Getting emotional about mobile phones
A nationwide study of over 3000 people has found that there is a direct correlation between the way people use their phones, and the way they feel for the day.

Available all the time: etiquette for the social networking age
As Facebook, Twitter and 24-hour Blackberry access blur the lines between business and personal lives, managers and employees are struggling to develop new social norms to guide them through the ongoing evolution of communications technology.

iPhone ‘undisputed’ leader in customer satisfaction, study reports
A new study by the CFI Group reports that the iPhone has taken the top spot in customer satisfaction. The company surveyed over 1,000 smartphone users and the iPhone (surprise, surprise) came out as the top dog.

“The Femme Den started as an underground collective of international women searching for answers in a world that was not designed for us. We’ve now grown to a leading team of design researchers, industrial designers, and engineers who are paving the way for a deeper understanding around design and gender.

Armed with our unique toolkit of know-how and fresh design methods, we create products that make a positive impact on people’s lives, particularly women’s. We bring our knowledge to life in the products we design–from the kitchen to the ski slopes to the emergency room.”

A series of articles on Fast Company provide more background on their work:

Forget “shrink it and pink it”: the Femme Den unleashed
by Kate Rockwood – From Issue 139 | October 2009
Boobs. The Femme Den talks about them easily and often — and about the challenges they present to designers. Backpack makers don’t seem to have a clue what to do about boobs. Ditto designers of unisex hospital scrubs, famous for their gaping V-necks. “One surgeon told me there wasn’t a woman at the hospital whose boobs he hadn’t seen,” says Femme Den member Whitney Hopkins.

Femme Den’s five tenets of designing for women
by Kate Rockwood – From Issue 139 | October 2009
1. EMPHASIZE BENEFITS OVER FEATURES: Rather than touting feature sets and specs (how fast or big or slick something is), make the product’s benefits clear. Who can it connect her to? How does it make her life easier? How will it save …

Design in action
by Kate Rockwood – From Issue 139 | October 2009
The Femme Den points to an array of products that smartly and subtly consider women in their design.

Examining design values: warm, cold, or just right
by Erica Eden – Sep 25, 2009
How products can hit a sweet spot between traditionally female (Warm) and male (Cold) values.

Designing for gender, when one or both parties reap the rewards
by Yvonne Lin – Sep 24, 2009
The most successful products are designed for one sex but embraced by both.

How companies can woo women with design
by Agnete Enga – Sep 23, 2009
When shopping, men tend to go linear and deep, researching a product in detail and then going in for the kill. Women go wide, gathering information that goes beyond herself and her personal needs.


Hunter vs. gatherer: gender differences on the mind
by Whitney Hopkins – Sep 23, 2009
Most of us are only aware of obvious physical or behavioral attributes that differ between genders. But our differences run deeper–to the way we think, the way we act, and to our primitive desires.

Why designers need to talk about sex
by Femme Den – Sep 22, 2009
It’s about time the design industry got serious about gender differences.

Introducing the Femme Den: going beyond “shrink it and pink it”
by Linda Tischler – Sep 21, 2009
The Femme Den aims to go far beyond the traditional “shrink it and pink it” strategy that manufacturers often employ when targeting the female market.

Sex and electronics – Part 1: women and smart design
by Linda Tischler – Jan 13, 2009
In the wake of CES, a pair of women designers offer some suggestions on how consumer electronics manufacturers could boost their market share by taking gender differences into account.

Sex and electronics – Part 2: Femme Den’s favorite gadgets from CES
by Linda Tischler – Jan 13, 2009
Here are the gadgets they loved at CES… and the ones they want to send back to the locker room.

Abstract
The main objective of this project is to contribute to our knowledge about user-driven innovation and to suggest how knowledge on user-driven innovation may be included in innovation efforts and systems both for the sports equipment industry and for other industries.

The study is primarily based on case studies of how firms within the Nordic sports equipment and outdoor industry involve users in their innovation efforts. Our studies concentrate on firms producing equipment for winter sport and outdoor recreation. The study builds upon a large number of interviews with firms and key persons as well as extensive analysis of available written material and research literature.

The results focus on the identification of certain key user groups in the sports equipment innovation cycle: user innovators, professional and sponsored users, enthusiastic amateurs, passionate insiders and chains and retailers. We consider the extent to which these users influence or take part in innovation processes within technical design, visual design, branding and the development of product systems.

