Blog Stuff we're discovering, learning, reading, watching, enjoying...

Our blog has been suffering a little lately… summer attitudes, holidays, deadlines, etc. However, via Twitter I came across the Design for Service blog this week, offering excellent insight and resources around thinking and designing using a Service Design approach. Whilst quite niche, I think the general thread of the site demonstrates the important but often misunderstood role of Service Design within the digital/interactive environment.

We’re running another installation of Five Trees Forest - our RFID/SMS  interactive mobile story this week at the Showcomotion Conference in Sheffield. Created with Blink, we’ve had to redevelop the mobile interaction this time round so that the game is played purely by SMS rather than RFID due to there being up to 400 players potentially taking part! It’ll be interesting to see how the story develops amidst the context of a conference and whether the players are as engaged using SMS as they have been with the physical interaction of using RFID.

A piece of work created at the MEX Conference in May shows the interesting, if unsurprising, disconnect between what mobile operators and the end consumer see as key elements of the mobile user experience. The mobile user experience is intricately complex… hardware/devices, network connectivity, differing usage requirements between users, content and services, billing, enablers, marketing/branding, etc. Whilst it seems unlikely that the ‘building blocks’ in the MEX diagram would ever be identical on both sides, it is hoped that they might one day be complimentary. Until the mobile industry adapts and recognises this it appears that mobile user experience will continue to disappoint many consumers for a variety of reasons.

NOTE: If the title to this piece, and perhaps that of the original MEX content, seem familiar then you’re probably thinking of the excellent book by Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience.

What might happen if we were really connected all the time? Newspapers would actually have video in them, book reviews would appear on book covers as you pick them up and you could check the time just by tapping your fingers on your wrist. Or at least that’s the vision in this MIT demo.

Two things strike me about this excellent video from MIT. First, you can’t knock someone who’s prepared to walk around looking as ridiculous as the guy covered in all the gear. I’d do it in a flash if it were me. Second, I love seeing the incredible approach at MIT where so much stuff actually gets prototyped. Don’t bother pontificating about how it might work. Build a prototype and see how it might work.

At tonights Sandpit #10 event, a game is being run using a system that we’ve developed with our partners and friends at Blink. You can play from afar or even better turn up at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. When London was built there were many monsters trapped underneath the buildings and foundations. It’s your task to  free them by solving the riddles, texting the answers and then drawing the monsters themselves.

Find out more and follow the progress and results from here.

This Econsultancy article about how Amazon made $2.7bn with one small tweak offers an excellent insight and short analysis of the value of constantly fine-tuning user experience to make the best of your content. This is particularly pertinent to user generated content which can vary hugely in it’s quality and value to other users. The article also demonstrates that content requirements change over time. In this case, as the number of comments grow they initially become useful but then after a certain amount it becomes difficult for a user to know which ones are valuable. Other similar scenarios may be to promote proven “respected” reviewers over others or to recognise that some products change over time too and therefore the respective reviews may have differing value.

As over half of the UK are now web users, the growth of new internet users is naturally slowing. However, as predicted for the past couple of years, mobile internet usage is now beginning to significantly increase. 25% more people accessed the internet using their mobile between April - Sept 2008. The increase can probably be accredited to improved handset capabilities across mainstream devices, higher awareness of mobile services, an increase in quality and breadth of ‘immediate’ information services and a growing focus on mobile from the key social networks such as Facebook and Bebo, along with simpler, inclusive data tariffs from the operators.

Apple have implemented one of the best known gesture based interaction models on their laptops and iPhone/iPod Touch, but Oblong industries, inc. have gone way beyond this as they try to bring to reality a Minority Report style interface.

A recent report by internet research company ComScore examines how UK internet users are accessing the internet across both web and mobile.