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Mark Spicer of Intel is February's Certified Usability Analyst of the month.

We’ve seen tons of parodies and pranks involving Siri, the personal assistant that comes with Apple’s iPhone 4S. But rarely do you see one with serious production value or special effects.

Today we got sent a video called “Psycho Siri” that is so well done, it could pass for a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie. The storyline involves one of the characters finding an abandoned iPhone 4S, but I won’t ruin the rest of it for you.

Try to not get creeped out when Siri says “it’s futile for you to run and hide”.

Twitter is a great platform to get people stoked about anything, if done right. You can promote potato chips like @popchips does, and it could turn into a huge following for your brand and have fun doing it.

Or, you can do it completely wrong and annoy the hell out of people by spamming them on Twitter. Toyota opted for the second choice, spam people.

In what is probably the worst Twitter promotion I’ve seen on the platform since the company launched in 2006, Toyota has created a slew of accounts and is spamming people about what it is calling the “Camry Effect a Friend’ Giveaway!”. The worst part is that they’re all verified accounts, so while Twitter isn’t involved in the promotion, someone at the company definitely knows about it.

Surely a company as big as Toyota did some research first, targeting people who would really be jazzed about this promotion right? Nope. It appears as if all of these accounts are spitting out the same junk to people who use any hashtags or phrases having to do with the Super Bowl. Tweets with hashtags like #giants and #patriots are causing these Camry accounts to reply to you in an effort to get you to sign up to win a car for your friend or something:

The accounts I’ve seen doing this are @CamryEffect, @CamryEffect1, @CamryEffect2, @CamryEffect3, @CamryEffect4, and @CamryEffect5. There are probably more, so you get the picture.

Like I mentioned, the worst part about all of this is that these accounts have all been blessed by Twitter as being “verified”. I’m not sure what the company was thinking when they verified a grip of accounts with similar names. It just screams “spam”.

Take a look at this “promotion” from one of Toyota’s accounts:

All this poor girl did was mention her favorite team, the Patriots. I’ve seen some chitter chatter from friends on the service and they’re all reporting the accounts for spam. So far it hasn’t worked, and hopefully it’s not because these accounts are verified. Twitter has enough to worry about during the Super Bowl weekend, like staying online, and this certainly isn’t a good way to start.

What do you think about Toyota’s promotion? Tell us in the comments!

UPDATE: It appears as if the Twitter accounts owned by Toyota that we mentioned above have all been switched over to “private”, and we received this comment from Toyota:

We apologize to anyone in the Twitterverse who received an unwanted @reply over the past few days. We were excited to share the message of our Camry Effect campaign in a new way and it was never our intention to displease anyone.
We’ve certainly learned from this experience and have suspended the accounts effective immediately to avoid any additional issues.
Kimberley Gardiner, National Digital Marketing & Social Media Manager, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. Inc.

Twitter has signalled its intention to grow its business and revenues in Asia after appointing the executive who headed up Google’s display advertising in the region as vice president of international operations, according to India’s Economic Times.

February 3 was Canadian-born Shailesh Rao‘s final day at Google, where he served as managing director of media and platforms across Asia Pacific and managing director of Google India. In his dual role, Rao managed the company’s display advertising business across the continent and headed up operations in India.

Twitter told Business Week that Rao will come on board later this year to work on the advertising side of its business, but it is unclear exactly what his day-to-day responsibilities and markets will be. The firm is moving to develop its presence and revenue outside of North America and key European markets, having most recently introduced a feature to help it comply with censorship, an introduction that was welcomed in parts of Asia last week.

Twitter’s advertising is predicted to triple over the next two years to hit $540 million by 2014, according to research from eMarketer. Bringing in a seasoned Asia veteran like Rao, who has experience growing ad revenues in the region, is clearly a key move to boost its presence and increase revenue in new and potentially lucrative markets.

The move is also likely to see Twitter tap into Rao’s experience in India. With the service blocked in China, with little sign of anything changing soon, India’s 1.17 billion population makes it the next biggest country in Asia and a logical target for Twitter.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the departure of Rao in a statement that was released on Friday:

We thank Shailesh for his fantastic contributions to Google, and Google India in particular, and wish him the best in his future endeavours.

Recently voted ’Internet professional of the year’ by the Internet Mobile Association Of India (IAMAI), Rao first joined Google in March 2005 as director of local search based out of its its Mountain View office.

During his time with the company, his projects included launching Google Maps and Google Earth in a number of emerging markets, before he moved to head up operations in India in 2007.

In its well-known annual prediction report, the marketing firm JWT identified ‘objectifying objects’ as one of the key trends that will dominate 2012.

We may spend our day using laptops and tablets, but from postcards to memo books, physical objects still matter when it comes to building memories.

This is something that the American notebook brand Field Notes understands very well; notebooks are about emotions.

The same goes for good ads, and its Valentine’s Day RED BLOODED promotional video nails it:

Sometimes we stumble upon things that make us doubt everything we’ve ever known. This may very well be one of those moments, as Terry Moore explains why most of us have been tying our shoes wrong forever.

As an aside, it seems that left-handed people tend to tie their shoes in the manner that Moore recommends. Are you a lefty? Sound off in the comments.

I’m a huge fan of the split keyboard that was added to the iPad on iOS 5. I have to credit a friend with predicting this addition several months before WWDC actually, he specifically said “a split keyboard on the iPad would make me so happy.”

He got his wish and now I use it all the time to type with my thumbs in vertical mode. It makes it a ton easier to hold the iPad in two hands and still jot out short messages.

Well, in typical Apple fashion, it has managed to sneak in a subtle and invisible addition to the split keyboard that makes it even cooler. It has hidden duplicate buttons invisibly along each end of the split, making it possible to ‘reach over’ the gap to grab a key on the other side without having to use the opposite hand.

This discovery was made by Finer Things’ David Chartier and makes a nice addition for those of us that don’t exactly conform to ‘home row’ practices when typing with our thumbs. If you’re used to crossing over to grab the occasional key that doesn’t belong to that hand, you might even do it subconsciously.

