Netbooks lead the way on how we’ll be using our mobile phones in the near future

Netbooks are set to revolutionize the mega-trend “Cloud computing” sweeping the technology landscape.

Based on some findings released by ThinkFree based on a survey they conducted, Netbooks are mainly being used for for business, entertainment and communication. Another survey noted that Netbooks will be used as secondary devices. Let’s analyze how they’re being used in each of these categories.

Business

Primarily used for reviewing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and making minor edits, but not generally treating netbooks the primary machine for these applications.

My Opinion: As they are treated as secondary devices, I don’t expect people to pay for Microsoft Office. Thunderbird, Open Office etc are sufficient for simple email management and some word processing.

Entertainment

Browsing the web, listening to music and viewing/editing photos.

My Opinion: As browser and media player are anyway free, Picasa can easily be used for viewing and quick image editing and posting photos to the net.

Communication

Sending email, IM, making VOIP calls and creating blog posts.

Next Step

Since it’s not replacing the laptop, I think what’s basically missing
is a phone added to the mix. I don’t see why users will want to carry
mobile, netbook and laptop at the same time. I foresee a Nokia communicator type device with decent screen size and usable keypad to overtake the Netbook just like Smarphones overtook the PDA. The software being used will need to be adopted for this new phone, that said, software to do all the above already exists for mobiles, it just needs to be made more easy to use.

With larger screen size and better keyboard I don’t see a reason why we’ll not see Netbooks being phased out to give way for the next generation of mobile phones.

Is this thought too outlandish? What do you think?

Email 2.0: Google Wave solves the “See comments inline” problem

Image by marketingfacts via Flickr

Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web. The biggest problem it solves is that you no longer have to reply to someone by saying “See comments inline” copying and pasting the email body and responding to specific points in the conversation. Wave allows you to respond within the original message itself while maintaining the context.

Users can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add others. It also allows replying to the other’s replies. Additionally, replies/edits are seen real-time, letter by letter, as they are typed so besides email it can also be used for instant messaging and real-time collaboration.

Oh, and you can also “playback” the thread to check the order which it was edited, and who edited/modified what and when. Pretty neat stuff.

For more, check out the video of it’s launch

The obvious next step is to incorporate it in the Blog Commenting System. WordPress, hope you’re listening… beat Blogger to the punch, after all, it’s open source.

Going beyond Usability: The need to design for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust

Dr. Eric Schaffer, founder and CEO of Human Factors International talks about his new design approach christened PET Design. It offers a new approach to help companies influence and deepen their interactions with online customers through Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust.

Eric talks about the evolution of software from the early days, when software, hardware were differentiators which have now become a commodity… similarly, he says, usability was a differentiator but it’s now become essential. You have to have great software and hardware and it has to be usable. The differentiator now, he believes, is to make the software more persuasive and engaging.

just because a site is easy to use doesn’t mean it will engage customers and meet business goals

Although I completely agree with Eric, I don’t think this is a revelation… you obviously need to design products that engage the customers so that you can meet business goals, and I can’t think of any Product Manager or UX designer not trying to do that from the outset.

I for one have always designed my products to engage the user and provide a differentiated experience than the competition in order to meet my business goals. As you can tell, all the above factors are linked and all must be satisfied for a successful product.

I give Eric one thing though.. Usability is no longer a differentiator, it’s a must have.

Is it just me or do you think that this is what we’ve been doing all along anyway?

What makes a mobile phone tick?

Isn’t this the million dollar question… although there are no straight answers, here are two important factors to consider while designing phones (or any product for that matter)

• Ensure the phone’s features are integrated with each other while maintaining ease of use in a meaningful way. It’s not about cramming more features, it’s about making those features work together to support a lifestyle. The buying decision comes down to the buyer’s perceived expectation of how well the phone will fulfill certain tasks. In other words, how well does a phone fit into the life of a consumer?

• Buying decisions are mostly driven by emotions, and we then use our intellect to add reasons and defend our emotional decision. Finding out these emotions is very important.

2009 Bad Usability Calendar

A quick post. 2009 Bad Usability Calendar is a one-page ebook that captures 12 usability mistakes on a single page. Must read for anyone desiging products.

