Why do people carry phones?
Why do people carry what they carry?
And if we can understand why, how can we use this knowledge in the design of future products, applications and services?

Why people carry phones might seem like a rather basic question for someone who works for a mobile phone manufacturer, but the journey to try and understand the answer has been an interesting one.

A couple of years back I carried out a multi-cultural research project with Per Persson and a number of other colleagues to figure out what objects people consider to be essential when they leave home. We spent time studying 17 urban dwellers in San Francisco, Berlin and Shanghai and Tokyo with shadowing, home-interviews, plus 129 street interviews and numerous observation sessions. One of our screening criteria for in-depth subjects was that people had to own a mobile phone although during the screening process we made no assumptions about whether they considered the phone a necessity or not.

In the cultures we studied 3 objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders were keys, money and mobile phone. Whilst this may seem obvious the interesting part of the study was in understanding the reasons why people considered these objects essential (largely survival, safety & security), why they were not always present (forgetting, awareness, making a conscious decision to be out of touch) and strategies people adopted to help them remember to take these objects. A lot of times money will be carried in a wallet or purse, but when it comes down to it, the money (cash and notes) are considered the essential objects before the other objects that are also contained there.

Some of the material from this study was presented in the DUX 2005 paper - 'Mobile Essentials - Field Study and Concepting' (download paper, 0.4mb). The paper introduces three interrelated ways to understand human behaviour to explain what we learned, and at some point I'll use Future Perfect to expand on some of these issues.

Firstly the Center of Gravity describes the most likely place where you are likely to cluster and consequently find these objects. In the home the Center of Gravity is likely to be the edge of a desk, a chair and often in the case of women, a bag. Objects don't stay in the center of gravity but over time they gravitate there.

As a private, relatively safe environment the home has a large range of distribution, whilst spaces like cafes or public transport have a relatively low range of distribution. The lowest range of distribution we observed was bus commuting in Shanghai rush-hour. The most extreme example of range of distribution was given to us by a vice cop in Berlin who explained about a drug dealer that double wrapped his produce which was then stored it his mouth - if the cops tried to bust them swallowed. Waiting for the produce to clear the digestive system was often too much hassle for low level busts, and was presumably rather unpleasant and messy.

Taxis are interesting environments in that they are often treated as a temporary private space - in which people can relax and objects are likely to spread out within the natural boundaries of the environment. When combined with other parameters such as: people using taxi's whilst tired or impaired e.g. drunk/high; the likelihood of using the mobile phone in the taxi; placing objects on the seat/out of sight after use; and a pressured sequence of tasks at the end of the journey such as thinking what to do next on arrival at the destination and paying the driver, help explain why mobile phones are often left in taxis.

There are naturally many other reasons why people carry a mobile phones - for entertainment, projecting status, a sense of belonging, or capturing and communicating an experiences using a camera phone to name a few, but the commonality was essentially their ability to help us survive.

Most people consider other objects essential - driver's license (particularly in the US), medication, travel pass and lip-stick are just some that have been mentioned but these can change over the course of the day and according to context. I would argue that nearly all objects that people carry are essential, because the carrier has already gone through a conscious and subconscious selection process to select those objects from all the objects they own or have access to. Nobody carries stuff just for the hell of it. Well actually that's not strictly true - many people carry things that they are not aware they are carrying - phones increasingly have features that the owner considers useful, is not aware are on the device. In these instances the smart question is what situations trigger initial awareness of a feature, and many researchers are working on contextual understanding in part to present the user with the right feature/knowledge at exactly the right time that it is useful.

The exceptions to why people don't carry these objects are in some ways more interesting than the fact they do in the first place. Designing solutions that meet a user needs are relatively easy, but for a product to be adopted into the flow of someone's life takes a good understanding of exceptions. Mobile essentials are often forgotten, despite the strategies for remembering. Keys are not necessarily needed if you live in an extended family or in areas of high unemployment. Some people like to 'switch off' and talk about quality time without the interruption of the mobile phone (I expect there to be different attitudes towards constant connectivity with younger generations). There is also the issue of at what point in a person's life they are entrusted to carry these essentials and in the case of children, if they are lost, who is responsible to replace them?

