Design Ripples

Online banking, warm fuzzies, and the impersonal personal

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 11:23:44 -0700

A few days ago when I logged into my online bank account, I was greeted by a banner wishing me a happy birthday from said bank. It wasn’t exactly my birthday yet, but I still had a split-second reaction of ‘awww, how sweet’ when I saw the message. This is in spite of the fact that I know no one at my bank actually knows who I am, and that banner was probably triggered by some conditional line of code that executed when the date got close to my birthday.

This is yet another example of the ‘impersonal personal’ that technology makes so easy. Another common example is when Facebook reminds you of a friend’s birthday. This frequently triggers a flood of wall posts from well-wishing friends, many of whom would not have had a clue that it was that person’s birthday if Facebook hadn’t told them.

This also reminds me of a device that Jean Paul Jacob mentioned a couple weeks ago at the IBM Almaden Research Center in his delightful yearly multimedia presentation, “The Future is Not What It Used to Be.” The device is a pair of glasses that is integrated with a personal memory organizer (YouTube video here). The idea is that when you meet someone you can store information about them (like their picture and business card info), and then when you meet them again have that information displayed on the inside of your glasses so that it can make it easier for you to pretend that you actually remember who the person is. (This also reminds me of a scene from The Devil Wears Prada, except in that case the personal memory organizers were obsequious humans!)

I wonder if an increase in ‘impersonal personal’ interactions will lead to new ways of showing when something really is personal. It makes me think of how medieval knights raised their helmets as a gesture of friendship, to show that they trusted the other enough to make their noggins vulnerable. This morphed into the gesture of tipping one’s hat, several centuries later. (This may in fact be a totally false urban legend, but since it sounds good and helps me make my point I’m sticking with it.) I wonder if in this age there may be a parallel gesture of (literally or figuratively) raising one’s digitally enhanced memory glasses as a way of showing that none are needed. In other words, is there a way I can show that I remember your birthday, not because I saw it on Facebook or because a line of code executed at the right time, but because it - and you - are important enough for me to remember?

Identity management on the social web

Mon, 4 Aug 2008 20:05:06 -0700

I’ve been following a new web TV series on the open web at thesocialweb.tv. The weekly 15-20 minute episodes consist of a group of panelists covering recent developments and issues in the effort to build the social web, where different social applications all play nicely together and share their data seamlessly.

These tech guys are of course approaching this as a technology problem. The technology is certainly a big part of it, but what seems equally important to me is the issue of identity management. Different social sites frequently serve different purposes, and the data that users put on them is often targeted at different audiences (professional separated from personal, for example). It may make it easier in terms of data entry and maintenance to have profile information flow between them, but this is a nightmare for identity management. It seems that what we need is some type of super application to manage the data flows to the different sites - ‘one site to rule them all’ and provide awareness and control over exactly what is going where (and to whom).

I did hear the first brief mention of identity management in this week’s episode, but I think there really needs to be more critical thought given to the social implications of these technologies. In other words, I think it’s time to call in the social informaticians! =)

On the other hand, I also wonder if the identities of the future will become more seamless. Maybe the children of the digital generation will be so used to playing out their digital lives on the web that maintaining strict boundaries among different facets of life will seem as passé as poodle bangs. Only time will tell.

Physicality and the iPhone

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I am becoming increasingly interested in the physicality of digital artefacts, and my interactions with my iPhone have given me an interesting perspective and opportunity for reflection.

It has been a somewhat weird experience to surf the web on a small device that I am holding. I am used to having to go to my computer, and even though it is a laptop (and therefore semi-portable) I usually use it while sitting at a desk. So I essentially adjust my body to the requirements and optimal configuration of my machine. The iPhone is different. With it, I can be in practically any position, and the machine adapts to whatever position I want to be in. This reversal is more than just a matter of convenience, I think, because it influences my experience of the interaction, even if I can’t quite articulate how or why. It is also strange to feel like I am ‘touching’ web sites. It is almost as if up until now there has been a barrier between me and the web in the form of the artefact (i.e, mouse) that I had to use to interact with it, and now I am interacting with the web directly.

