Wearables can learn from history

Wearables are seen as the new digital battleground. The big boys are spending serious money to get involved, Google's Project Glass, debatable rumors of a 100 strong Apple iWatch team, snaps have surfaced of a Samsung watch, Nike Fuelband is already established and in the wings there is a host of kickstarter projects.

Lets look back at the original wearable, the watch. Prior to the mobile phone it was likely to be the only item of technology - be it mechanical or digital - that the average person would carry with them. Interestingly the wrist watch first became popular during the first world war where it was far easier to look at your wrist than find your pocket watch. It has succeeded as our primary wearable for four key reasons.

Utility:  a watch provided a function that was an important for members of the industrialised world.  We needed to know the time, to make sure we got to work on time, caught our train, met our friends, knew how long till closing time etc. When you were out and about, if you were without a watch you were out of the system. You had to rely on finding public clocks or to ask others for the time. A watch was a vital part of your work equipment.

Status and fashion: watches were/are available in many styles and at many prices. The choice of watch could be an expression of status, a reflection of your fashion tastes, or an indication of your type of job. The specialist watches have moved mainstream. Few who wear an aviator or divers time piece actually fly planes or dive deeper than the municipal pool, but the additional functionality or performance capabilities appeal as symbols of adventure, strength performance etc.

Affordability: we think of the digital watch as being the dawn of cheap watches. Of course there were mechanical watches which were cheap, but in the days of mechanical movements the more you paid the more accurate the time keeping. Digital allowed a £1.99 watch to keep time as well as a £5000 one. Digital allowed functions which were once the domain of expensive watches to be affordable, and for new functions to be integrated. People can afford to loose digital watches. While they are securely strapped to our wrists only some are cherished as symbolic objects; my father's watch, the first watch I bought; weeding gift etc.

Ease of use: In most cases you can hand a watch to someone and they will be able to "use it". It seems an odd term to apply to such a  mundaine item of technology, but most watches are well designed for telling the time. There is a fashion for hard to decifer watches or some fashion designs are poor in terms of usability. But on the whole telling the time forma  watch is easy. Where they have additional functions there may be problems, setting the date, finding out the atmospheric pressure, resetting the stop watch etc may be harder. But the core function is easy.

I would argue that for a wearable to succeed it will need to match the same criteria, but with one additional element, interoperability. A wearable must work with an existing operating system and may need to tie in with some cloud solution for data storage. This is an important new consideration and is why Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazone and even Facebook are monitoring and may enter this field. Smaller players know they cannot succeed with an issolated solution and will wed themselves to one or more OS.

Up untill a couple of years ago wearables were primarily research or millitary projects. In both cases utility was the primary goal. Secondary was ease of use whereas affordability and status & fashion were rarely considered. As they look for a mass consumer market these also ran criteria come to centre stage.

Utility
So far most devices are aimed at the sport fitness and well being. Activity trackers, sleep monitors etc. Sport and fitness is a big bussiness and an area where dedicated individuals are willing to spend on high tech clothing and equipment. The spread of obesity is also a prime market, where such devices can assist to motivate and engage indivudals in a healthier lifestyle. So it is a good first segment. But if we leave this area aside, there are many questions that need answered.

• What problems will wearables solve? 
• What data do we need collected via sensors and either stored or relayed back to us in real time? 
• Does a wearable need to exist in isolation or as part of another mobile device eccosystem?
• Will the wearable establish new needs?

Google appear to be going down the constant virtual assistant route. Where the device acts as an extension to your brain, pulling in information that it thinks will be useful to you and presenting it as an augmented layer over your view of the world. I am sure users will be able to highly tailor the types of assistance offered and some will be on demand other automatic.  While it is always hard to second guess Apple,a n iWatch would be a convenient method of accessing data streams form your iphone. The battle weary digital executive will find it easier to look at an iWatch than pull out and unlock their iPhone - back to the trenches.

Nike have shown that you can grow a market where users were previously unaware of a need. Initially through the Nike+ and now Fuelband they have generated a need which was previously only supported by at the one end pedometers and the other heart monitors. Both of the later were either seen as boring or fanatical, and not as applicable to fitness for the masses as Nike's offerings.

