Don't forget me

July 23, 2010

Urban mobility through rent-a-bike ubiquity →

I just came back from using Stadtrad Hamburg the first time. It's a pretty new rent-a-bike service here in Hamburg, offering around 1000 bikes at currently 71 stations all over town. There are a dozen bikes per station and anyone can instantly rent a bike with a touchscreen terminal, calling a number or using your smartphone instead.

It is a good example for connecting a digital service to the real world. No advanced techno-magic, no circumstantial visit-our-website-and-print-out-your-data disillusion – it's just there and works. There's an iPhone app you can download for free (I'm sure there's also something available for other platforms), enter your credentials once and then handle the full process of renting a bike. It tells you where the next station is, how many bikes are available and let's you unlock a bicycle of your choice on location by providing you with a 4 digit pin code you only need to enter into a tiny touchscreen that is mounted on the bike.

When I first heard about the service, I was a bit sceptical – I guess we're just used to find a catch in such things. But today I'm quite excited about a few aspects they have done just right for an urban mobility offering:

It's quite simple and can be used instantly (you pay €5 for registering, getting cleared with your first bill).
There are plenty of stations and bikes available all over the city. You can go pretty much from anywhere to everywhere, it's very likely a station is nearby and they're planning to extend this ubiquity even more over time.
The first 30 minutes are free of charge.
You can rent two bikes at the same time, so you can always take a friend on your ride with you.

It is also a good example for a service, or product being an advertising campaign itself. You can see the stations and bikes pretty much everywhere and you hear a lot of satisfied customers as well as good press, so there's effective word-of-mouth recommendation going on. Which in turn casts a pretty good light on the Hamburg senate and even their operational partner Deutsche Bahn, the German railway carrier, a brand that is not very liked among customers.

Comments (0)

June 7, 2010

Kids and User Interfaces →

Some days ago, I attended a get-together, where there were several (heavy) internet users telling anecdotes from their everyday digital life: an online activist, a blogger, an ex-hardcore gamer, a start-up guy and a 61 years old retired man. The latter made an interesting point: he said he doesn't understand why there isn't a lot more technology and user interfaces optimized for old people, a huge and profitable audience. Of course there are very simple and no-frills cellphones for the wrinkly, he argued, but they mostly don't notice since they inherit discarded pieces of old technology from their children or grandchildren.

So what does this have to do with Kids and User Interfaces? I'd like to think about some ideas related to designing target-oriented user interfaces for specific groups of people. Although it's mostly very complicated (or even impossible) to lump together people to treat and communicate them as separable target audiences, I think it's quite possible to do so with elderly people and kids. Of course, there is a high level of diversity just within the boundaries of "seniors" or "kids", but it works in a more general, mainly cognitive manner. Kids aren't as handy, mature and experienced; an elderly person is more likely to be visually or motor impaired.

When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to watch TV until I was around 16 or 17. Which at that time made me very greedy for staring at a television or playing computer games when visiting friends. On the other hand, I today still feel awkward when in contact with a TV: I turn it on and watch whatever's currently running, for example. I'm not really able to channel-surf. In a positive sense, I have no television habits or addiction at all.

I'm thinking alot about what's the best way to handle these things for Tilda, my 3,5 year old daughter. And today, there are even more points of potential seduction – screens and digital media are pretty much everywhere, we're surrounded by more and more interaction and distraction and we need to adapt carefully. So no matter if you're having a lot of devices in your household or not, you have to develop a strategy. And I think the best way to go is a playful but very deliberate exposure to technology. There's some risks and a lot of great things, so you need to find a good balance for and together with your kids.

Of course Tilda was very curious when she first saw the iPad. Although she was already quite experienced with touch screens due to the iPhone (she managed to intuitively unlock it when she was around 2), this bigger and glossy apparatus fascinated her even more. I think it's in a way about the scale of the device, which compares much better to the real thing: people in movies appear a lot bigger, and the canvas of drawing apps feels quite similar to standard paper sizes. So when Tilda first picked a color to draw with, she had a look at her fingertip to make sure the screen didn't loose color.

But what I think would be a great field for kids usage of the iPad is not the passive consumption of films, radio play or music. It's rather things that stimulate creativity and invention. For smaller kids it starts with puzzles, simple cause and effect games, color and shape association. A next step could be drawing (do you remember your Magic Sketcher?), step by step leading to more advanced educational games and applications (reading, writing, making music, editing video, programming …).