It’s well known that Apple plays with the tap target sizes of buttons invisibly by predicting which letter you’re going to type next. This makes it easier to snag a button that you’re going for next even when you’re stabbing away a bit recklessly. The addition of these invisible additional keys is another great example of invisibly helping a user without their knowledge utilizing subtle and invisible UX design.

You can activate the split keyboard by simply dragging it apart with two fingers or by tapping and holding the keyboard button at the bottom and choosing ‘split keyboard’.

A gym that lets humans generate energy for a Spanish city; open data about obesity levels in the Netherlands; a smart bus network navigation system in Japan, and a wireless network to control street lights; monitor car parking spaces and more in San Francisco. These are just some of the solutions being asked for by cities around the world as part of the Living Labs Global Award.

Living Labs Global is a non-profit association which promotes new technologies and services in cities. In all, twenty cities have partnered with the organisation to identify innovative solutions to problems around tourism, transport, health and open government.

The twenty cities are currently looking for ideas to be submitted, with winning solutions set to be announced in May. From there, pilot projects will test out each winner’s viability.

Previous winners of the competition have included a smart real-time peer-to-peer parking system in Stockholm and an open data citizen participation platform in San Francisco.

The cities taking part this year are Barcelona, Birmingham, Caceres, Cape Town, Coventry, Derry~Londonderry, Eindhoven, Fukuoka, Glasgow, Guadelajara, Hamburg, Lagos, Lavasa, Kristiansand, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Sant Cugat, Santiago de Chile and Terrassa.

You can browse everything that the cities are looking for, and submit your idea on the Awards website, but hurry – the deadline is 17 February 2012.

➤ Living Labs Global Award 2012

Keynote—Jonas Löwgren: Exploring, Sketching, Other Designerly Ways of Working

Jonas’ keynote is reminiscent of Bill Buxton’s sketching user experience, beginning with the quote “IxD is about getting the right design and the design right”. He encourages designers to explore possibilities while we can, sketching cheap and fast, and thinking beyond storyboards. Storyboards are limited because interaction is temporal with many unknowns, a major one being the user.

Instead, sketching (in the broad sense) allows you frame and shape the problem in parallel, and understand through the problem solving process. No more trying to establish requirements before designing. This is especially true for unique experiences where interactions are not idiomatic, in which case he argues you need to prototype with higher fidelity materials. He gave the example of Body Synths – you had to prototype it with sounds and sensors as a full body experience in order to know what it was.

In instances where designers don’t understand the domain, subject matter experts are needed as co-designers, especially since most knowledge is mostly oral. Doing a show and tell in moments of work becomes crucial in the design process, such as an intensive care ward with hundreds of machines and a few experts to needed to operate a machine.

Other projects he talked about include:

• Pinpoint: a directory for a large organisation
• Avatopia: getting students involved in the community

In conclusion, he calls on all designers to treat sketching as a continuum (which runs through the execution phase) and to keep a sketching mindset while prototyping

Building a Better Starship: Scaling Design Systems into Humanity’s Future
Scott Nazarian

I suspect at least a few people thought this talk was going to be about sci-fi and space-travel. They were in for a shock. Nazarian’s talk reminded me of some of a combination of Bruce Sterling and Ezio Manzini’s discussions. Fast paced and challenging, it’s one that I’ll be reviewing once the videos come out.

He had one key aspect we need to consider in our digital future: the relationship between data and energy. (Without power centres, the data is effectively dead).

Moving down the futurist rabbit hole, he transposed the UI designer’s stack to a more fundamental one: (humans, environment, systems etc), and posed such questions as fidelity, subliming information, and capacitant futures where we have stored memories so that we can survive 1000 years of sleep during space travel.

Hacking Space Exploration and Science
Ariel Waldman

She had us at ‘f**king teddies in space!‘
Equal parts entertainment and education, Arial Waldman made space seem as exciting as it did during the space race. Speaking of space races, she pointed out that 1969 is the year not only of the moon landing, but also the first virtual connection through APRANET. “It wasn’t much. It sent the message ‘L O’, or ‘log on’, to another computer—which crashed”. Still, from these inauspicious beginnings, now it’s the net that has far more wider impact than space travel.

Her frustration at the lack of takeup of NASA’s Open Data happened to be heard one day by Jeremy Keith, and as a result he helped form Science Hackdays where designers, developers, and scientists come together to hack fun things—”Hackdays are not about solutions, they’re about getting inspired and having fun, using space as a material”—ranging from a synesthesia experience made with a scary looking gimp mask, to listening to the sounds of particles colliding, a typeface where each letter has the same wind drag, or making an electronic canary for quakes using electronic devices ”I worry that people would game the system by all jumping at the same time”.

She also touched on opening up space exploration to the masses, if not by actually going to space, but by discovering universes and being recognised for it (hello Green Peas Galaxy).

And going back to history, and making data open: just because it’s open doesn’t mean it’s accessible. While NASA has had their transcripts online for a while, it’s only recently that Spacelog has actually made it engaging.

Beyond Gamification: Architecting Engagement
Dustin Di Tomassio

Mad Pow’s Experience Design Director Dustin spoke on the somewhat maligned topic of gamification, filtering self-determination theory through games in order to get beyond badges and leaderboards to reveal the human traits and values that gaming exploits. Dipping into the motivational psychology beneath games, we discover that they provide safe environments in which to undertake our lifelong pursuit of ‘the sensation of mastery’ – we all want to be better at something at some time, and gaming builds on that need. There’s an addictive sequence of tension and release in exerting effort and achieving a goal, and by scaffolding tasks to keep those goals ever so slightly out of reach we keep users in the pleasurable state of challenge. However that state can’t go on forever without risk of user burnout so it’s important to build in moments of reflection, allowing them to look back and revel in their growing mastery. ‘Juicy feedback’ that gives users huge rewards for small actions was a game technique Dustin felt designers could make better use of, and asked for examples of long-term gamification techniques he encouraged us to tap into people’s over-life goals, such as the desire to improve their education, health and wellbeing. In closing he also pointed out that good game platforms are never really complete – once your user achieves the ‘epic win’, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and build them a whole new game.