Users can’t predict what features they “need”

Product Managers often turn to gathering requirements about their product by talking to the customers, asking them what their requirements are. Talking to internal stakeholders like sales, marketing etc and drawing up a list of features. Sounds like a great process to go about designing a product or feature, just one problem… Users don’t know what they want until they see what they get.

People didn’t know what features they needed in an iPhone. They just needed to be able to do some things like: staying in contact with friends, checking your favorite websites, want a phone that is easy to understand, knowing upfront how much it’s going to cost to use the phone etc

In an interview, Maryam Mohit, the guy responsible for online customer experience at Amazon talks about how the collaborative filtering navigation mechanism for book recommendations on Amazon.com was inspired by users, but didn’t come directly from their comments

“It’s a combination of listening really hard to customers, and innovating on their behalf. For example, quite awhile ago we developed the “similarities” feature – the one that says “people who bought this also bought that.” In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they’d say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had. That’s an example where there was a need expressed by customers, but the innovation was taking that general need and making the leap to a technology that meets that need in a new way.”

What’s really needed is to identify the unmet needs and gaining insight into customer’s real problems. We can’t accomplish this by asking them what they want but observing them over a period of time, figuring out what they’re struggling with, gain insights into their deep-seated desires and innovate on their behalf.

Note: No one said it was easy

Understanding ‘User Needs’ a Mobile Social Network can satisfy

Mobile phone enables real-time feedback from the users and enables him to live in the moment. When you are surfing the Web with a stationary PC at home, you are either accessing information about some past events, or some real-time information about some event a distance away. In contrast, with mobile phone you can take part in the event, capture it, provide comments and share all this with others. Mobile phone therefore provides richer social interaction. The core of mobility is not movement but context. Adding context-awareness to services brings about complexity, but at the same time lots and lots of possibilities.

In a previous post, I had written about a few mobile social networking scenarios. Now before we go designing something, it’s important to understand the user needs that the product will satisfy. Here I want to put forth my take on what user needs I felt a mobile social network can satisfy based on which I created those scenarios.

• Get updates on what’s going on with my social circle whenever I have time or feel the need to check on them.
  
• Conversation is what the whole deal is about. It’s easy to see who’s available to chat right now and a conversation can be started anytime/anywhere.
• Transmit my location to let others know where I am at the moment so they can interact with me based on that
• Find out if there are any friends near my location.
  This would be better executed with a map as user gets a visual reference of proximity of his friends, and can figure out exactly where all of them are easily in reference to his own location, much more powerful than say 10 street addresses. Narrowing down or expanding the field is useful if to get him those friends in range with whom he can interact with at that moment
• Instantly share my thoughts or pics/videos with my social circle and get instant feedback from those who may be tuned in.
• I’m at a location and curious about what others have done at or said about this location, phone can bring up photos, videos of the location and comments entered for the location
• As the number of friends increase, the noise level increases and it’s very tiresome to sort through them on a mobile. If there’s a person or group that user is most interested in at any time, he shouldn’t have to parse through the entire feed, he should be able to get updates just from that person or group.
• All said and done, privacy is a big concern. There are some things I can share with all my friends, others I only want to share with close friends and some I want to share only with family. These concerns must be addressed and user should be put in total control of his privacy settings.
• For a mobile social network to be of any use to me, it must work on my friend’s phones as well.

I feel a mobile social network is best implemented when integrated with the Phonebook. See Finally… Phonebook gets social for why I think so and advances being made on this front.

Why isn’t Voice-based UI mainstream?

There’s a very interesting discussion this topic on IXDA. I have summarized the main reasons below

Social

• Imagine 4 people in a small office all talking to their computers every 2 seconds to say “new window….scroll down… stop…up… select file….”. Imagine how noisy a cube farm of just 20 people talking to their computer would get
• Us humans rely heavily on being able to communicate. Our survival as a species depends on it, and our success is a direct result of the ability we have to understand each other.
  We are hard-wired to be really upset when we cannot make ourselves understood. At the gut-level, mis-communication is a threat, and so when the system doesn’t understand us, we lose trust in it’s ability to help us
• The main problem with voice is still social/ psychological. How do you talk to a machine?
  I’ve looked at a bunch of Sync videos on Youtube – people are obviously feeling uneasy talking to their car