The report concludes with policy recommendations for how firms may take advantage of each user group. In this respect we present some key points and examples on firms’ interaction with users in innovation processes. Other recommendations consider public policy and suggest that public policy ought to encourage firms to take advantage of knowledge held by those groups. In society a large number of user groups exist and public policy ought to stimulate use of their knowledge for a broader purpose, including societal development. Merging user groups in order to stimulate cross sector development, in addition to organising meeting places may be a theme for public policy at the
regional level.

Download report

How “user-driven” innovation can best be supported, and what role clusters and cluster organisations can play in this process, are questions being put to the Europe INNOVA and PRO INNO Europe communities.

To facilitate the discussion in view of developing better policies together, a draft discussion paper “Fostering user-driven innovation through clusters” has been prepared by the Support of Innovation Unit of the Directorate-General for Enterprise & Industry of the European Commission. This discussion may also inspire the forthcoming European Innovation Plan currently being prepared by the Commission.

Stakeholders are invited to provide online comments through this website until 31 October 2009. During this period, the latest version of the draft discussion paper can be downloaded in Word format and contributors can upload their own new versions with comments, new text suggestions and examples in ‘track changes’ mode. While contributors must identify themselves to the web exchange moderator, they can choose for their contributions to be displayed anonymously. This will allow the moderator to contact contributors in case clarifications are needed before new versions are uploaded.

In the interview, Churchill explains how in her present position as principal research scientist at Yahoo Inc., she aims to mine cultural patterns in a bid to make technology more useful to people across multiple cultures.

“Finding patterns is what Elizabeth F. Churchill does. Patterns that underlie human behaviour and can point to what certain people might want to use their mobile phones for or how they might go about finding a friend online. A psychologist by training with a PhD in cognitive science from the University of Cambridge, Churchill has specialized in observing people and the way they interact with technology for 15 years now. [...]

In a conversation, Churchill (who was born in India) explains how in her present position as principal research scientist at Yahoo Inc., she aims to mine cultural patterns in a bid to make technology more useful to people across multiple cultures.”

Read interview

Listen to podcast: part 1 – part 2

“In a recent report “Social Science Meets Technology in Next-Generation Jobs,” Gartner Vice President Kathy Harris discusses in some detail four areas of jobs needed in the near future. Though she never really uses the words “social networks” the implication is that most companies aren’t really geared toward taking advantage of the impact of these online communities, and that the numbers will be too large to ignore, regardless of the business you are in.

The four areas detailed include:

• Web User Experience roles that include UI designers, virtual-assistant designers and interaction directors.
• Behavior Analysis roles that include Web psychologists, community designers, and Web/social network miners.
• Information Specialist roles that include information anthropologists who are expected to play historical Web fact finding and assisting in legal analysis, intellectual property management and where the quality of information is at risk.
• Digital Lifestyle Experts roles that include helping senior management understand whats going on and stay aware, and building personal brands and managing online personas for desired online effect.”

Read full story

According to Jonathan, the paper focuses specifically on two questions: what happens when the first and only means of accessing the internet is via one’s mobile? What are the implications for M4D and ICTD?

Abstract

This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile-centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self-expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

Download paper

Sitra, the Finnish innovation agency, revealed that the winning team of the Low2No development design competition was made up of Arup, Sauerbruch Hutton , Experientia and Galley Eco Capital — selected out of 74 initial entries — for their C_life – City as living factory of ecology project.

Experientia bring their unique perspective as an innovative experience design company to the project. With a focus on people-centred design, and people’s real needs, behaviours and experiences, Experientia provides a balance to the architectural and financial parts of the project, and considers the impact of sustainability on people’s day-to-day lifestyles.

The competition jury stated that the multinational team leveraged a particularly promising consumer/behavioural framework to empower citizens in meeting the goal of sustainability.

Marco Steinberg, director of strategic design at Sitra and chairman of the competition jury said “A well developed holistic proposal, the strategy highlighted two important insights: the creation of a carbon neutral district dovetailed with consumer oriented planning, thus supporting Sitra’s objective of empowering citizens.”

While other team members devised the architectural and financial strategies for the project, Experientia’s responsibility was to address the delicate theme of how to initiate behavioural change to support a sustainable style of living in this completely renewed urban district. Starting with the concept that people, their contexts, social networks, habits and beliefs are crucial tools for creating sustainable change in behaviour, Experientia explored ways to offer people control over their consumption and to see the effects of their actions on the environment.

