With regard to my post on Tawkon, ima2seven asked my opinion about various smartphone options. She didn’t know what she was getting into!  So instead of replying in the comments, I’ll post my response here:I love my iPod Touch as an iPod and mini-portable computer, BUT absolutely prefer my Blackberry as a smartphone (that’s why I have a Touch and not an iPhone). Blackberry is a much better fit for me, in terms of phone and email usability. For example, my biggest uses (no particular order) of my smartphone are: check new emails, phone functions, send myself notes via email to act upon when I get back to my desk, camera and calendar. I use (with less frequency) podcasting and music features, Google maps, Twitter, Facebook, alarm clock.It’s important to note that the Blackberry is MUCH less convenient for syncing to my Mac than the Nokia E71 it replaced. The E71 synced wirelessly and flawlessly via Bluetooth, keeping my computer and phone contacts and calendars up to date. The Blackberry will not sync to iCal (despite claims to do so), and is erratic and unpredictable about syncing with the contacts. It also requires a special USB cable to sync (none of my 100 other micro-USB cables fit the BB).[As an aside, whichever smartphone you decide to go with, you must first backup your contacts, email, calendars and bookmarks before attempting to sync it to your computer! This will save you a lot of grief if you manage to accidentally overwrite your computer with your empty smartphone instead of vice-versa.]The lack of calendar sync keeps me teetering on the verge of switching back to Nokia or iPhone, but the vastly better email and phone functions keep me with Blackberry. The speed of opening, composing and sending emails from Blackberry is unmatched, for now.I have no personal experience using an Android phone. But here’s a typical quote, tweeted just yesterday by a very tech-savvy colleague who works in the mobile industry, albeit not a programmer:

“almost destroyed my android phone today of rage, because of the time I lost trying to make it a great phone and realizing I won’t succeed. I will stick to my love-hate iPhone for now and patiently wait for WIN7 phones to show up. cannot wait to synchronize Outlook with my phone, and mirror my inbox etc. […] will always be a fun tool for application developers, a phone for geeks and Google adepts, but for a simply rooted guy like me using MS Outlook and few cloud apps, this is not going to work.”

I expect it’s just a little too early for most people to move to Android, unless you are either a programmer, or someone who keeps most of your data in Google’s cloud, anyway (GMail, GMail contacts, Google Calendars, Google Reader, etc.).The upshot: Choosing a smartphone depends on how you really behave when you are mobile. Your real smartphone choices are a QWERTY-keyboard Blackberry (if email and calling is a big part of your day); iPhone (if you mostly want a great iPod and a phone rolled into one, or you’re on a Mac and desire seamless syncing with your computer and MobileMe); and Nokia enterprise phones (if you value great calling functions and sound quality above all else, and don’t want to sacrifice any other features, even if they take a few more keytaps to reach. Nokia phones are fabulously hardy, and gorgeous, too.).Good luck, ima2seven, and I hope you’re happy with your new smartphone!

Ostalgie: a German term referring to nostalgia for life in the former East Germany; longing for life in the Communist era. It is a portmanteau of the German words Ost (east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia).(Stumbled across in the book The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar.)

Received in a child’s school prize today:

PRODUCT EXPLAIN:The product for voice,light,elecericity.incorporate.the material adopt all wooland a yard wide .excellent maked and have speciality of defiant,stimalate recreational.it be propitious to children touch and mind enhanceing.atthe same time adult as well as sportful fine toys.

GAME RULE:From jumping–off pointalong pathe end 100cent the pontil go ahead on the way not blow and reach astandard.good luck !

Got it? Good.

*Actually, The Power of Babel is the title of one of my favorite books on language.

Oh, very cool!

…a Burger King in Hillside, New Jersey tried out the MotionPower energy harvester from New Energy Technologies to see how it would hold up to the heavy traffic flow they experienced over the holiday period. As drivers wended their way to the window to get their Whoppers, the cars ran over a metal speed-bump affair that, using the weight of the vehicles to depress a plate and turn some gears, produced 2000 watts with each passing.