Status & Fashion
The Nike Fuelband, the Jawbone and the Fitbit are the first mainstream wearables which have attempted to meet all criteria - to greater or lesser sucess. They are still specialist items, designed at the keen sports/fitness user, and their price point of around £100 is heading in the right direction. They are also the first devices which try not to look techie. They have a sports aesthetic rather than a geek uglyness. Project glass is aware of the need to produce an attractive product in order to broaden the appeal.  One company, Misfit is starting with looks and fitting utility into an object designed to look good and feel more like jewellery than technology.

Affordability
Early adopters will pay high prices for entry into the elete set, but the masses will require affordability. It took many years for mobile phones to become almost disposable items - the cheapest I could find today was £5.99 for a pay as you go basic phone. So we can expect the first wearables to have a higher price point and economies of scale to bring down the price. In some cases they could be subsidised by data packages. Google Project Glass will require a constant internet connection to save to the cloud and to retrieve data. Others such as Apple may use design or brand values to justify higher prices.

Ease of use
This is the big one. The wearable has to be easy to use its self and the data it collect has to be accessable and presented in a way which adds value. Nike has a track record of stylish user interfaces mapping your training performance data, and adding social and competitive elements. They are the current masters. The Fuelband itself is easy to interact with and the notion of fuel points is a master stroke. By using a single energy currency they make it easier to introduce gamification and competitive social interaction.

Interoperability
Who knows who will win. Forrester Research see this as the next big battle ground. Will we have a single wearable eccosystem or use a best in class approach? The big boys will attempt to produce the defining products which open up the market and open consumer's minds to the potential of wearables.  Apple may create a device which creates a totally new market. Google Glass may provide an all encompassing solution which can be bent to fit every user need. Or the market may fragment into niche products for different activities or professions.  Rather than todays tech giants having it all their own way it is just as likely that a new kid on the block will produce the killer device, and the OS providers will scramble to work with or buyout the new entrant.  Who knows, but in five years time not wearing computing devices will as old hat as, wearing a watch.

Online sales top 1 Trillion dollars and UK shoppers spend the most

What interests me about this is not the headline figure but that China is racing forward - not surprising as their infrastructure improves, expanding middle class and massive population. What is startling is that the UK spends the most per head on-line. More than that we are predicted to continue leading.

Why is this? Our economy is certainly not the strongest. UK population's  access to the internet is 83% which is behind the scandinavian countries and equal to Germany. 

Nielsen found that 26% of global online users plan to purchase groceries or food stuffs online. But when they looked at the UK the figure was 75%. While in the states only 54% occasionally buy groceries online. 

My hypothesis is that it is our love of online grocery shopping that is putting us at the top of the list. We need to buy food on a  regular basis. We have a limited number of large national supermarkets, each competing on price and service. They have well developed fulfilment mechanisms. We have been doing online food shopping for many years now and it is a well entrenched habit for many people. 

In terms of non grocery shopping in the  UK, despite our groans and moans we have a well developed and trust worthy postal service. Both the Royal mail and the various commercial delivery services are reliable and the small size of the country, well developed infrastructure makes next day delivery easily achievable.

RyanAir - how not to do UX

Last night my friends, I failed. I had to book a flight and the only airline that flies the route I wanted, is Ryanair.

Last time I booked with them I vowed never to go through the experience again. But as must be the case with thousands of others I had no option. May the gods of UX look down upon me with pity.

If ever there was a site which was created to evoke the most vitriol from its users it was Ryanair. Meeting the business objectives of a company and maximising profits is one thing, but Ryanair take this mantra to a whole other level.

The booking process is designed to attempt to wrong foot users at every step by forcing them to accept additional chargeable items. You have to work very hard to avoid falling into the many traps. And when you do manage to deselect travel insurance or, priority booking, or text alerts etc your route is blocked by grave warnings of the dire consequences of your actions. It takes a brave soul to stand up to the barrage of objections and to hold your nerve. Many a user will fall into the various boobytraps.

