My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
I stumbled upon an interaction today on my iPhone that made me smile—kind of like finding a chocolate on my pillow. I don’t often edit people’s contact information on my phone, but I had call to do it today. Open the Contacts app and edit one of your contacts. Enter some text into the street address field. A second field slides down as soon as you enter the first character. Enter some text into the second field, and a third field appears. Now, clear the first field and tap on the second field. The populated second field slides up, replacing the empty field.
It’s a very simple thing, but it is so elegant. Nicely done, anonymous Apple UI designer.
While Siri is getting all the attention, and it is certainly deserved, iMessage is the secret agent sneaking by under the radar. When it was first announced, I assumed it was going to be a separate app. I figured I would have to make a conscious decision to use iMessage or the SMS app. I was taken aback by its integration. There is a single app that will detect whether or not the person you are texting has iMessage. If so, it will send an iMessage, using either WiFi or your data plan. If not, it will send an SMS message, applying to your texting plan. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to know which phone the other person has, or which version of iOS they are using. iMessage does the right thing. On top of that, it provides feedback, indicating that a message was delivered, and even showing that the recipient is typing a reply.
I decided not to pay for an SMS package with my new plan because of iMessage, so I’m paying per SMS message. iMessage is going to save me a lot of money, and it’s making a huge chunk of the service provider’s profit disappear. No wonder AT&T dropped all of their cheaper SMS packages.
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the iPod, and while most writers are looking back to the innovation of the day and where it has lead, I’m thinking about how far we’ve come in those ten years. Friday night, my church opened it’s annual haunted house. I was scrambling to get all of the sound set up. I had an assortment of iPhones and iPod Touches, each with an ambient track or a cued sound effect, along with one iPod Classic. I turned it on, and without thinking, tapped the playlist that I wanted to play. Of course, nothing happened. Once I had navigated to the desired track using the dial, I needed to set it to repeat. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember or figure out how to do it. I had to go find the owner of the device. You have to navigate to “Settings” and find it in the options there. I was trying to do it from the screen where the track was playing. The iPhone’s touchscreen has allowed for much more intuitive and direct interaction, a fact made starkly apparent when compared with ten-year-old technology.
I wanted to correct something I mentioned in Monday’s post about Siri. As I pointed out, Siri utilizes information in Address Book—information that until now was of very limited use. Address Book allows you to add relationship fields to a card. For example, I can add a “Spouse” field to my card and enter my wife’s name. This creates a loose connection between our cards. The only use for this that I am aware of was the printing of mailing labels. At one time, and I don’t know when the capability was removed, Address Book had a setting or option that would combine spouses into a single mailing label, rather than listing them separately. I can’t find any way to do that now. Siri puts these familial connections to use, allowing you to “Send email to my mom,” or “Let my wife know I’ll be late.” However, it currently only concerns itself with these fields on your own card. I can’t, for example, ”Send a message to my brother’s wife,” or even “Send a message to Todd’s wife.”
Similarly, Siri isn’t yet intelligent enough to use any address. It was able to recognize a person’s name and use their home address for a location-based reminder, but it won’t recognize a business in the same way. I was finally able to get it to recognize by church by adding the address to my own card as a custom address field labeled “Church.” This, I’m sure, is just a temporary solution. It’s not often that Apple releases a product as a public Beta, but with some experimentation, I can see why Siri is labeled as such.
My iPhone 4S was waiting on my front porch when I arrived home Friday evening. Replacing my 3GS, it’s a significant upgrade. Performance is drastically improved, of course, and the retina display is gorgeous. I really do like the industrial design, and while I don’t typically use my phone for much photography or video, the improved camera will be nice to have on the occasion that I do. That’s all great, but what really excites me is Siri.
I remember playing around with speech recognition back in Mac OS 8 and 9. I actually tried using it for awhile, but it was never as cool or useful as I thought it should be. My first cell phone, a Motorola flip phone, allowed me to voice dial, which I really liked. My Nissan Cube also let’s me voice dial, but I haven’t made the effort to enter any numbers aside from my wife’s. And, of course, the iPhone added some voice commands, including dialing, at some point, and I’ve used that regularly as well.
