Wireless Business Applications

My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots

Charlie Brooker provides the cell phone review I wish I had the guts to write:

It seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind. It starts gently - a pinch of annoyance here, an inconvenience there - but before long the steady drip, drip, drip of minor frustrations begins to affect your quality of life, like a mouth ulcer, or a stone in your boot, or the lingering memory of love gone sour.

The menu system is a confusing mangle of branching dead ends. It has touch-sensitive buttons that either refuse to work, or leap into action if you breathe on them. One such button also terminates calls, so it is easy to cut people off merely by holding the phone against your ear to hear them. It has no apparent "silent" mode, and when you set it to vibrate, it buzzes like a hornet in a matchbox. ...

Worst of all, it seems to have an unmarked omnipresent shortcut to Orange's internet service, which means that whether you are confused by the menu, or the typeface, or the user- confounding buttons, you are never more than one click away from accidentally plunging into an overpriced galaxy of idiocy

(posted by Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond)

Multi-touch user interfaces

If you haven't yet seen Jeff Han's user interface supporting multiple simultaneous touches make sure to view that demo or this updated demo.

Beautiful stuff!

There are also rumors of commercial availability tied to a new company Preceptive Pixel with a very large screen and commercial applications. Apparently the iPhone and Jeff Han's work were developed independently.

Multi-touch user interfaces

Jeff Han has taken touch senstive user interfaces to the next level:

While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops. ...

Our technique is force-sensitive, and provides unprecedented resolution and scalability, allowing us to create sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accommodate both hands and multiple users.

Make sure to see the video on his site. This is the future of user interface.

Analyzing real users of wireless

Chris Fahey has documented who rides the New York subway each morning -- hour by hour. For example:

3:00-4:00 AM
Drunks of all sorts, club kids, and winos. Late night workers, busboys, getting off their shifts. Only a handful of people per car. 6:1 male/female ratio.

4:00-5:00 AM
Transit workers changing shifts. Maybe 6 people per car. All male.

5:00  AM - 6:00 AM
Blue-collar laborers, minorities, immigrants. Half the car is asleep. Maybe 20 or 25 people per car. 9:1 male/female ratio.

There is also an hourly study of subway population on the 1/9 line and a great cartoon treatment of the demographics by stop on the F line.

Why are their not similar kinds of studies of how people actually use wireless devices? Wouldn't it be useful to categorize the purpose of work related wireless phone calls? How do wireless carriers and device manufacturers decided what device features to support? Shouldn't they want to know what kinds of wireless mediated interactions are done by people on the job, on particular jobs?

What is the average content of a work call for a construction manager for example? Given that almost every construction manager carries a cell phone and pays at least $50 to $70 per month to use it just for voice, you would think we had a pretty good idea what it was being used for. Is that $50-70 per month being well spent? Could the wireless voice work be done more effectively using other wireless data approaches? What other tasks could be done given the investment in the voice device and the monthly airtime?

 

I don't think anyone knows. Do any of my readers? Do any of you know of studies of wireless users and how they use their devices, particularly in a work setting?

Tiny Keyboards Biggest Obstacle for Handheld Users

The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research says that:

... most consumers would be willing to utilize more data-oriented mobile services if the keyboards on their handheld devices weren't so impossibly cramped. The study found that adoption of wireless activities such as text messaging, picture messaging, Web surfing, phone personalization and gaming remain bogged down by frustration with digit-challenging handheld interfaces.

Wireless devices need to be one-handed

Andrew Seybold's Commentary takes of the subject of Smartphone usability. Two critical points for him:

• One-handed operation
  

I am at an airport, changing planes and have to walk from one gate to another. I am pulling my carry-on luggage and briefcase with one hand so I only have one hand free during this walk.

I can easily use a standard clamshell or candy bar phone to place and receive phone calls with a single hand. I can also use my BlackBerry to make calls, look at my inbox and click on and read messages. I can even send a quick email reply using one hand, which is the optimum situation. Being able to place phone calls and read email as I walk is a must for me.