Why is no one using your product?
Julie Baher

The second stream of afternoon lightning talks kicked off in a jam-packed Liffey hall 1 with Citrix’s Julie Baher on finding the right users to inform product development. While designers can make their products completely adorable, they are still puppies in a window waiting to be adopted until a user takes them on – like TiVo when it first hit the market. While it’s pretty easy to get feedback from experimental early adopters, they’re unlikely to become your mass market. Recognising this Citrix are sending free products out to ‘real people’ – the slow steady pragmatists who would usually avoid trying something new without a heap of recommendations from existing users. By removing the barriers of price and access Citrix get more useful feedback from appropriate user groups, allowing them to tighten their design cycle and iterate products faster.

Designing the mobile wallet experience
Jonathan Rez

Seren Partners’ Jonathan Rez discussed the consequences of our smartphones transitioning into mobile wallets, containing by necessity all that is currently in our physical wallets: from primary, secondary and emergency cash cards to forms of ID, warranty and cashflow control. He outlined the very different risks of losing a mobile wallet – with all the data and credentials it contains stored in the cloud, and the mobile wallet itself capable of being de- and re-activated remotely, you might think it a much more secure alternative. However this depends on whether you trust your mobile wallet provider, which could be Visa, Google, Tesco or even your local corner store. Jonathan closed by asking us to contemplate a future where our Google cash card posts details of purchases to a Twitter feed, as a means of perpetuating the status symbol denied us when we can no longer have a platinum card to whip out in restaurants.

Input/Output: Interaction design at the intersection of city and its interfaces
Sami Niemala

In his work at Nordkapp Sami Niemala has discovered that cities are lumbering beasts on the brink of waking up. The blinking blue charging points still waiting to be used are at odds with street furniture contracts that run for 20 years – an eternity in the life of the interactive touchscreens Sami’s team were looking to create. The practical challenge of designing devices that would survive the extreme Helsinki weather (as well as general drunken city shenanigans) were matched by the challenge of creating truly urban touchscreen interfaces, which Sami likened to designing for mobile but at much lower resolution. He summarised the key learning from this project by calling on his fellow designers to aim as high as possible aim when designing devices anew, and cited the example of architects who, when invited to propose a new building for Berlin, instead envisaged a mighty mountain to be placed right in the middle of the city – an idea whose ambition has since become a cultural symbol.

Sculpted! Using Sculpture as a Design Lens
Rachel Bolton-Nasir

Inspired by an interest in sculpture, Rachel Bolton-Nasir took a refreshingly physical approach to interaction design by showing how principles from sculpture could be applied to interaction design.

She walked the audience through six principles of sculpture, and their application to interaction design:

1. Form: as sculpture is divorced from function, as it’s not a means to an end, you focus on elements more.
   In interaction design: what happens if you remove the functions from the page? Is the visual language strong enough to work without it?
2. Multiple viewpoints: sculpture unfolds over time & experience.
   In interaction design: think of multiple touchpoints (e.g. Zipcar has the site, the key, the car ….)
3. Physical parts: devoid of function, the different materials and how they are changed give meaning.
   In interaction design: do the materials in your designs feel familiar?
4. Bodily empathy: imagining yourself to be what it is your making
   In interaction design: Do physical interactions ring true, to they mimic natural actions?
5. Multi-sensory: can’t always touch, but you can move around etc.
   In interaction design: Does it require or inspire a physical engagement (e.g. zipcar fob)?
6. Context: interacts with space & vice versa.
   In interaction design: How does this interact with  its environment? is it flexible?

Your Users are Hobbits: How classic quests can inform your next design
Abi Jones

The Quest Cycle is a story that transcends culture (it’s been detailed by story expert Joseph Campbell) and helps people reach fulfillment. Abi Jones illustrated the elements of this story using Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. It’s worth noting that neither example appeared to fully capture all the elements—how can it be that that Frodo never becomes a Master of both worlds?—but it was still a good romp through story craft.

The quest cycle is based around an archetype: the hero is us and who we design for.

• The story starts with a call: (Frodo been given the ring, Luke being called to fight)
• And a refusal: (both turn it down)
• They need mentors and helpers (Gandalf and Sam; Yoda, Millennium Falcon crew). “Mentors don’t need beards or wands or anything, but they need to know the tools you need to be of help”
• Each involves crossing a threshold (getting past ringrwaiths with elves help, or escape w/ Millennium Falcoln). While this is exhilarating, it also means a point of no return for the hero.
• There are a series of trials and ordeals: be they trial of the dragon (an unknown enemy) or trial of the brother (a known enemy,  either in self—e.g. the ring—or outside, such as Boromir)
• There’s always a meeting with a goddess (not necessarily a woman, but beautiful e.g. Galadriel). They show hero good and represent love: not romantic love, but idealised love.
• But there is Temptation: (the ring to Galadriel; or the Dark Side). Giving in would be to become less than whole.
• his comes with atonement (e.g. Aaragon, or Darth Vader’s eventual apology).
• The adventure finishes with apotheosis ”often in movies with change of clothes!”; a change to whole person. (In LOTR, it’s with destruction of the ring). The help from an unexpected place (e.g. Gollum).
• However, there’s a Refusal of Return, (Luke and Frodo both delay going home); needs a Rescue with Without. In the real world this is from parents when a child, mentors when an adult.
• Ideally, the hero becomes a Master of Both Worlds: returning to your old life with the knowledge of the new  (Sam gets this, but Frodo doesn’t).
• It finishes with Freedom to Life (becoming a teacher; as Luke does).

Core Principles of UX Management
Michael Hawley

Michael Hawley gave practical tips on UX management, with three tenets:

1. Educate: build expertise , be pro active, budget for it
2. Mentor: enhance creative thinking.  Juniors struggle at selling ideas, getting over stumbling blocks and a number of other skills. Mentoring helps.
3.  Motivate: inspire best work. Money seems helpful, but it isn’t (Dan Pink reports on research that shows that monetary rewards helps with physical tasks, but not cognitive ones). People are by far motivated by intrinsic value (internal guides). e.g. give autonomy, enable progress, alignment

For me, given the current general discussions about mentoring, the most interesting question for me is what you should be as a mentor: you should not be the solutions person. Instead you should be encouraging your mentee to be able to find their own solutions.