Using their expertise in designing valuable user experiences, Experientia’s strategies to empower people’s change include: developing engagement and awareness programs, through services aimed at creating social actions based on green values; using technology to assist people in making decisions, such as energy metres and dynamic pricing systems; producing positive reinforcement loops (with incentives and benefits) for people who live, work and visit Jätkäsaari; and using the community as a knowledge network to share best practices.

Over the next 6 years, the Jätkäsaari district will be designed, constructed and opened to people. From there, the sustainable ideals that govern its day-to-day life will act as a model and example for the rest of Helsinki, Finland and the world. Through Experientia, Turin will be a vital part of this journey.

See also this earlier post on Putting People First.

As part of his introduction as guest blogger on Fast Company (his blog is called Beyond The Widget), he has been wonderfully accoladed with the statement: “McCallion has been able to bridge the elusive gaps in the design world between spaces and actions, objects and emotions. And somehow, he makes it all look so effortless.”

What I didn’t know is that Steve once worked as an architect for Richard Meier, and we probably bumped into each other in the elevator, as I was working for Charles Gwathmey downstairs.

The four articles he posted are definitely worth checking out:

Does your company support consumer experience innovation?
Companies want to create value by delivering better consumer experiences, but many are not quite sure how to get there. The results have ranged from a proliferation of Apple-like Genius Bars to projects that simply never make it to market. This week, Steve McCallion explores some of the challenges companies face when trying to deliver consumer experience innovation.

Building consumer experience value using the power of metaphors
Metaphors not only transfer associations from a previous experience to a new one, they function as shorthand to help people understand the consumer experience offering and what it means in their lives.

How customers saying “no” can become a consumer experience “yes”
The customer is not always right. And it’s often those moments when the customer resists change that an opportunity to innovate exists.

What promises can your consumer experience make?
Meaningful consumer experiences are based on a relationship between brands and people. By clearly promising something to people that is authentic and relevant, brands can increase the value of their products and services and connect on an emotional level.

“Launching across the region this August, pan-Arab consumers will benefit from a number of special features, including a Qiblah indicator that uses an inbuilt longitude and latitude orientation or city references that, when used in comparison to the magnetic north, indicates the direction of the Qiblah. The two phones also come complete with Adhan and Salah prayer time alarm functions as well as Quran software, the Hijiri calendar and a Zakat calculator. With Ramadan approaching, the features will be a welcomed benefit during the holy month.”

User research was apparently crucial:

“Key to LG’s success in innovation has been its dedication to consumer insights during the planning and design phase. LG made it top priority to better understand customers’ needs when it came to the GD335 and KP500N phones and this has resulted in integrated features that are almost ‘tailor-made’ to meet the needs of every Muslim worldwide.

‘We’ve worked very hard to understand our customers and develop products based on their individual needs and have once again pushed the very limits of innovation with our Islamic feature phones. In an effort to offer a more personalized and upscale experience for our Muslim consumers, we developed and embedded these features in the GD335 and KP500N phone to provide a totally new concept in mobile telecommunications,’ said Mr H.S Paik, President LG Electronics Gulf FZE.”

Read full story

“The tool that most people associate with automotive market research is the focus group but another tool has become more popular recently: ethnography.

With this, market researchers go into people’s homes to see how they live, what they do with leisure time, how they use their vehicles and how they define themselves by what products they use.

Two new cars from Detroit for 2010 were developed partly based on ethnography: the Ford Taurus and Buick LaCrosse.”

Read full story

“Despite growing agreement on the potential of technology to expand access to finance, or branchless banking, there is surprisingly little data publicly available about low-income users. This Brief draws on some of the first ethnographic research on M-PESA, one of the earliest success stories in mobile phone-based delivery of financial services. The research offers insights into how poor people use M-PESA, its impact on their lives, and some unexpected consequences.

This Brief presents 10 observations on how poor people use M-PESA and how it has impacted their lives.”

Download brief

(See also this news story on The Guardian)

In which contexts do alternative uses, e.g. savings, become popular and why?

