I the user, not the monkeygrinder.

Practical usability

Remember symbiotic relationships? The sit of a guitar on your lap while you practice the harmony of working with it on evoking a simple rhythm. Practice made music. That was the beautiful and clarity of a tool. The complexity was in the production. The guitar lived to be played and you were it’s player.Within a band you brought your harmonies to fit within the larger song. It rocked or rolled depending on your disposition.

To me, mobile technology has a similar role in alot of senses. It’s a tool to be used not to produce treacle for the ears but enhance my ability to communicate. Entertain me in those small interludes in the day and increase my ability to just get shit done easily. I am the player and it is the guitar.

Get shit done. Faster.

Think about the words interaction and usability. I rattle these terms off daily saying this website has some clear interaction points or how another phone app looked like usability was the furtherest thing in their mind as they designed it. Stuff like that.

These two terms denote how I feel about my experience using this outward facing visual technology. Take for example my iphone and ipad two products designed for movement and my changing context. My interactions are slow and encumbered by my own ability to process what I want to do and where that app/function is located on the device. The complexity of the technology doesn’t help me overcome my own shortcomings and get quicker results and is even worse when my context keeps changing. Should this not be what the primary goals for this tech should be: Get shit done, faster. Simply.

When I don my running shoes and head out into the depths of Vondelpark (a local park in the middle of the city) to get some badly needed exercise I bring with me my iphone to gauge my progression, pace, route and calories burned. But I spend more time fitting the phone into a pouch that i bought and fixing the ever moving headphones that the focus on the run is diminished. I start to get the sense of who is on control in this relationship.  

Mobile should mean move

I’m a big believer that any app should be self centric and offer to solve something in my life I believe is a pain in the ass to undertake (I’m not a mobile games kinda guy). I don’t have to make this realisation on my own but if the app presents it to me and I agree, then you are on a winner. Also if the app looks and behaves like it doesn’t give a shit about what I want then your time with me is limited.

I feel let down by the word mobile. Is the fact that technology is smaller and more easily able to move with us the sole reason we call it mobile? It isn’t responsive, it shows me the same information whether I am sitting at my desk perusing through reams of content or moving through hordes of people trying to find the right platform to get my delayed train.

If you think about it our behaviours are modal. I need to put my head into the context of what I need to get done. I am fluid. My behaviours switch from ‘home mode’ to ‘travel mode’ to ‘office mode’ and other variants. I wish for technological systems that anticipate and respond to my immediate needs based on where I am and what the learned end points could be. Learned behaviours are meant to be common place in applications. The app Path claims “Path should learn about you as time goes on. It should help you see interesting patterns in your life, and the lives of your loved ones. It should learn to write itself, and require less effort from you over time.” In principle this is great but to this point I haven’t found the utility in Path so I don’t use it.

Here is my guitar moment.I would love this scenario: I take out my phone or ipad and it provides me with opportunities before I set about the task of finding them. Show me the path less taken when I want travel (do i feel like scenic or efficiency today), show me the advantages of all this big data being accrued all around me. The revolution of ‘the quantified everything’ is in full swing where sensors are attached to the toilets even so we can use this data to make my life easier and possibly more fun. I am a creature of habit and learned systems surely this can be exploited to create an intuition scenario and introduces new possibilities of doing things that I need to do.

Symbiotic.

Imagine I got up in the morning and my computer realised there was movement and quietly booted itself up and had my emails to hand. Imagine that I decided to go for a run and my Runtracker tracked my movements because it realised my actions through biometric sensors. I didn’t need to worry about having the setting right or even if I remembered to turn the app on. Wonderful, quiet and enabling/quantifying my daily routine. Most of all it enables me to focus on the task at hand.

What I look for is simple. I don’t want static technology I want fluid behaviours to realise and enhance mine. Help me achieve my daily goals through operating systems and applications that arrange to suit my condition at that time.

I want to be happy with my technology like the relationship that existed with my guitar. I knew it’s role and what we could achieve together. I want my tech to behave with me as the focus. Simple idea right?