IPhone

In light of Apple’s launch of Siri, the mobile personal assistant for the new iPhone 4S, I thought I’d take a brief look at why voice control has, to date, never managed to truly hit the mainstream. There have been automated speech recognition tools for longer than you’d think. Bell Labs developed a system that could recognise numbers in the 1950s. By the 1980s there were systems capable of recognising a small vocabulary of words, with the vocabularies increasing to the size of human vocabularies (10,000 to 150,000 words) by the early nineties. In the early noughties Orange had a system called Wildfire, which did many of the same things that Siri will do. Wildfire, however was ahead of its time and was discontinued (upsetting many customers with disabilities who had come to rely upon it).

One problem that has prevented this technology from widespread adoption is the rate of errors. There are a number of factors that contribute to this, particularly noise, diction and accent. Background noise is a real problem in speech recognition systems to this day. Equally challenging is the issue of how a user speaks. Strong accents or indistinct diction has continually caused issues with recognition accuracy. Anyone who has used automated customer service lines will be only too aware of these problems.

One way in which speech recognition systems used to achieve higher rates of accuracy was through learning the user’s voice (Dragon Naturally Speaking for example) and thereby becoming better at understanding what a user was saying. However, not all systems have this opportunity, although Siri will.

There are two other issues that are likely to have affected how willing people are to use speech recognition systems; the interaction and the context. Tackling interaction first. In the past, systems that permit voice control have tended to shy away from natural language style interaction, as technically it’s very challenging. This results in users having to adopt a more machinelike style of interaction, such as “Search, restaurants, submit”. This feels unnatural and makes the sequence of interaction harder to remember. You also sound pretty odd talking like that in public.

This brings us onto the second issue, context. Just how comfortable are people talking to a machine in public? Speech recognition customer service lines are ok until you reach the “I’m sorry…” moment, at which point the repetition and frustration often result in a level of embarrassment. If the language you use is more natural, then tasks become more like a conversation, which in turn makes it more comfortable to use the system in a public place. Even so, I suspect it will be a while before people are comfortable picking up their phone and demanding it to give them information like they’re an extra in Star Trek.

However, if any company can convince people to change their behaviour it’s Apple.

If Siri does succeed and developers have the opportunity to take advantage of the functionality it offers, they should consider the following aspects of their users’ interaction:

• Appropriateness of task: is your task suitable for voice command use? Shorter spoken interactions are likely to be more successful (and satisfying).
• Context: where are your users likely to be when they interact with your product? This will influence the types of phrase they use and the brevity of those phrases.
• Privacy: what information will your users need to speak out loud? Will they be comfortable broadcasting this information? Are there points at which you’ll need to switch to a different type of input mechanism?
• Triggers: what is likely to cause a user to begin a specific command or information request? This will govern how the interaction should flow.
• Mental models: if you’re replicating a real world interaction, make sure that you do so accurately as any mismatches will be jarring and confuse users.
• Errors: ensure that recognition or interaction errors are handled gracefully so that the illusion of a conversation is not broken.

Voice control has, and has always had, a lot of promise. It will be interesting to see if Apple can help to embed this style of interaction into our daily lives.

Social and mobile are two of the largest growth areas in the technology world. It is therefore inevitable that commentators are keen to identify (and understand how to monetise) convergence between the two. There is great synergy between the two areas. Both are focused on communication, both are undeniably personal and both are very immediate.

Whilst a computer is a window onto the web and into your social connections, a mobile, be it an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone, is your personal window. And unlike a computer it brings extra data and functionality with it. With a mobile, you can share where you are and what you’re doing, generally in a much richer way than a simple status update. This is all becoming fairly commonplace and the level of use of this type of functionality is growing inexorably. The question is, once you’ve gained access to your social network of choice through your smartphone, what is there to tempt you to do more than what effectively amount to multimedia or spatial updates?

This is the question put to business and organisations who seek to engage with users in the social mobile world. Some businesses have an easier time answering this question than others. Foursquare, for example, is a great example of a social mobile offering. Find, visit, share, rate, all a great fit for social mobile and one of the key factors behind its success (as well as the gamification). But your business isn’t Foursquare, so how do you work out where you fit in this space?