To add insult to injury when you do finally reach then end you are charged £6 credit card handling charge for every ticket you buy.

As I went through the process the stress levels rose, the shouting and swearing at the screen increased and the enter key was pounded harder and harder. I went to bed in a furious mood. In the morning I was still cross and sought out the "Ryanair are complete b**tards" support group. In my searching I came across this design exercise.  

Now even if this is not perfect, many simple UX improvements would help change people's perspective of the brand. I cannot be alone in finding the whole booking process an insult and a shock to my belief that on the whole the internet is a force for good.

Ah well at least I have the flight to look forward to....

Facebook Graph a Semantic Social Search Engine

Facebook graph search has landed and with it a worlds first, a semantic social search engine. The vast quantity of work we have all put into Facebook, all those likes and status updates, the affirming and rejecting of friends. The location updates, the invites and group events. They all add up to an immense pile of neatly structured data. More than that. Data that is inherently understandable by humans. Compare that to the mountains of data utility companies and banks hold on us.  This stuff is about us, what we do and like and who we do it with. We all ways knew it was a goldmine, but now we can see how Facebook intends to profit.

The data is already ripe for semantic search. We have fed it data in social formats which relate to our lives and the times of our lives. So providing a social search engine is a brilliant thing to do.

Initially I though the data would be fairly crude in terms of how to rank and apply relevance to results. Facebook appears to have a  a very narrow tagging system you can either like something, comment or share. But beyond that there is how you structure your feeds, who you elect to receive updates from. If you read those updates, if you follow links. Once you add these variables into the mix they have a the ability to prove more granular or accurate results. I can't tell if they are doing this yet but it would seem the obvious path to take.

The auto complete in the search box offers terms which fit with the content types and relationships you are searching for. So  "National parks my friends.." could complete to "National parks my friends like" or "...have been to". It knows that national parks are places you visit, it will also know that restaurants are places you eat, Sony makes things you buy, Justin Timberlake is someone who makes music and has concerts you can go to, and that you can like and comment and share all of these.

If they open up to other services such as retailers, location based services -  FourSquare, brand and product recommendation engines, then the value of the Facebook data is released every time a user searches. First pull in related results from the external sources. Then charge to allow other sites to pull in social graph results into their results. Of course this will bring privacy issues to the fore again. But int he past Facebook has managed to ride the waves of discontent and come out winning.

An analog life and a digital death

Una in Nigeria dancing to Highlife

On the first of September 2012 my mother died. She had lived a full 87 years. She grew up in the highlands in the 1930’s and remembered that even through the Scottish winter there were children who walked barefoot for several miles to attend school. She went on to excel at medical school in Edinburgh and then to live and work in the Yemen and the soon to be independent Nigeria. Returned to Scotland and taught, researched and wrote five books. She had five children and was married twice, the second time to an eminent Scottish politician. She was never a philistine and always looked forward to the future and was enthralled by developments in science, the arts and culture. She intermittently used personal computers to write, and produced her unpublished autobiography.

Four years ago my mother asked why she didn’t have a blog. Everyone else seemed to have them, why had we not made sure she had her own. It was more an accusation than a question. I agreed to set one up for her and collected some images and started to design the site. When we discussed what she would like to write about, it became evident to her that she could not think of anything. Or rather anything that would be of sufficient interest to either her or potential readers. She did not want to look back and her life at that time, like so many older people was a dull routine of empty days and occasional family visits. So she never got her blog.

Sometime during the last couple of weeks of her life I searched for her on Google. There was no trace. Eventually I found her name in relation to her husband and she was wrongly assigned in Wikipedia as the wife of her long term companion.

She found this discrepancy funny.

She was a member of perhaps the last non digital generation. Despite her full life and achievements, all her work and writings were before the internet. She never used email, or as far as I am aware joined any online groups or networks. So we were spared the task of reviewing her digital legacy and personal digital correspondence. The need to close online accounts,  and the apparent hassle of having to prove that she had died.

The paradox is that, us, her family relied on Facebook and email to keep each other informed of her health. We were in daily contact, scheduling when we would visit her, messages for the doctors, selection of care homes and all the network of issues surrounding the support of a loved one. We lived in different locations, in UK and abroad. Facebook was our principle method of conversing.