In>connecting people, dis-connecting people, and re-connecting people.

My colleagues have initated a study of where people in Helsinki carry their phones and whether they notice incoming communication. A paper, drawing on data from follow up studies in Milan and New York will be presented at the Mobility Conference 2005 in Guangzhou China. (I'll post it when its available)

Another theme is the role of the phone in supporting and on occasion triggering personal crisis. Not life threatening events but things like being locked out of home, being lost late at night, breaking up with boyfriend/girlfriend and yes, mobile phone theft and loss. Notice the overlap between mobile essentials and personal crisis?.

5:05:33 PM    comment   

KDDI, the number two carrier here in Japan has obviously invested a large sum of money on their KDDI Designing Studio in Harajuku to show off all things KDDI. The 5 story cylindrical building devotes space to their product line-up, a creation space, a stage for live events, a collaboration studio and on the 5th floor a 'relaxation studio' which is, um, another branch of Wired Cafe. It's unfair to judge from one visit but it was notable how empty the space was, and how little interaction it had and invited from the otherwise teeming Harajuku.

The building devotes some space to future technologies from KDDI R&D Laboratories most memorable of which is the break-dance robot. No that's not it's official name, but the demo from the studio staffer could have come straight out of my highschool playground - only needing a cardboard mat and cheering onlookers to complete the authentic break-dance experience. (Though how much time did the staffer need to have on her hands to hone her bust-a-move-robot-breakdance-skills?)

The serious-fun question in all of this is why and how to engage the public with what's coming out of the research lab?

Wireless watch has a video tour.

5:03:17 PM    comment   

Where do you carry your mobile phone? And how will this change if the phone were to adopt some of the functionality associated with other objects that you carry such as money and personal identity? (Both payment and ticketing are already available on handsets in Japan).

We've been conducting a series of studies to understand where people carry mobile phones and other mobile essentials. The original research was driven by a need to know to what extent people notice incoming communication and to what extent this was affected by where the device was carried. After all - the usefulness of a mobile phone is diminished if the user fails to notice that someone is calling. (For the record, we assume that the user wants control over whether or not to be notified in the first place - 24/7 connectivity is a discussion topic for later perhaps?) If you observe customers in a cafe for an hour one of the most frequent behaviours related to mobile phones, especially for women, is checking whether they have missed any incoming communication. User data on device location can support product designers for example helping them decide defaults speaker volume or lanyard placement.

My colleague Fumiko Ichikawa is today presenting the first fruit of this research in a paper entitled Where's the Phone - a Study of Mobile Phone Location in Public Spaces (download pdf) at the Mobility 2005 conference in Guangzhou, China. This paper draws on data from the first 3 studies - Helsinki, New York and Milan. Whilst I was not present in the original study in Helsinki I managed to take part in the follow-ups studies including cultures as diverse as the US, Italy, South Korea, Japan, China and India. In the future we'll be publishing data for these other cultures and explore the issues related to the full range of mobile essentials (the paper above focusses on the mobile phone).

Where people carry things today is interesting enough. The ultimate goal of this design research is to predict how the primary carrying location might change according to issues like new features and form factors. (New form factors will be enabled by technologlical advances such as minaturisation, flexible components or new charging methods). The fun part is figuring how this will collide with and influence future social and cultural trends.

And finally, if you're wondering whether I travel the world just to run these studies the answer is no - the team tends to run the street surveys in conjunction with more in-depth user studies that are already going on - its a good way to utilize assistant down time, meet hundreds of local mobile phone users and get a feel for a culture.

5:02:18 PM    comment   

To communicate with someone outside your immediate proximity requires at least 4 things: something to communicate; tools to create what you want to communicate; an infrastructure to carry the communication; and a means of identifying with whom to communicate. There are an estimated 799 million non-literate peoples world wide. If you can't read and write how do you manage your contacts?

This simple observation was the starting point to conduct a series of (ongoing) exploratory research studies in India, China and Nepal - our aim to understand the communication needs of non-literate users. For mobile phone manufacturers who wish to address these needs: How does the inability to read and write affect the ability of mobile phone users to make effective use of mobile phones? Making and receiving calls? Creating and managing contact information? Text messaging? Using time management features? How can we design communication tools that draw on the knowledge and experiences that these users do have?

