Yu Centrik

Here’s a quick summary of some more presentations from the EuroITV conference:

* The use of TV as a reminder system for seniors’ medication (Brazil). Not that crazy of an idea.
* A panel on the impact of Internet on the traditional TV remote.  The panel moved a bit strangely.  Each presenter advocated an idea, one after another on the future of TV (the TV guide is dying, the future is in placeshifting, quality content is king, etc.).
* User expectations in terms of self-identification on interactive TV (for a personalized experience). A study was presented on the acceptability of different interaction modes on televisions in Austria. Strangely, fingerprint identification proved to be the users’ favorite …?
* A comparative study between a traditional remote control and a remote touchpad: the two remotes are more or less equal in terms of error rate, but the touchpad requires a lot more user movement.  The author concludes by stating his opinion that these remotes are destined to become popular in 5 years time, when touch interfaces become the majority.

* Recommendations: Because there’s so much content, specialists are calling for the television timetable to be replaced by intelligent recommender systems. A researcher presented an interesting overview of problems with recommender systems. One challenge is the notion of time; it is difficult to make good recommendations at first, as there would be no initial user data (implicit profiling).  He continued to present a method to optimize this element, a bit complex ..  On the same topic, another author has summarized his study on the use of recommendation software for Youtube videos as a Facebook application.  Their system uses a method combining both subjective measures and explicit judgements (user ratings of movies) and objective measurement (automated analysis of listening habits - eg playing time of a video, kind of the most popular videos, etc..). The system indicates that explicit and implicit data seem to converge, and that this combined approach is promising.  However, the majority of participants indicated they would not continue with the experiment afterward, as they judged it too demanding…

I recently returned from a month-long foray through India.  As the country from which both of my parents immigrated to Canada, the trip was enlightening in many ways.  Among the countless revelations lay a few economic and technological insights which I thought might interest our readers.  Are you a global traveler?  These thoughts are obviously anecdotal and I welcome your comments from your own experiences in other parts of the world.

While the major cities of India have become increasingly “westernized” and the country’s reputation as a hotbed for technology grows, the proliferation of technology has reached beyond the cities into rural villages and remote farmland.  Let me paint you a picture: imagine a young indian farmhand, shirtless, his legs draped in a cloth dress.  He’s riding one of his family’s bulls, slowly bringing it to the other side of the village.  He’s got a stick in one hand, which he’s using to whack the bull for navigation, and a cellphone in the other.  Despite my limited understanding of the language, he’s clearly discussing farm work.  This was a bold image I witnessed first-hand on a rural farm village in northeastern India.  This is a sugar plantation with no consistent residential electricity, no water pipes or hot water, and two small mobile phone towers.

The third world is collectively skipping 100 years of technological development.  While we painstakingly iterated from basic gas-guzzling cars, rotary phones and vaccuum tube computers to the current technological world, the fruits of our advance have globalized.  This child went from having no phone or communication lines whatsoever, directly to a mobile phone.  In the near future, I can imagine these third-world children engaging with technologies that access e-mail and web browsing (perhaps the iPad is a step in this direction as a simplified internet interface?).  Many talk of the “digital divide” as an emerging problem in our already-imbalanced world.  I would argue that this gap is destined to be filled through the globalization of our most modern, efficient and cheap technologies.

What does internet access mean to rural villages and third-world citizens?  Despite attempts to create structured and organized education systems (I visited several rural Indian schools), there is a clear lack of dedicated teachers with international-level skill and knowledge.  However, stories of intelligent people emigrating out of the third world have spawned a generation of young rural kids with intelligence and a passion for education which is simply unparalleled in the developed world.

The fire I saw deep in the eyes of an 8-year-old village girl who studies english and biology textbooks twelve hours a day of her own volition is a testament.  Her clear and firm intention to “become a doctor and move abroad” is in stark contrast to what interests the 8-year-olds I’ve met in the developed world.  Her smooth conversation with me in a self-taught english represents a calculated move from her remote village to the world stage.

As mobile technology develops and these young rural children get access to the wealth of information on the internet, it seems possible that this feverish appetite for education will be satisfied through self-directed learning.  The untapped potential of the intelligent-yet-uneducated workers I met at the nearby sugar mill could cease to be a reality with the advent of information technology.   Especially in the midst of this past decade’s collapse, the economic implications of a techno-savvy, self-educated and passionate third world are astounding.

How can we prepare for this onslaught of new talent?  First of all, the selfish question: how can we stay competitive by highlighting what makes our skills and experiences unique?  More importantly, how can we alter our economic systems and requirements to evaluate and embrace these talented people, knowing that they might be able to help solve major global problems despite not having an official degree or diploma?