As it was just an initial durability test, the fast food franchise didn’t actually benefit from the “free” electrons but customers were treated to a very small light show that was installed to demonstrate the that system was working. The manufacturer envisions larger MotionPower machines installed in places where traffic is slowing down to prevent the scheme from requiring extra energy input from vehicles. [via autobloggreen]

I was using Wite-Out® today for the first time in years. As I painted out type, I thought for a moment what it might have been like to be a Wite-Out product manager 10 years ago. Imagine asking the user experience question: What bothers Wite-Out users about Wite-Out? What can we improve? The immediate replies that came to mind:

• Waiting for the Wite-Out to dry
• Clumpy application of the correction fluid after the first use; the fluid dries and sticks to the brush and the neck of the bottle
• Having to paint over the same words two or three times because they show through even after the first application
• The smell (some people like it, some hate it)

What jumps out here is that improvement in any one of the first three areas will have a negative impact on one or two of the others. If Wite-Out dried faster, it would dry (and clump up) on the bottle and brush applicator faster. If it clumped less, it would take more time to dry; it would also be a thinner fluid that would be less opaque once the liquid evaporated.It’s a no-win scenario, which is probably why there were no major changes in Wite-Out technology over the first 20 years of my life: the product designers had found the best balance — or perhaps the least-bad compromise — between drying quickly and maintaining wetness (smoothness), and were sticking to it. But it must have been frustrating if you were trying to make a better product and increase market share.I popped over to Bic’s Wite-Out site to have a look. Guess what? As of 1994, there are four different formulations of fluid Wite-Out: Quick Dry,  Super Smooth, Extra Coverage and Water Base (low odor). Hm.I suppose a cynic might say that there are four different packages for the same product, and the formulation label just panders to the public’s varying degrees of Wite-Out insecurity. In fact, the proliferation of Wite-Out recipes reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s classic statement from Howard Moskowitz that “There is no perfect spaghetti sauce. There are only perfect spaghetti sauces.” In The Ketchup Conundrum, Gladwell expresses it thus:

The answer appeared almost immediately: a specific recipe that, according to Moskowitz’s data, produced a score of 78 from the people in Segment 1.  But that same formulation didn’t do nearly as well with those in Segment 2 and Segment 3.  They scored it 67 and 57, respectively.  Moskowitz started again, this time asking the computer to optimize for Segment 2.  This time the ratings came in at 82, but now Segment 1 had fallen ten points, to 68. “See what happens?” he said.  ”If I make one group happier, I piss off another group.  We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product the best you can get across all the segments is a 60—if you’re lucky.  That’s if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family.  But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72.  Is that big? Ahhh.  It’s a very big difference.  In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.”

I’m guessing that a similar process went on at Bic: if you can’t actually improve a product’s features without making some other problem even more annoying, then instead of finding a compromise balance (as was done historically), optimize for each problem separately. Voila! Four kinds of Wite-Out.Of course, you can then go ask Barry Schwartz why having four correction fluid options won’t make your life happier…P.S.: I just realized that Wite-Out also now has a sponge-wedge tip instead of that inconvenient shaggy bristle tip. Nice!

Poka-yoke (ポカヨケ^?) (IPA: [poka joke]) is a Japanese term that means “fail-safing” or “mistake-proofing”. A poka-yoke is any mechanism in a Lean manufacturing process that helps an equipment operator avoid (yokeru) mistakes (poka). Its purpose is to eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur. The concept was formalised, and the term adopted, by Shigeo Shingo as part of the Toyota Production System. [Wikipedia]

Peter Abilla offers a great new example of design that accommodates human frailty: Embeda, a newly FDA-approved pain-killer with

…an interesting property: If you take the medication as prescribed, it works fine; if you abuse the medication, it ceases to work.

…EMBEDA(TM) contains extended-release morphine pellets, each with an inner core of naltrexone hydrochloride, an opioid receptor antagonist. If taken as directed, the morphine relieves pain while the sequestered naltrexone hydrochloride passes through the body with no intended clinical effect. If EMBEDA(TM) is crushed or chewed, the naltrexone is released and absorbed with the morphine, reversing the morphine’s subjective and analgesic effects.

After all, if pain killers can’t relate to human weakness, what can?

illative: [adjective]

1. Of, relating to, or of the nature of an illation.
2. Expressing or preceding an inference. Used of a word.
3. Of, relating to, or being a grammatical case indicating motion toward or into in some languages, as in Finnish Helsinkiin, ”to Helsinki.”

(American Heritage Dictionary via Dictionary.com)This word also seen in Five Days in London: May 1940 by John Lukacs, in this context:

“Yet the immediate effect of these speeches [of Churchill’s] on the British people was limited. Their effect was cumulative (or, to use Cardinal Newman’s favorite adjective, illative).”