If your interest is piqued then you might enjoy the following essay entitled Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication which explores these issues and proposes a number of possible design solutions. As with a lot of our work the original projects included a fair amount of concept development that is only touched on in this essay.

In the studies we spent time with non-literate users exploring, mapping and understanding the things they used and the tasks they wanted to achieve - from using washing machines to weighing scales to running motorbikes to re-tuning TVs to paying for things. How did they interact with objects with textual and numeric interfaces? What problems did they encounter? What strategies did they adopt to overcome these problems? Were these strategies successful? If not, why not? And how can we bring the knowledge from this research and apply it to create communication devices that are more in tune with our non-literate users?

Researching non-literate communication practices has been rewarding: it touches on a very basic human desire - to communicate across time and space; the potential payback for the research is obvious and non-trivial; and the study participants, collaboration partners and environments in which the research took place have been quite simply inspiring.

Photos taken from street research in Mumbia, Bangalore, 2004 & 2005.

5:01:23 PM    comment   

Mobile with GPS and map application. So you want to make a map reference in a hurry?

"It's easier to just ask someone"

In many instances so it is.

5:00:17 PM    comment   

A few weeks ago I wrote about a little company called SoonR, that hooked into consumer desktops using Google Desktop Sidebars and gave access to files, or allowed email access over the air on pretty much any mobile phone. Since then Avvenu launched its own version of mobile-desktop access (pdf), that also uses the Google desktop search app. SoonR has since added X-1 search, and also plans to add other desktop search tools to make it easier to access information (files etc) on the go. EasyReach, is another start-up that is betting the mobile desktop access is going to be a big business.

The company was started by John W. Stossel in April 2005. Stossell till recently was a senior executive at Intellisync. (Nokia bought Intellisync earlier this month for $430 million.) He sold his start-up Dry Creek Software to Intellisync, and it was the product that gave Intellisync software the ability to sync web based content to Outlook, Lotus Notes, and other popular handheld organizers. Prior to founding Dry Creek, Stossel was CEO and Founder of Real World Solutions (acquired by Puma Technology), a provider of enterprise mobile servers.

The Campbell, California which thus far has been mostly angel funded is betting on one device - the Blackberry - instead of focusing on all web-ready mobile phones. I saw the demo on a Blackberry 8700 and was fairly impressed by the performance. That is because it is a native Blackberry app, and leverages the client’s processing power to the max. (I have not used it on my own so I am not sure how it does over an extended period of time, but I am pretty sure you will let me know )

Here is how it works: Fire-up the application and do a simple keyword search. You don’t have to remember where the information is stored; only a word in it. Once found, you can instantly open the file or send to any e-mail address. Because it only exchanges a tiny amount of data, it works just fine on the slower networks. All one has to do is make sure that the desktop/laptop is left turned on. “Blackberry users normally end-up carrying their laptops when on the go because they want access to their files,” says Stossel. For them, this is a service which can prove to be invaluable.

It also does not provide the caching service as promised by SoonR. Unlike SoonR or Avvenu, Easy Reach uses its own desktop search-and-indexing system. “We did not want to make it complex for users to start using the service right out of the box,” says Stossel. His argument - what if you don’t have a desktop search installed. But he doesn’t rule out using other desktop search engines. Easy Reach is working on trying to integrate its service with Apple’s Spotlight desktop search as well. You can use the service with a Treo using the browser, but the service truly shines when it is a native app. Next-up are native clients for Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian.

Download it here.

4:26:43 PM    comment   

Graeme Oxby, marketing director of Hutchison 3G UK, hopes to challenge MTV. He said: "We're starting to see significant changes in the scheduling of releases, with channels such as 3 much higher up the pecking order, challenging traditional routes s u ch as MTV for premieres."
Tag:3g | Posted in: Countries Specific 3G News Europe UK Applications
Our 3G Support Service - 3G Applications [Daily 3G News]
4:23:52 PM    comment   

The features are pretty much the same as Samsung's D600 phone, but the more recent SCH-B360 now has DMB (Digital Media Broadcasting) capabilities, letting you watch your fave TV shows. And what do you think this does? Well, I'll tell you. Its diminutive size makes it the smallest DMB phone yet. Ok, so watching any of your programming on such a tiny screen doesn't really make much sense, but when there's a first involved, who really cares, right? Look for this phone early next year from SK Telecom.