Cognitive

• It creates more cognitive load to verbalize what you want something on screen to do and then say it, then confirm that it has worked;
• Humans work better by recognition rather than recall. Visual UI’s aid recognition, while voice UI basically requires good recall. You’d have to remember the exact command that’d generate desirable response
• It is essentially serial, as opposed to visual UI which is parallel. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of voice based interaction with a computer. This is one of the reasons why I think the iPhone’s visual vmail was such a hit. In this respect, the computer would really need to get to the level of a human-human interaction – just “knowing” when to interrupt and when to get interrupted in order to carry a serial interaction with almost parallel efficiency

Technical

• Dealing with accents, sound levels, ambient noise etc.
• The computer would need to understand what we ‘mean’ as opposed to visual UI where we click what the computer has to offer
• Recognizers usually tend to miss-recognize short words that would feel intuitive to the user, such as “back” and “next” and “stop” What you are left with as the a designer is “Go back, Play next, Stop now” – words that consumers would never think to say, and frankly irritate them.
• Let’s assume though that they do make the effort to learn the keywords, and are alone (or ignore the folks at the office). They open their mouth wide and say “Plaaay Neeeext.” only to be faced with their worst fear: “I’m sorry, I couldn’t understand that.”
• The system faces problems about accuracy because of background noise
• I find interactive voice response difficult at best, but frequently infuriating. As many people have been indicating, error rates are high, and what you intuitively think you need to say to get the response you need is not necessarily the command that the response system requires in order to get that action. My own experiences with interactive voice response have generally ended with me trying to usurp the system by pressing the * key repeatedly, which does usually boot you out of the system and land you on the phone with a real live human
• Even at 99.99% voice recognition reliability (plus the absurd 100% natural language parsing reliability we see in the movies) , every command interaction that involves a non-trivial, unrecoverable change in state is going to require a confirmation phase: “I think you said ‘Go Left’. Is that correct?”
  One-way auditory signals are a great thing, even under high-stress conditions. Two-way auditory communication requires a mix of trust and half-duplex hand-shake negotiation, and that last bit is the deal- breaker for unreliable computer voice recognition.

Conclusion

I think Voice UI will not become primary mode of interaction in the near future for obvious reasons. It’ll be used mostly when Visual UI is difficult to use i.e while driving a car, taking care of babies, performing surgical procedure etc

What’s your take on this?

Note: These are only some of the responses. You can visit the original IXDA post to view all the responses

Why haven’t Video Calls (Mobile Video Telephony) taken off?

Image via Wikipedia

It was supposed to be the next big thing but it seems to have fizzled out like MMS. It failed in many 3G-enabled countries that deployed it. Gartner’s consumer mobile hype cycle (July 2007) claims that wireless video calling has failed to create any excitement in the mobile industry, with no demand from either consumers or business users.

Nokia’s VP feels video calling was not successful because it turns you ugly

it’s because the angle at which the front-facing cams are held gives callers a view of your face that “isn’t very flattering.” He mentioned that most webcams are typically placed just above the user’s line of sight, which gives a more pleasing view of the face; obviously, that’s not something you can practically do with your phone most of the time

The first thing that came across my mind was Privacy. You would have to use the speakerphone to do video calls (unless you’re on BT headset or hands-free, which is not true for an overwhelming majority of people) and this compromises privacy in a big way…no one wants people nearby snooping in on their conversations.

I felt there has to be much more to it than just these two reasons, so I asked this question to LinkedIn and IXDA communities to get a feel for why video calls failed from Business and User Experience perspectives, and I received several great responses. I have summarized the primary reasons below.

