I’m going to class a digital introvert as one who participates in social media or multiplayer games, e.g. has a facebook or twitter account and posts regularly, as opposed to a digital introvert who shuns posting their personal details on t’Interweb, let alone a commentary of their lives, on social media.

There is another category which many of my friends fall into  – that of the lurker. These are the people who have facebook and twitter accounts, read all the posts but never post anything about themselves. Which type are you?

If your TV is reasonably new it is probably a “smart” tv which means it can connect to your home internet connection otherwise it’s a case of connecting your laptop/iPad to your TV with an overpriced HDMI cable. Either way you will now experience a classic HCI issue – the experience changes depending which service you are using as there are no industry standards. This means that currently on a smart TV you can access iPlayer, 4OD, Netflix and a host of other services using a standard ‘Up, Down, Left, Right, Select’ controller. However, each service has a different way of displaying their content so the Down control in one service might move you through the channels while in another it moves you through time or genre. It’s a similar experience if you’ve connected your laptop to your TV. It leads to a lousy user experience and TV viewers are used to the “Zap” factor where it just works with no delays and no need for reboots.

One way of dealing with this would be to have one interface on your smart TV that “deep links” to the content through a common interface. So, if I’m a Sky or Virgin TV customer my TV could show all their content, plus any other subscriptions such as Lovefilm or Netflix, plus all the free services such as iPlayer, plus all my recorded programmes through one content guide. That way you only have to learn one method of navigation rather than multiple differing ways. I wonder if this is what Steve Jobs meant in his biography when he said “finally cracked it” with regards to TV.

The "Everything is fine" Alarm

Here are the four types of Hyper Feedback:
a) unnecessary as you are acutely aware of the action you have taken;

If you take your seat belt off to open a gate and you don’t bother replacing it for the remaining 5 metre journey in a driveway. And yet the car will beep at you incessantly.

b) continuous or repetitive;
The classic here is the car alarm. (aside: when has anybody ever heard a car alarm and called the police to report a potential crime?) Any alarm that continues will cause habituation and will therefore negate its own usefulness slowly through logic.
An oven timer beeps to let you know that food is ready. This is a good interaction. If it beeped once. But some won’t stop. You have to race to the oven not because the food might spoil but to prevent beep-induced insanity.

c) unintelligible but insistent;

These are the error messages that tell you the Core Creezel needs Reshevelling to prevent Error Code 3546 self-referencing.

d) excessive – you’re just too darn loud!

The sheer number of messages that emerge on a Windows screen and fade away notifying available updates, files changes and that devices are working (I assume they work – tell me when they don’t)

So for those of you with kids, how many boxes of Hyper Feedback can a crying baby tick?

Alarm image courtesy of gameanna

Smog
This is an anagram of GOMS or Goals, Operators, Methods and Selection rules. As it gives a quantifiable measure of HCI it’s popular among academics and the more engineering-led areas of HCI. Rarely spotted in London design agencies.

Flat Wits
An anagram of Fitts Law which models the act of pointing so can be used to prove that it’s easier to click on a bigger button or something at the limit of movement such as the edge of a screen.

Big Mucous Input Quoit
Or Ubiquitous Computing which is a post-desktop view of human-computer interaction where you may not even be aware you are using a computer. The Smartphone is taking us there.

Banjo Eel Skin
Anagram of Jakob Nielsen who knows rather a lot about this usability malarkey.

Bandsmen Herein
or Ben Schneiderman who is an expert on Information Visualisation (not to be confused with Data Visualisation)

Sadly, nobody won the URL to purchase a Porsche. Better luck next year.

No quiz is complete without a prize so the winner will receive a link so that they can buy themselves a brand new Porsche 911. That’s right, I will send the winner a link so they can buy themselves a new car with their own money, shaving almost seconds off having to search for the link themselves. In fact, as it’s the season of goodwill, if anybody posts the correct answers I will then post this shiny new URL so everybody can use it.

So here they are, answers on a virtual postcard in the comments section below:

Smog;

Flat Wits;

Big Mucous Input Quoit;

Banjo Eel Skin;

Bandsmen Herein.

Good luck and Happy New Year!

“But when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride I’m gonna give you some terrible thrills…” – The Rocky Horror Picture Show

There are two main ways of watching TV: sitting on your couch in front of a large screen connected to a cable or satellite dish probably with some kid of hard drive attached that lets you record programmes, or watching some flavour of Internet service. There are 3 main ways of getting Glee, The Premiership or Fight Club over t’Internet:

- Watching a Live TV service such as BBC’s Watch Live service;
- Catching up on TV streamed from the internet such as ITV Player;
- Watching media downloaded previously and stored on your device using a service such as iTunes.