Samsung SCH-B360 comes with DMB capability [Ubergizmo]

[Gizmodo]
4:22:59 PM    comment   

If the child activates the alarm, the handset will call up to three registered numbers with a voice message alert at regular intervals until all registered numbers pick up, or until a password is entered into the child's handset. In addition, DoCoMo has established the Kids' Advisory Board of people with expertise in children's issues, who will advise the company on the development of products and services beneficial to children. The parents who are signed up for imadoco search can also set their phones to receive an automatic email of the child's location when the child's handset is turned off. Moreover, even after the child's handset is switched off, it is possible to receive e-mails of the phone's whereabouts in 15-, 30- or 60-minute intervals. The emails continue until a password is entered into either the parent's or child's handset. [Wireless Watch Japan]
4:12:19 PM    comment   

KDDI has hired several designers from outside the traditional OEM supply chain to help them develop innovative new models or what the company calls "communication tools that merge fashion with portability." Takashi Nikaido, a former Casio team leader who worked on the original G-SHOCK watch design is one of them. His 'Rotary Design' (photo right), circa 2001, was on view along with the even more futuristic 'Wearable' 3-piece concept [.jpg] which he developed the same year. In 2003, Marc Newson created KDDI/au's Talby based at least in part on an earlier design model, the InfoBar, designed by Naoto Fukasawa, who also produced the Penck. Ichiro Iwasaki, who spent several years at the Sony Design Center, created the Grappa Slider and Wallet styles and Ichiro Higashiizumi also had his two Apollo concept handsets on show (WWJ subscribers log in for the full story). [Wireless Watch Japan]
4:05:46 PM    comment   

It looks kind of kinky, me waddling around town with a big belly. But really it’s an excellent way of carrying your kid around. I can thoroughly endorse the Maya wrap slings, although if I were doing it again I’d get one with a shorter tail. Our older daughter has travelled zero feet in a buggy in her whole life. Slings, shoulders and walking make up the rest.

Anyhow, the evening walk with the baby under the coat is good think-time. So here’s some thought-entropy from Martin’s brain from a night or two ago, courtesy of the voice note feature of my phone.

#1: One of the ideas of me going walkies with the baby in the evening is so she is warm and rocked to sleep in a dark place during peak colic hours. In the meantime, my wife can render her older sister unconscious. (I also get to work off some of the fat and flab that seems to creep in with marriage and parenthood!) But whatever happens, I mustn’t bring a screamy infant home when big sister isn’t yet asleep. Now, my wife could call me to say she’s slipped into the Land of Nod, but that’s a bit over the top. She could SMS me, but that’s kind of an expensive way to transmit such a puny and useless bit of information.

So I started to think: how to price discriminate SMS better? My idea was the “SMS Ping”. You just select someone from your address book, and select “Ping!” from the menu. I think you can guess what happens next — they get a fixed “I pinged you!” text message. Mechanically still an SMS, but economically a different beast.

So I could agree with my wife that she’ll ping me when the older one is asleep. Pings could be configured to not even ring the phone, having a different behavior to vanilla SMS.

The underlying observation is that the success of SMS may in fact be somewhat of a mirage. What people are doing is using SMS to make up for the presence system that the mobile operators forgot to build. Enrich the pricing scheme for SMS and people can afford a wider range of presence messages. And if you’re a mobile operator, shouldn’t you be thinking that there could be a little pile of gems under the presence stone?

#2: This isn’t an original thought, I’m sure. But no harm in reproducing it. When I’m carrying the wee one around in the sling, I can’t wander the streets with my wife’s iPod any more. I use some rather expensive but truly wonderful earphones that block out all the world. But with a baby attached you need to be able to hear if, say, she pukes her guts out (a not infrequent occurence). You need to hear it so you can be a hero and rescue her from suffocating, choking oblivion. So now I rather wistfully notice all the other people around using their iPods as an (anti-)social dissociative anaesthetic.

