Product Reviewed: Tawkon (www.tawkon.com) version 1.0.1 tested on a BlackBerry 9700 (Onyx).

The upshot: While documentation and online help for purchasing and troubleshooting are still sketchy, Tawkon is a remarkable application, and comes as close as I’ve ever seen to achieving the Holy Grail of “Set It and Forget It” as any application out there. Tawkon should be considered a vital utility for every mobile phone.

Tawkon describes itself as “a mobile phone application that gives users information and tools to avoid mobile phone radiation as much as possible, with minimal disruption to normal phone usage.”

Go back and read that sentence again. There are an awful lot of promises packed into that claim:

[1] a software application for your mobile phone (not a hardware measuring gadget); [2] delivery of information about your phone’s radiation emissions from its various radios; [3] tools to help you minimize exposure to cell radiation; and [4] a usable interface that lets you get on with your calls. 

Does Tawkon deliver?

[Disclaimer: After some initial difficulties purchasing and activating the application, Tawkon provided me with the application and asked me to test and review it.]

I’ve been using Tawkon for a week on a BlackBerry 9700 (Onyx). Navigating to the Tawkon website [http://www.tawkon.com/m] on my phone’s web browser, I clicked the big green PayPal button. This took a leap of faith, actually, since no price was noted (Tawkon costs $9.99) and I associate big buttons like that with “one-click” purchases. I clicked anyway. Much to my surprise, I was taken to BlackBerry’s AppWorld and the message “This application is not available on your device or for your carrier.” Hm.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just closed the browser and gave up.

Within hours, and much to my surprise, I received a classy email from Tawkon, thanking me for my interest and asking about my experience downloading and using the application. This was a first for me, and tipped me off to the fact that the Tawkon team is serious — really serious — about getting the user experience absolutely right, every step of the way.

Who could resist a letter starting, “As a young start up, we’re eager for constructive feedback…”? I wrote back: “Today I finally got my AT&T Blackberry 9700 working with my Orange (Israel) SIM. Tried to download Tawkon, and got a message that it’s not compatible with my phone or my operator. Don’t know which. So, I’m disappointed.”

Four hours later, I got a personal email reply from a real person — one of the company’s founders. After some troubleshooting, he explained that the problem was that I had chosen to purchase via PayPal, which meant purchasing through BlackBerry’s App World store, which is not supported in Israel (who knew?). Instead, I needed to click the other green button, and opt to pay using my credit card via the Mobihand store. Purchasing via Mobihand was indeed quick and easy.

Obviously, this gateway to purchase is confusing and difficult to use, and Tawkon will have to make sure that customers see only relevant buying options, or they will lose many bewildered customers along the way…

…which would be a pity. Because once the aches and pains of getting to the right web page to purchase Tawkon were over, and once the application was installed (important — and undocumented — note: you need to restart your BlackBerry after installation in order for Tawkon to launch properly! You can tell if it’s working by checking for the Tawkon mini-icon in the top margin of the BlackBerry home screen), everything went as smooth as silk.Tawkon has done this application right. They have obviously put a lot of thought into making the application function seamlessly, so much so that it’s hard to believe this is just a first release. Once they cross a few T’s and dot a few I’s, you’ll never guess this is a start-up. Tawkon feels like a mature mobile app from an experienced first-tier company.

I launched Tawkon from the Downloads folder on my BlackBerry, and was taken directly to a Tawkon Prediction screen that scanned my system and reassured me that my phone’s radiation levels were low. The Real-Time Radiation Indication Bar is liquid mercury; it’s so sensuous and fluid you’ll want to walk around mapping your radiation environment just for the pleasure of making the colors flow.

Keeping that screen open, I placed a call from my cell phone to my landline and took a tour of my home. (When you’re not on a call, Tawkon scans using a “Prediction Mode”. When you’re on a call, Tawkon goes into “Call Monitoring Mode”.) The results? My home and office are in good shape, although I won’t be making any calls from the bathroom. It’s just as well.

In fact, you don’t even have to open the Tawkon application to see your phone’s emission status. That little mini-icon on the home screen changes color from green to yellow to red to cue you in, say, before you even make a phone call.

Where Tawkon really shines is when you’re on the move. Most of the time, I never even noticed that Tawkon was there, running automatically in the background. But when I answered a call sitting in a mall café — bzzz. I walked into an elevator while deep in discussion — bzzz. My phone vibrated and a message appeared on the screen, an alert from Tawkon that my phone was emitting high levels of radiation. I switched to a bluetooth headset or the built-in speakerphone and was pleased to see that Tawkon registered the change and let me know that it was helping. Tawkon also records the emission patterns during calls, letting you go back to review your call history to see how much you were exposed to — or avoided exposure to.

How the heck does Tawkon work? Tawkon says it monitors and analyzes your mobile phone radiation as a function of  three key parameters: your phone’s specific absorption rate (SAR) – different for each phone model; environmental conditions – rural versus urban area, mobility, and distance from a cellular base station, terrain, etc.; and personal phone usage – the way the user holds the phone, distance from the user’s head or body, etc.

