Torrential rains slowed me down (I have to drive in from Kansas City), but despite a pretty long night of drinking and eating, everyone was still energized this morning.
This morning we set up sessions about the people side – vs. the business side – with a focus on research.
After much fiddling with his UMPC tablet before the sessions started, Jeff Axup talked to us about mobile community research, and how to turn that information and mindset into design.
A lot of his work is on “backpackers.” To me this term means some of the long-range outdoorsyness I participate in, and I’m vaguely aware of the alt music style, but this means a sort of tourist. Apparently it’s common in the rest of the world; this is the young, hostel-staying euro-trekker as well as a the european style of adventure traveller. He shared with us the story of a specific person (whom he interviewed for his research) and then discussed how mobile tools could have solved some of her issues, presenting maps, transport schedules, translation services.
As part of the University of Queensland, he brought a set of backpackers to an animal park and had them indicate during the day how they would use little paper and foam “devices” to improve their day (e.g. information gathering, geocaching). This was cheaper and quicker than prototyping these devices, and allowed a more free gathering of information. And he’d say it proved out his middle ground of “weak determinism,” where almost everyone follow the rules, even though they are free to use products or technology in other ways. Design provides a social path, with some situations easier or cheaper, but you can always break the boundaries. I used to think I was pretty humanistic, but this makes a lot of sense to me.
All of his thoughts here, in much greater detail, will be included in his “Building a Path for Future Communities” section of the forthcoming Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems.
C Enrique Ortiz, of MoMo Austin among other things, then talked to us about a concept near to our heart: context. He used different terms than me, but characterizes good design as being practical, relevant and interesting.
Today we can do this because of better handsets, better (faster, cheaper, more open) networks as well as the “mobile lifestyle” that leads to more innovation and increasing indispensability by users.
Luckily, he also gave us a checksheet for designers and developers to make their products be contextual:
- Support as many interactions as possible – this changes over time, and by region; the U.S. has much poorer support for NFC and 2D barcode than in europe
- Capture the interactions and related information – digital footprints are out there, so capture them
- Understand the interactions – Intentions vs. actions
Mobile context is a good thing because it can make your device or service more informative, timely, accurate, relevant, connected, dynamic, adaptive and even transformational, promoting behavioral changes.
He also covered some good strategies, and warnings, regarding storage, analytics and of course privacy and identity. This stuff takes a lot of room, a lot of time and some clever processing to work fast, well and securely.
After a break for yet more fruit and baked breakfast goodies, Jason Ward came to talk to us about “field research,” which he heads up for hometown mobile carrier Sprint. Field research there means mostly surveys and similar, generally very quantitative systems; a different team does observational, ethnographic work, actually in the field.
While no longer a designer per. se., the goal for his team’s work is to inform design. His programs look at interactions between:
- People and the environment & ndash; find customer needs
- People and products – view behavioral responses to the product
- People, products and the environments – assess the product through the lifecycle, in the market
Although there is lots of good value in one-off studies to answer design questions, he likes the program approach. With this he can start to form baseline information about user behaviors and acceptance across the market. How well a service works on one device can be applied to new handsets, as well as tracking across revisions of a single product or device.
He went over in some detail how the several programs they employ work, in quite a bit of detail. He also skipped a whole lot of slides, partly because we just got a short version of the presentation, and partly because we kept interrupting him with questions.
For another view of Jason’s opinions on all of this, check out my Carnival-mentioned interview with him from the other week.
And before lunch Jared Benson gave us the Punchcut manifesto on presence. By the way, now I know what the name of the company means; it’s a reference to hand cutting lead type. They had lots of cool stuff that can’t be shown, as we often encounter, where all their cool stuff is under NDA.
Presence has formed a traditional, technological sense in the AIM status mode. But with mobiles always being in the hand, the world is changing. How is 24/7 presence going to work. He talked about explicit vs. implicit (location, sensors) status; this should all be removing the “it’s not a good time to talk” issue, and give options to communicate and improve a sense of communicatedness without direct communications.
7 points to consider when designing (or living) with a presence system:
- Presence should not be interruptive – probably both ways; Twitter is pretty intrusive
- Presence should be open and non-proprietary – don’t you have friends on other carriers? Do you even know this information?
- Setting presence should be quick, simple and easy – flip side of point 1; this is why I never tweet, and rarely change profiles on my Nokia
- I control how others see me – comm preferences, what apps can report, and how various people see (or do not) see you; consider proximity, both physical and societal
- Some presence info works harder than others – time delays are a killer; social closeness lets small notes imply further information
- Presence should work at a glance – can an emoticon be enough; app context as presence filter (current music)
- Presence can extend beyond people – all technology can be linked, and display it or react appropriately
Check back at the end of the day for the last of the session summaries, and in the coming weeks (probably) for further information we will be distributing.