People are Software — The Story of Project Interaction
Katie Koch

“Our kids are ‘of’ design, but they aren’t aware if it” —Takeo Onishio

Concerned with how high school kids can find out about design as a career, Katie Koch and Carmen Duke are part of an initiative (whilst stil having full time jobs!) teaching a group of New York girls about interaction design. They shared their experiences of running Project Interaction over the last few years.

1. High school students ‘get’ interaction design. They were born in 1995, have only known a world with tech. (Koch laughed at the results from one exercise they do with their students, where they have to try doing an everyday action in another timezone. When it came to finding an alternate subway route in the 90s “their mime for using a payphone was very funny as they’d never used one before”)
2. Young people are full of creative ideas, and they’re ready to share them. When given sketchbooks, they love them and fill them with observations from their lives.
3. Students learn design through a clear, repeatable process. 

They’ve also found that they use a cycle for teaching, as well as with students:

1. Entry: students invariably think of fashion and product design when asked about design, but they get it with real life examples like subway ticketing systems.
2. The make/test/reflect cycle:
   Make: using all sorts of materials, be it paper wireframes, post-it notes (really useful with students as it allows them to commit but also move, rip off page) even lego/cardboard
   Test: iterate (the students didn’t like being told to throw stuff away at first!), try different ways to tell a story (ranging from simple presentations to comics, dance)
   Reflect: compare feedback to expectations (have students critique each other right throughout process, which is new and hard for them “they’re used to just handing something in and getting a grade”)
3. The showoff stage: sharing final work in presentations; having a presence on project website; just getting their thoughts out of their head

There were also some interesting questions from the floor:
Why interaction design rather than some other form of interaction design? Is it just because of your background? 

Kate explained that her and her business partner had stills in graphic design and video, so interaction design wasn’t a fait accompli; but they felt that interaction design had the greatest application beyond just being a designer.

Also, another question (mine!) about backgrounds and technology: is the student without a computer at home at a disadvantage? No, Koch explained, from her observation (the class is socio-economically mixed) they’re just as aware of technology as their more affluent peers, and in fact are often better as they not only have more critical distance from the technologies, but also don’t take them for granted.

Keynote: From solid to liquid to air:Interaction design and the future of the interface
Amber Case

Amber Case’s keynote built on her work as a work as a cyborg anthropologist. She defines a cyborg as any individual who stores parts of themselves externally in the world, and went on to explain that as humans we often use tools as an extension of our physical – and increasingly – mental selves. The progression of physical to mental augmentation is reflected in today’s devices, which are so unstable and change so fast that they are actually becoming invisible.

In 1981, Steve Mann from MIT began wearing computers around himself in an attempt to augment reality through a view-piece strapped around his left eye (wearcam). This was the genesis of contextual notification systems (replacing messages on annoying billboard ads) and computer-mediated reality (projecting conversation histories over specific people that he met), which became the inspiration for movies like the terminator. While technology has advanced since the 80s, our perception of cyborgs is still influenced by this augmentation of the physical.

Today, digital has resulted in what Amber calls an “automatic production of space”, where things that used to take up physical space (photos, music, movies) are now becoming invisible due to digital storage. She began to question what if the stuff we have in the future doesn’t really exist, where all our memories remained as hyperlinked objects? She also referred to today’s personal devices as prosthetics, which transform us into superhumans when we use them to transform our perception of reality, which brings its own problems.

In the future, however, we’ll move towards the use of “calm technology”, progressing from “actions as buttons” to invisible interfaces to what she calls “trigger-based interactions”, where interactions are caused by mere actions of the user. She also called out against Skeumorphs as interfaces, because they make use of the persistent architecture of old models that are outdated. We should instead be reimagining super human interfaces, where interactions and experiences will occur in a grander scale. She used the example of Geoloqi, an augmented reality service that mapped Wikipedia articles to physical locations, triggered via geolocation on a phone. Amber suggests that the phones will be like a remote control for reality, and in the future we’ll see the interface disappear.

IXDA Awards

The evening continued (and for some attendees, continued well into the morning, thank you Google free bar with Guinness and Baileys!) with the inaugural—and very swish—IXDA awards  at the Mansion House.

Keynote—Jonas Löwgren: Exploring, Sketching, Other Designerly Ways of Working

Lowgren challenged designers to consider sketching as being more than just on paper: while wireframes are useful for somet things, they’re of no use when you want to create unusual interactions.

To capture temporal non-idiomatic experiences, sketching must extend in to building and execution.

Lowgren talked through a number of projects he has been involved in, with the common thread that they involve ‘sketching in code’:

• Pinpoint: a directory for a large organisation
• Avatopia: getting students involved in the community
• Mediated Body: a project that created a ‘bare skin theremin’. While it wasn’t surprising that it worked for club ravers, it was also surprisingly successful with (sober!) Berlin commuters.

Fashion designers have fabric. Interaction designers use content as a design material

Building a Better Starship: Scaling Design Systems into Humanity’s Future
Scott Nazarian

I suspect at least a few people thought this talk was going to be about sci-fi and space-travel. They were in for a shock. Nazarian’s talk reminded me of some of a combination of Bruce Sterling and Ezio Manzini’s discussions. Fast paced and challenging, it’s one that I’ll be reviewing once the videos come out.

He had one key aspect we need to consider in our digital future: the relationship between data and energy. (Without power centres, the data is effectively dead).

Moving down the futurist rabbit hole, he transposed the UI designer’s stack to a more fundamental one: (humans, environment, systems etc), and posed such questions as fidelity, subliming information, and capacitant futures where we have stored memories so that we can survive 1000 years of sleep during space travel.

Hacking Space Exploration and Science
Ariel Waldman

She had us at ‘f**king teddies in space!‘
Equal parts entertainment and education, Arial Waldman made space seem as exciting as it did during the space race. Speaking of space races, she pointed out that 1969 is the year not only of the moon landing, but also the first virtual connection through APRANET. “It wasn’t much. It sent the message ‘L O’, or ‘log on’, to another computer—which crashed”. Still, from these inauspicious beginnings, now it’s the net that has far more wider impact than space travel.