Josh Clark, a well-respected voice in the field of iPhone app design, talks about three mindsets mobile users tend to have:

• Microtasking, when a user is engaged in short periods of intensive activity
• Local, when a user seeks information about or to support them in their current context
• Bored, when the user is looking for distraction, novelty or entertainment

As Josh himself has recently pointed out, these mindsets map nicely onto Google’s categorisation of mobile information usage; repetitive, urgent and bored.

Now, social mobile can fill one or all of these categories. So we need to delve a little deeper to understand what aspects of social interaction match these mindsets.

When thinking about the different types of interaction possible through social media, I found this model by Isra Garcia particularly useful.

<Click to enlarge>

 From this model there are effectively four different types of interaction:

• Connecting to others
• Exposure, viewing information and activity within your network
• Sharing information with others
• Providing feedback on shared information or on a specific topic

There is also an associated interaction that can be facilitated or initiated through social media:

•  Communicating directly with others.

When combined with the mobile mindsets different types of social mobile interaction emerge. Using this, albeit simplistic abstraction, we can start to see how organisations can understand where their business and any potential mobile offering might fit.

<Click to enlarge>

 If we return to Foursquare we can see that it covers the following areas:

• Researching – what’s good in my area?
• Situational support – is there anything good near me right now.
• Reporting – I’ve found something great, or I want to review this too.
• Matchmaking – are any of my network available to join me?
• Reaching out – well, what could I do today?

Which is quite a large portion of the spectrum, particularly the local part. Interestingly if we look at the social networks themselves, we can see that Facebook covers the entire spectrum (depending upon which of their suite of services you use), whereas the professional network Linkedin, is rooted firmly in the microtasking area, with some small forays in local.

So, how is this useful? There are two aspects, understanding what situation you find a user in will directly influence how you can engage with them and what the likelihood of them wanting to engage with you is. This I will cover in a future article. The other is determining which aspects of a product or service could benefit from a social aspect. A couple of examples might help to illustrate this.

iPad video app:

I have an app that lets people insert their face over the lead character in short clips of popular films. It’s a great timewasting app, but after the initial rush of downloads, sales have stagnated. There are several aspects of social interaction we can target. Broadcasting and the flipside, consumption, would allow people to share their videos with others. If we add in reviewing, via commenting, then we cover off a neat conversion of a bored user into a microtasking (and therefore more engaged) user.

Customer reviews app:

I have a service that helps people to view and share reviews of cars. I only focused on letting people easily view the reviews database (the researching goal). This is great, but I’m missing two other goals that would help to harness the community. If I were to provide an easy route to information about “that car there” (situational support) then I add to the utility of my app/mobile site. If I were to offer the ability to review a car (reviewing/reporting) or even ask a question (conversation) then I would increase both the utility of and engagement with my app.

Or how about a real world example, Groupon. Groupon is an offers site, with the key to their success being the sharing and viral spread of deals. Currently the Groupon mobile offering lets people find offers near them and share them with their network. This is simple, straightforward and it works. However, there are a number of ways that this could be enhanced. What if the service were to recommend deals that my friends have looked at or taken up (consumption)? What about reviewing or rating deals (reporting)? For dinner deals in particular, how about the facility to invite other people in your network to take advantage of a deal (matchmaking). All of these could enhance the Groupon service. As I was putting this article together, Groupon and Foursquare announced that Groupon daily deals would now be available through Foursquare. This looks to be very much a win-win situation for both of these companies.

It’s important to stress that I don’t intend to advocate simply bolting social elements onto a mobile offering. The appropriateness and likely appeal of the social aspect should be carefully considered. For example it might be good to use a service to find reviews of local doctors, but you probably don’t want to connect to your doctor or share with others that you’re visiting them.

The question then becomes, how do we gauge appropriateness and appeal? A great first step is to look at what similar services are doing and the level of engagement they attain. This will provide some indication of what social features might be useful and whether people will actually use them. If you have an existing product that you’re looking to socially augment, then depending upon your budget you then have a couple of options for determining which social features would be best for your product. Surveys provide a cost effective way of building a picture of the types of features people might use. Focus groups and one to one interviews can then build upon this insight.

If you don’t have a product yet, then your silver bullet is ethnography, whereby actual user needs are collected in context over an extended period of time. This is a very powerful method for understanding a person’s interaction, not only with technology, but also their environment and the people in their lives.