The final report will be presented during autumn 2009 and made available at the project blog. Meanwhile, they sent a dispatch to the CGAP blog:

“While M-PESA in Tanzania has had a hard time competing with its sibling in Kenya in user uptake, there is one way of sending money via the mobile phone that is very popular in the country. That is by using airtime top-up vouchers. The most common way to do this is to buy an airtime voucher, scratch it in order to get the code and then text the code in an SMS to the person you want to send money to. It is then up to the recipient to go out and sell the code to people who want to buy airtime, or resellers and shops that in turn will sell it to people wanting airtime.”

Read full story

You can also more about the project here or download the whole project outline here (pdf).

It is based on a 2008 paper by Norman, entitled ‘The Psychology of Waiting Lines‘ (which is freely available), but sections have been added on “Variations of basic waiting lines” (including triage, categorization of needs, and self-selection of queues) and “Deliberate Chaos.”

According to Norman, “the original is better in the amount of detail and formal analyses, worse in the rough draft and inelegance of the writing as well as a lack of examples which I added for SMR.”

Here is Norman’s introduction to the 2008 paper:

Waiting is an inescapable part of life, but that doesn’t mean we enjoy it. But if the lines are truly inescapable, what can be done to make them less painful? Although there is a good deal of practical knowledge, usually known within the heads of corporate managers, very little has been published about the topic. One paper provides the classic treatment: David Maister’s The Psychology of Waiting Lines (1985). Maister suggested several principles for increasing the pleasantness of waiting. Although his paper provides an excellent start, it was published in 1985 and there have been considerable advances in our knowledge since then.

In the PDF file, The Psychology of Waiting Lines, I bring the study of waiting lines up to date, following the spirit of Maister’s original publication, but with considerable revision in light of modern findings. I suggest eight design principles, starting with “emotions dominate” and ending with the principle that “the memory of an event is more important than the experience.” Examples of design solutions include double buffering, providing clear conceptual models of the events with continual feedback, providing positive memories and even why one might deliberately induce waits. These principles apply to all services, not just waiting in lines. Details will vary from situation to situation, industry to industry, but the fundamentals are, in truth, the fundamentals of sociable design for waiting lines, for products, and for service.

“Matt Killingsworth, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Harvard University, thinks the phone might at least help researchers gather some data about it. Mr. Killingsworth, a former software developer, has helped create an application called “Track Your Happiness” for the iPhone to collect information to determine which factors are associated with happiness.”

Read full story

“While I’m sure Jobs says he doesn’t do research, it’s pretty clear that his team goes out to thoroughly study behaviors and interests of those they think will be their early adopters. Call it talking to friends and family; but, honestly, you know that these guys live by immersing themselves in the hip culture of music, video, mobile, and computing.

The point is not to go ask your customers what they want. If you ask that question in the formative stages, then you’re doing it wrong. The point is to go immerse yourself in their environment and ask lots of “why” questions until you have thoroughly explored the ins and outs of their decision making, needs, wants, and problems. At that point, you should be able to break their needs and the opportunities down into a few simple statements of truth.

As Alan Cooper says, how can you help an end user achieve the goal if you don’t know what it is? You have to build a persona or model that accurately describes the objectives of your consumers and the problems they face with the existing solutions. The real benefit, as I saw in my years working at InstallShield and Macrovision, is that unless you put a face and expectations on that consumer, then disagreements about features or product positioning or design come down to who can pull the greatest political will—rather than who has the cleanest interpretation of the consumer’s need.”

Read full story

Below is a run-down of the 2008-2009 speakers (all videos are available online):

September 26, 2008 – Tristan Harris , Apture
New models for browsing (video)

October 3, 2008 – David Merrill, MIT Media Lab
Natural Interactions with Digital Content (video)

October 10, 2008 – Karrie Karahalios, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
Visualizing Voice (video)

October 17, 2008 – Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path
Aurora: Envisioning the Future of the Web (video)

October 24, 2008 – Peter Pirolli, PARC
Information foraging theory (video)

October 31 , 2008 – Justine Cassell, Northwestern University
Building Theories: People’s Interaction with Computers (video)

November 7, 2008 – Merrie Morris, Microsoft Research
SearchTogether and CoSearch: New Tools for Enabling Collaborative Web Search (video)

November 14, 2008 – Gail Wight, Stanford Dept. of Art and Art History
Unreasonable Interactions (video)

November 21, 2008 – Sergi Jordà
Exploring the Synergy between Live Music Performance and Tabletop Tangible Interfaces: the Reactable (video)