Mobile or portable devices such as smartphones and tablet computers also show a great potential for a more social use of technology (who would take a laptop to a crib?). Where some parents stopped reading lullaby stories to their kids long time ago, just placing them in front of a screen, new forms of shared multimedia storytelling could arise, where parents read some bits, then there's some sounds and music, interactive elements and short movie clips. And why not even combining these new digital gadgets with classic material – e.g. an iPhone with a book?

Although there are plenty of iPad apps for kids in the education or games section of the iTunes store, I haven't found anything that truly convinced me yet (any kind of tip highly appreciated!). At this point, I'd like to share three observations I made during checking out some of these apps together with Tilda. They are less about the actual intention or purpose of these applications, but rather about more general kids interaction issues that popped up quite quickly.

Alice for the iPad Lite*: accidental page turns
Alice for the iPad has gotten a lot of attention from the press. It's basically a very well designed classic book, enhanced with some playful interactive features that engage you with the story by moving things around with your fingers or by tilting the device. But the problem is – at least that's what happened when Tilda was playing around with it: to go to the next/previous page, you have to swipe right/left. So there's a conflict with moving objects around the screen and a lot of accidental page turns – leading to regular frustration. I think in this case it would make much more sense to only use the arrow icons on the bottom for navigation (as shown in this movie – it seems they added the swiping in a later update).

* we only used the free light version, since it wouldn't make much sense to read the English version

Drawing Pad: no easy sharing option
After Tilda had finished her first masterpiece with Drawing Pad (the name of the app should be quite self-explanatory), she felt the urge to share it with her aunt and her grandparents. There are several options to export drawings: they can be saved or shared by Email, Facebook or Twitter. But all these things involve text and writing capabilities, so I was thinking: why isn't there a way for me to setup like 3-5 pictures of relevant family members, and whenever Tilda's finished with a new piece she can easily share it by just tapping on a face she knows?

General issue: irrelevant settings pages
We encountered this problem with Drawing App as well, but I think it's a general issue. Within many apps, settings pages that are not really relevant for a kid's usage, are mixed into their interaction flow. They open them by accident, don't know how to get rid again (an "X" icon is not learned in this case) and get lost or frustrated. I think this could be solved quite easily: it's not about hiding these buttons or icons, we (the parents) still need them for configuration purposes. But why not using multitouch gestures such as tapping with two or three fingers simultaneously? Hints would be easy to give, but if kids don't need them (or just cannot read), they won't really get in their way. I think this works quite well in the Atomic Web Browser for the iPad, where a 3-fingers-tap toggles between normal and fullscreen mode.

Comments (0)

May 31, 2010

Even more thoughts on the iPad: Print vs. Web. →

In my last post regarding the iPad, it took me 15 paragraphs to ask a simple question: why haven't I seen any really great (newspaper or magazine) website dedicated to and fully optimized for the iPad? I'd like to add a few aspects regarding the "print vs. web" thing now.

I just read a very interesting post entitled Understanding iPad, which took 28 paragraphs to come to the following conclusion:

Flaws and all, the iPad is indeed in a class all by itself. It's a new kind of computing device

It's very extensive and has a lot of background info and details about current computing platforms in general. According to the author, the iPad is made to consume, not to contribute. And it's hard to categorize. But for me, there's still no answer to what the iPad actually is. Not that I need that answer, maybe it's part of the magic not being able to nail it down. But what I know for sure is that it engages me with content in a way that I haven't experienced before and that I can't really verbalize.

I'd like to write on the topic of "Print vs. Web" on the iPad, which correlates with this ambiguity.

A lot of publishers of print newspapers and magazines are currently releasing content apps that are highly reminiscent of print design. They probably do it because they want to be visible on the platform as soon as possible, or because it's what they can do best, they don't know better, or because they don't see the iPad as a screen, but a discrete canvas such as paper. We don't know.

On the other hand, there are the web people complaining about that. Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects has made some evident points on why multi column grids and the usage of non-screen fonts are making iPad applications such as the WIRED app quite hard to read and enjoy. All in all, there are a few people asking why publishers aren't releasing their titles on the iPad as … websites – the modern way of treating digital content. There's a lot about how this new breed of newspaper and magazine apps is "a step back in history".

