The Feature is off

Sad news: The Feature (Nokia-owned independent non-branded blog about the mobile Internet) is shutting down today.

Its goal was straightforward: “TheFeature aims to be nothing less than a voice — an opinionated, independent voice for the mobility community.”(…) in that sense, we can say “mission accomplished.” It’s with a heavy heart, then, that we must reveal this will be the last post on TheFeature.com. When the site launched, 3G was still a far-off, almost pipe dream concept, and GPRS was barely a reality. We helped begin a conversation around these ideas; we now leave that conversation to carry on in the community that supported us. (…)Now is the time for us to step back, and let the conversation and community move forward on its own. It’s been a great ride, and we’re glad that everyone could join us. So, would the last one out please turn off the lights…

Well, I am sure all the people who published there will keep on doing their work elsewehere amd my hope is that it’s just a matter of time before having another platform enriched with new people, new content and new objectives. MobHappy is a step towards this goal!

A shift in user-centered design?

Donald Norman wrote a relevant column in ACM Interactions, Vol.12, No 4 (2005), pp. 14-19: Fresh: Human-centered design considered harmful. His point is that user-centered design is now treated as accepted wisdom, which is bad since:

One concern is that the focus upon individual people (or groups) might improve things for them at the cost of making it worse for others. The more something is tailored for the particular likes, dislikes, skills, and needs of a particular target population, the less likely it will be appropriate for others.

The individual is a moving target. Design for the individual of today, and the design will be wrong tomorrow. Indeed, the more successful the product, the more that it will no longer be appropriate. This is because as individuals gain proficiency in usage, they need different interfaces than were required when they were beginners. In addition, the successful product often leads to unanticipated new uses that are very apt not to be well supported by the original design.

But there are more-serious concerns: First, the focus upon humans detracts from support for the activities themselves; second, too much attention to the needs of the users can lead to a lack of cohesion and added complexity in the design. Consider the dynamic nature of applications, where any task requires a sequence of operations, and activities can comprise multiple, overlapping tasks. Here is where the difference in focus becomes evident, and where the weakness of the focus on the users shows up.
(…)
Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests can lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem.

Donald then explains what he means:

Maybe what is needed is more activity-centered design; Maybe failures come from a shallow understanding of the needs of the activities that are to be supported.(…) The focus upon the human may be misguided. A focus on the activities rather than the people might bring benefits. Moreover, substituting activity-centered for human-centered design does not mean discarding all that we have learned. Activities involve people, and so any system that supports the activities must of necessity support the people who perform them.

Why do I blog this? just another a brick about the lively debate between human-centered design and activity-centered design.

Let’s relax a bit with a quote

Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Venkman: Why?
Spengler: It would be bad.
Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean “bad”?
Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every
molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Stantz: Total protonic reversal!
Venkman: That’s bad. Okay. Alright, important safety tip, thanks Egon.

Ghostbusters, 1984

Roadmap for current european project (summertime)

Roadmap for the MutualModeling project:

1. State of the art document for end of september: literature review / paradigm / methodology to grasp Mutual Modeling / main results / perspectives with regard to our project. I have to take care of “shared cognitive environment” (Sperber and Wilson), “grounding” (Clark), “coordination theory” (Malone and Crowston)
2. Explore the methods we discussed for September. First, sketch the experiment design + concrete needs
3. Think about workshop or seminar: a list of potential speakers
4. Conference/journals list
5. Meeting “mutual modeling acts” in july

A book you can literally walk into

Walk-In Comix by Maribeth Back, Dale MacDonald, Mark Meadows, Scott Minneman, Beatrice Gallay, A. Balsamo, and Maureen Stone (the reading lab):

a graphic novel you can literally walk into — it’s printed on the walls, floor, and ceiling of a small set of labyrinthine rooms we built at the Tech. Talk about getting immersed in a book…

The story tells the adventures of five teenagers who literally get lost in a world of text and can only find their way out by learning to read it. The exhibit’s maze-like structure reflects the story’s twists and turns.

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of embedding interaction into a physical activity.

Music Insects Performance

Music Insects by Toshio Iwai (1992). Permanent collection at the Exploratorium, San Francisco, U.S.A.

These “music insects” “react” to color dots on the screen. When they pass over them such dots, they trigger musical scales, sounds, and different light patterns. The user selects colors from a palette with a track ball, and paints in their path, and
the insects perform the colors when they pass over them. The insects’ direction can be changed with certain colors, and colors can be painted to achieve less random musical “performances.” This piece is a sort of tool for visual music performance.

NOKIA’s Digidress

A 2002-2003 project at Nokia: Digidress by Per Persson, Younghee Jung, Jan Blom, Ionific. It’s actually one of those matchmaking system that allows colocated people to be aware of relevant partners presence in the vicinity.

Mobile phones have traditionally been used to connect remote people. With Bluetooth, W-LAN and other short range radio technologies, mobile phones could also be used to connect proximite or co-located people. Mobile devices could exchange data with or without the users’ immediate awareness. In an encounter between spatially proximate people, how can information in digital realm support and augment existing social behavior, practices and experiences taking place in real space?