• Handset Availability (in techtalk Device Penetration)
• Call Quality (in techtalk Quality of Service)
• Perceived as too costly
• Privacy
• Don’t want the other person to see how I look
• Inconvenient
• Can’t do anything else while on Video Call
• Video doesn’t add much to the conversation

Handset Availability

3G handset penetration is still low. How do you know if the other party has the service configured? [Marketing Manager at South East Asia at Ericsson]

Perhaps the number of devices supporting video telephony. At least I don’t know anyone who to video call… [Product Marketing Manager - New Business at Universal Electronics]

Call Quality

Video needs to constantly buffer, video breaks up, resolution is low, slow connection, etc. [Owner, www.idesignsgroup.com]

Video call demands for much greater bandwidth with high sensitivity to latency and frame size. For the longest time, the available video codecs are just not efficient enough on its compression to effect full frame rate video call [Principal at CSC]

Video Calls are bandwidth heavy, and unreliable in terms of quality. Sometimes it’s good other times choppy etc. It has to work like TV all the time from any location. Sort of how audio phoning works [Principal Interaction Designer at Oracle USA]

Perceived as too costly

When it was launch the price was 2 or 3 times more expensive than a voice call. Today in most of the countries it’s the same but there is a perception that it’s still expensive [Marketing Manager at South East Asia at Ericsson]

Price is a barrier or perhaps customers still perceive it as luxury service [Projects Specialist at Telenor Mobile]

Privacy

I think the reasons are psychological rather than anything to do with the cost. People don’t want their privacy to be invaded. Nobody wants to talk on a loud speaker in public. [Sr. RF Consultant]

Do you want to see your boss face , when you just wake up? Probably not. [Marketing Manager at South East Asia at Ericsson]

When you’ve got anything worth displaying in the video, it’s also often too loud and/or impolite to speak through a loudspeaker. Everybody else is there too. Imagine a shop, an office, or a museum. [Senior Interaction Designer, iXDesign]

Don’t want the other person to see how I look

A few other perceptions besides what Nokia’s VP feels:

Ordinary people on a video phone don’t look like people on video should look. We’re all used to seeing people on television who are in make up, well lighted, and in carefully chosen clothing. On a video phone, the presentation of an individual is underwhelming [Technical writer and editor]

Most video calls are designed to extend the concept of a phone call to include video representations of the speakers. As a potential user, I have to ask myself two questions:

1. How do I look?
2. What will the other party learn from seeing me and what will I learn from seeing the other party?

In most cases, the answers aren’t reassuring. I look like a grizzled old coot with a scowl (I’m squinting at the screen). The other party will probably look a lot worse than they would in person. That won’t help either one of us and neither of us will go very far out of our way to use it. [Associate Professor at Auburn University and Owner, interactive Point of View]

If you saw my hair right now, you’d have your answer!
I’m only joking with you just a little — there’s actually quite a bit of truth in my answer.

It really is about image. If you can’t project a Hollywood standard in a video call (and most cannot) — it’s probably a good idea to stick to audio calls. [Writer, Covering the Internet Marketing & Presentation Beats]

You don’t want the other person to see how bored you look by what’s being said or the person you’re having an affair with in the background. [Owner, Digital TX Ltd and IPTV/VoD Consultant]

When you’re in a place that you chose for privacy to make the call, you’ll look creepy in the video. Just look at all the self-made webcam videos in Youtube and you know what I mean [Senior Interaction Designer, iXDesign]

Inconvenient

It’s not convenient to setup video calls typically (too complicated to setup, call connection takes too long, etc.) Need to have the camera constantly track your face (who wants to constantly hold a device looking at their face and always adjust to keep it there) [Owner, www.idesignsgroup.com]

It’s too much hassle to sit in the right place, have the right lighting etc. to make it worthwhile. I remember when I first used webcams (low res, choppy etc.) the excitement of seeing someone from another part of the world was quickly overcome by constantly wanting to ‘place’ them such that I could be ‘eye to eye’ with them, and be able to see their face properly etc. Typically, lights behind the person that work fine as local ambient light are terrible for the person on the other end of the call – all they see is a silhouette [Principal Interaction Designer at Oracle USA]

Can’t do anything else while on a video call

For video calling you need to have your phone in front of you, which makes other movements and task much less convenient [Managing Director at econet.hu Group's eMusic]

One of the benefits of the phone is that you can multitask…you don’t have to actually pay attention to the conversation (My god, if my mother had a video phone, I’d be dead). [User Experience Consulting & Project Management]

Audio calls, SMS, voicemail, MMS, all can be done while doing something else, either synchronously or asynchronously.