While I fully agree that slightly adapting print titles and pushing them to the iPad as "interactive slideshows" or enhanced PDF-Readers is not really the way to go, I'm also asking myself what this actually says about newspaper and magazine websites. I went into detail on that in my last posting, but seriously – how many really compelling websites for major publications do you know? Didn't we all excoriate them before we had this new iPad content apps thing to rant about?

My point is: why shouldn't there be any good and well established design principles from printed matters we can elaborate and adopt for something like a multitouch-enabled slate device with highly responsive direct manipulation capabilities? Just because the web is digital, does it need to be the blueprint for anything digital? Does digital design always need to correspond with the loss of control?

Many of us used to complain about typographical restrictions on the web, longing for (and even inventing) mechanisms to extend the limitation. Now there's more typographic richness in an iPad magazine app and – no matter how weak and flat the production quality might be (text layouts as PNG graphics) – we also find reasons to lament about that. For sure, there are technical restrictions to the iPad screen text and rendering engine that make weak readability for a lot of fonts. But isn't there a bigger picture to look at – the screen technology might be very much improved even with the next generation of the device. The iPhone currently has 480x320 Pixels with 160 Pixels per Inch. The next generation of the screen is rumored to be 960x640 Pixels, two times as much and which would lead to a much higher density given the fact that the iPhone can't really become any bigger.

From a user perspective it's quite irritating that currently, most newspaper and magazine apps have different navigational models. Some use scrolling, some let you swipe from page to page within an article, others use horizontal swiping to move from article to article, some add a lot of arrow icons doing a lot of things you pretty often wouldn't have expected to function the way they do. Just as with the familiarization of the WWW – which made a good portion easier to use, but also more boring to experience – the best principles might evolve and become standards. Like Amazon did for e-commerce (and a lot of websites beyond that category). Or apple.com for product presentation.

I have thought a lot about the question if I prefer scrolling or page swiping to move forward within text. And when talking to other people I often recognize how this might in the end really be a matter of taste. That's why I like how it's a user preference in Instapaper for iPad – long articles can be continuously scrolled by swiping vertically. But you can also the the behaviour to paginated, which means that every swipe (or tapping left or right of the text body) leads to another page. And I have to say that I even switch between those two modes and I need some further evaluation to understand when and why I do it.

Something that I really liked about the WIRED app was how within an article, no matter at what position you currently are, the layout looks great. And when I'm using Instapaper on my iPhone, eg. for commute with many breaks and reinitialization of my cognitive apparatus, the paginated mode helps keeping track of where I last stopped (and there's not as much accidental scrolling).

And really, tell me whatever you like, I still love the idea of issue based magazines. It's not only a technical thing, it's also an intellectual concept. Compare it with music albums and you know what I mean. Most print magazines are, from a content perspective, compromises though. A lot of different things are being cramped into an issue – some things that need to be up-to-date are really having a hard time in bi-monthly magazines. So actually, most magazines rather compare with compilations (to stick to the music thing). A magazine in the sense of a musical album could also be topic or theme based smaller issues – monolithic content bundles on an irregular basis …

So what I really like of what I experience with the iPad is how it challenges a lot of things. It's really not that much about what an iPad really is or could be, but what it does to storytelling and how people perceive and interact with content. Regarding magazine design, it questions print and web design at the same time. It challenges magazines as a format and I'm looking forward to a lot of exciting things happening down the road. iPad or not, both print and web design need a refreshment.

Comments (1)

May 31, 2010

Some more (rough and lenghty) thoughts on the iPad: Apps vs. Browser. →

This is part II of my iPad series, which has actually become quite rough and lengthy. If you prefer it a bit shorter (just a bit), you should rather start with part I, which is about sharing the device.

Apps vs. Browser – that's my favorite topic around the iPad right now, because it relates to the other major surprise I encountered during my first weeks with the device: for me, the killer app is the web browser. Which doesn't seem to be a very special thing: "surfing the internet" is with 83% among the "most common uses" for new iPad owners, according to a survey by ChangeWave Research.