Siri is a quantum leap forward. More than just voice commands, Siri will recognize natural language. It is conversational. It’s right out of Star Trek. It’s tightly integrated, so it understands relationships and locations. If I tell it to send a message to my wife, it knows to send it to Susan Moffett. Of course, the key to this seeming intelligence is to have such relationships recorded in your address book—information that, until this point—had only been useful for printing mailing labels. I tried setting a reminder for the next time I arrived at my church, but I could’t get it to use my church as a location. It didn’t understand. I later realized that the problem was due to the fact that I wasn’t using the exact name I had entered in my address book. Maybe eventually it will attempt to find locations by searching Google Maps, but for now, I’m going to have to add or change address book entries to improve Siri’s intelligence.
This is almost magical. After playing around with it for awhile, I said to it, “I love you, Siri.” My phone responded, “I bet you say that to all of your Apple products.”
I knew it would take awhile to update my iPhone to iOS 5. Not only does it have to install the OS, but pull down all of the content that was on it before the update. Hundreds of photos, hundreds of songs, and a bunch of apps have to be reloaded. So, I kicked off the update a little before I went up to bed. It had already installed the update and rebooted the phone before I left it. I assumed it would have synched all of my content well before morning, when I would be able to grab it before my shower. I always listen to a podcast or audiobook while I’m getting ready in the morning. What I found, however, was an alert dialog requesting permission to access my keychain. It still had to synch all of my photos and possibly other content as well. So, I took my shower without any audio entertainment.
When your product is going to be performing an activity that takes as long as a major OS update and re-synch, don’t expect the user to be present and attentive during the entire operation. If you need permissions or any other type of input from the user, front-load it. Get all of the agreements, settings, preferences, and permissions done at the outset, and let them get on to doing something else while you carry on in self-sufficiency.
I was in the Disney theme parks for eight days over my vacation, and Undercover Tourist helped me make the most of them. The iPhone app provides the following information for all four parks:
- Park hours, including Extra Magic Hours
- Name and description of each ride organized by park area
- Color-coded wait times for every ride, or other status, such as that the ride is closed
- Whether or not a ride has Fast Pass
- Star ratings for each ride
- Suggested age for rider and minimum height
- Distance the ride is from your current location (measured in yards)
- Parade and show times
- Names and descriptions of every restaurant, including type of cuisine, whether it’s fast food or table service, general price range, star rating, whether it is covered by the Disney Dining Plan, if it has character dining, menus, and more.
My wife and I used the app constantly, and it significantly improved our experience in the parks. It was a bit buggy, crashing often, but it was informative and accurate. The one type of information it was missing was the status of Fast Pass for rides. It doesn’t tell you for what time they are currently giving out tickets, or that all tickets are already gone. I saw ads for a Disney phone app that included this information, but it’s apparently only available through Verizon, so I couldn’t try it. Disney is missing an opportunity there. I also tried Undercover Tourist’s app for Universal, which was also helpful, but I found it to be less accurate and less informative than the one for Disney World.
The app has both a free, ad-supported version, and a full, for-pay version, but given that I only needed it for a week, the free version sufficed. It was a really handy tool to have. I recommend it.
I don’t get out to the theater very often, but there are certain movies that my wife and I make a point to see. I’ve quite enjoyed the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, so we decided to see the most recent one and had a friend watch the kids. While enjoyable, I didn’t find On Stranger Tides to be as compelling a story as the previous films, but this isn’t a movie review site, so I’ll spare you my opinions. What I really want to mention briefly is a serious gaff made in the design of the Fandango iPhone app.
Overall, I like the app, and I have the theaters we go to marked as favorites for easy reference. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m not a fan of the current 3-D fad, so I was looking for a non-3-D showing of the movie. When viewing a particular theater or film, there is a button to set the day for the showings listed. I was ordering tickets a few days in advance, seeing as that it was opening weekend, so I navigated to a particular theater, selected the day, and perused the showings. When I switched to a different theater, the app reset to the current day, rather than using the day I had entered before. It didn’t even remember the day I had entered when I went back to the first theater. Defaulting to the current day is the smart thing to do, but once the user has selected a different date, it should persist that setting throughout the app.