The problem with virtual or simulated experience compared to other extensions of dialogue modes that are more abstract is that it’s just better doing the real thing.  Abstracted communication forms can be highly efficient, they save time, or allow for deeper time when they enter into polychronic modes (a group of friends texting one night as they meet up here or there, or any group social event whether in the real world or some extension of it or a combination of the two like people attending SXSW texting and twittering.)

The asynchronous forms don’t really tax our sense of being that much (obsessive compulsions aside, a problem in any case), you can still very much be focused and present in your being while carrying on a SMS or Twitter exchange with people over time.  So it seems to me, that “video calls” will only ever be a fraction of the usage say synchronous audio phone calls [Social Media Blogger]

Video doesn’t add much to the conversation

Simply seeing the other person on the other end of the line adds very little to the communication. [Director of User Experience at Qik]

In most cases, voice is more than adequate. What real benefit does adding video have to a conversation? You can look at how they interact with you and others, you can recognize cues that you would normally not when just using voice or text, etc…. I don’t think there has been a substantial business case to warrant this in the consumer space [Manager, Information Architecture and Content Management - Trapeze Group]

It’s still remote, and not in person. Pretty much anything you can do with video calls you can do over the phone….so what’s the advantage for all this cost and complexity?
There’s definitely value in it for some uses… but enough to go mainstream… not really. Most people don’t have a need. Even if the technology improved… that wouldn’t create a need. [Web Developer @ CBS Interactive]

Conclusion

It seems like another example where technology has been put before user needs.

The main problem is understanding user behavior and how people use technology. Nobody is taking in consideration what consumers want and the way they behave. This is a typical case were the Telecom industry had put technology before the consumer understanding [Marketing Manager at South East Asia at Ericsson]

Most of the resistance is due to a combination of psychology and a subtle, individual cost-benefit analysis [Associate Professor at Auburn University and Owner, interactive Point of View]

Does this mean it’s the end of the line for video calling…. certainly not…. from the responses I received, turns out there are a few things it’s got going for it. I’ll be covering those in the post FOR video calling.

Note: These are some of the responses I received. You can visit the original LinkedIn question and IXDA post to view all the responses.

What I want from my Mobile Social Network

In a previous post Social Networking and the Mobile Phone, I had discussed how mobile can extend the reach of a social network and open up new ways of socializing. I have gone through a couple of mobile social networks out there and they are nowhere near my expectations. So I decided to list down a few scenarios for you to consider.

Scenarios

• I open the client from phone menu, it opens quickly and I get recent photos/updates from my friends.
• I can easily send updates from main page itself.
• I open a map and my friends are mapped onto their locations in the map, I can narrow down the map by giving a radius of say 1 KM, 5 KM, 10 KM.
• I can easily start conversations with my friends
• I can classify friends in groups/categories and choose how much of my profile is visible to which group
• I can follow updates from a single friend or a group/category
• I am at a location and I can choose to see who else from the network is there, I can see their profiles and nudge someone I want to connect with. If they nudge back I can start a conversation.
• When I post something, I can also send the update to any other networks I’m active in as well, including say Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed.
• I take photos and videos from the camera and select post to <network> from the menu, I add my comments, geo-tags are automatically added and media is uploaded
• I enter (or point to) a location in the map; and photos, videos of the location and comments entered for the location are shown in a map indicating exact positions of photo/video/comment entry.
• My location is automatically updated. I can choose the level of detail of the location i.e. update only city, or just the locality or exact location. I can also choose to go “offline” where my location will not be published.
• If I just want to send a text update, I am able to do so via SMS.

Listed above are a few things I want to be able to do, now here’s something I don’t want to do - Check for compatibility with my phone, download a client etc; it should just be there on the main menu. Social networks that tie up with carriers and/or handset manufactures will be better positioned than those who are not.

This is just the beginning

This is just the “What to implement” part (and that too off the top of my head), what’s equally important is “How it’s implemented”. This is where Visual and Interaction design will play a key role in designing the experience. Making sure interface is clear (as in not cluttered) and visually appealing, user is easily able to do things that he wants to do (as in relevant options are readily available, contextual navigation will play a part here) etc etc. Oh and don’t forget performance….oh yes, engineering has a part to play as well