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

Hot Tap

In order to dispense hot water for beverages, two buttons must be simultaneously depressed to ensure your hand is not in the way of the hot water. However, this means you must place your mug on the tray which makes the water splash out which could also scald you and splashes coffee etc.onto the surrounding surface. Should a device as simple as a hot tap require instructions?

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Cigarette Warnings

English cigarettes on the left, Irish on the right. The impact of the warning on Irish cigarettes is reduced by having the warning in two languages which reduces the font size and therefore the impact. Further, placing the warning in Irish first is questionable in a country where English is the most readily understood language. Is it a deliberate and cynical ploy by Irish tobacco manufacturers to reduce the effectiveness of the warning or is it an accidental consequence of political correctness?

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Panic

Here’s a sign in a lift which in case of emergency does not reassure sure you that help will be imminent and that you should remain calm but rather that you should press the button repeatedly. I’m surprised there wasn’t a second sign saying “Screaming is not discouraged.”

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And finally (Esther), did they need such an evocative picture?

Dog Sign

The Cognitive Tasks

These tasks are cerebral in nature and include activities such as remembering a telephone number and engaging in conversation. These tasks can disrupt driver performance by diverting attention to an engaging cognitive context other than the one associated with driving.

Driving and Talking

Driving relies on visual attention while tasks involved in holding a conversation require non-visual attention. These tasks occur in two separate modalities: the visual-spatial and the verbal-auditory. Multiple-resource theory suggests that it is most difficult to divide attention within a single modality, but that there is a less, and perhaps still significant, interference across modalities. This implies that as driving and using a phone occur in different modalities it should pose less of a distraction than if they occurred in the same modality. However, there is still a risk in dividing attention between the two risks.

Distraction Comparisons

It is reasoned that if it is the attention switching that causes the most distraction, and not the physical act of holding the phone, then it raises the question as to whether we should stop the driver from engaging in conversations with other passengers or listening to a radio. The comparison of the two types of conversation reveals that because the passenger and the driver share the same environment they can both recognise road dangers and employ subtle communication which allows them to alter their conversation accordingly. Also, attending to verbal material, such as listening to a book on tape, does not produce the same detrimental effect that phone conversation does in producing dual-task interference. It is suggested that a passive activity such as this can be ignored when appropriate and that full attention can be directed towards the primary task of driving.

There is another, more subtle, cognitive effect at work that may influence the attention of a driver. The very act of speaking to somebody who is not present seems to cause a distinct type of distraction as the speaker focuses his attention in a notional place that represents the person with whom he is speaking.

A Driver perspective

The benefits to allowing the use of a phone in a car include personal security and the ability to report accidents and crimes quickly. In one study, 39% of drivers who had a motor collision while using a mobile phone then used the phone to call the emergency services.

In experiments measuring headway, it was shown that drivers can compensate for the increased risk of using a phone while driving by increasing their distance between their car and the one in front. This effect can often be nullified as they may be unaware of the impact of the phone on their ability to react and thus not make the adjustment. It may also be because drivers tend to overestimate their driving ability.

An interesting finding from experiments in dual-task driving studies is that subjects can improve with practice. This raises interesting training and testing alternatives to banning mobile phones outright.

It would now be very difficult to enact a total ban on phones in cars relying on evidence that was available during the first law. Similarly, those that did purchase a car kit would have a legitimate reason for complaint.

Texting. Hmm, let’s leave that for another day but remember phones don’t crash cars – people do.

Indicator Bars

Yet there is no consistent number of bars between any of them. The volume on a TV set might have 100 graduations while the WiFi strength indicator has only six. However, we easily understand when our battery is running low and we never have to ask someone to turn up the volume by fifteen units.

However, there is also no consistent name for all these disparate indicator bars, therefore I suggest the using the word “Bleem.”

“Turn up the TV a few bleems’

“I’ve got full bleems on the WiFi”

“I need to recharge my phone – I’ve only got one bleem”

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