Her frustration at the lack of takeup of NASA’s Open Data happened to be heard one day by Jeremy Keith, and as a result he helped form Science Hackdays where designers, developers, and scientists come together to hack fun things—”Hackdays are not about solutions, they’re about getting inspired and having fun, using space as a material”—ranging from a synesthesia experience made with a scary looking gimp mask, to listening to the sounds of particles colliding, a typeface where each letter has the same wind drag, or making an electronic canary for quakes using electronic devices ”I worry that people would game the system by all jumping at the same time”.

She also touched on opening up space exploration to the masses, if not by actually going to space, but by discovering universes and being recognised for it (hello Green Peas Galaxy).

And going back to history, and making data open: just because it’s open doesn’t mean it’s accessible. While NASA has had their transcripts online for a while, it’s only recently that Spacelog has actually made it engaging.

Beyond Gamification: Architecting Engagement
Dustin Di Tomassio

Mad Pow’s Experience Design Director Dustin spoke on the somewhat maligned topic of gamification, filtering self-determination theory through games in order to get beyond badges and leaderboards to reveal the human traits and values that gaming exploits. Dipping into the motivational psychology beneath games, we discover that they provide safe environments in which to undertake our lifelong pursuit of ‘the sensation of mastery’ – we all want to be better at something at some time, and gaming builds on that need. There’s an addictive sequence of tension and release in exerting effort and achieving a goal, and by scaffolding tasks to keep those goals ever so slightly out of reach we keep users in the pleasurable state of challenge. However that state can’t go on forever without risk of user burnout so it’s important to build in moments of reflection, allowing them to look back and revel in their growing mastery. ‘Juicy feedback’ that gives users huge rewards for small actions was a game technique Dustin felt designers could make better use of, and asked for examples of long-term gamification techniques he encouraged us to tap into people’s over-life goals, such as the desire to improve their education, health and wellbeing. In closing he also pointed out that good game platforms are never really complete – once your user achieves the ‘epic win’, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and build them a whole new game.

Sculpted! Using Sculpture as a Design Lens
Rachel Bolton-Nasir

Inspired by an interest in sculpture, Rachel Bolton-Nasir took a refreshingly physical approach to interaction design by showing how principles from sculpture could be applied to interaction design.

She walked the audience through six principles of sculpture, and their application to interaction design:

1. Form: as sculpture is divorced from function, as it’s not a means to an end, you focus on elements more.
   In interaction design: what happens if you remove the functions from the page? Is the visual language strong enough to work without it?
2. Multiple viewpoints: sculpture unfolds over time & experience.
   In interaction design: think of multiple touchpoints (e.g. Zipcar has the site, the key, the car ….)
3. Physical parts: devoid of function, the different materials and how they are changed give meaning.
   In interaction design: do the materials in your designs feel familiar?
4. Bodily empathy: imagining yourself to be what it is your making
   In interaction design: Do physical interactions ring true, to they mimic natural actions?
5. Multi-sensory: can’t always touch, but you can move around etc.
   In interaction design: Does it require or inspire a physical engagement (e.g. zipcar fob)?
6. Context: interacts with space & vice versa.
   In interaction design: How does this interact with  its environment? is it flexible?

Your Users are Hobbits: How classic quests can inform your next design
Abi Jones

The Quest Cycle is a story that transcends culture (it’s been detailed by story expert Joseph Campbell) and helps people reach fulfillment. Abi Jones illustrated the elements of this story using Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. It’s worth noting that neither example appeared to fully capture all the elements—how can it be that that Frodo never becomes a Master of both worlds?—but it was still a good romp through story craft.

The quest cycle is based around an archetype: the hero is us and who we design for.

• The story starts with a call: (Frodo been given the ring, Luke being called to fight)
• And a refusal: (both turn it down)
• They need mentors and helpers (Gandalf and Sam; Yoda, Millennium Falcon crew). “Mentors don’t need beards or wands or anything, but they need to know the tools you need to be of help”
• Each involves crossing a threshold (getting past ringrwaiths with elves help, or escape w/ Millennium Falcoln). While this is exhilarating, it also means a point of no return for the hero.
• There are a series of trials and ordeals: be they trial of the dragon (an unknown enemy) or trial of the brother (a known enemy,  either in self—e.g. the ring—or outside, such as Boromir)
• There’s always a meeting with a goddess (not necessarily a woman, but beautiful e.g. Galadriel). They show hero good and represent love: not romantic love, but idealised love.
• But there is Temptation: (the ring to Galadriel; or the Dark Side). Giving in would be to become less than whole.
• his comes with atonement (e.g. Aaragon, or Darth Vader’s eventual apology).
• The adventure finishes with apotheosis “often in movies with change of clothes!”; a change to whole person. (In LOTR, it’s with destruction of the ring). The help from an unexpected place (e.g. Gollum).
• However, there’s a Refusal of Return, (Luke and Frodo both delay going home); needs a Rescue with Without. In the real world this is from parents when a child, mentors when an adult.
• Ideally, the hero becomes a Master of Both Worlds: returning to your old life with the knowledge of the new  (Sam gets this, but Frodo doesn’t).
• It finishes with Freedom to Life (becoming a teacher; as Luke does).

Core Principles of UX Management
Michael Hawley

Michael Hawley gave practical tips on UX management, with three tenets:

1. Educate: build expertise , be pro active, budget for it
2. Mentor: enhance creative thinking.  Juniors struggle at selling ideas, getting over stumbling blocks and a number of other skills. Mentoring helps.
3.  Motivate: inspire best work. Money seems helpful, but it isn’t (Dan Pink reports on research that shows that monetary rewards helps with physical tasks, but not cognitive ones). People are by far motivated by intrinsic value (internal guides). e.g. give autonomy, enable progress, alignment

For me, given the current general discussions about mentoring, the most interesting question for me is what you should be as a mentor: you should not be the solutions person. Instead you should be encouraging your mentee to be able to find their own solutions.

People are Software — The Story of Project Interaction
Katie Koch

“Our kids are ‘of’ design, but they aren’t aware if it” —Takeo Onishio

Concerned with how high school kids can find out about design as a career, Katie Koch and Carmen Duke are part of an initiative (whilst stil having full time jobs!) teaching a group of New York girls about interaction design. They shared their experiences of running Project Interaction over the last few years.