To be honest, in a way the iPad did not live up to my expectations. Which is, in retrospect, a good thing. I guess I bloated expectations with comparing to the fascination I experienced when first touching and using the iPhone (and at that time, this was my first real contact with a commercial, comprehensive multi touch product). Today, the iPhone is a commodity for me. And the iPad actually started on that level – no geeky excitement, no technology lust this time. Which again is why I think it's a good thing being underwhelmed at first glance.

On the iPhone, I'm totally into the single task and purpose nature of the apps model. When on the go, I totally embrace the focus it leads to and I can mostly forgive limitations it sometimes brings along. I think designing mobile interaction reduced for that very specific context of being away from a full-blown or stationary computer is the right thing to do. Many things just aren't important enough to take care of when standing in the middle of 35 other badly tempered people on a bumpy bus trip. Yeah, for sure I feel often tempted to accomplish inappropriate tasks in awkward moments. But I learned my lesson when – in a moment of inattention – I dumped my iPhone on the ground and it was fully broken. And let's not talk about those fully immersed people on the street, almost falling over themselves while staring at their mobile screen ...

Many of these iPhone apps feel similar in a way, cause the good ones mostly stick to some basic patterns defined by the environment of the iPhone OS. This is much more about some general principles, less about sticking to guidelines as close as possible. I have seen and used apps that have their very individual visual language and even some quite unusual behaviour – but as long as they're designed specifically for the iPhone and with iPhone users in mind (most often by hardcore iPhone users themselves), they work really well.

But apart from the fact apps can be sold thru iTunes and some native features that can only be done with apps, why shouldn't all the things I described be possible with websites or web apps? I'd say the fact that I have used many more great apps than mobile websites doesn't have to do with the format of delivery, it's rather about what's been done with it. And maybe developing apps for the iPhone more likely leads to better user experiences, because developers often rely to existing frameworks and use common building blocks (for convenience reasons, or simply because they have to). To put it cynically: these restrictions, on one hand from designing for a really small screen for people on the go and on the other hand thru predefined patterns rooted in a closed and regulated ecosystem are a good thing for undetermined decision makers, cause it actually forces them to eg. throw out a lot of things if they want to create an acceptable mobile user interface.

If the undecided are now using the iPad as a platform to bring back all their company level compromises to the user, because there's more space and a broader spectrum of interactivity, that's quite a bad thing. And this again doesn't have to do with apps or websites. It's a matter of general attitude and setup. Tablets, such as cellphones again have their characteristic criteria that have to be taken into account when developing content and functionality for that very target platform and audience (the same is true for desktop computers by the way, but some kind of actually needed reset seems to be way easier to accomodate if it's rooted in an external and seemingly inevitable impulse).

Why the biggest competitor to iPad news apps may be a familiar icon is a great posting on Nieman Lab. The author also experienced how web browsing would be his favorite task on the iPad and claims that for newspapers and magazines, their websites might become a major competitor for their rushed-by-a-hype content apps.

Many publishers are releasing theit titles to the iPad in highspeed, though I have not really seen a single news or magazine app that really convinced me. Many rather seem to fancy the paywall and blindly agree to the need of those real world metaphors that Apple wants them to use (I'm not against them in general, just very careful about it). In their case, using layouts, typography and "material" they know from the print world. And everybody does it in a different way – as a matter of taste, or to differentiate from competitors? I have even seen (or heard) page turning sounds in an iPad magazine that claims to be a "living magazine", which at first glance sounded kinda promising (apart from ringing the multimedia cd-rom bell). But I thought they at least are freeing themselves a bit from the world of dead trees. It seems many publishers feel urged to move their asses on the tablet in a quite dizzy rush.

On the other hand, more and more iPad owners are going to visit their websites – because they always went there, because internet surfing is very common and convenient for them on their tablet or simply because it's free. And you know, even the paid magazine apps for the iPad have a lot of adverts, no matter how well they're integrated or executed, so no excuse on that end. If your server statistics are going to tell you there are a lot of iPad Safari users on your website, what are you going to do? Block them and redirect them to your paid apps? Rather not, I guess (although I wouldn't be too surprised about such reaction).