Upon her death it was Facebook which was the best method for us to notify our social circles of our loss. Telling the reduced group of her surviving friends was mush harder analog process. Trolling through her address books, phoning and sending letters.

The process of arranging for the burial, selecting the funeral director, and all the choices one makes is arduous and time consuming. It is done at a time of high emotion, again in a large family there are group decisions to be made, shared responsibilities. The funeral business is a human face to face business. At least in Scotland it is almost devoid of any digital element. This makes sense as the personal touch is important, but to a generation used to Amazon, it is odd that you cannot do any of it online. Select the flowers, view the options for the coffins, is all done via brochures and poorly produced leaflets.

She was part of the last generation who lived a full and rich analog life. Within ten years I doubt there will be any more UK citizens who will die without making some form of digital footprint during their lives. After her death my mother now has a digital legacy. The burial notice and obituary and videos of the speeches at her funeral are all online. We have scanned and uploaded important photographs from her collection of family photos onto Shoebox. The largest legacy lives on in our Facebook pages and the messages of condolences and the continued exchanges and remembrances of family members.

Predictions for 2013

Windows 8

Windows 8 will be seen as a failed digital mashup. The Jeckle and Hyde nature of attempting to combine two UI paradimes does not resonate with users. Those that upgrade find they live in either one UI or the other, but rarely switch between the two. The old school Windows users find it does not significantly improve Windows 7 and removing the start menu frustrates many. Microsoft eventually relent and launch a campaign telling users how to reinstate the start menu. Those that looked forward to the bright new world of touch are equally disappointed by the limited functionality of the core apps, and the low number of 1st rate apps available in the app store. The effort required to learn the charms metaphor or hidden functionality proves too annoying a hurdle for those used to the iPad's on screen approach. The minimalist design attracts while the minimal functionality confuses.

As a result PC sales continue their decline. Hundreds of millions of copies will be sold via OEM sales and a trickle of expensive touch enabled laptop hybrids will cater to the business market. Despite Microsoft's best efforts Windows 8 and Surface and the undelivered promise of Courier will further hasten the decline from what was once global dominance.

Second Screen

Sports will fuel the second screen revolution. The use of the second screen as an integrated supplement to TV broadcasts has started to arrive in the US but has yet to make significant inroads in the UK. 2013 will be the year when it goes mainstream. Data rich events such as sports events are the ideal content  for the dual screen approach.  Sky will continue to lead the charge. They will extend the functionality of their second screen enabled iPad apps to include data on a wider range of sports. There will be a closer integration with social media, and the ability to share realtime self commentary with your social circle. More and more people will augment their viewing experience of live sports events both at home and in the stadium by using a second screen. Making sense of all this data and deciding what stats to display and the level of information required by different user types will prove a significant UX challenge.

3D rights

Staples are set to launch a 3D printing services in two European cities with plans to roll the service out over the course of the year. But in order to print people need models. 3D modeling is still a specialist skill, even tools such as Google Sketchup require a significant effort to become adept at producing complex printable models. The 3D clip art market will expand as witll portable scanners. 3D smartphone based scanning apps such as 123D Catch, will proliferate. Now with a  smartphone and an app anyone can create a facsimile of a 3D object. Admittedly the intial offerings will be low fidelity but 2^nd and 3^rd generation apps will make significant increases in quality. The mainstream press will latch onto the dire concequences of such a capability. Stories will abound about who owns the rights 3d rights to objects. Museums will have to consider if they allow visitors to scan their artifacts. Brands will try to protect the 3d rights of their products, as a whole and in component form.   Celebrities will charge for 3d files of their bodies. Questions will be raised in the house.

Bot Menus

Tesco and other data rich retailers will employ more proactive and intelligent shopping bots. Regular grocery shopping will automatically take into account calendar events, school holidays, festive periods, birthdays. Weather predictions will inform alternative choices based on personal and aggregate and regional tastes. Users will be able to specify how the shopping bot can assist them. Any shopping list can be analyised to deliver, cheaper, healthier, and ethical or celebration alternatives. Users will be incentivized to employ the bots by preferential prices on staple goods. Brands will have to pay the supermarket chain to be part of the schemes and to feature their products in the initiative. Some will go as far as to offer "surprise me" features for new menu selections.