1. High school students ‘get’ interaction design. They were born in 1995, have only known a world with tech. (Koch laughed at the results from one exercise they do with their students, where they have to try doing an everyday action in another timezone. When it came to finding an alternate subway route in the 90s “their mime for using a payphone was very funny as they’d never used one before”)
2. Young people are full of creative ideas, and they’re ready to share them. When given sketchbooks, they love them and fill them with observations from their lives.
3. Students learn design through a clear, repeatable process. 

They’ve also found that they use a cycle for teaching, as well as with students:

1. Entry: students invariably think of fashion and product design when asked about design, but they get it with real life examples like subway ticketing systems.
2. The make/test/reflect cycle:
   Make: using all sorts of materials, be it paper wireframes, post-it notes (really useful with students as it allows them to commit but also move, rip off page) even lego/cardboard
   Test: iterate (the students didn’t like being told to throw stuff away at first!), try different ways to tell a story (ranging from simple presentations to comics, dance)
   Reflect: compare feedback to expectations (have students critique each other right throughout process, which is new and hard for them “they’re used to just handing something in and getting a grade”)
3. The showoff stage: sharing final work in presentations; having a presence on project website; just getting their thoughts out of their head

There were also some interesting questions from the floor:
Why interaction design rather than some other form of interaction design? Is it just because of your background? 

Kate explained that her and her business partner had stills in graphic design and video, so interaction design wasn’t a fait accompli; but they felt that interaction design had the greatest application beyond just being a designer.

Also, another question (mine!) about backgrounds and technology: is the student without a computer at home at a disadvantage? No, Koch explained, from her observation (the class is socio-economically mixed) they’re just as aware of technology as their more affluent peers, and in fact are often better as they not only have more critical distance from the technologies, but also don’t take them for granted.

Keynote: From solid to liquid to air:Interaction design and the future of the interface
Amber Case

Amber Case’s keynote built on her work as a work as a cyborg anthropologist. She defines a cyborg as any individual who stores parts of themselves externally in the world, and went on to explain that as humans we often use tools as an extension of our physical – and increasingly – mental selves. The progression of physical to mental augmentation is reflected in today’s devices, which are so unstable and change so fast that they are actually becoming invisible.

In 1981, Steve Mann from MIT began wearing computers around himself in an attempt to augment reality through a view-piece strapped around his left eye (wearcam). This was the genesis of contextual notification systems (replacing messages on annoying billboard ads) and computer-mediated reality (projecting conversation histories over specific people that he met), which became the inspiration for movies like the terminator. While technology has advanced since the 80s, our perception of cyborgs is still influenced by this augmentation of the physical.

Today, digital has resulted in what Amber calls an “automatic production of space”, where things that used to take up physical space (photos, music, movies) are now becoming invisible due to digital storage. She began to question what if the stuff we have in the future doesn’t really exist, where all our memories remained as hyperlinked objects? She also referred to today’s personal devices as prosthetics, which transform us into superhumans when we use them to transform our perception of reality, which brings its own problems.

In the future, however, we’ll move towards the use of “calm technology”, progressing from “actions as buttons” to invisible interfaces to what she calls “trigger-based interactions”, where interactions are caused by mere actions of the user. She also called out against Skeumorphs as interfaces, because they make use of the persistent architecture of old models that are outdated. We should instead be reimagining super human interfaces, where interactions and experiences will occur in a grander scale. She used the example of Geoloqi, an augmented reality service that mapped Wikipedia articles to physical locations, triggered via geolocation on a phone. Amber suggests that the phones will be like a remote control for reality, and in the future we’ll see the interface disappear.

IXDA Awards

The evening continued (and for some attendees, continued well into the morning, thank you Google free bar with Guinness and Baileys!) with the inaugural—and very swish—IXDA awards  at the Mansion House.

“Have you ever had the problem of finding something again you have already seen on Facebook or elsewhere on the Internet?,” asked Gerald Bäck, co-founder of Archify. A few vague nods of agreement flickered around the audience as Gerald explained some of the difficulties in remembering where you’ve read a piece of content online.

This was at Startup Bootcamp’s London investor day last week, where twelve startups pitched for investment cash. Archify is a browser plugin which, once installed, saves everything that you browse online – including every update from you and your friends on your social streams. If you search for something on Google, a little overlay will appear telling you that there are also results in Archify.

Archify is like your own personal browsing archive. In addition to indexing all the content you’ve viewed, Archify also takes a screenshot of each page you visit, allowing you to not only find content, but view it exactly the way it looked on the day you visited the page.

Archify is three guys from Vienna - Gerald Bäck, Max Kossatz and Walter Palmetshofer -  who have launched startups previously but sold them last year to concentrate their efforts on Archify. It’s currently in private beta and they’re hoping to launch it publicly by the end of Q1 2012. For now, you’ll have to submit your email address and wait for an invite – or if you can’t wait, The Next Web has 100 invites to give away (see further down).

How Archify works

So…how does Archify work? Well, when you activate your account, your browser should automatically detect the correct plugin and prompt you to install it – this works with all the major browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. You then set up your account, including username and password, and you can choose to register without connecting your Twitter and Facebook accounts if you like. However, if you connect with your social media accounts, it will enable you to archive your browsing there too.

As it’s a browser plugin, Archify works away in the background snapping your every search. When you enter keywords in into a search engine, an overlay appears informing you that there are search items with your keywords included already in your Archify archive. It’s worth noting here, that the product was previously called egoArchive, and this branding still exists on the plugin for the moment, though it will change in the coming weeks.

You can either click on the link within the overlay, or you can visit your account at Archify.com any time to search directly within it.

The one thing I’d say is the search box within Archify seems needlessly big and dominates the page, as you can see here:

Archify also lets you filter your search results to include just your search engine browsing history, or Facebook and Twitter. It also lets you specify time-frames, including the last day, week or month.

Your search results also let you delete specific archives, share them with the social sphere and even favorite them – the latter meaning you can choose to search specific results that you have personally bookmarked as ‘important’.

 So…what exactly does Archify record?

When you browse a website that uses the secure https protocol, Archify doesn’t record the pages – after all, most people don’t want their online banking pages saved for posterity. And if your Twitter’s Always use https is enabled, it won’t record your Twitter browsing either, though if you’re accessing Facebook, Twitter or any site using http they’ll be archived. It’s worth noting here that Archify won’t record your browsing if you’re in private ‘incognito’ mode.