As part of this process you also need to consider how social features in your mobile offering link up to the rest of your communications channels and services. If the social experience is constrained just to the mobile platform, this represents a missed opportunity to widen the reach of your service. This opens up another set of questions around consistency of experience and handling of transitions between channels.

All of the above can be considered in an ad-hoc manner, but I would strongly recommend creating a mobile strategy to guide the development of any mobile offering. When coupled with a full user centred design approach, you can ensure that your mobile service or product meets the needs of your users, delivers on your commercial priorities and offers a great user experience.

This article was originally published on MyCustomer.com

So far I have downloaded a lot of apps, free and paid for, many of which I have not used, I need to find the time. There are apps for education, design, games, news, and just about anything and everything.

The Sunday Times published a Top 100 list of the best apps a couple of months ago,  which I’m still working my way through. There are many articles and blogs all over the web talking at length about some of these apps, best of  articles, not to mention the App store’s own featured rankings.

That’s the first big problem: the size of the market means it is quite hard to know what to buy or download, not what works or what is fun. It’s like the old saying, about spending your first year at university making loads of new friends and the rest of your time there trying to get rid of them! I find there is not enough good information out there to give you confidence in your purchase. The same applies to the ratings and comments within the app store, quite often there are too few for them to be reliable. While this has relatively little importance for free apps, it becomes more problematic when you consider the cumulative spend on paid apps which range from 59p to £5.99 or more. 

Navigating with one’s hands, tapping and swiping is becoming increasingly natural. So much so, that my 6 year old the other day tried to “click” with his finger on the family PC’s screen. Granted he’s had minimal experience with keyboards, and has much more experience with touch and gestural interfaces, from iPod touch to Nintendo Wii and DSi. Still, shades of things to come, I think.

One frustration however is the lack of consistency from app to app, beyond the general swipe and pinch gestures. Many of the text heavy apps react in quite different ways and have resorted to different modes of manipulating the blocks of text and images. Flipboard folds pages down the middle (almost so it looks like a three dimensional shape), Le Figaro (French newspaper) scrolls up and down as well as turns the pages, while the innovative PushPopPress has published Al Gore’s “Our choice” as a fantastic interactive book – with interactive graphics, video, and voice overs. In a similar spirit, Alice in Wonderland comes with interaction that hints at the future of books, I think. But the only consistent thing is the inconsistency. Tapping once or twice, where hidden menus might appear from, what some of the icons mean even – is anybody’s guess. This should take a while to sort out, and naturally companies like Foviance will contribute to the development of best practices for the user experience on tablets.

Photography on the iPad2 is stunning – the Reuters app, for example, showing an editor’s selection of the day’s news in photo – Flipboard is as great as Scobleizer said it was, allowing single point of access to your news sources and social media accounts. Too many apps are still not optimised for iPad and the rendering is fuzzy if you use the full screen space – like bad resolution on your computer screen when you over enlarge pictures. This should change as more developers upgrade their apps.

I’m not using my iPad as much as I hoped to – for one I still feel such a geek taking it out on the Tube! More to the point, it’s another device competing for my limited time: email and browsing tend to remain PC activities as the screen is bigger and the keyboard more comfortable, texts are sent from my iPhone (a wi-fi connection is not always handy, and watch those data charges on iPad 3G!)…I read a Kindle (more ergonomic to hold than the iPad) and paper books and magazines (but if there is an iPad version available, the subscription will not be renewed).

As a newspaper/magazine substitute it really comes into its own, but it’s an expensive substitution! Luckily there are other emerging uses, I have watched a film on it and found it surprisingly immersive. Literally holding the movie in your hands takes you into the picture much more than sitting in a huge dark room with strangers, and the screen is plenty big enough for this. Of course if you have to use headphones because others are present it becomes a little anti-social, just as listening to music can be.

There are also some excellent educational apps both for children and adults. From learning musical notation, playing the guitar, maths bingo, virtual visits to Ancient Rome and the fabulous photography available on the Nasa and the Hubble apps.

In fact I am seriously considering an iPad for the kids when they are a bit older rather than a first computer. I am also exploring using it instead of a paper notepad (saving the rainforest!). With writing apps – either with digital transformation or without – and a stylus, it’s becoming more of a viable option, and when you throw in productivity apps such as Instapaper and Dropbox you have the potential to completely change the way you work.

