why do people carry what they carry?
And if we can understand why, how can we use this knowledge in the design of future products, applications and services?
Why people carry phones might seem like a rather basic question for someone who works for a mobile phone manufacturer, but the journey to try and understand the answer has been an interesting one.
A couple of years back I carried out a multi-cultural research project with Per Persson and a number of other colleagues to figure out what objects people consider to be essential when they leave home. We spent time studying 17 urban dwellers in San Francisco, Berlin and Shanghai and Tokyo with shadowing, home-interviews, plus 129 street interviews and numerous observation sessions. One of our screening criteria for in-depth subjects was that people had to own a mobile phone although during the screening process we made no assumptions about whether they considered the phone a necessity or not.
In the cultures we studied 3 objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders were keys, money and mobile phone. Whilst this may seem obvious the interesting part of the study was in understanding the reasons why people considered these objects essential (largely survival, safety & security), why they were not always present (forgetting, awareness, making a conscious decision to be out of touch) and strategies people adopted to help them remember to take these objects. A lot of times money will be carried in a wallet or purse, but when it comes down to it, the money (cash and notes) are considered the essential objects before the other objects that are also contained there.
Some of the material from this study was presented in the DUX 2005 paper - 'Mobile Essentials - Field Study and Concepting' (download paper, 0.4mb). The paper introduces three interrelated ways to understand human behaviour to explain what we learned, and at some point I'll use Future Perfect to expand on some of these issues.
Firstly the Center of Gravity describes the most likely place where you are likely to cluster and consequently find these objects. In the home the Center of Gravity is likely to be the edge of a desk, a chair and often in the case of women, a bag. Objects don't stay in the center of gravity but over time they gravitate there.
The second idea is the Point of Reflection - the moment when leaving a space when you pause current activities turn back into an environment and check you have the mobile essentials. Typically this involves looking at the Center of Gravity, sometimes tapping pockets, sometimes speaking aloud. Not seeing the objects where they are supposed to be (the Center of Gravity) can be a sign that they are already carried.
The last behavioural concept is something we call the Range of Distribution - essentially the degree to which essential objects are likely to stray from the person, or from the person's line of sight/range of touch. Range of distribution is largely based on perceived risk of theft - the higher the perceived risk the further away objects are likely to be placed be allowed to 'stray'. This way of thinking about objects is important because the more likely an object is to be out of sight the more likely it is to be forgotten, and a mobile essential that is forgotten has little use in solving emergencies. In addition as mobile phones that take on functions associated with other mobile essentials for example access/identity (key, smart-card) or payment (money) can affect where and how they are carried.
As a private, relatively safe environment the home has a large range of distribution, whilst spaces like cafes or public transport have a relatively low range of distribution. The lowest range of distribution we observed was bus commuting in Shanghai rush-hour. The most extreme example of range of distribution was given to us by a vice cop in Berlin who explained about a drug dealer that double wrapped his produce which was then stored it his mouth - if the cops tried to bust them swallowed. Waiting for the produce to clear the digestive system was often too much hassle for low level busts, and was presumably rather unpleasant and messy.
Taxis are interesting environments in that they are often treated as a temporary private space - in which people can relax and objects are likely to spread out within the natural boundaries of the environment. When combined with other parameters such as: people using taxi's whilst tired or impaired e.g. drunk/high; the likelihood of using the mobile phone in the taxi; placing objects on the seat/out of sight after use; and a pressured sequence of tasks at the end of the journey such as thinking what to do next on arrival at the destination and paying the driver, help explain why mobile phones are often left in taxis.
There are naturally many other reasons why people carry a mobile phones - for entertainment, projecting status, a sense of belonging, or capturing and communicating an experiences using a camera phone to name a few, but the commonality was essentially their ability to help us survive.
Most people consider other objects essential - driver's license (particularly in the US), medication, travel pass and lip-stick are just some that have been mentioned but these can change over the course of the day and according to context. I would argue that nearly all objects that people carry are essential, because the carrier has already gone through a conscious and subconscious selection process to select those objects from all the objects they own or have access to. Nobody carries stuff just for the hell of it. Well actually that's not strictly true - many people carry things that they are not aware they are carrying - phones increasingly have features that the owner considers useful, is not aware are on the device. In these instances the smart question is what situations trigger initial awareness of a feature, and many researchers are working on contextual understanding in part to present the user with the right feature/knowledge at exactly the right time that it is useful.