December 5, 2008 – Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, Stanford Dept. of Music
Composing with Sounds and Images (video)

January 9, 2009 – Todd Mowry, CMU
Pario: the Next Step Beyond Audio and Video (video)

January 16, 2009 – Hayes Raffle, Nokia Research
Sculpting Behavior – Developing a tangible language for hands-on play and learning (video)

January 23, 2009 – Dan Saffer, Kicker Studio
Tap is the new click (video)

January 30, 2009 – Bobby Fishkin, ReframeIt
Social Annotation, Contextual Collaboration and Online Transparency (video)

February 6, 2009 – Bjoern Hartmann, Stanford HCI Group
Enlightened Trial and Error – Gaining Design Insight Through New Prototyping Tools (video)

February 13, 2009 – Vladlen Koltun, Stanford CS
Computer Graphics as a Telecommunication Medium (video)

February 20, 2009 – Michal Migurski & Tom Carden, Stamen Design
Not Invented Here: Online Mapping Unraveled (video)

February 27, 2009 – Sep Kamvar, Stanford University
We Feel Fine and I Want You To Want Me: Case Studies in Internet Sociology (video)

March 6, 2009 – Jeff Heer, Stanford HCI Group
A Brief History of Data Visualization (video)

March 13, 2009 – Barry Brown, UCSD
Experts at Play (video)

April 3, 2009 – John Lilly and Mike Beltzner, Mozilla Foundation
Firefox, Mozilla & Open Source — Software Design at Scale (video)

April 10, 2009 – Clara Shih, Salesforce.com
Social Enterprise Software Design (video)

April 17, 2009 – Alex Payne, Twitter
The Interaction Design of APIs (video)

April 24, 2009 – Jim Campbell, electronic artist
Far Away Up Close (video)

May 1, 2009 – Gary and Judy Olson, UC Irvine
What Still Matters about Distance? (video)

May 8, 2009 – Dan Siroker, Carrotsticks
How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election (video)

May 15, 2009 – Scott Snibbe, Snibbe Interactive
Social Immersive Media (video)

May 22, 2009 – Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts
Launching Creative Communities: Lessons from the Spore community experience (video)

May 29, 2009 – Robert Kraut, Carnegie Mellon
Designing Online Communities from Theory (video)

Archived lectures from CS547 can also be downloaded from iTunes.

“Modern communications are not expanding our social circle, but anthropologist Stefana Broadbent says that mobile phones, instant messaging and social networking are actually strengthening our core relationships.

Research has shown that with instant messaging, if there are 100 people on your buddy list, you’ll only chat with at most five people on your list. Eighty per cent of phone calls are to four people. With voice-over-internet service Skype, that number drops, with most people calling only two others.”

Read full story

Read more about the democratisation of intimacy on Broadbent’s UsageWatch blog.

(TED stands for technology, entertainment and design, and it’s an exclusive conference that brings togethers thinkers and doers from around the world. The TEDGlobal edition is directed by Bruno Guissani.)

Here are some selected highlights:

Manuel Lima
An interaction designer at Nokia, Lima looks at how complex interconnectedness can be understood. He is compelled by the divide between information and knowledge. So he looks at information visualization.

Rebecca Saxe
In her talk at TEDGlobal, cognitive neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe presented her breakthrough discovery of a particular section of the brain that becomes active when we contemplate the workings of other minds.

Aza Raskin
Aza Raskin is the head of user experience for Mozilla Labs (the people who created Firefox), and today he’s giving us a demo of a whole new kind of Internet browser. Instead of asking us to become computer literate, he’s making the browser learn our language.

Stefana Broadbent
Technology anthropologist Stefana Broadbent analyzes how we text, IM and talk.

Jonathan Zittrain
TEDGlobal director Bruno Guissani takes the stage to welcome Jonathan Zittrain who is a lawyer that specializes in technological, and of course, Internet-based law.

Gordon Brown (video)
Speaking to an international conference of technology entrepreneurs, academics and artists at Oxford, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for the creation of global institutions to deal with the global problems.
>> See also Guardian PDA post

Also check out the Guardian PDA blog post on a new mobile phone search service for Uganda. It talks about the work of Jon Gosier of Appfrica, who has launched a simple project using a corp of mostly volunteers with mobile phones to find out what Ugandans want to know.