All in all then, I am thrilled with my purchase; it was well worth the money, the hassle of ordering, the wait and all. It’s a great device; one that you really feel is changing the game as you use it: and how exciting is that?

Apple has been in the media wars of late, with some significantly negative publicity relating to the tracking of users via their iPhone. Whilst the reality is rather different to that initially portrayed, it does highlight some interesting trends…

For those of you that watch South Park, a recent episode highlighted the public perception of end-user licensing and privacy statements. The character Kyle doesn’t bother to read the privacy agreement of an Apple iTunes update and has to suffer the consequences, which cannot be detailed here!

Apple has suffered a significant damage to its public reputation recently, due to the news that it has been tracking the location of it’s iPhone and iPad users.  Apple, along with Google, have been requested to participate in a US Senate panel on the issue of mobile tracking, with Apple adamantly stating that it does not track user’s locations, but uses the data collected to help speed up the use of location based services. As you can see from the map below (produced using the iPhone Tracker tool ), the wi-fi location and cell towers around your phone, can give an impression of your own location – you’d never guess that I use the east coast railway a lot!

<Click to enlarge>

Last year I wrote about the issues of advertising on mobile devices, a theme that I’ll be coming back to again shortly, along with the potential difficulties of mobile tracking. One of the issues related to the latency of the tracking and the corresponding issue of data accuracy. A recent article by ‘Localytics’ has highlighted this problem and it will be an ever more important issue as the use of mobile devices becomes more and more main stream. The common consensus (Wikimedia & Online Marketing Trends)  predicts that mobile devices will surpass desktops as the method of browsing the internet by 2014.

The Apple story is interesting as the issue of tracking on mobile devices, and indeed this specific issue relating to the user’s location, has been known about for well over a year. It only gained momentum in the popular press when the information was visualised!

This really shows the importance of visualising data. We all love a good story and need to be able to relate to the protagonists. Data is great, but insight is better!

Our own Neil Mason discusses the use of storytelling in his recent blog post. We are often confronted with the conflict of making data look ‘sexy’, think of glossy 3D pie charts, rather than meaningful. For me it is vital that a data visualisation tells a story. It should allow the user to experience a journey through the data to gain meaningful insight.

What is interesting, is that the depiction of data can often feel like an uphill struggle, everyone has an opinion on what a chart should look like. It is often only when you have played with a couple of different visualisations that the true meaning comes through. From a linguistic or memory perspective, this would be termed as ‘semantic’ meaning that a greater level had been achieved. As analysts, it is our job to help create this journey for our client.

This is not easy. It may take several iterations before the insights come through, but then again, it wouldn’t be a true story without a struggling hero now would it!

For more about Foviance’s Data Privacy Audit

The Apple iPhone saga continues… To cut a very long story short; after jumping through various hoops to prove to the Orange call centre that my iPhone was dysfunctional, I have finally received a brand new handset. However, I’m confused as to which brand should be tainted by the initially poor customer service that I experienced. And on the other side, which should be praised for the excellent customer service at the end of the process. Read more…

By Lis Shorten

It didn’t occur to me until recently that a blind person would even contemplate using an iPhone. After all, it’s a touchscreen interface that requires interaction between a finger and an onscreen image and lacks any sort of tactile or sensory feedback.

If I turn my phone off, then close my eyes and try to turn it back on, I fail at the first hurdle (slide to unlock). Even though I’ve turned my phone on hundreds, possibly thousands of times, with my eyes closed I never seem to get my thumb in the right place to accurately swipe the slider. Read more…

The application (app) market is booming. The advent of the iPhone and its application concept just three years ago generated new ground for online revenues. Thanks to this development of the smartphone market and the emergence of app marketplaces such as Ovi (Nokia) and Android Market, the app business is at the exciting beginning of its story. Read more…

I have a friend Luke, who is a big gambler, big to me anyway as he’s happy to squander more than a month’s worth of wages over a weekend on horses, football and whatever else is happening at the time. He’s an alpha male, he’s loud, he can down a few pints and he enjoys life.

So when I think about my world of marketing, brand and user experience, I often look at him and consider that he is somewhat absolved from the matter, almost that he is not capable of being understood as an individual or won over as a customer on the grounds of such squandering. Read more…