The two experiences are very different. TV is high quality and instantly responsive to your channel changes. If you want to watch Masterchef on your tablet it can be a bit hit and miss. If watching live you better have a good internet connection which is not always predictable outside your own home and watching a pre-recorded show means you have to have thought about it and downloaded it in advance.

One neat way of combining these two services comes from Ubiquitous Computing. Apple’s iCloud gives a good indication of how these two worlds will merge. This service automatically keeps all your documents, apps etc. synchronised on all your connected devices. So, if you take a photo on your phone while out and about, when you come home it will already be on your laptop. Now imagine you’ve recorded The Deerhunter on your PVR and you begin watching it at home but have to travel by tube where there is (currently) no WiFi. How cool would it be if the remainder of the film had been loaded to your tablet/laptop/phone in the background and it knew exactly where you were so you could continue watching it seamlessly?

With Sony buying up the rest of Sony Ericsson yesterday, mobile gaming is the current platform which many designers are building for.
“This acquisition makes sense for Sony and Ericsson, and it will make the difference for consumers, who want to connect with content wherever they are, whenever they want,” said Sony’s chairman Sir Howard Stringer.

Eddie Capstick

My first ever commercial job, was within the Virtual Reality lab at the University of Essex, and although my main role was to create a well designed website for the university (back in ’96), my other responsibility was to promote virtual reality. I’d fallen in love with immersive experiences at a young age, reading fiction, and playing computer games starting with an Atari, then a BBC B computer (while friends had ZX spectrums and Commodore 64’s). For me, my favourite games, were the ones you could play together with friends, both against each other, but especially collaboratively.

I now study social computer games as a PhD, within UCLIC (University College London Interaction Centre).  I’m really interested in how social games have impacted upon the immersive experience, but when I say immersion here, I don’t mean the physical nature of being within a virtual cave, it’s the psychological feeling of being connected to the computer game (or disconnected from the ‘real world’).  Some people use terms like, ‘in the zone’, ‘being inside the game’, or ‘flow’, to describe their feelings when playing a game and ‘totally inside it’. I’ve played games like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4, and I’ve found the social aspects of playing with, and against, sometimes on my own, but still able to chat or not if I want to others who also are playing highly enjoyable. Trillions of people-hours have been spent playing games already, and with mobile games on the rise, like Angry Birds (downloaded over 160 million times in 18 months), what next for gaming?

…watch out for new Augmented Reality Games. For me there are just so many exciting possibilities with augmentation. I watched a demo last year at Game 10, hosted by Imperial University, London, where just by changing aspects of a room, like your bedroom, the gameplay instantly changes. We watched a miniature car being driven which ‘hit’ a coffee cup, and launched off an upward angled piece of paper, and in realtime you could take away that coffee cup and no more barrier existed. Now I remember in Scalextric, there was alot of fun in building the right circuit, imagine how much creativity you could have if everything you own could be part of the gaming environment!? Couple this with mobile gaming, then everything, everyone is part of the gaming world (even if you don’t know you are). On their mobile screen, you have just been shot with a paintball, and scored 200 points for a headshot…’ouch’, and they didn’t even ask your name!

Eddie Capstick
References:

‘Sony buys the rest of mobile phone firm Sony Ericsson’, 27 October 2011 ,

UCLIC (Interaction Centre at University College London) (new Professor: Yvonne Rogers)

VASE Lab (Virtual Reality lab at University of Essex) (created by Adrian Clark)

‘New Games Link Tech and Reality’,   4 March 2011

Games research from a Human Computer Interaction group  (created by Charlene Jennett).

Game conference (Information found here)

Dom Joly

According to this Fast Company article the iPhone 5 is going to be heavy on voice recognition for all major tasks including text, mail and GPS. Moreover, it will be utilising Wolfram Alpha to enable natural language queries and create an interface like a personal assistant.

Sounds interesting but I’m not holding my breath. Despite voice recognition improving and there being many excellent commercial products available it has never become popular in the office environment due to noise, distraction and privacy concerns.

In the mobile arena it is already fairly well integrated into Android phones though is not a hugely popular feature. Dragon Dictation can be used to speak texts and emails etc. on many platforms and although useful it is hardly the default even for users who have it installed. Would a teenager really want to share what they are texting with the rest of the bus? I think not though I’d be quite interested if they would.

