The EchoUser Experience

A last minute glitch and I could not get international roaming activated on my cell phone. This was the first time I was going to be without a convenient access to a phone while on an international trip. I wasn’t happy…

First stop Hong Kong airport, and I was pleasantly surprised to find the complete airport WiFi enabled. I was able to use Skype on my iPhone to talk back home, check my emails and send updates to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. So far, so good…

My entire stay in San Francisco, I must admit I never missed not having cellular connection…it seemed like the entire city was WiFi enabled even though it was only in parts. Any restaurant, shop, pub I found myself in had WiFi so staying connected was a breeze. In all my years in the US and my trips there over the last 3 years, I never saw WiFi so entrenched in the ecosystem until now.

It goes without saying that WiFi enabled Internet access on mobile phones is the way of the future (Virgin America has even started offering WiFi on their domestic flights).

Suddenly, with broadband data access, 3G seemed a bit too slow, cumbersome and a hindrance to the overall user experience.

In almost all aspects of consumer consumption behaviors in India, there has been a leapfrog like trend where the Indian consumer has bypassed some of the technical/behavioral aspects of adoption due to the late entry of some technology or product. Jumping from having no phones to the cell phone, getting introduced to the Internet directly on the mobile are some classic examples.

Apart from the government run service providers, 3G in India is still some distance away. Can India leapfrog in this aspect of adoption as well? Can we jump directly from Edge to WiFi? One can argue that carriers like TTSL, Reliance and Airtel are well positioned with their already existing home based broadband service to provide blanket (to some extent) WiFi coverage in metro cities. This could earn them enhanced revenue from their broadband service and also help bypass 3G. They could focus on mid/high tier WiFi enabled mobile phones, and generate greater ARPU through a much enhanced user experience of their VAS services.

It will be worth investigating a two-tier strategy - A limited 3G rollout to cover the rural geography in India for enhanced voice/data services and WiFi rollout in metro cities for data services.

Sometimes I come across positively delightful tidbits as I trawl the web, and this one, the “coming soon” page for Hosteeo, totally got me.

Nice look and feel? Check.

Mystery? Check.

Sense of being privy to something secret? Check.

Provides me with a way of finding out that secret? Check again.

All in all, a pretty effective way of getting my email address - but more importantly, my attention. Thanks to Chris Spooner for finding this gem.

A recent post by the folks at Nielsen from their AlertBox service titled “Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign” talks about how users tend to prefer incremental UI changes (i.e. familiarity) to something novel and unique.

The theory goes that a more aggressive redesign will force a user to relearn and re-familiarize herself with a new visual layout and navigation, thereby reducing the overall usability of the UI in question.  I think that in principle this makes sense - assuming we still live in the 1990s!

I can’t believe how traditional usability seems to design for the lowest common denominator user, assuming that any little change, anything that will make a user have to - god forbid - actually modify their behavior (gasp!) is a bad thing.  I call this the “1990s approach” to usability, because back in the 90s it made sense to design for novice users: the interwebs was barely hitting the road (and not yet the mainstream), and web designers the world over were just starting to figure out how to design websites and UIs that didn’t confuse people with conflicting colors, black backgrounds, and hideous layouts.

But we’re in the 21st century, people.

This means that for the first time in UI design’s short history we are able to create designs that delight while also serving a broader functional purpose, rather than worry too much about making something purely functional and usable. Sure, there’s a place for functional design that hits all the right usability buttons, but I get frustrated when I see the usability profession, my profession, getting pigeonholed as stodgy and uptight.

A friend of mine who used to work at Apple, someone who I thought understood that usability involves both function and (sometimes beautiful) form, drove it home for me: “Usability? That’s boring, there’s no creativity or design innovation in that. You guys just make sure things are usable.”

This isn’t because he doesn’t understand usability, and more serves to illustrate that usability overall has a slightly stale rap - one that I aim to change.

Who’s with me?

Measure me this

Over the past few years, the buzz on the street in the development space (read: international development), has been all about impact.  What is it? How does it affect our bottom line? Is it related to success - and if so, how? Who’s involved? How to improve it? But most importantly:

How to measure it…?