And then again – and this refers to the point made above about limitations in the platform leading to better experiences because more clear decisions have to be made: many, many newspaper and magazine website interfaces are a mess nowadays. They have grown over many years and are mostly the result of dozens of compromises and quite often also victims of internal politics and infighting. As a user, we can feel the fuddy-duddy skirmish between marketing and editorial people on almost every single page. I'm talking about overcrowded start and section pages, weak navigational flows or readability, bothersome advertising displays and overlays, nasty tricks to get you to the site (SEO) and to keep you engaged on the site. Many things that have been designed to keep the system running instead of making great content available to a wide – and satisfied – user base. And I'd say clever browser extensions to hide banners – or third-party applications such as Instapaper to make text actually a joy to read are not the best possible solution, although they solve these problems for an ever-growing amount of people.

Are publishers trying to get rid of their newspaper or magazine website legacy? Does this, in combination with the illusion of refunding through app store paywalls, make them blindly rush on every new platform that sounds promising at first glance? Did anyone seriously ever think, this could save them – like, almost automatically?

I'm not saying publishers should not develop these apps for the iPad or tablets in general, or even sell them. I totally appreciate this early wave of – let's face it – experiments with a new mass market platform. Finally, even hard-nosed decisions makers seem to talk about interface design being part of their responsibility. And really, I was never as excited to engage with content as I am with the iPad – although I haven't found a silver bullet yet (and haven't touched any other tablet). Even doing showcases for PR reasons is fine, if they're treated as such. They might help us feel some kind of perspective, they're showing us unclaimed territory to be explored and have conversation around. All these discussions that are now raising, aren't they a really positive and good thing? Something that is really necessary to move forward?

I really think we should profoundly take into account what we learned from the web more than a decade ago – and how it evolved over the years. How people started to adopt it, and how they're using it now. We cannot avoid all mistakes, they're part of the game. But all kinds of people – designers, programmers, journalists, consultants, marketers etc. – that are now developing for the iPad have already worked in the digital world since mid or end of the nineties – and already went through an even quite similar early wave, when web design was about bridging print design to the digital world. As a designer, having spent many years on designing websites and software mainly for the desktop environment, I really feel excited like a kid again to experiment with new platforms such as mobile computing, tablets or the internet connected TV. That's a new kind of variety to deal with, a lot of new ground to explore. Time for fresh imagination, based on experience gathered over time, instead of just applying and repeating what already exists.

Ok, what I'm really asking myself: why isn't there a single great example of a newspaper or magazine website fully optimized for multitouch tablets? Something that is neither loveless accumulation of content cramped with countless ads nor the new school of multimedia enhanced ePaper/PDF-Reader thingie. Or am I just blind? Naive? Asking too early? Shouldn't we just start working on it?

One of my favorite newspaper web interfaces is the New York Times Skimmer. I was really curious to try it on the iPad, but it's actually not working that well. Isn't this an app (web-based or not) that is predestined to be experienced on a tablet computer? They have optimized the fast skimming scenario for the PC thru adding keyboard shortcuts. Why aren't there eg. multitouch gestures supported now, why isn't there a sophisticated article view …?

Wow, you're still here! I actually just started writing part III and trying really hard to keep it as short as possible. The harder I tried to keep it short, the longer it became – here's part III:
Even more thoughts on the iPad: Print vs. Web.

And some highly recommended reading on the topic of content treatment for the iPad:

WIRED on iPad: Just like a Paper Tiger…
I Prefer Safari to Content Apps On The iPad
Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?

Comments (1)

May 31, 2010

Some thoughts on the iPad: Sharing the device. →

This is part I of my today's series featuring some impressions and thoughts on the iPad after having it in use since a few weeks.

Well, a lot has been written on the iPad already. Mainly the social media tubes are filled with it and I'm sure there's already been something like iPad-related getaway – which is not easy, since it's just everywhere. But I actually like to read other people's thoughts on it and I really see the discussion just starting to get interesting, because now the iPad is a) available for quite some time in the US and b) is getting available (and used) in more and more places all over the planet.

For me, the iPad has brought up quite some surprises. I never understood the early whining about the lack of a camera, USB port or "real multitasking". Ok, some way to connect it to an external hard drive or printer wouldn't be too bad, but I'm convinced this will come soon (no matter if it'll be USB or something without wires). But no – or limited (in terms of: by design) multitasking is something I appreciate, cause it helps me focus and concentrate on one thing at a time, which I'm quite bad at in general.

