From J.K. Rowling’s Harvard Commencement address (worth reading in its entirety):

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

A classic picture, part of a great post from Nicolas Nova:

[Pasta & Vinegar]

Note that the currently posted Streets albums may be viewed at the following links: Tokyo, London, Seoul, Gibraltar, Barcelona, Andalusia.

In my recent correspondence:

“I’m confused… You go all the way to Tokyo and spend your time taking pictures of manhole covers and sewer drains? Am I missing something here?”

 * * *

“I didn’t know you like photography. Cool. What made you decide your particular focus?”

* * *

“What also struck me powerfully was how many of your photos were photos I’ve taken, if less artistically. I’m so fascinated by shapes and textures, and of concrete material goods that lead an abstract existence simultaneously.  Picking up on the geometry of the Seoul palace, walls, and pothole covers are all in my repertoire as well. […]

“A word about the architectural symmetry and how it spoke of the power and authority of the monarch. According to Confucian thought (which lives strikingly in Korea even more than in Japan or China), there is Heaven and there is Earth (including humanity), and it is the responsibility of the ruler to put Earth into order according to the divine principles of Heaven. What better way to represent the monarch’s ability to create order than to create symmetrical space?”

It’s time for me to talk a little about this manhole cover fetish fascination…

Lens focus? Interest focus? Nokia made me decide my particular focus, you might say — the pictures are all taken with my cell phone (not so amazing), because it’s there with me. I do take pictures other than streets (!) but I post the streets, because it is something different from the norm.

I am interested by a couple of aspects of “street design”:

(1) There is a conversation that happens on the ground. Sometimes it’s very loud, as in colored signs and lane markings, communicating between the city or an institution and the public. Sometimes it’s subtle, as in spray painted notations by city workers. I like eavesdropping on that conversation, and I’m interested in the communication and “language” that is used; the assumptions made about who is listening, and what they understand.

(2) Different cities have very different patterns and systems for infrastructure access holes — in some places, everything seems modular (a few standard sizes); in other places, everything looks pretty chaotic. Some cities seem to care a lot about the beauty of even the manhole covers; some really don’t. I think that says something about a culture and about feelings about the city.

(3) There’s design at work even on manhole covers — some are beautiful; others ugly. Some are very useful, and identify what’s in them very specifically; others are generic, or nearly so. That’s a form of industrial design that probably has scope for improvement, and seems interesting — identifying who needs to know? (the public? the maintenance workers? other repair people?) what do they need to know? how best to convey the information? what are the risks of making the information known?

Anyway… you’re getting an earful!

Best,

Sarah

A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That’s right: just holding your body in the right position means you’ll have faster, more accurate access to certain memories. If you stand as if holding a golf club, you’re quicker to remember an event that happened while you were golfing than if you position your body in a non-golfing pose. […]

Dijkstra’s team believes that the effect may be due to the way memories are stored in the brain: one theory of memory suggests that memories are composed of linked sensory fragments — odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions. Simply activating one or more of those fragments makes the entire memory more likely to be retrieved. In any case, if you’re trying to recall a particular incident in your life, putting your body in the right position might help you remember it faster and more accurately. The key appears to be your body position when the memory occurred.

[via Cognitive Daily — one of my new blog loves]

This is a really fascinating topic, and the first time I’ve seen it studied methodically.

What is the long term impact of our growing involvement in virtual life and digital communication?

If you see all movies in the same general context (on your iPod or computer screen), rather than surrounding them with a trip to a theatre, candy, theatre seats…

If your reading material consists of Word and eBook files, without the sizes, fonts and thickness of books…

If your letters are all emails or instant messages, without stamps, handwriting or envelopes…

If your conversations are all via SMS, with no body language or tonal cues beyond emoticons…

…and if all that happens within a very limited number of positions and locations (on the sofa, on a train, in the kitchen, at the desk), then what impact does that have on your personal internal journal of your life?

Is that why we need our cell phones to journal our [digital] lives, with automatic uploads of pictures to Flickr, video to YouTube, status to Facebook, and stream of consciousness to Twitter? Is it because we might experience life as a giant blur of digital events that in retrospect are difficult to tease apart from one another… or even difficult to call up as memories?