In the design of social media, our task is to provide a medium and context for human interaction.  With this power, the behaviour of our interfaces can be interpreted as the behaviour of our human colleagues, friends and family.  Considering this fact, we run the risk of creating unnatural, awkward or even hurtful social situations for our users - in other words, a terrible experience.

An example.  I was recently conducting business out of town when a peer and I agreed to keep contact via text-messaging.  At the time, I hadn’t yet realized that my network provider was not stable in this part of the world.  As it turns out, everytime I tried to send a text message, my phone was sending numerous duplicates.  Not only was the service assaulting the receipient with messages, but it was also giving me errors saying that it couldn’t complete message delivery.  So there I was, trying to re-send a message which had actually already been delivered twice; my recipient ended up receiving almost 10 identical text messages.  Needless to say, she was frustrated and annoyed, but most importantly, she was attributing the technical errors to me and drawing social conclusions (when we discussed this error later, she said I had seemed overeager and tactless).

As another example, consider a recent addition to Facebook which displays those friends you haven’t interacted with lately, reminding you to send them a message.  Unfortunately, this feature has been the target of a recent wave of complaints from users who automatically recevied such requests from recently deceased friends or family.  This is a clear example of an emotionally hurtful user experience directly resulting from Facebook’s attempt to socially-integrate their interface.

Embodying an interface within human social norms also allows users to understand and interact as if it were a social being.  If you’ve ever used voice response systems which attempt to use human language to engage in a natural conversation (”at the tone, please tell me what you’re calling about”), then you’ve likely felt a little frustrated, uncomfortable or confused.  In some cases, these interfaces greatly simplify the process, yet in others they are frustrating and strange.  In such novel interfaces, we move closer to the re-emergence of a principle introduced in the field of robotics by Masahiro Mori known as the “uncanny valley”.  Mori used early philosophical work on the ‘uncanny’ to demonstrate that overly realistic robots can result in a negative reaction from human observers.  The implication here is that while modest social embodiment of our interfaces can improve the user experience, we should be careful in more extreme applications of this principle, as we run the risk of making our users feel uneasy.

Considering the social role of your technological designs is a valuable technique.  However, designing for a more intimate realm of human experience also introduces new risks.  Our penetration into the emotional lives of our users has also opened possibilities for increasingly detrimental consequences of design errors.  Any designer should take heed of the lessons learned within these examples and consider the added risks when working on socially embodied technology.

Engaging with socially-powered technology for the past decade, I’ve noticed the slow, natural formation of ‘digital etiquette’.  In the same way that researchers have found information-seeking behaviour to be akin to animalistic ‘foraging’ behaviour, it seems that our typical social behaviour manifests itself on the web as well.  As online tools are appropriated by real users in a social context, we are starting to see the natural development of online ‘politeness’.  Some examples…

Re-Tweeting and Sharing Posts
When finding an interesting link posted by another user, it is polite to credit them when sharing it with your own network.  Twitter users accomplished this by creating and following the convention of re-tweeting (which is now being integrated formally into the system by twitter).  Along the same vein, Facebook has recently added a share feature which allows you to auto-distribute any post to your own network. However, Facebook’s system does not automatically include any information about the original poster with a user’s “re-post”.  This can result in a reaction from users; unless you mention whose post you’re sharing, you’re likely to receive a friendly “hey, you stole my post!”.

Multiplayer Gaming Conventions
Since their inception, multi-player games have been steeped in their own customs, language and culture.  Upon the release and adoption of a new game, its player community naturally tends to form rules and customs surrounding the freedoms and limitations of the game.  Starcraft, a classic strategy game from Blizzard, became extremely popular due to its balanced and engaging gameplay.  After an online community of players developed, a weakness of the game was revealed: advanced players could bypass an involved war by rapidly training a few troops to kill off beginners before they even get a chance to start playing.  The process was named rushing and an abundance of players started hosting games with “no rush” in the title, resulting in civil games based solely on players’ trust that fellow players would show politeness.

Selective Photo Tagging
Photo tagging is a useful feature on Facebook.  Users are able to tag the people in a photograph, automatically notifying them and attaching the photograph to their profile.  This creates a delicate situation, as anyone has the power to add pictures to your profile.  At first, users would tag every picture added to the network.  As users become more and more aware of this phenomenon, they have started tagging only the best pictures.  This creates an environment where all photos are accessible, but only the best are attached to a users’ profile.  Selective tagging is a clear display of respect and politeness for fellow users of the service.

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There are many more examples of online politeness.  As social technology becomes more central, the trend is not likely to slow down.  What does this mean for designers?  We should take note of this trend and improve the user experience of any socially-driven system by considering and accomodating digital etiquette in our designs.