However, when you choose to actively ‘connect’ Archify with Facebook and Twitter, Archify automatically archives all updates from your friends on Facebook and all the tweets from the people you follow on Twitter, as well as your own tweets and updates. This happens in the background, regardless of whether you actually visit Twitter or Facebook.

Interestingly, all your browsing is stored to your Archify account, meaning that no matter what browser you’re using on what computer, your online activity will be archived in a centralized repository in the cloud. Assuming you have the plug-in installed on each browser, of course.

Plugin updates will be rolled out prior to the full public launch, and we’re told that new versions due out imminently will also archive a user’s geo-position and display it in their search results as a marker. This means that in the future, you will be able to search for what pages you viewed on a given day in a specific location.

In terms of money, basic Archify accounts will always be free to use. In the coming months, more features will be added, including social-graph technologies, additional filters and labels, some of which will be available as part of a premium service offering. However, for the duration of the alpha and public beta, all features will be available to all users.

The verdict…and the invites

Archify is certainly an interesting project, and it does what it professes to do. Of course, it’s still in development so there are a few bugs – for example, some versions of Firefox don’t yet have the overlay feature built into the browser, though this is being fixed. And there are a few other niggles here and there which will be ironed out as the tool is developed.

It’s probably worth mentioning the performance too – there’s a danger with such plugins that they will adversely affect your computer’s processing power. I installed Archify and forgot it was there until I decided to check out exactly what it had been recording.

Meanwhile, The Next Web has 100 invites to giveaway – first come, first served. Simply visit this link, and the special invite key should already be filled in – it’s tnw01. Just complete the rest of your details and you should be good to go. But you’ll need to be quick…if you miss one of the 100 invites, you can submit your email address and join the waiting list.

➤ Archify

It’s not often you would see a rugby app featured on The Next Web but with the RBS 6 Nations rugby tournament commencing today, Europeans will be finding that comfy spot on their sofa to take in the best that England, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy and Ireland have to offer.

To accompany today’s matches, a new official has been commissioned to help armchair rugby fans enjoy the spectacle, fusing sport with a little bit of social to deliver RBS 6 Nations Live Challenge, an informative and fun game app for iOS and Android.

RBS says it is rugby’s first ever interactive in-game companion app, from what we have seen, it could be right. The Challenge app compliments the company’s existing fixtures application, delivering scores, stats, gameplay in the form of an in-game quiz and a social scoring system to pit people against their friends via Facebook Connect.

The app is best used when matches are in progress, with RBS pushing trivia questions to smartphone and tablet owners as events occur on the pitch. Think Toby Flood will make that conversion for England following a try? Back him and be rewarded with a points win should he score. Each answer will be compared to other gamers, and your friends if they are connected to the app from their devices.

All of your results can be automatically shared to your Facebook wall, motivating others to join you and show you their rugby knowledge.

  

The app will activate 40 minutes before each live match and enable fans to test their rugby knowledge with a few pre-match questions. It doesn’t matter which app you use or on what device, RBS will make sure that scores are updated in real-time, enabling you to face-off against your friends and family from either your tablet or smartphone.

The app also saves your data so you can add to your score throughout the Championship, tracking where you stand on the leader board based on your selected supported nation, matches, or friends playing.

RBS 6 Nations Live Challenge is available to download now; if you fancy yourself as a bit of a rugby pundit and want to take on your mates, make sure you grab it today before the France vs Italy match kicks off at 2:30pm GMT.

➤ RBS 6 Nations Live Challenge – iOS | Android

Amazon has amended listings for its Kindle Touch e-reader, enabling visitors to Amazon.com to ship the keyboardless device to a large number of countries outside of the US.

The eBook Reader spotted the modification, noting the amended product description – Kindle Touch, Wi-Fi, 6″ E Ink Display – for international shipment – and addition of a dropdown which customers can specify which country  the device can be shipped to.

Whilst a number of regions can be selected and allow customers to ship their touch-sensitive Kindle internationally, some are still unavailable to select, including the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and France — instead directing customers to their local Amazon website.

There’s a reason for this, although Amazon won’t tell you why.

The Kindle range is the bestselling product range on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.es and Amazon.it, at least over the holiday season. Instead of quietly rolling out the Kindle Touch worldwide, Amazon has slightly capped its launch in these countries so that it can give them a dedicated launch, suggesting to us that it will soon debut the Kindle Fire also on those European shores.

If you live outside of those five countries, you can now get your hands on your very own Kindle Touch, although for the time being you will not be able to buy the 3G-enabled model.

For those of you living in Amazon’s ‘hot’ regions, we guess its only a matter of time before Amazon sends its press release onto the newswires, finally launching the rest of the Kindle family.

De laatste dag! About to start... Ik hou weer aantekeningen bij op mn site.

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Fab.com is hot, hot, hot. The daily deals site has seen some amazing growth in the past four months alone, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down at all.

Today, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg shared some interesting stats and trends on his personal blog about the company.

Most notably, Fab saw its direct traffic pass traffic from email for the first time since ever last month. That means that the company has serious brand reputation which could be driving some wild word of mouth advertising.

In his post, Goldberg shared a graph showing the jump:

His insights on why this is?

We believe that the rise in direct traffic is because of 3 reasons:
- Mobile visits now account for nearly 1/3 of all visits.
- More and more people are just typing in www.fab.com into their browser at 11am ET / 8am PT each day instead of waiting to click on our emails.
- With 2 million members now, growing by 450,000 in January 2012 alone, we’ve reached a bit of a tipping point in general awareness of Fab.

The fact that its email traffic has dominated so much is a testament to how much its members love the service. That much traffic just from email campaigns is impressive.

Speaking of hot services, Goldberg also pointed out that Pinterest has now passed Twitter in referral traffic to the site, a pretty impressive feat for a service that’s still in its infancy as well.

Once every few weeks a new app hits Apple’s app store that has a very hidden, yet very sought after feature, tethering.

We reported on one just a few weeks ago, called QuasiDisk, which has since been taken down by Apple. Another app called “PayUpSucker” also saw a similar fate.