Quite a few people have been thinking about this for awhile now, and first among them is Sasha Dichter from Acumen Fund.  His thoughts on the matter merely reflect a broader movement within philanthropy that is focusing on what it means to create a sustainable development space that is responsive to changes on the ground.  Of course, before measurement comes definition, and what a bugbear that has proved to be!  Sara Olsen at the SVT Group has spent years trying to answer this question, and while she has been generally successful in some ways, it seems that a cookie cutter solution will be hard to come by.

Read more…

Since the launch of the MotoCliq yesterday, my Facebook and Twitter have been flooded with hurrahs and comments about this cool new device. Seven years in Motorola gave me enough friends there and some of them were heavily involved in making this Motorola dream a reality. Great work guys!

The iPhone kick-started it all and now Motorola has joined the social networking bandwagon (many others have but very few deliver the experience worth mentioning) with it’s first Android phone. They have gone a step ahead (as should be expected) and created a great experience around integration of the various social networking sites in a very cool looking ‘Homepage Dashboard’. Sanjay Jha in his talk at Mobilize 09 said that ‘one-to-one’ communication is a thing of the past. Now, it’s all about ‘one-to-many’ and the MotoCliq is true to this tenet.

This is all good but what happens if ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’ are not ‘THE’ social networking sites anymore. The probability of that happening is low at least till the launch of Motocliq but same time next year and the story might be very different.

If changes in the human behavior at the high tier segment has forced companies to respond with the now social networking solutions, can they not extrapolate this behavior to the many many more low/mid tier user groups, provide customized social networking solutions, encourage this networking behavior and drive ARPU.

How do mobile phone companies respond to 2 basic questions?

• How do we keep pace with the ever-changing landscape of social networking sites
• How do we scale it so that such services are made available to the rest of the 80-90% low to mid tier cell phone users worldwide

Living in India the second question intrigues me more. For sometime now I have been thinking about a flexible mobile social networking platform that can be customized for different and specific user groups at the low and mid tier user categories.

Consider these user groups:

• Auto rickshaw/Taxi drivers across a city like Mumbai
• Truck drivers across India
• The millions of maids employed in every middle-class family of India
• The millions of farmers across various states in India

Now a few facts about the above user groups:

• They all have cell phones
• They do not possess an internet connection
• The cell phone is their main channel of communication and entertainment
• Their awareness levels of things around is very minimal and hence are an exploited lot
• They come from very specific user groups and normally communicate within their own group/community

With the above facts, a dashboard like networking application can improve the quality and extent of communication and also make them more aware, entertained and connected. It could eventually provide them with a better life.

I hope the mobile industry is already working on such solutions but I suspect the focus is very heavily bent on making the iPhone competitor. There is an opportunity waiting to be tapped. Any takers!

I stumbled across the work of Jonathan Jarvis (@JonathanJarvis) the other day, thanks to my housemate and colleague, @zaqintosh.  The idea of creating a “design language”, as Jarvis calls it, certainly isn’t new. Visualization geniuses like @Stamen (and here), Hans Rosling, Dan Roam and many others have long argued that a visual language is absolutely necessary when it comes to understanding complex information systems.  Even when I was at Origo, and we instituted a company-wide policy to take mind-map style notes and meeting sketches, a few of us took to creating our own “visual vocabularies” (as we called them) to help systematize our visual note taking, making them easily understood by anyone.

Goodbye chicken scratch, hello iconography and flow diagrams.

I think the most compelling piece of Jarvis’ story isn’t that we need to create a malleable visual taxonomy - systematizing is a natural step in any language, and visualization is no different.  No, the best part of his argument is that a new class of professionals, “New Mediators” as he calls them, will come to supplant - or blend - the previously separate roles of Journalist, Analyst and Designer.

I’m curious to see how this plays out - now I’m off to brush up on my After Effects skills, since it looks like I’ll be needing them.

(image courtesy of Jonathan Jarvis at www.newmediators.com)