How reliable is Tawkon’s feedback? I’ll have to leave it to someone with a lab equipped to independently check Tawkon’s results against their own measurements. (Tawkon claims to have tested its results in collaboration with In4Tel, a strategic partner.) What I can say is that the feedback makes sense. Tawkon buzzed me in places where my phone would be expected to boost its power to get a signal — in elevators, enclosed stairwells and basements.

What is the impact on battery life? I don’t know how to gauge that, but I would expect it to be minimal, since Tawkon is a software solution. I spent a day at a convention and used my BlackBerry heavily all day for email, some long calls, Bluetooth radio on (WiFi was off), taking pictures of slides and constant Twittering during panels and sessions, and still had plenty of battery life left at the end of the day even though Tawkon was running in the background.

How does Tawkon know what it knows? Beats me, but I feel a lot better with Tawkon installed. You can read up on WHO’s most recent findings regarding cell phone emission risks here. I set out to purchase Tawkon because I wanted to feel some sense of control over my mobile risk:reward ratio.

The upshot: While documentation and online help for purchasing and troubleshooting are still sketchy, Tawkon is a remarkable application, and comes as close as I’ve ever seen to achieving the Holy Grail of “Set It and Forget It” as any application out there. With the risks of cell phone emissions still unclear, Tawkon should be considered a vital utility for every mobile phone.

Tawkon is a keeper. It’s earned a home on my phone.

PROS:

• “Set it and forget it” convenience
• Gorgeous interface
• Responsive, helpful customer service straight from the development team.
• Provides valuable information about what’s going on in your hand and near your head.

CONS:

• Instructions are not part of the application (you can find information in videos posted at Tawkon.com and on YouTube here and here, but it’s up to you to find them).
• Purchasing process become confusing if you’re outside the BlackBerry App World zone. (I guess it’s an “App Region”, not an “App World”, yet.)

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!

Simply pop in the battery, push the lever on the side and well, that’s the beauty of it… you already know how to use this little guy. There’s also a helpful LED on the front to indicate the progress of the charge for the hopelessly impatient. “Toasting” your lithium-ion batteries is, at first glance, a little weird, right?

[via Engadget]

Yeah, designing a charger to look like a toaster is pretty kitschy. But it sure got me thinking… having a clear, visual and visible indicator of battery charge would be a huge improvement over my current (sorry) situation.

On the one hand, I keep reading urgent articles claiming that 30% of cell phone energy use is actually wasted electricity spent on chargers left in the sockets (or plugged in to already-charged phones). On the other hand, of my many phones, only one keeps a message on the display to tell me “Battery full: please remove charger” (another one keeps a single chirp as the “battery full” alert). Not that it helps a lot when the phone has been left to charge overnight, but still.

I wouldn’t want to remove the battery from my phone every day or two for charging (especially since that would turn the phone off — I don’t keep spare batteries much). But I would love to have a smart charger that turns itself off once the device battery is full. (If it would turn itself back on when the device got back down to, say, 50%, all the better.)

How about it? Anyone want to have a stab at making/marketing it?

Shouldn’t your first reaction to any change of corporate policy be to redesign the logo?

Enjoy the full set of 15 here.

[Via Business Pundit. Thanks to Ken for the tip.]

Exclave: A portion of a country which is separated from the main part and surrounded by politically alien territory.

But here’s the great part: “The same territory is an enclave in respect to the surrounding country and an exclave with respect to the country to which it is politically attached.”

(definition excerpted from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, as referenced at Dictionary.com)

Lovely, isn’t it? Came up in the context of the territories of Liechtenstein:

While many of these Liechtensteinian fragments might be considered exclaves, most also border more than one other territory, and consequently only three can be considered enclaves…

[Strange Maps blog]

You read that right: 1880s. 1881, to be exact. That’s two years before my great-grandfather was born. That’s coincident with Laura Ingalls Wilders Little House childhood. That’s… well, that’s a long time ago.

[via Comic Book Resources — with thanks to Michael Danziger for the tip]

Some people are in a race to “keep up with the Joneses”. Some people are in a race to “keep down with the Cohens“. As for hats…

[today’s offering from xkcd]

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

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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. 

Seen Los Angeles:

Pretty funny, huh? You have to look closely to be sure there isn’t actually a golf ball half-way through the rear windshield.

Seen in Jerusalem:

Great café; nice decor. The whole facade is plate glass, including the sliding front door (maximizes usable interior space). Someone neglected to put any cushion or spring on that door. It shuts glass against glass. Ouch. I cringe every time it shuts (including when I’m the one shutting it). It already has some chips and dings.

Light is wonderful. Glass lets in the light, and connects the spaces. I’m delighted (sorry) to be seeing more and more glass used in architecture and interior design. Too bad it isn’t yet perfect.

Some of you will have noticed that the arrow in the top sign is pointing the wrong way (it’s pointing to the open direction, not the shut).