Eyes in the sky

Low cost aerial drones fitted with video cameras will be the top geek presents for Christmas 2013. Just as remote helicopters have moved from the domain of hobbyist to the general public so will quad copter. In 2013 these four and six motor devices which range from the cheap and cheerful with a low power video camera to robust versions capable of carrying the owner’s own camera will find a mass market. As these will be designed for non commercial purposes they will escape the existing legislation. Even so privacy issues will be raised and the public will be wary of these toy eyes in the sky. Digital services will spring up to allow users to geotag their movies as we all get up close and aerial with our, and our neighbor’s world. Police and security forces will employ them in a more Orwellian fashion. In 2013 it will be the norm for strikes, public demonstrations and even small scale public events to be monitored from the skies.

Windows 8 review

Over the course of the last couple of years my view of Microsoft has changed. They have seemed to be on a roll. First with the original surface – those bespoke multi touch tables, then Kinect and its promise of coming to the desktop, and recently with Metro, the new Surface and Windows 8. Microsoft seemed to me to be on the up. They were the guys who were innovating, who were not content with the exiting paradigms. With Metro, I had my concerns about the design approach of mixing two UI approaches in one OS, but hey the design was refreshing and far away from the skeuomorphic tendencies of the Apple mobile offerings. What’s more they proudly boasted “Windows 8 is the most widely used and tested pre-release product we’ve ever delivered,”. Bring it on.

So, it was with great anticipation that, on the day of its release I installed Windows 8. Admittedly my laptop was ancient, I bought it when Vista had just been launched, but one of the great things with Windows 8 is that it will still run on this old hardware. Sure it would be better to have a touch screen machine, but money is tight. I did look at getting a new machine, and was tempted by all the new laptops pre installed with the new OS. Some of which looked very affordable. But these are the non touch screen models. The cheapest touch screen Dell I could find was £879.

So I was stuck with my old PC, and I suspect I am in the same boat as the bulk of Windows 8 users, either upgrading or using a cheap machine and no touch UI. So what is it like?

Metro a promise unfulfilled

It is fast to load. But although it was the launch day, it still required updating – as it does on an annoyingly frequent basis. On first impressions it looks slick and tight. The tiles look good and bright, the Metro, (or whatever it is now called) UI is attractively simple looking. But, oh how quickly a dream can be destroyed.

Once you start to use the touch UI it starts to fall apart. The simplicity and cleanliness of the UI is partly down to its distinct lack of functionality. The core apps such as IE, calendar, maps seem so paired down that their functionality is compromised. Surely what has been learnt form the IOS App revolution is that touch screen does not have to mean lack of functionality. Surely even the most basic calendar would make it easy to switch between day, week, month and even year views? But in Windows 8 these options are hidden in the bottom task bar. It seems impossible to move an event from one day to another by dragging, or any other method except going in and changing the event parameters. Could be my lack of touch, but come on get this right.

The issue of off screen controls is surely one which must have raised some issues during the testing. A central tenant of a WYSIWYG interface is the notion that functions are laid out in front of the user, or represented by visual labels or icons. With Metro functionality is hidden at the side, top and bottom. As a new user I found this very hard to get to grips with. What can I do here was never clear. Design concept  over function.

The whole design of Metro seems to be an antidote to the increasing skeuomorthism of Apple’s recent designs. Skeuomorphism is the practice of making a design appear to look like its real world counterpart. So the Apple calendar has a stitched leather header and torn paper embellishments. The design establishment has heavily criticized the approach. Interestingly it does not seem to be a turn off with the general public, or maybe that even in this day of social media they are yet to voice an opinion. It is seen as rather tacky and over ornate. It is against the modernist aesthetic of simplicity and form follows function where the UI is a highly functional element of the design and almost fades into the background. Rather than attempt to draw attention to itself.