DigiDress application allowed mobile users to create a page on their phone with text and imagery describing themselves, their interests, dreams, things they are proud of, favorite jokes or any other content. Pages were then viewable by other users within Bluetooth range (typically 10-20m), without the page owner’s explicit consent. In this way, DigiDress users could take a ‘peak view’ at others without revealing their identity, similar to peaking at non-aqcuinated people in public spaces.

What is interesting is that they conducted user-testing:

DigiDress was provided to Nokia employees for user trial. The software was made available and users with compatible phones were invited to download and try it out. The DigiDress prototype was equipped with a logging functionality that enabled us to collect very detailed information about what features were used and how much. During the study we collected 46 DigiDresses which were later subjected to analysis. We also interviewed 10 of the most active DigiDress users.

During the trial period (89 days) 618 users installed DigiDress on their phones. The average use span was 25 days. The identity expressions created were both serious and playful, revealing and non-revealing. Factors influencing the identity expression included strategies for personal impression management, privacy concerns, and social feedback. The application was used with both acquainted and unacquainted people, and viewing the identity expression of people nearby was one major motivation for continued use. Direct communication features such as Bluetooth messages were not commonly adopted. In several instances, DigiDress acted as a facilitator for ‘real’ social interaction between previously unacquainted users. Privacy concerns and their alleviations, as well as use barriers, were identified.

Why do I blog this? even though I am not really convinced by this sort of application (due tu privacy concerns and the cost to enter the information to create the profile), I like the way this project reflects the design process; the architecture seems preytt light and the interface seems interesting.

Conference paper about Catchbob! / Article de conférence sur CatchBob!

I wrote a paper for the french Human Computer Interaction Conference that has been accepted.

Empirical Study of Geolocation Use in Mobile Collaboration by Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin and Pierre Dillenbourg

This paper describes a collaborative location based application in built-in environment. This system is basically a platform that aims at exploring the impacts of positioning technologies on collaborative processes involving geographically dispersed teammates. The paper presents the platform as well as the first results of an ongoing study in which we tested two interfaces: one with a location awareness tool and another without. Results show that being given the position of the partners does not lead to better performance. Moreover, participants who were not provided with the position of others sent more messages to each other’s and made more mistakes when we asked them to draw the path taken by their partners.

J’ai écrit un article pour la conférence Interaction Homme Machine qui a été accepté

Etude empirique de l’utilisation de la géolocalisation en collaboration mobile par Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin et Pierre Dillenbourg

Cet article décrit une application de géolocalisation de groupe en environnement construit. Ce système constitue une plateforme d’exploration de l’impact des technologies de positionnement spatial sur les processus de collaboration entre partenaires géographiquement dispersés. L’article présente la plateforme ainsi que les premiers résultats d’une étude testant deux interfaces : l’une affichant avec le positionnement des partenaires et l’autre sans. Les résultats ne montrent pas de modification au niveau de la performance. Par contre les participants qui n’avaient pas ce positionnement com-muniquent plus et font beaucoup moins d’erreurs quand on leur demande de se remémorer le chemin parcouru par les partenaires.

Video-Game interface to read books

A smart project at the Reading Lab : Speeder Reader by Maribeth Back, Jonathan Cohen, Rich Gold used a video-game driving interface with dynamic text. It couples the notion of dynamic typography with the notion of the car as interface.

Speeder Reader gives you a gas pedal to control your rate of speed-reading and a steering wheel to navigate between streams of text. You can also jump forward or backwards in the text (by sentence, paragraph, or chapter).

In Western culture, the act of driving is very personally empowering (just like reading!). By combining the driving interface with dynamic text, we’re offering a model of reading as a medium that gets you places.

Update Trevor Smith precised that the work was done by the RED group at PARC, not at the Reading Lab. What happened was all of the RED people left PARC and one of them, Maribeth Back, started the Reading Lab.

For cool hunting, go out!

In a short interview of Josh Rubin (the guy who does cool hunting), there is this interesting excerpt:

Q. What tip(s) would you give a brand/marketing manager to help them become more aware of consumer/cultural trends in their day to day worklife?
JR. Get up from the desk, go outside and walk the streets. If you’re not in an urban environment, move to one. Travel often to get perspective. Learn how to search, sort and filter the blogosphere.

Why do I blog this? I think this is a crux issue; there are so many companies asking for more “consumers insights” and blablabla but the first lesson would be the go out and try to pick up facts, which is different from reading massive GFK or Datamonitor reports about trend watchingf. Of course I have to admit that execs may have lots of stuff to do but I am pretty sure they could be benefit from learning a bit how to observe what’s going on right now in different places. It’s not a matter of asking them to take care of consumer studies or ethnograpy but rather to keep in touch with reality.
Personnaly, it’s one my favorite activity: wandering around in cities and suburbs with a digital camera. There are so many trends that you can pick up! Pattern identification and analogical reasoning are then central in terms of skills required