The exceptions to why people don't carry these objects are in some ways more interesting than the fact they do in the first place. Designing solutions that meet a user needs are relatively easy, but for a product to be adopted into the flow of someone's life takes a good understanding of exceptions. Mobile essentials are often forgotten, despite the strategies for remembering. Keys are not necessarily needed if you live in an extended family or in areas of high unemployment. Some people like to 'switch off' and talk about quality time without the interruption of the mobile phone (I expect there to be different attitudes towards constant connectivity with younger generations). There is also the issue of at what point in a person's life they are entrusted to carry these essentials and in the case of children, if they are lost, who is responsible to replace them?
In one sense the easiest way never to ever forget anything ever again is to have nothing to remember. This is not as glib as it first sounds - it is possible to delegate responsibility to remembering to other people or indeed to technology. (The concept of delegating can be considered as a solution to many problems except entertainment and bodily functions).
A number of interesting avenues have come out of this research:
Why people make a conscious effort to leave mobile essentials behind and in the case of their mobile phone - switched off. This loosely comes under the heading connecting people, dis-connecting people, and re-connecting people.
My colleagues have initated a study of where people in Helsinki carry their phones and whether they notice incoming communication. A paper, drawing on data from follow up studies in Milan and New York will be presented at the Mobility Conference 2005 in Guangzhou China. (I'll post it when its available)
Another theme is the role of the phone in supporting and on occasion triggering personal crisis. Not life threatening events but things like being locked out of home, being lost late at night, breaking up with boyfriend/girlfriend and yes, mobile phone theft and loss. Notice the overlap between mobile essentials and personal crisis?.
Writing from Tokyo | November 11, 2005 | Comments (1) | Permalink
(Lack of) Curves
Straight lines condusive to transcibing characters onto tarmac.
Writing from Meguro | | Permalink
Simple Food
A simple, very sociable recipe.
Take one large Goffman and the stems of 6 Weegee and chop finely. Add to pan with a dash of Hiromix and cook on a low heat for 5 minutes stirring regularly. Add the leaf of 3 Kieslowski (preferably blue, but red or white Kieslowski will do just as fine).
Squeeze the juice of a Petroski in to a bowl and add the hand-crushed leaves of four Clark (the stem of Clark can be bitter, so make sure you only take the leaf). Pour/scoop the mixture into the pan, mix gently, and transfer the contents into oven proof dish. Finely grate one Norman and sprinkle on evenly. Cook in a pre-heated oven on gas mark 6 for 25 minutes or until it starts to turn a golden brown.
Remove from oven, serve and garnish with with a decorative sprig of Tufte.
To be enjoyed in the company of strangers, far away from home.
Any recommendations for desert?
(Photos from street research last year in Mumbai and Bangalore)
Writing from Tokyo | November 10, 2005 | Permalink
Traces of Communication
What resources are consumed to generate what we want to communicate?
What trace is left by what we communicate?
Who has access to the traces of our communication?
And for how long?
Given the option, would user's like greater control over the trace of their communication?
What is the optimal way of presenting these options to users?
This gentleman writing with brush and water.
Writing from Tokyo | November 9, 2005 | Comments (0) | Permalink
Where You Can Expect People to Sit First
The properties and infrastructure in a space influencing where people choose to sit.
Waiting lounge for the San Fran - Tokyo flight the 3 males on the far left and right of the photo were clustered close to the power sockets (2 x laptop, 1 x dedicated DVD player), the couple reading - situated close to the check in gate with their backs to natural light.
I'm surprised no-one has tried to brand power sockets in locations like this - this socket sponsored by 'T-Mobile Wi-Fi access'. Micro targeted advertising should get interesting when it collides with the widespread adoption of IPv6.
Observed power socket clustering to charge mobile phones in a variety of cultures including Hangzhou train station and JFK Airport, below.
Writing from San Francisco | November 7, 2005 | Permalink
Search Engine
Flexible and appropriate use suggested through design of (bi-directional) search mats at airport security screening.
Had a pleasant discussion with a friendly TSA staffer before taking this photo. Their previous rules forbid the taking of photos in the searching area, though I presume someone has challenged this because now the rules are 'it's a public space so the taking of photos is ok'. What of the rights of the TSA workers not to appear in the photos?
Writing from San Francisco | | Comments (0) | Permalink
Where To Stay When You Run a User Study
The location of where we stay on exploratory user studies can have a big impact on what we learn, the effectiveness of the team working together and being able to gather data we need to get. The preferred options are not as obvious as might first seem.