What does it take to make a digital experience memorable in the way a fully physical experience is? I doubt that color or even sound are enough. New trends in haptic and scent generation might help… but I suspect that the real trick is to tie the digital experience to the surrounding environment (or at least to a discrete digital environment) — tying the mobile ad to the location, to the store, to the time of day, to the people in the room, for example.

A whole new meaning for Location Based Services.

Thanks to M.G. for the link tip and the reminder. For reprint permissions, please contact me via the blog.

I am not a cellphone.
I don’t want to have to change my style every eighteen months to hold your interest. Do I really have to be RAZR-thin for you to be seen with me? I don’t really want to download new tones and wallpaper to keep up with your friends.

I am not a search engine.
I may not always be instantaneously at your service the moment you reach out for a small tidbit of information, day or night. I do, in fact, have interests, priorities, and a life.

I am not a text message.
I care if you speak to me bluntly. I feel slighted if you tune out when I am trying to communicate with you. I do not appreciate repeating myself three times so that you can “multitask.”

I am not a file download.
If you cancel on me at the last minute, I am offended. If you don’t have the patience to wait ten minutes when I am delayed, I feel devalued.

I am not an application launcher.
Yes, it is OK to feel impatient and edgy when an application takes ten, twenty, or thirty seconds to load. No, it is not OK to feel impatient and edgy when it takes me ten, twenty, or thirty seconds to reflect upon your words, get in touch with my feelings, and formulate a response.

I am not an e-mail.
Guess what? When you don’t respond to me, you make me suffer tension, disappointment and rejection to spare you the inconvenience and discomfort of having to say… “no”. You respect me when you answer me.

Me. I am me. I am your sister, your spouse, your co-worker. I am your friend. I need to share a relationship with sensitivity, with compromise, with thoughtfulness and selflessness.

I am not a character in a multi-player virtual universe. I am a person.

What fun! Line Rider is a fantastic web app that lets you draw and… well, it’s a visual thing, so just go take a look or watch a video.

This video demonstrating a BMW design concept philosophy has won my heart. It expresses so much of my own User Experience philosophy, and through it creates a design of such beauty it almost hurts.

[via reaction beta]

One of the frequent topics of discussion in the mobile tech world is how operators can increase revenues. Statistics have been showing a plateau in voice usage for nearly a year now. With some countries having reached a theoretical saturation point for mobile uptake (over 100% is typical for wealthy countries), it would seem that recruiting new (cell plan naive) customers is nearly impossible. Which means that an operator’s new customer growth will come by leaching customers from other operators, right?

Well, customer churn is also very high in the mobile industry (I’ve seen numbers as high as 20% per year). “Churn” here represents the process of customers switching carriers when their contracts expire (or even before). Why do customers churn? Often, it’s because of poor service, not surprisingly.

The guys over at SMSTextNews have often griped that service providers seem to be more interested in recruiting new customers than in enticing existing customers to stay on board. This is odd, because you’d think that it would cost less to retain a customer than to recruit a new one (existing customers should require less advertising dollars and already recognize the brand).

Here’s a classic case: my U.S. phone is a Blackberry. I bought it via Cingular about two years ago, in great part because Cingular was the only carrier with rollover minutes in their plans. Since I’m in the U.S. only sporadically, having my minutes roll over is extremely valuable. With the two-year point approaching, I’m ready to think about not only extending my plan, but upgrading my Blackberry device.

My first stop was Wirefly.com, a site through which I have had previous positive experience. On the splash page, they were advertising a Blackberry Curve through AT&T (who bought Cingular a while back) for $75, free after rebate (I don’t count rebates — too much fine print). When I then clicked on a link to price the same plan with the same phone as a contract extension, I was offered the phone for a price which came out $50 higher. Huh?

That’s crazy. I’m poised to make the decision as to whether to buy the phone from AT&T or T-Mobile (where the model has WiFi but not GPS)… shouldn’t AT&T be trying to woo my business?

What is User Experience (UX)? It’s not just a fancy way of describing your latest greatest web page design…

_____________________________

Last summer, while in Washington DC for Adaptive Path UXWeek, I hailed a taxi. Not just any taxi, as it turned out, but an old Oldsmobile, just like the one my Grandpa Morris had when I was just a little girl.