And here's the first surprise. Actually, it first came as a surprise, when thinking about it now it seems just obvious. The concept as well as the form factor of a tablet makes it a device that's implicitly designed to be shared with others, with your surrounding. The lack of a constant place as we know it from the PC, the fact that it's just a thin (though quite heavy) screen, in fact an everyday object to serve you as a window to the digital world. Something that seamlessly fits into your household and everyday life – with all its pros and cons. It could easily get hidden between paper magazines and newspapers (sic!) and fall on the floor when carelessly moved, or it might intuitively integrate into your cooking procedures and look quite messed up after a while. You put it here, somebody else picks it up sometime later to use it for something else somewhere else. You get the idea.

But the iPad, or it's operating system is not designed for that purpose (yet?). It's not a multi user device. Despite all these mentioned aspects related to collective usage, it's built for one single user. Whatever you do with it, no matter if you're using a bunch of apps or just logging into websites with the browser, the treatment of data is highly personal.

And I think this is quite the contrary of what it should be. It might be that Apple has avoided some kind of user management for the sake of simplicity – and there might be some other difficulties nobody understands (such as DRM restrictions etc.), but then again, why does Mac OS X have it? isn't this also an operating system designed to be for everybody's ease of use? And really, I don't use it on my MacBook. But it would be a killer feature on the iPad.

When we only had a single iPad for our design studio (we got it quite early for project research reasons), we needed to share it between the two of us. Because if you want to truly experience the product, you have to set it up to your very own preferences and work with your personal data. We found some rather cumbersome workarounds that nobody would like to apply for that purpose on a daily basis. And now that we have two devices on hand, I still want to share it with my girlfriend – or even with friends that come to visit. I already wrote about it earlier: the iPad is a piece of technology that is just there. Almost no barrier for a stranger to pick it up, use it and then suddenly finding her or himself unintentionally confronted with somebody else's private messages.

Let's not waste more time on the issue, as it will become available soon anyway. I'm convinced. That's what's going to happen for TVs as well, the smarter they'll get and the more they are going to be connected to the internet. And also, from an interaction point of view: for the same reasons described above (everyday object, ubiquitously integrated into environments ...), it totally makes sense to always password protect it. So why shouldn't there be different logins for different people, plus something like a guest user with restricted functionality and no access to other's personal data?

If you didn't fall asleep until here, please read part II:
Some more (rough and lenghty) thoughts on the iPad: Apps vs. Browser.

Comments (1)

January 27, 2010

Thread-Parties →

I'm quite fascinated how conversations around Facebook wall postings sometimes evolve. I have something around 300 contacts on Facebook, all from completely different contexts: from school, from places where I worked, family, close friends, casual friends etc. Sometimes, very surprising constellations of people are mixing within the comments on wall posts and I always, just for fun, try to imagine all these different people together in a room. How would this work, what kind of conversation would arise and so on. So the next step could be: a (real world) diner or a party just for people that have been part of a certain Facebook thread. Did something like this already happen somewhere?

Comments (1)

January 19, 2010

Thoughts about "post-digital" (by Russell Davies) →

I guess my main thrust was about 'post-digital' thinking. Which sounds good doesn't it? What do I mean? Hmm. I mean a few things:

1. Screens are getting boring. It's really hard to impress anyone with stuff on a screen any more. However clever you've been. However much thought you've put in. However good the tech is. No-one's impressed. They've all seen better stuff in ads and movies anyway - when will onscreen stuff be as good as that? Whereas doing stuff in the real world still seems to delight and impress people. Really simple stuff with objects looks like magic. Really hard stuff with screens still just looks like media.

2. There are a lot of people around now who have thoroughly integrated 'digitalness' into their lives. To the extent that it makes as much sense to define them as digital as it does to define them as air-breathing. ie it's true but not useful or interesting.

3. The stuff that digital technologies have catalysed online and on screens is starting to migrate into the real world of objects. Ideas and possibilities to do with community, conversation, collaboration and creativity are turning out real things, real events, real places, real objects. I'm not saying that this means that these things are therefore inately better, or that the internet has 'come of age' or any of that nonsense. I just mean that there are new, interesting things going on IRL and that they have some advantages (and penalties) that don't apply online.

via russelldavies.typepad.com

I already came across this post a while ago and just read it for the second time, which was really worth it. There's also a follow-up here.

Comments (0)

Tags

thoughts