Nintendo DS and Sony PSP information architecture

Last year, during a project with Nokia and the EPFL Media and Design Lab, we "mapped" the structures of the "digital world" as represented in mobile devices (cell phones, iphones, ipods, portable consoles). The point was to graphically represent the information architecture so that we could understand how it evolves over time in different devices. Francesco Cara, design strategist at Nokia is talking about it in his LIFT08 presentation.

Anyhow, I was in charge of looking at mobile entertainment devices (such as the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP, among others) because one my research them is about the exploration of portable technologies to understand the implications in terms of mobility and new interactions. The underlying idea, consists in analysing the usage of the technologies to determine opportunities and constraints for design.

This type of quick graph is interesting at it represent different information architecture strategies (menus globally speaking) and to so in a quick glance how Nintendo simplifies interfaces with a limited depth unlike the PSP. This graph was a first step before other more evolved representations mostly focused on cell phones that I can't show here (non disclosable yet).

An old french bread vending machine

At a certain moment in time, bread used to be sold in vending machine in France, as shown by the picture below taken last week in Arles. It may have been perceived dreadful (or the machine broke) and the owner it would be better to pain it using the same color of the baker building. Depending on the culture what is acceptable to be sold in vending machine?

GPS versus maps versus direct experience

In Wayfinding with a Mobile GPS System, Ishikawa et al. examined the effectiveness of GPS navigation in comparison to paper maps and direct experience. Since it's a psychological study, the study is focused, more specifically on the user's wayfinding behavior and acquired spatial knowledge. The results show the following patterns:

"Based on information received from one of these three media, participants walked six routes finding the way to goals. Results showed that GPS users traveled longer distances and made more stops during the walk than map users and direct-experience participants. Also, GPS users traveled more slowly, made larger direction errors, drew sketch maps with poorer topological accuracy, and rated wayfinding tasks as more difficult than direct-experience participants. Characteristics of navigation with these three learning media and possible reasons for the ineffectiveness of the GPS-based navigation system are discussed."

go4walk describes some of the factors of explanation:

"The researchers have suggested a number of possible reasons for their observations - the users' unfamiliarity with the technology, the small size of the screen that prevented users seeing their current location and the target at the same time, and the temptation to look at the GPS screen rather than the actual surroundings. This third factor is interesting because it suggests that over reliance on a GPS makes it hard to build up a mental model of your surroundings - where you are and how you got there. The obvious consequence is that should your batteries fail or your GPS 'lose' its satellite fix for some reason - you would become instantly lost with no idea how to get back safely."

Why do I blog this? the paper is interesting as it tries to define the differences between specific medium. Results are intriguing and the last one concerning the over-reliance on the screen versus the surroundings is an important one. It echoes with some results we noticed in the CatchBob experiment with people puzzled by the mismatch between the screen and the context.

Toru Ishikawa, Hiromichi Fujiwara, Osamu Imai, and Atsuyuki Okabe. 2008. “Wayfinding with a GPS-Based Mobile Navigation System: A Comparison with Maps and Direct Experience.” Journal of Environmental Behavior, vol. 28, pp. 74-82.

Why do you read Pasta and Vinegar?

Time for a quick address: it's been 5 years that I keep this blog and things have changed over time. Topics discussed here vary but revolves around ubiquitous computing, tangible interactions, innovation and foresight, user experience and research. My situation also evolved from the one of a master student to the one of an independent researcher with a PhD. Of course I know some of the readers and got some feedback about what they find here but I wanted to know more about it from people I do not necessarily know. So two questions: (1) Why do you read Pasta and Vinegar? and (2) What do you find here?

Not sure whether the answers would have an influence but I am curious about it.

Cybercity representations

In "The Cybercities Reader (Urban Reader)" (Steve Graham), there is a wonderful text by Anne Beamish called "The City in Cyberspace" which tackles the city metaphor in "virtual worlds" and how superficial the metaphor is often taken.

Some excerpts I found relevant to my interests:

"What do these digital worlds [Alphaworld represented above, Planet9, Le Deuxieme Monde, Virtual Los Angeles] tell us about the creators' image of the city? When digital urban environments are designed, the downtown is often seen as the Holy Grailv - the vivid, exciting, teasing, tantalizing city is held up within sight, but out of reach. The image of the city is used to attract us and to draw us into the world, but it functions mainly as a decoration or marketing technique intended to get the customer in the door. The creators of these virtual worlds appear to take the image of the city literally but superficially, and they generally do not seem to have given much thought to what it is about a city that their visitors would find appealing. They use the image of the city liberally but strip it of meaning. (...) Too often, rather than mimicking the vitality and excitement of downtown, the digital environment is disconcertingly desolate and empty; the buildings are blandly modern; and it is common to travel around these worlds without meeting another soul.