The iPod will be tumbled from its pedestal. Some assert it’ll be the mobile phone that kills the iPod. I tend to agree in general, although I think the timescale will be longer because the challenge of battery life will take years to sort out. A flat iPod is a minor bother, whereas a flat mobile is a real problem.

No, what’ll topple the iPod is when someone really makes music social again. It could be physical proximity based, it could be “logical proximity” (friends or others with similar tastes). Somehow, the joy of sharing music and knowing you made someone else happy by recommending good stuff will eclipse the stand-alone listening experience. The only question is who will crack the functional and business issues in making it happen.

#3. I’ll join two disparate dots. The first is Douglas Galbi’s paper on presense which you should read, or at least get the summary. The other is my essay on how successful products are those that make your customers happy, and transcend mere function.

Now I see the connection between these two. I think these are saying the same thing from different approaches. We’re all junkies for neurochemical stimulation. Some achieve this through productive means, others through destructive. Our entertainments are centred around exciting our monkey brains. Darkened movie theatres with loud noise and bright wide-field pictures; strobed dancefloors and tranced-out music in the nightclub; the soothing hypnotic backdrop of TV; the excitement of the rolllercoaster. What Douglas calls “sensual media” is a codeword for “highly dopamine/seratonin/etc. stimulating” (there’s lots to choose from).

We’re addicted to attention, praise, distraction, status. Yet the types of committee that come up with systems like MMS are only interested in traditional functional attributes that bridge obvious user desires. What matters is how the product makes the user feel, not what it did. (Indeed, the iPod’s success was the perfect blend of function and form — that form and white earbuds being a social signal about the user’s superior aesthetic habits despite the Apple price premium.)

Being useful is potentially a downright disadvantage! I suspect that blockbuster communications products almost certainly cannot emerge from a traditional user needs and product design process. The more a communications tool is used for “useless social chatter” the more certain you can be of its vitality.

UPDATE: With this last one, forget “Location-based services”. Think: “Emotion-based services”.

UPDATE: Here’s a social music application from the research labs.

3:58:20 PM    comment   

There's a new book out called The Google Story, subtitled "Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time." I haven't read it, but I did read a review in this morning's New York Times. The reviewer describes a passage that comes at the end of the book:

Sergey Brin, one of the search engine's founders, is marveling, as he and his co-founder, Larry Page, are wont to do, about their product's awesome computational powers. Having hatched a plan to download the world's libraries and begun a research effort aimed at cataloging people's genes, Mr. Brin hungers, with the boundless appetite of a man who has obtained great success at a tender age, for the one place Google has yet to directly penetrate - your mind. "Why not improve the brain?" he muses. "Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain."

Visionary? Scary? Cute? Hey, give a kid a Fabulous Money Printing Machine, and he's bound to get a little excited.

What struck me, though, is how Brin's words echo something that a Google engineer said to technology historian George Dyson when he recently visited the company's headquarters: "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI." I wasn't quite sure when I first read that quote how serious the engineer was being. Now, I'm sure. Forget the read-write web; the Google Brain Plug-In promises the read-write mind.

The theme that computers can help bring human beings to a more perfect state is a common one in writings on artificial intelligence, as David Noble documents in his book The Religion of Technology. Here's AI pioneer Earl Cox: "Technology will soon enable human beings to turn into something else altogether [and] escape the human condition ... Humans may be able to transfer their minds into the new cybersystems and join the cybercivilization ... We will download our minds into vessels created by our machine children and, with them, explore the universe ..."

Here's computer guru Danny Hillis explaining the underlying philosophy more explicitly:

"We're the metabolic thing, which is the monkey that walks around, and we're the intelligent thing, which is a set of ideas and culture. And those two things have coevolved together, because they helped each other. But they're fundamentally different things. What's valuable about us, what's good about humans, is the idea thing. It's not the animal thing ... I guess I'm not overly perturbed by the prospect that there might be something better than us that might replace us ... We've got a lot of bugs, sorts of bugs left over history back from when we were animals."

As I described in The Amorality of Web 2.0, this ethic is alive and well today, and clearly it's held not only by the internet's philosopher class but by those who are actually writing the code that, more and more, guides how we live, interact and, yes, think.