If Apple had cracked natural language queries then I’m sure they would have sold the algorithms to Google by now as that would radically change our relatinships with search engines. Ask Jeeves tried it but it never really worked. So what about the Wolfram Alpha connection? Well it’s great for comparing say, two stocks over a defined period, but try using it to find out if it rains more in Cardiff or California.

There were MP3 players before the iPod and there were mobile phones before the iPhone but Apple has a way of disrupting the status quo and getting consumers to behave and consume in unanticipated ways. My guess is they won’t be doing it with the iPhone 5 but as Niels Bohr remarked, Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

It started simply with a friend mailing some other friends with some recommendations of books he had recently read. Everyone on the list joined in with more suggestions, reviews of books that many of us had read and general comments about how our group tended towards non-fiction. Some of the more popular books included blink, Freakonomics and Black Swan which has not recently been made into a movie about dancing.

The conversation ended abruptly but with a whimper rather than a bang. To understand why such an enjoyable thread would stop dead we must look at another phenomenon that occurs in online forums, Godwin’s Law.

It states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” In other words, given enough time, in any online discussion someone will compare a point of debate to beliefs held by Hitler and the Nazis. When a party makes this comparison they lose the argument and the thread ends as Godwin argued that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.

So did my informal book club make comparisons to Nazis? If only. One participant, nicknamed Truff, made a single comment and what actually happened has given rise to Truff’s Law:

Jeffrey Archer

“As an online discussion about books grows longer, the probability of someone saying they like Jeffrey Archer approaches 1.”

And thus, the thread ended.

For example, we could at first start with the idea of a tourist visiting London who wants to find their way around. We might start with the idea of an app with a map. As we delve further into the needs and goals of the tourist we might discover that it’s not a map they need but a GPS system with popular destinations built in.

So when I received the following mail from Padraic, it was like I’d been handed a detailed, real-life user journey with a view to solving a user issue.

“This weekend is the start of Summer holidays. As a result, don’t ask why, I’m driving on my own from Lyon to Carcassonne on Saturday a journey of around 500km. This begs the question what do you listen to when you’re in the car for hours at a time?

In the bad old days this meant mix tapes followed by those books of CDs but inevitably due to boredom, repetition or argument “How about ABBA? No! I want Radiohead. Not in the morning, how about Lily Allen as a compromise?” you ended up on French radio stations like NRJ or FUN where you got stuff you knew along with awful French pop, not that Radio 1 or Capital are much better.  Next came the iPod and the hell that was the FM transmitter, the lengths we went to to get those working said everything about most radio stations.

Anyway most of us now have medium to full iPod connections in our cars as standard or retrofitted.  So it either comes up on the nav screen and works via the steering wheel controls (full) or you plug it in and it plays through the system but you change tracks on the iPod itself (medium).  This is fantastic and obviously changes the whole nature of long drives.  Some people have an inbuilt 30gb jukebox in their cars for music and the next generation of BMWs will be able to sync wirelessly with your iTunes if it’s parked at the house but this is still basically your iPod. My problem is I still find myself eventually getting bored by albums and podcasts on a really long drive and yearn for the randomness of radio not to mention the occasional voice.  Genius playlists are one option and they are quite useful to mine the unlistened to stuff you have but it’s not the same as radio.  In car wifi to stream the radio is getting common and is an easy retrofit but like a 3G iPad it doesn’t roam, you would need to have an unlimited data French SIM to swap in which isn’t very practical.

Driving to Holyhead in Feb and back a week later we listened to 6Music all the way and never touched the iPod so how do you get that in France without incurring massive roaming charges?

Turns out you can, sort of, if you have a medium iPod connection or the inbuilt jukebox system.  If you have a radio app on your phone you can record the radio to listen later.  So today I am taping 6Music from 10am to 4pm on my phone and on Saturday I will get in the car, hit play and get non stop radio with only the news bulletins sounding odd.  The reason this doesn’t work on a fully integrated system is that the music is stored via the app and doesn’t appear in your music library.

Anyone else have any tips or ideas for good sounds on long drives?  Where would Spotify fit in if at all?  Can you track down the file with the taped radio in the app and make it discoverable in your normal music library?”

This then generated a wealth of ideas and suggestions like a miniature crowdsource which resulted in the following tried and tested solution:
“A follow up post holiday…
Playing back taped radio (Internet radio box app) on the continent for long journeys is unquestionably the future.  I had it both ways and I think crucially I was driving around the time I had taped, 10am-4pm, so it fitted in well.  A night time show would sound odd mid afternoon.”

Interesting use of the word ‘taped’. I wonder if people under 25 would have said ‘recorded’ instead? Any other ideas for long journeys