To be fair, though, the crude and simplistic environment is not always a reflection of the creator's aesthetic taste; it is also a reflection and result of technology, economics and regulation."

Why do I blog this Working on both fields of video games and urban computing, I find interesting to observe the relationship between the image of the city and its physical counterpart. For that matter, it seems that some progress are attempted especially with games such as GTA IV. The representation of the city in entertainment is surely interesting as a sort of artifacts to depict "possible futures" which are of course very culturally-situated.

Horizontal codes for vertical planes

That pictogram ensemble is a project by german artist Ulrike Gruber. It actually re-uses urban signs targeted at pedestrian and project them on the building facade. As described on the public work authorization (only in french), this painting aims at using pedestrian pictograms to describe new elements added on the facade after the renovation (such as the elevator, new stairs, etc.). The painting shows the movement of the elevator, the rotation of the stairs and also the presence of recycling containers to induce new behavior (turn right, do not lean against the balcony) and suggest new uses (authorized swimming, belvedere altitude).

Why do I blog this? what looks intriguing here is how the space of flow is made explicit through the pictograms, and how new affordances can be created on a vertical plane using codes of the horizontal plane. The sort of things to ruminate on a sunday morning perhaps.

LBS delusion (again)

(Via Small Surfaces), this "Do humans really need location based services?" is interesting at it covers some of the questions I am wondering about when it comes to the potential of LBS. An excerpt I found intriguing:

"Even though I am confident that there will certainly be significant growth in some areas (i.e. vehicle tracking, in-car traffic information) I doubt that someday everyone will be using Google’s "Search nearby" feature to find the next ATM, restaurant or supermarket.

Even though mobility and travel has increased tremendously, the majority of people still roam in just a few locations and in general they do not move far from home. Vacations and business travel are exceptions - the percentage of time individuals spend in locations they don’t know is very small. (...) I strongly believe that there will be a market for location based services. Nevertheless I think one has to shift focus from the technical possibilities that GPS-enabled, connected mobile devices potentially offer. The key is to understand the potential users of these location-based services in order to be able to find the next "location-based killer app"."

What I find intriguing here is the coupling of the need for LBS and the recent results about people's mobility showed in the last issue of Nature. It seems indeed that apart from navigational LBS (in-car GPS), other applications (such as location-based annotations and friend finders) are failing to find a user base.

Why do I blog this? interesting elements to be added to my list of LBS issues that I presented at O'Reilly ETech 2008 (see my slides on Slideshare). Although there are more and more "yet another LBS" projects recently, i am also noticing that people increasingly start to raise eye-brows about it (see for example Joe MacCarthy's blogpost about meetro) 2007 was about the delusion of the non-satNAV LBS pioneers and 2008 start to get some interesting criticisms and afterthoughts about LBS.

Interestingly, one of the comment of this blogpost is about the fact that "the title is intriguing as it suggests that there might be someone else (machines, m2m, the web of things) who will make use of LBS more than we will do (location-based APIs?)". As it surely connects with 2006 discussions about blogjects or the idea of "new interaction partners" (the presence of pets in the internet of things).

long+slow+blurry innovation

The introduction of "Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone" by Lindholm, Keinonen and Kiljander features this interesting excerpt:

"the only way to get a working assumption of what the technology enable us to do and how they are likely to be used is to be involved in these projects long enough. Even then, educated guesses and developed intuitions are only approximate. Something that was supposed to be easy to implement turns out to be practically impossible. Sometimes, the opposite occurs. Solutions that were originally postponed to allow technology to catch up are suddenly realized in unexpected ways"

Why do I blog this? This quote is an interesting summary of what I believe as it covers different aspects:

• The importance to have a long-term involvement in an organization which design something: I personally work with a french video game studio for 7 years and it strikes me how much I learn in the long run and not through short gigs on their projects. For example, it's been almost from the beginning that we discuss the usability test and user experience field study ideas. It took us approximately 4 years to turn what was "user research as a R&D project" into "user research in the production pipe-line". The time to convince people, to show the value of user research, the importance to insert it in the production process, and finally to get some funding to make it accepted...
• The notion of "educated guess" and "developed intuitions" is important. For that matter, I like how Jan Chipchase frame the results form his work: not facts but "informed opinions". Although the quote does not refer to user research, I find an interesting pattern here in the sense that knowledge construction about the evolution of technology is rarely absolute. There are contingencies and idiosyncrasies that plays an important role.
• The difficulty in forecasting results because the world is a complex system.
• The importance of time: innovation is slow, change takes time and as foresight researchers say, we always tend to overestimate the short term and minimize the long term (tail).