Plug me in, Sergey. I'm ready to be debugged.

3:49:42 PM    comment   

Last week, Ross Mayfield posted an interesting essay called The End of Process. In it, he argues that software-mediated social networks will tend to render formal business processes obsolete by reducing the costs of communication and coordination. "I do believe," he says, "the arguments for engineering organizations are being trumped by new practices and simple tools. The first organizations bringing [processes] to an end will have a decided competitive advantage." He goes on to claim that even today "some staid corporations are abandoning process all together."

While provocative, the argument is much too broad, and it floats on a raft of dubious assumptions. "Organizations," Mayfield writes, "are trapped in a spiral of declining innovation led by the false promise of efficiency. Workers are given firm guidelines and are trained to only draw within them. Managers have the false belief engineered process and hoarding information is a substitute for good leadership." Actually, over the past 50 years or so, businesses have become steadily more flexible, more innovative, less bureaucratic, less hierarchical, and less characterized by rigid work flows and fragmented and hoarded information. They aren't free from these problems, of course, but in general they've been getting better rather than worse. There's no "spiral of declining innovation led by the false promise of efficiency."

In fact, meticulously defined and managed processes continue to be a powerful source of competitive advantage for many companies. Look at Toyota, for instance. Its highly engineered manufacturing processes not only give it superior productivity but also provide a platform for constant learning and improvement. The formal structure, which is anything but democratic, spurs both efficiency and innovation - productive innovation - simultaneously. Structured, well-thought-out processes are also essential to most knowledge work, from product development to financial analysis to software engineering to sales and marketing. And the more complex the effort, the greater the need for clear processes. Far from making business less effective and agile, the increasing attention to process has increased effectiveness and agility.

In a response to Mayfield's post, IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger says that "an innovative business looks for the proper balance between process ñ covering those aspects of the business that can be designed, standardized, and increasingly automated ñ and people ñ who bring their creativity and adaptability to handle everything else." I see what he's getting at, but I don't agree that there's necessarily a tension between process and people. Bad processes can destroy individual initiative, but well-designed processes, even very formal ones, can encourage individual initiative and, importantly, guide personal and group creativity toward commercially productive ends. I'm not sure you need to balance process and people so much as harmonize them.

If Mayfield had narrowed his argument, focusing on the way knowledge workers collaborate in certain situations, rather than on business processes in general, he would have been much more compelling. The simple group-forming and information-sharing software tools now being introduced and refined will often provide greater flexibility and effectiveness than more complex "knowledge management" systems. But even in these cases, processes aren't going away; they're just changing. There can't be organization without process.

3:48:43 PM    comment   

M. Montanaro, vice president, Nokia Asia Pacific, said, "India is one of the fastest growing nations, and the largest telecom market. We are excited to offer three very exciting mini-computers for consumers' pockets."

3:11:47 PM    comment   

Zee Telefilms Ltd (ZTL) is planning to digitise 50,000 hours of its programming as part of its plans to exploit the content across all the delivery platforms. The company is also planning to launch mobisodes (mobisode is a brief episode of a video programme designed to be viewed on a mobile phone or handheld devise) based on its key properties.

"We are seriously looking at launching mobisodes. We are identifying our key programming properties for this," says Zee Telefilms director and business head of Zee TV channel Punit Goenka. According to Goenka, the whole process of digitisation would be completed by the end of 2006. The total project cost, for which Zee has partnered with IBM, would be between $5-6 million.
ZTL and IBM Global Services India Ltd. had entered into an agreement this August to develop end-to-end digital media asset management solution using technologies that will optimise the asset acquisition, development and broadcast playout.

Related:
MTV India To Launch Mobisodes Of Upcoming Soap Pyaar Vyaar
Star India Launches India's First Mobisode On Hutch Phones
Digitisation The Next Big Thing For Television: Star CEO Peter Mukherjea
Zee Ties Up With IBM For Digital Media
Zee News Exploring Delivering News Content On Net And Mobile
Zee To Launch Video On Demand On Its DTH Platform
Mobile TV In India Soon?

[ContentSutra]
3:08:46 PM    comment