According to InformationWeek, a new one called “iRandomizer Numbers” has found its way onto the store and might be able to stay there the entire weekend, since Apple’s reviewers don’t tend to work weekend shifts.

When you download the app, which is $4.99, simply enter “1984″ in as the minimum number and “31337″ as the maximum number. Tap generate, and boom you’re able to tether any machine to your iPhone and use its 3G connection.

The CEO of the company behind the app, Nick Kramer, told InformationWeek that this feature was originally meant for friends and family:

Reluctantly, I will admit that my application ‘iRandomizer Numbers’ does have a hidden tethering feature. I say reluctantly because I didn’t plan on the feature being released. I designed the tethering functionality for my family and close friends not thinking it would be disseminated outside that circle.

If you don’t want to pay your carrier for tethering, grab the app now before Apple figures it out and takes it down. Pay at your own risk!

➤ iRandomizer Numbers

Just in case you were wondering if Apple would start making lower-priced MacBook airs and other mobile devices based on the ARM chip set, ala Microsoft, the company has no interest according to a report by AppleInsider.

Citi analysts recently met with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Openheimer, and one thing was clear: the company is focused on the iPad, as Cook feels like the tablet market could soon overtake that of PCs.

Instead of creating smaller and cheaper version of its MacBook line using ARM chip-sets, the company is going to focus on making the iPad feel more like a PC, or at least give it the capability to do just as much as a desktop or laptop can do.

Analyst Richard Gardner shared that he:

walked away from this meeting with the impression that Apple feels iPad satisfies—or will soon satisfy—the needs of those who might have been interested in such a product.

Given the success of the iPad, it makes complete sense that Apple would stay on its current course. Apple is a software company after all, and it clearly feels like most of the gaps between the PC experience and tablet experience can be solved with a strong operating system.

According to a report by AdAge, Facebook has made a huge hire which will change the way the company markets itself to consumers. In fact, Facebook hasn’t done much marketing of itself at all, so this hire is a one to pay attention to.

Reportedly, Facebook has hired Rebecca Van Dyck to be its head of global marketing. Having spent just 11 months at Levi’s, Van Dyck worked alongside Steve Jobs at Apple during the release of the iPhone, iPad, iPod and iTunes. Needless to say, Van Dyck knows consumers.

Van Dyck’s history is impressive, as you can tell by her previous experience:

- SVP, Chief Marketing Officer at Levi’s (11 Months)
- Sr Director, Worldwide Marketing Communications and Advertising at Apple Inc. (3 years)
- Sr. Director, WorldWide Advertising at Apple (4 years)
- Global Account Director, Nike at Wieden+Kennedy (12 years)

Given that Facebook will be publicly traded within the next three to four months, the company will need to put itself out there to draw more users, developers, and most importantly, businesses to advertise on the platform. Given Van Dyck’s pedigree at Apple, the company could fast become a more user-friendly when looked at from the outside.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and haven’t heard back yet. We’ll let you know if we do, though.

UPDATE: A Facebook spokesperson told us:

We can confirm that Rebecca is joining the marketing team and we are thrilled she’s decided to join us.

Apple has issued an update to its Apple TV software that ads the Genius feature to its Movie and TV sections, reports Appleinsider. It seems clear that this was always coming, but in practice it makes a ton of sense as a counterpart to Netflix’s recommendation engine.

The new sections appear below the Movies and TV Shows sections and dispplay several rows of selections based on recent movies watched. Whatever algorithm is being used it seems fairly loose, and not based directly on genre or actors involved, at least going off of the choices it gave me.

I do love that there is a chick flick followed by Krull, a movie I love but have never watched on my Apple TV. Seems to be a good selection available for both my wife and I, who use the device together. The two rows that follow are based on specific titles, so it’s a tad easier to see how it spins these choices out. One thing that I noticed immediately was that there is a bit of repetition going on across the categories. This could be due to the fact that we only casually use Apple TV rentals and spend a lot more time in Netflix.

The TV selections are nearly spot on, with almost every selection being to either my tastes or my wife’s. I watch more TV than she does on the Apple TV so much of it is curved toward the sci-fi or genre shows, although The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, two of her favorites, make a showing as well.

The comparisons to Netflix’ recommendation engine are immediate, of course, and fill in the gaps in the Apple TV’s ‘discovery browsing’ capabilities. This should help in those ‘what to watch’ situations when browsing through movies and their connected properties via the standard browsing just didn’t turn up likely options.

These additions won’t likely convince someone to purchase content instead of watching it for free on Netflix, but it does bring the Apple TV browsing experience more in line with what you can get on the streaming service. That ‘poke around and see what it thinks I will like’ serendipity was missing without Genius.

According to Transit Wireless, a company formed to respond to the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s requirement for a shared wireless infrastructure for NY Transit, New Yorkers can now look forward to cellphone service and free WiFi in 30 more subway platforms over the course of 2012. So far, only two stations have been outfitted by Transit Wireless (14th and 23rd Streets), which happened late last year.

The network was designed to act as a neutral host to extend a variety of wireless carrier services, and numerous carriers have already signed up (notably, AT&T and T-Mobile). The free WiFi access will be sponsored and available to all riders, which should help ease the pain of long subway commutes across the city.

Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Columbus Circle and stations along 96th Street are just some of the many stations that are planned to be wired for cell service this year. According to Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the MTA:

Bringing wireless service into our underground subway system reinforces the MTA’s effort to use technology to improve customer convenience that allows them to stay in touch with friends, relatives and business contacts. And by having access to real-time service status updates while underground, riders can better navigate the system.

The WSJ reports that the MTA had previously estimated “the of wiring all 271 subway stations in the transit system at roughly $200 million, a cost being borne entirely by Transit Wireless.” Now, it has been decided that “Transit Wireless and MTA will share proceeds of the company’s contracts with wireless carriers, MTA officials have said, with a minimum annual payment to the transit system of $3.3 million once the cellphone network is complete.”

It’s a sigh of relief for me, as not having cell phone service during a long ride can be a big pain in the case of “emergencies.” That said, I’m not looking forward to hearing every rider yapping on their phones —  probably the modern equivalent of the boom boxes that spanned NY’s subway stations back in the 80s.