Design Thinking in HBR (Tim Brown)

Once in a while the Harvard Business Review tackles topics close to my field. Sometimes it's about foresight, today it's about design with this article by Tim Brown called "Design Thinking" (in the june 2008 edition). Starting an insightful model in R&D/innovation, namely Thomas Edison, Brown describes design thinking as a descendant of that tradition of a "blended art, craft, science, business savvy, and an astute understanding of customers and markets". He simply defines it as:

"it is a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity."

In these days of desperate need of innovation as "a source of differentiation and competitive advantage", design thinking is literally more and more invited to the business table (hence a publication in HBR). Brown definitely make clear that design evolved from

"put a beautiful wrapper around the idea (...) making new products and technologies aesthetically attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or by enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising and communication strategies"

to

"Now, however, rather than asking designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, companies are asking them to create ideas that better meet consumers' needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value.

Giving some examples, he also enters in more detail in the process itself, discussing the role of prototypes and "tools for design thinking". As well as an interesting deconstruction of the myth of the creative genius, Brown shows how it's not about ideas popping up out from the blue, but instead the results of an hardworking process with human-discovery and iterations.

Why do I blog this? it's a decent overview of what is design, to be kept up handy for upcoming teaching gigs. The good thing here (for designers) is the acknowledgement of the strategic value of design and the intrinsical importance of adopting a user-centred approach. The sidebar about designers' profile and the non-importance of black clothes is also a good start.

As a side-note, I find intriguing that the term "behavioral scientists/researchers" is more and more used. It sorts of echoes with the NYT piece about Jan Chipchase. Working in that domain and having troubles to define in 2 words what I am doing, I am always intrigued by the terms employed by different stakeholders: behavioral researcher seems to be the term for the press lately, whereas consultants and companies use "user experience" (I know there are nuances though).

Game on the street

Simpler than ARG but surely along the same line, this sort of street game (spotted yesterday in Lyon, France) always makes me wondering about Jane Jacobs and the importance to have people/eyes/activity on the street.

don't touch my touch screen

Taken today while visiting a big industrial factory. The left sticker says: "touch screen: no BEWARE: don't touch the screen... except me: I am the operator" and the right one says "Don't touch my screen". It reads like a Kraftwerk song.

I found interesting the existence of these stickers which gives order about ownership of touch-screen. There aren't any sticker about keyboard ownwership but in that factory, it seems that touch screens make me people willing to touch/interacti with the device.

How to refer to people

As discussed by David R. Millen in Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research

"Even the terminology used to describe the research sample belies different research perspectives. For example, psychologists refer to subjects, HCI researchers talk about users, market researchers refer to consumers or segments, and anthropologists refer to informants. "

Stack overflow in urban computing?

Stack overflow?

Overloaded Joystick

Definitely a fan of Antonin Fourneau’s Overloaded Joystick (here):

A short excerpt of the text written by Douglas-Edric Stanley about the artist and the exhibit shed some more light about it:

"When I look at some twenty-odd buttons of all sizes joyfully scattered about a controller, I can only read in it a boyish call to the gaming industry: “please someone, come and bring some joy back into this stick”. In this way, Antonin has stolen that ladybeard and placed it on top of his own, thereby redefining his own — very French, and very devilish — form of a wink, which is both innocent and sophisticated, all at the same time." (Douglas-Edric Stanley)

About distractions and work habits

There's this interesting post by Paul Graham on distractions and time sinks (tv-then-internet):

"Something that used to be safe, using the Internet, gradually became more and more dangerous. Some days I'd wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn't gotten any real work done. And this started to happen more and more often. (...) The problem is a hard one to solve because most people still need the Internet for some things."

So what to do?

"At first I tried rules. For example, I'd tell myself I was only going to use the Internet twice a day. But these schemes never worked for long. Eventually something would come up that required me to use it more than that. And then I'd gradually slip back into my old ways. (...) The key seems to be visibility. The biggest ingredient in most bad habits is denial. So you have to make it so that you can't merely slip into doing the thing you're trying to avoid. It has to set off alarms.

Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internet distractions will be software that watches and controls them. But in the meantime I've found a more drastic solution that definitely works: to set up a separate computer for using the Internet. (...) If you try this trick, you'll probably be struck by how different it feels when your computer is disconnected from the Internet. "

Why do I blog this? interesting hint about work practices. It reminds me of a friend working in a big aerospace company where no personal computers are connected to the Internet (for security reasons) and where people have to go to an Internet computer (yes, in 2008).

Although I agree with the time-sink problem and suffer from it myself, I am still wondering about the definition of "work" Graham have. There are indeed different definition of work: - need to be connected to newsfeeds. - looking for intelligence, reports, material, hints, stats, etc. This requires first-hand sources or second-hand sources, search engines, tagging systems... - ...

(Picture taken from my temporary office in a swiss train)

And there are of course different recombination of work allowed by networks: - look things up on the google even for crazy things such as checking grammar (google fight), looking for a reference in a paper, etc. - need to access definition (wikipedia or urban dictionary!) - share and work on documents: Google Docs/Spreadsheet for example - use of certain websites to "compute" things, for example, I have few urls like that one to compute statistic things on-lines - communicate with people using Skype/Google Talk, etc. - update agenda - find picture on Flickr to illustrate a talk

Of course, all of this results from the choice I made (with colleagues) to use on-line tools. Personally I find more efficient to split my time between different moments/activities and places:

1. browsing/having a glance at stuff (daily read of my RSS feeds, websites, quick glance at magazine at news shops every day...), generally after breakfast. This is about news, people blogging about their activities or what they are doing. It's then a sort of ambient awareness of lots of things.
2. selecting few "signals" and turning them into something more concrete (a blogpost, in delicious, a note in a .txt file that corresponds to a specific project, and email to myself or friends), generally while/after browsing (morning)
3. reading "seriously" (on paper or on the computer), generally in a disconnected place (like trains!)
4. talking to people (whenever), eating with people (whenever), chatting (generally in the afternoon)
5. be on the field (observations) or in a work meetings (mid-morning/afternoon)
6. analyzing data coming from the field or writing seriously on a document (in a disconnected place sometimes) or with email/browser switched off.

All of this separated by breaks (walking, jogging, dreaming, taking weird pictures).

Interview on Infonomia

Been interviewed recently by Alfons Cornella and Doris Obermair for spanish website Infonomia, the conversation is here. A short excerpt where I make my point (about the near future of urban computing) that the important thing is less about technology than human needs:

"¿Cuál es el futuro en este campo? Si hablamos de las ciudades del futuro, no debemos pensar en tecnología, sino en las necesidades humanas, en lo que la gente quiere en lugares específicos. ¿Quieren circular mejor, conocer a gente que comparte sus mismos intereses, o, por otro lado, simplemente quieren que se les deje en paz y estar inaccesibles? Se trata de ciudades basadas en los deseos de la gente, más que de ciudades donde la tecnología se lanza sin más y la gente no entiende lo que está pasando."

The complexity of urban signs

Lots of signs on that picture taken in Geneva. Different meanings, some are official (street number), some aren't (graffitis); some are about navigation (street number), some about making explicit invisible phenomenon (the purple rainbow shows the availability of the wifi signal), some are easy-to-grasp ("COOL"), some are impossible to parse. The weirdest is certainly the black-scotch tape on the right.

"Everyday Engineering": be inquisitive about your environment

"Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See" is a nice little booklet by Andrew Burroughs from IDEO. A bit in the same vein of "Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design" by Jane Fulton Suri, is about all these small things and details that I sometimes blog about: observations about the world, the complexity of assemblage, failures, cracks, misuses, etc. All these small details matter as they tell us about "the thought process behind designed things".

Compared to Thoughtless Acts, that book is more about the way to see the world in the engineer's eyes but it's definitely of interest for anyone interested in design or user experience research.

In addition, this collection of pictures is an invitation to be more "inquisitive" about our environments. As I sometimes try to do with picture I annotate here, the point is rather to ask questions concerning why things are like this or that. And as the author says, it allows to become "better observers":

"Perhaps we discover a point of failure that is completely counterintuitive, as when corrosion aggressively attacks the most protected part of a steel beam. And we can also see success, when things do go as planned and the end product proves to be a match for everything that is thrown at it. Regardless of whether we find inspiration or not, we owe it to ourselves and those around us to become better observers. Our environment is brimming over with information that can help us with our basic ability to navigate a course. The better we are able to refine our actions and our thoughts based on seeing what has gone before, the fewer mistakes we will make"

When the affordance is not enough...

The need to put a "bell" arrow sticker to indicate the button position.

John, saved by GPS

Technology as a life-saver? enabler? Seen in Geneva few months ago