In a slightly different vein, I find it interesting how many of the icons and interaction metaphors of the iPhone are drawn from concrete objects in the physical world. The majority of the icons for the applications I have depict something concrete, with only a few that are on the more abstract side (such as Yelp and Facebook). I have also been surprised at how physical the soft keyboard feels, through its combination of audio and visual feedback.

In short, it seems that physicality is still important - maybe even more important - when objects become virtual.

How my iPhone changed my life

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I love my iPhone 3G. It is a brilliant and elegant design that I have really been enjoying using over the last week or so that we have been together.

This morning though I started to reflect on how it has changed my life. Not in any earth-shattering way, but in the little things. I started this reflection this morning as the alarm went off on my iPhone (I have been using my cell phone as my alarm clock for the last several years, so my iPhone has now taken over these duties). As I groggily picked it up and silenced the alarm, I also noticed that I had several new email messages. It seems I am almost incapable of resisting the inexorable pull of that little red dot, so I threw my usual rule of ‘coffee before email’ out the window and went straight to my inbox before even getting out of bed.

I then started thinking about other times that I succumb to the pull of The Red Dot, and its accompanying you’ve-got-mail sound. In fact, I heard that sound as I was drifting off to sleep last night, and jumped to investigate just like one of Pavlov’s dogs. A few months ago I realized that I could concentrate a lot better if I shut down my email client and just opened it to check for new mail a few times a day. Now, even with my desktop program shut, my email can still bombard me on my iPhone (there may be a way to shut off mail on the iPhone, but if there is I am not aware of it). I sometimes feel like a connectivity junkie, and my iPhone is feeding my habit big time.

I have also realized that most of the time when I jump to look at new email, it is nothing important. Usually I end up jumping so that I can see the latest and greatest marketing spam (or sometimes I get lucky and actually get a coupon). But every once in a while there is something good. And as Pavlov taught us, if you get a reward only once in a while, you will still keep coming back.

I wonder if an email program could be designed to differentiate between the unimportant / insignificant stuff and the things that are important and meaningful (say, from family, friends, or close colleagues) in its notifications. Maybe this could be kind of like a cell phone ringtone. For example, I know when I hear a certain song on my phone that it is a certain friend calling; if it is the generic ringtone, it could be anyone. Or could there be not just a red dot, but also a blue dot, or a green dot? Something that could help me discriminate among the different types of email that I get could at least help me to make sure that I’m jumping for the important ones.

But for right now, I’ve got to go... My iPhone just made a noise.

News portals as mirrors

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I listened to a presentation at the IBM NPUC conference by Deepak Agarwal of Yahoo! last week in which he talked about how the Yahoo! front page content is customized to users based on their browsing history. Essentially, if a user has previously looked at stories about Britney Spears, this increases the likelihood that he will see a story about Britney Spears in the main slot.

It is clearly in Yahoo's interest to show users stories they are interested in, so they will click to view the entire story and see the associated ads. But taking a step back, how is this affecting the way that we as a society get information about the world? When I go to bbcnews.com, I am reasonably confident that the stories on the front page (and especially the leading story) give a fairly accurate snapshot of the current state of the world. I may not necessarily want to hear about political crises, earthquakes, food shortages, etc., or read about them in detail. And yet by going to a news site like BBC News and seeing the headlines related to these issues, I still have at least a surface awareness of what is going on in the world.

The Yahoo! front page is quite different. If I don't view pages related to world events, but do view a lot of stories related to entertainment, I will presumably start to be presented with primarily entertainment stories in the future. It is not clear what Yahoo! users' mental models are, and if they are aware that this customization is happening. If they are not, they could conceivably develop the impression that the really important stories are the ones dealing with entertainment, and remain oblivious to other world events.

This may seem trivial, and perhaps it is. However, since we increasingly get our information about the world through electronic sources, I think this points to the deeper implications of technology design and use. Users should not necessarily be forced to 'eat their vegetables' when it comes to news consumption; and yet when their news site customizes to their preferences and increasingly pigeonholes the content they are shown for the sake of increasing ad revenue, they are not getting a true picture of what is going on. This is fine if they use it for entertainment, not so fine if they use it for establishing their world view. It seems that Yahoo! users at least are increasingly looking into a mirror rather than a window on the world when they go to their Yahoo! front page.