Pre-trip, one of the first tasks is to figure out what the optimum location will be to run user studies. If the study participants are likely to be traveling around by subway, in what part of the city are they located and where is a good axis point? Personally I prefer to be situated in a pedestrian-friendly location since it makes ad-hoc capturing of observational data that much easier. One method we use to find suitable ad-hoc study participants is to ride a bicycle around the city. Hotels usually allow bike parking near to the staff entrance and getting there is a good excuse to interact with and interview hotel staff members. (try and take a peek inside the security office if you get a chance - they are often located around the back of the building and security people can have interesting perspectives on human behaviour). From recent memory, the Hudson is particularly bike unfriendly.
Booking the flights my travel agent by default books a company recommended hotel usually located to be near to local company offices, airports or manufacturing sites and whilst comfortable are usually pretty lousy as a base for conducting user research (a pleasant exception is the Nikko Hotel here in San Francisco).
The research team tends to spend a lot of time coming and going from the hotel so the difference between a five minute walk and a 15 minute walk to where you do what you got to do - like breakfast meetings or other working space, can result in unproductive hour every day. Sometimes the walk time is good for gathering data, and getting a bit of exercise but I prefer to be given the choice of when and where. If you are hiring assistants paying their hotel even if they live in the city that you are researching has a number of benefits, not least of which is that they can sync and work to the rhythm of the rest of the research crew.
Wi-Fi and high speed internet access is not a necessity given the alternatives that are available, and I would argue that internet access is a distraction. One of the reasons for traveling to a location is to submerge ourselves in the local culture and going online to read up on what is happening back home can take you away from that mind-space.
On a recent road-trip study in the US $19.99 motels were fine for what essentially amounted to a decent night's sleep and a shower. Different rest stops have different demographics and are a possible source of ad-hoc participants.
Booking a suite in the major hotels or is usually cost effective - since longer studies require a space that can function as a mobile office. It's not uncommon for cleaning staff to be freaked out by furniture re-arranging and the removal of what ever was hanging on the walls to be replaced by maps of the city and participant profiles. The space afforded by a suite is good for generating a data wall as the study progresses. The data wall is useful for sharing incoming data with the team, highlighting particular aspects, and noting down and sharing ideas and concepts. I recommend the Canon i90 mobile printer with Bluetooth adapter - wireless printing saves a lot of hassle.
At this point you might be thinking that it's better to stay in the home of the study participants. We've done home stay its good for certain studies. However I wouldn't recommend entering into this arrangement lightly. It can be tricky when you factor in the modern moral, legal, ethical, professional requirements, the need be awake from before participants get up to after they go to bed. A colleague rightly reminded me that anthropologists have been living amongst the people they study for months or even years at a time - it's true, but I'm not sure they had to jump through the legal hoops we do. I once had to excuse myself from an overnight stay due a combination of the inability to stay awake (severe jetlag) and the home sleeping arrangements (guest-researchers get to sleep on the living room sofa). Even if you stay with participants, double book a hotel room - its useful for storing equipment and as an emergency backup for team members.
My final recommendation is to consider the short stay hotels if you are looking for a place for a couple of nights. They are often conveniently located next to stations, check-in is pared down to a bare minimum - great when you are tired, they often have an emphasis on good bathing facilities and they tend to be quite functional. In Korea I stayed in one for a couple of nights which included high-speed internet access - I'm not sure what the most likely use cases were but imagine it was to play Star Craft or something similar. Minor downsides to short stay hotels include no hanging space for clothes, dim lighting, can't walk around the building with recording equipment (the whole hotel is considered a private space), and can be noisy early mornings and at weekends. They don't come with breakfast. And because they are often cash businesses you have to remember to request a receipt. Processing the expense claim is fun.
I'm aware of the relative luxury of having these options and if it comes down to it - its possible to run user research by kipping on the floor of a friend (thanks SB).
Writing from San Francisco | | Comments (4) | Permalink
Communication Over Time
Sprayed to presumably guide anyone taking off the cover to return it in the correct orientation. A number of covers up and down the street were sprayed in a similar same way. A simple, relevant and robust way to communicate information from one maintenance person to another.
With one exception - replaced the 'wrong' way. Or was it placed the 'wrong' way when it was originally sprayed? Or does it not matter which way it is replaced? And if multiple covers were removed and stacked together before being replaced would there be another marking?
It's the little things.
Writing from San Francisco | | Comments (4) | Permalink
Cabin Announcements as Airplane User Interface
With the cockpit off-limits to passengers the only direct communication that most passengers have with the pilot of a plane is his or her voice through the plane intercom. (The way the plane is flown could also be interpreted as a form of indirect communication). In some ways that voice is the user interface to all the aspects of the plane that we associate with the pilot and co-pilot - in particular our trust in them getting us to our destination safely.