My notes at the moment: 

The quilted vinyl seats, the width of the bench, the low headrests of the front split-bench seats. The power window controls and the little noise they make. The sound of the air conditioner, of the gear shift… It’s like traveling back in time.

The sliders for the AC that aren’t sliders but arcing switches, the shape of the back windows. It’s incredible how extensive and redolent the design vocabulary of the car is. It’s spoken by the door locks, the handle grips, the ceiling fabric, the horizontal speedometer, the seatbelt buckle. Every single element was designed, and reveals it’s common source/culture.

I am transported (in more ways than one) and astonished, as well. It’s like getting a flood of memory from an olfactory stimulus… but visually.

That is what User Experience means. That is its power.

_____________________________

User Experience is the interaction, the interface, the feel, the sound, the smell, the brand, the advertising, sales attitude, the customer service, the subliminal associations. And yes, the visual effect and (hopefully) lack of frustration. Experience is a result of everything, and it is also the core, the goal, the hinge of everything.

Now you understand why one of my personal mottos is:

Experience is Everything. 

I recently ran a little tiny usability test, with myself as the subject.

The background:

For a year or two I’ve griped about missing calls on my cell phone — it’s in my purse… it’s on my desk in the other room… the convention was so noisy… — and I’m not the only one. Somewhere I read that up to 80% of women complain of missing calls on their mobile phones.

I keep saying that I need a good-looking accessory that will give me a window into the basic phone information on my mobile phone: incoming call alert (with customizable profiles, including ring volume, vibrate and LED), caller ID, and missed calls/message alerts.

The Competition:

The MEX User Experience Design Competition seemed like a great place to submit the design concept for the product, currently going under the name “My Link” (My Link PDF). I figured that at the very least, it would be the right forum to air the user need, especially since I can’t justify diverting Power2B’s attention to a project outside its R&D focus. I was delighted when the My Link Wireless Phone Accessory entry was short-listed for the award in the Professional category; even more delighted when it won.

The Test:

The MEX competition stimulated me to think more about the missed call issue. So I intermarried a Bluetooth headset with an iPod Shuffle, brought them back to the lab to void the warranties, and created a functioning My Link mock-up. The mock-up doesn’t have all the features that matter for the intended use, but it does two critical things: it clips to my clothing, and it gives an audible alert to incoming calls.

The Findings:

At a cafe with my husband, I was struck by a feeling comparable to the first time I left my newborn with a babysitter: a slow buildup of “vigilance anxiety” (subliminal habitual listening for the baby’s cry), followed by an eruption into consciousness (”Omigosh, is the baby OK?”) and a relief (”Oh, right, she’s not with me”). Then a slow return to vigilant state.

The My Link equivalent ran: subconciously listening out for the phone to ring -> sudden consciousness (”Did I just miss a call? I haven’t hear the phone for a while”) -> “Oh, the My Link would have beeped if the phone had rung”. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This led me to realize that there are two categories of problems with missing calls:

• frustration and dilemmas caused by not receiving information/communication in a timely manner

• anxiety and behaviors relating to fear of not receiving information/communication in a timely manner

My personal and unscientific estimation is that the missing calls problem is comprised of 15% of the former, and 85% of the latter.

I also observed the following auxiliary hassles that stem from anxiety about missing calls (no, I don’t exhibit all of these behaviors personally!):

• obsessively checking the phone’s status to see if a call is missed (worst with older clamshell models that don’t have an external display)

• hearing phantom rings

• dumping a purse upside down to find the phone before the call is diverted to voicemail

• family members calling 5 times in a row

• placing the phone on the table / countertop / dashboard in order to monitor it

• family members calling many times in a row “in case you didn’t hear”

• inappropriate ring volume when the profile was changed for outdoor use, and the owner forgot to change back to an indoor profile afterward (also a problem vice-versa)

Thanks to the staff, sponsors, judges and participants in the MEX design competition for the positive interest, and for the opportunity to develop the My Link concept. I would love to see this get taken up and manufactured soon.

My Link PDF