It’s an interesting use, since in this context, illative implies a significant effect produced by a prior accumulation of insignificant impacts, whereas the dictionary definition suggests a subtler manipulation.

rhodomontade: braggadocio: vain and empty boasting; vainglorious boasting or bragging; pretentious, blustering talk. (Dictionary.com)Wow.Not just an unusual word, but one I don’t think I’ve ever even seen before. I came across it in the following context:

…now Halifax asked Churchill ‘to come out in the garden with him’ for a talk. Before that Halifax told Cadogan, ‘I can’t work with Winston any longer.’ Cadogan: ‘I said, “Nonsense: his rhodomontades probably bore you as much as they do me, but don’t do anything silly under the stress of that.”‘ (from Five Days in London: May 1940, page 153 by John Lukacs)

(Do you think Cadogan actually used the word “rhodomontades” in conversation?!)

Lovers of language, unite!Back in December 2007, I quoted a passage from The Meaning of Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod. Tingo is a book I enjoy dipping into; discovering words from other cultures that express a novel viewpoint is always delightful.So I was pleased to hear from Adam the other day, telling me about his new book, The Wonder of Whiffling, which discovers words from the English language as its usage has evolved around the world:

Discover all sorts of words you’ve always wished existed but never knew, such as fornale, to spend one’s money before it has been earned; cagg, a solemn vow or resolution not to get drunk for a certain time; and petrichor, the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.

Even better, there’s a blog at the book’s web page with some interesting word discussions.And even better than that, you can follow @wonderwhiffling on Twitter, and get words delivered right into your Twitter feed. For example, the three most recent tweets:

NEW WORD: tyromancy (1652) fortune telling by watching cheese coagulate

new phrase: ash cash (UK slang 1989) a fee paid to a doctor for signing a cremation form

today’s word: pingle (Suffolk) to move food about on the plate for want of an appetite

Enjoy!

I had an experience yesterday that was totally exhausting, but fascinating. An expected action catalyzed an unexpected emotional reaction; a relatively small incident set off a huge welter of emotions. The trigger turned out to represent — and therefore evoke — much larger, parallel, issues that lurked under the surface.

It’s almost like a pain path: when a person has physical pain, it stimulates the nerve path to the brain. The more often that path is traced, the more developed — and responsive — that nerve path grows. And the more sensitive and exquisite the pain.

I don’t know if the identical neuronal process applies to emotions. If it doesn’t, it surely provides a useful parallel, a useful analogy. Once an emotional route is traced — a certain type of event, a certain interpretation of that event, a certain emotional response to that event — that same route is more likely to be retraced the next time an event of that type occurs.

[I suppose this is the foundation of behavioral psychology: to encourage a desired emotional response by forcing interpretation (either positive or negative) to a controlled event combination (grafting a contrived event onto one that otherwise occurs spontaneously). And by repeating the process over and over, to “retrain” the interpretation to that type of event, thus leading to a different, more desirable, emotional response.]

Musing on Using

All of this led me to think about how the best products or interfaces take positive advantage of this quality: of the ability of one small experience to somehow tap into a depth of prior, more emotional experiences.

In some ways, this is the goal of great User Experience design: to create a series of positively felt interactions that build upon one another to create a superlative overall experience of a product.

Every “Little” Interaction Counts

This is why every “little” key press, every symmetry of interface, every tactile feedback, every sound, every visual transition matters so much. It’s why people like Steve Jobs and Jon Ives are totally obsessive. Because the User Experience as a whole is created by tens and hundreds of little interactions, little trigger events.

On the one hand, this means that the system can tolerate a certain degree of bad experience (think Symbian S60 menus), if the overall experience is positive enough (think Nokia phones). Because the positive emotional reaction will still be triggered often enough to keep the overall experience positive.

On the other hand, this means that the first series of experience event absolutely has to be wonderful, to establish the desired User Experience pathway (think original Palm Pilot). If not, a neutral or negative pathway is established, which is difficult to overcome — perhaps impossible to overcome entirely (think Motorola RAZR).

Creating Passionate Relationships

But the really powerful lesson is that if once you’ve established a solid experience path, you can evoke a strong response in it with even a very small interaction (think iPhone). You can leverage the historic cumulation of experiences to evoke a disproportionate emotional response… for better or for worse.

Each little experience doesn’t just add to the effects of the previous ones, it builds upon them. The speed and intensity increase, up to a certain point. You get more bang for your buck. And you create passionate user-device relationships.