I've been wondering about the pitch and accent of the pilot's voice, and the difference between these and the announcements made by cabin crew. My observation, which of course I have no way of validating, is that announcements made by male and female cabin crew are higher pitched than those made by the pilot.
My observation has its biases. I tend to fly planes with Japanese air stewardesses, and when Japanese females talk formally they tend to talk in higher pitched voices. It could also be that cabin crew tends to be female and pilots male, refelecting then natural differences between males and females. Or it could be the content of announcement lends itself to being spoken in a different manner. Is there a implicit hierarchy of tonality in an airplane once the role of steward/stewardess/pilot is assumed, people adopt a stereotypical voices associated with those roles?
What studies have airlines done on passenger announcements by pilots and cabin crew, both in terms of what is said, and how it is delivered? How do individuals change their pitch in order to communciate a particular piece of information or instruction? And if future technologies enable on-the-fly changes to voice pitch and accents could (and should) announcements be optimized to meet user expectations for those roles?
Writing this sitting on a flight to San Francisco. Tomorrow I'm scheduled to give a short talk at 4am Tokyo time - should be fun.
Writing from San Francisco | November 5, 2005 | Comments (6) | Permalink
4 x SSSS
This is the third time on a flight to or within the US this year my boarding pass has the SSSS designation - indicating that I'm to be pulled aside for further search before bording the plane. The joy of flying (to the US).
Writing from Narita | | Comments (3) | Permalink
Tokyo Graffiti
Decent pop-ethnography magazine covering ordinary Japanese, what they carry, what they think and sometimes running features like documenting everything a person has in their bedroom, or bag. Very accessible and good if you want tips on how to present research material.
Writing from Shibuya | November 2, 2005 | Comments (4) | Permalink
Unintended Uses
Spent today at the Fieldwork Untethered workshop here in Tokyo. The aim is to brain-dump knowledge of the different methodologies used to collect user data outside the laboratory environment. Today's presentations were informed - and as much as anything I like listening to the language people use to describe stuff you've been working on, but haven't yet figured out how to best capture in those few words. With a background in UI design the language of sociologists and psychologists takes some getting used to. One of the aims of the workshop is to publish more about the methods we use to gather data - maybe that's the right forum to go into detail about the things I've started to cover here?
The workshop included some field research in and around Shibuya. Spent 10 minutes watching the Shibuya crossing street hustlers - tanned, preening men chasing after women trying to entice them to host-bars that are surprisingly popular here (apparently - I've never been and I guess I'm too old, unsophisticated and ugly to be hired as a host). There's a pecking order on the street and the competition is fierce to be the first to confront the single women as they go past. Its pretty unsophisticated stuff, but what can I learn from them?
The laptop photos are of one of the workshop delegates - a simple example of how objects used in the real world have unintended uses.
Hmm, collecting this kind of data at a ethno methods workshop is the equivalent of distilling then swigging vodka at a alcoholics anonymous meeting. Smart.
Writing from Mita | | Permalink
Proximity Interaction
Tags constrained by tagger's reach, and perhaps imagination.
What happens when future technology help people project physical manifestations of identity beyond what is physically possible?
Writing from Shibuya, back of | | Comments (0) | Permalink
Headsets and Earpieces
Knowing whether someone is speaking on the phone is easier if they're speaking into a Hulgar P-Phone headset - it looks like it does on the box. For 8,000 yen you get a novelty that works with a mobile and a nice box but not much else.
Writing from Shibuya, back of | | Permalink
Surprise, Delight
Picked up a iRiver U10 on last trip to Korea. The purchasing experience in the iRiver shop was pretty good and included a demonstration by a knowledgeable member of staff. The device plays video (along with about a dozen other features), which is relatively easy proposition for consumers to understand. It is presented in an optional stand which for me had considerable 'come play with me' emotional pull, followed by delight in the way that the device ejected from the stand, and the puckered mammal face, above.
A few downsides on the out-of-the-box-experience. Everything in the package - cables, device, individual straps and even an 8 page manual came in a separate box within the box which was complete overkill. The boxes were desiged so it wasn't clear what was inside each one. The install CD design (just the design, not the software on it) was a complete rip of Apple iPod installer CD. And the box included a sticker informing the purchaser not to throw away the box without checking the bottom of the box packaging for a hidden pouch. Adding the pouch was clearly an afterthought followed by badly corrective design.
Writing from Seoul | November 1, 2005 | Permalink
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