The UI is so slimed down it fails to contain sufficient content. Edward Tufte has long crusaded for higher information density. 

"Match the information density in your presentation to the highest resolution newspapers [The Wall Street Journal has the highest resolution of all]" Tufte

While this may be extreme, Metro seems to be taking the PowerPoint school of UI design and putting as little content as possible into its screens. Metro is not alone this delusional view of communication is rife in the marketing and design community. It is taken to its extreme in apps like Haiku Deck where you are advised to only use minimum words to explain a concept. At least in a presentation the presenter will expand upon the limited message. On a device you are alone and want to consume, not simply admire the design.

And then there is the idea that you do not need to see more than one browser window at once. Surely there is a way of implementing tabs or some other solution. The general lack of multiple windows in the Metro UI is odd for a laptop or PC UI. Granted it is a common limitation of mobile and tablet OS – the notable exception being the defunct WebOS – but once you are on a laptop it should be supported. Microsoft’s answer to this is to make Metro only one half of the OS. (Update, I found the multiple windows – off the top of the screen )

Metro takes minimal design to the extreme. The basic button, is a building block of UI design since the days of the Xerox Star. In Metro it has been stripped down to a level where it is merely a symbolic image with or without a label. Sometime the symbol has no enclosing boundary and the text looks the same as other on screen text. The act of rolling over (which is nonsense on a  touch screen) is  sometimes the only way of knowing that the area is interactive. This is following trends in web design, where visual design and the expected sophistication of the end user negates the need for clear, or what is perceived as excessive visual clues. As someone with a background in design and fine art the design of Metro was alluring. But time and again in web UI evaluation we find that users do need clues. They are not as sophisticated or as quick to grasp what to do or how to do it as we would like. Websites are fashion victims. Of course there is a bedrock of usability design, but the visual design and design tricks evolve and follow trends. Often short term trends. This is not what one wants for an interface which has to last for years. It is a core element and should rid itself of the notion of fashion. I feel Metro is a UI of today, but it is already failing because of its design stance.

Desktop and the demise of the start button

If you want to do real work and forget about touch then you launch the desktop. So now instead of having to learn one way of interacting users have to learn two. Is this a good idea? I expect not, it is a comprimse of a legacy system combined with the need to keep up with new forms of interaction.

The desktop is an evolution of the Windows of the past, but it does have at least one fundamental change which make it harder for old hands to transition. That is the removal of the start button.  I can understand that the start button may not easily sit at the bottom right hand corner anymore because you could have your desktop beside a Metro app. Then it would be easier to miss a hotspot in the corner of that “window”. But its complete removal is a bit extreme.

Once you have managed to get to the desktop, a single click on the Metro start page, but not a global element of the off screen Metro functions – then you instinctively reach for the location of the old start button to run a program. If you click the spot where start was you are thrown back into Metro. To actually open an app without starting from a file you need to:

·      switch back to Metro,

·      access the all apps button from the off screen bottom taskbar,

·      right click on an application and then the bottom taskbar will appear and give you the option to pin to the taskbar.

You are not pinning to this taskbar you will not see any visual indication that you have achieved your task or any confirmation. You are not pinning to the Metro taskbar but the desktop taskbar.

I can’t think of a worse way to introduce people to the new desktop. There is no intuitive way of doing this. There does not seem to be a way of doing it within the desktop environment. I want to change the desktop so I have to go into Metro? If you use the desktop help and search for “start button” you don’t find anything useful. Because the start button does not exist, so there is no help relating to this feature. Try “pin applications to taskbar”, nope no joy. This is bad.

I may be missing something, but I approached Windows 8 as a novice user, I did not watch the introduction videos till after I had struggled for a while, and even then they were of little help. I am an experienced design and usability professional who has worked in UI for 24 years, used more operating systems and their various incarnations than I care to remember. But in the end I had to reach for Google to find an answer to this basic, basic task.

I will battle on with Windows 8 to find its hidden depths. Admittedly within Metro there are some nice features, but I see these problems as fundamental issues. Microsoft may innovate and test to the nth degree, but they still don’t get it user interface or experience design.