• Push email -- your email comes to you without having to explicitly request it each time

Seybold often is very white-collar oriented, but I think his comments in this article are applicable to any mobile user or application. One more dead-on quote:

And don't put a notebook computer into the form factor of a handheld. Give me the features, functions and capabilities that will permit me to leave my notebook home more often.

Exactly right.

How NOT To Phrase Error Messages

We learned a lesson this week. We have product that display's the following error message:

Cannot connect to service provider

90% of the time this is due to poor wireless coverage to the device. Occasionally, particularly when just getting started, a customer will get this message because they have not set up the customer's server link correctly. When we came up with this message wording, we congradulated ourselves on the technical precision in covering all the possibilities in just a few words.

We were taken to task by a customer this week because the staff in the field had no idea what this message meant or what to do. We'd heard this before, but this customer didn't want to hear our expanation, they wanted it changed so the user knew what to do. I patiently explained that this usually means the user is in an area of bad coverage, and they should try again later. The customer said, "Well if that's what it means, just say so -- tell the user whats wrong and what to do."

Great advice. Here is the new message:

Weak coverage, try again later

How to analyze a handheld user interface - project management as an example

An earlier post described a terrific discussion at Edward Tufte's web site about building effective project management user interfaces. I have had recent experience with handheld interfaces to project management systems and want to add some thoughts about that.

The critical place to look is at who will be using the handheld interface to the project management system and why they are using it from the field. As soon as you ask these questions, the discussion is shifted. Desktop project management systems are used by project managers, trained in the complexities of gantt charts, resource leveling, float dates, critical path analysis, budget planning, etc. etc. These are experts looking for a powerful tool with lots of options and complex visual displays. They want to browse around among many interlinked projects and tasks, selecting the views and operations consistent with their job of managing all the many disparate pieces.

Why get field managers involved in project management at all? They have their daily "to-do" list and are not involved with big picture project management and resource planning. Instead, they are the critical link that provides data from the field to reconcile the plan with what actually happened. Project management tools can only deliver value when they are closely linked with real data about what is really happening.

We now have the focus we need to develop an effective handheld user interface. Present a "to-do" list with the current plan and easy ways to provide the "what really happened" information needed back at the office by the project manager. This is probably done with pop-up responses associated with each todo list task -- "completed", "requires 1 more day", "delayed due to weather". There is no need for gantt charts, resources leveling, visual displays, etc.

The lesson: handheld user interfaces should focus on the task at hand for the field staff member. The desktop user interface for the back end software to which the handheld application is tied typically tells you very little about what the handheld interface should look like. Instead, look at the tasks of the person who will be using the handheld.

User interface design - Edward Tufte - deep discussion of project management

I have been meaning to write an entry about wireless project management. As background, I found a very rich and thoughtful discussion about project management interfaces at Edward Tufte's website. For those who don't know, Tufte is one of the deep thinkers of our age on effective use of visual displays and information design. He is opinionated, a purist and deeply original thinker.

Portable Devices are Terrible for Browsing

Being on the run, and trying to get something else done is absolutely the wrong situtation for browsing or navigating. On a mobile device you want just a few choices presented at any given time. Mostly, you want your work handed to you in a well-defined order -- much like an MS Windows wizard. You want to be led through the task with just a few choices presented in context.

The paradigm for the typical web site is exemplified by Yahoo or Amazon. Just look at how many links are on those pages! These sites require intensive browsing and navigating. This is not usually a problem because fonts, graphics, and layout are used to visually organize the links, allowing you to quickly search the page with your eyes to find the link you want. This approach only works, however, when you have a big screen. Even with the smart algorithms in portable browsers like Opera typical web pages have way too many links to make browsing convenient and easy.

A portable application should “disappear” when it is in use. That is, using the interface should not require any understanding or thinking or conscious work. Navigation and manipulation of the interface should not be something the user thinks about consciously. This is what Martin Heidegger calls “ready to hand”.

Russell Beattie has a nice discussion of mobile browsers, with a similar point. He believes that we will eventually create a whole separate web designed for small devices and small screen browsers.