Design research “against needs”

Posted on 03/06/2010 by lgalli

What we need from research is more than description, and especially, more than a list of “needs,” explicit or implicit, met or unmet.

This is from Rick Robinson‘s talk at IIT Design Research Conference 2010, very recently made available online as a video on Vimeo. I listened to it one first time while writing but I will strive to go for it a second time with more attention.

Among other things, Robinson argues against the point made by Donald Norman in a much debated post and following article on Interactions, in which he said that ethnography-inspired design research quest for “unmet needs” can not provide a basis for breakthrough innovations, which are rather a result of technology invention (Norman added also that still design research has a key role in improving innovative products, making them usable and enjoyable).

One of the key points of Robinson is that actually “needs”, and hence uncovering “unmet needs” is not or it shouldn’t be the main business of design researchers; instead, they should focus on the values that inform design decisions.

Now, it is interesting to note that at the end of the talk Norman himself stood up and expressed his praise for Robinson, saying that he was not in agreement :) about their disagreement (and asking for one of the t-shirts exhibited by Robinson, namely the one with the “against needs” slogan).

IIT Design Research Conference 2010 on Vimeo via Putting People First.

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Android surge vs. iPhone repeats Windows vs. Apple pattern

Posted on 17/05/2010 by lgalli

This is not the blurb of some Google enthusiast or Apple hater but the reasoning of Fabrizio Capobianco, the CEO of Funambol and a leading voice in the industry, especially when it comes to mobile and open source. See the original post (published about one week ago) for the complete commentary on the NPD data on US 2010 Q1 sales reported below (again, copypasted from Fabrizio’s blog).

In short, the parallel drawn by Fabrizio is about the contrast between better but closed operating systems (the ones from Apple) on one side and not vertically integrated / somewhat open alternatives on the other side (Windows in the past for the PC, now Android for mobile — yesss, not open source on the MS side ;) The end result is that Apple’s share in the PC market never reached high marks.

Any pattern recognition? I bet. That’s the PC business. One Apple operating system which was closed, and one Microsoft operating system that hardware manufacturer could adopt and ship at “low” cost (for the time). Apple was better and now they have 4% of the PC OS market share.

via Mobile Open Source

Two personal takes:

1, We all have heard the argument that you can run a very successful company with a small share of the market; but it can be counter-argued that the perspective of the analysis above is not focused on a single corporation as such, but on general market dynamics, which at some point in the future could indeed impact the performance of any company in the arena.

2, I know that I am mixing (real ;) apples and pears, but the surprising NPD data are a striking confirmation of the expectations about future mobile OS diffusion expressed by the respondents to the RTM survey on which I blogged about a while ago (it was: Android first, iPhone second, but now it looks like it could be a very distant second).

Update: I noticed that Apple has publicly reacted to the NPD data claiming that “this is a very limited report on 150,000 U.S. consumers responding to an online survey”, as reported by Reuters and others. Furthermore, Apple reference to another report by IDC on global market sales for mobile vendors in 2010 Q1 highlights also how big is the difference for Nokia penetration in the US vs. the global markets. BTW, perhaps analysts shoud measure (OS) platforms and device vendors together (terminology discussions on “smartphone” vs. “mobile converged devices” might be interesting but they are not very practical).

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Digital TV, audience, users and people

Posted on 04/05/2010 by lgalli
Having been invited to give a talk about “challenges and opportunities” of digital terrestrial TV — this month in Italy many regions will start the switch-over — I tried to draw some reflections on expressions like “audience”, “users” and “people”. I think they bring many assumptions that often go unquestioned. “Audience” is TV and media jargon, “users” are those of ICT, HCI and user research, and I guess “people” are the real individuals behind the previous categories. One great reference in this respect I think is the 2009 paper on “non use” by Satchell and Dourish (see here the PDF from Dourish publications page); some more comments on the local perspective in the Italian version of this post (click Italiano on top right).

Now, the presentation was mostly a series of visuals, so there is not much sense in sharing it here. But see below the video with which I managed to entertain the conference audience ;) — It is a 2008 viral produced by a then successful FOX talkshow; the intent was to show how “insanely difficult” had been the switch from analog to digital TV. The conference has been held in Trento, under the auspices of the Autonomous Province of Trento and the public agency Trentino In Rete, in cooperation with Create-Net (I have already worked with them).

Mae Laborde accepts her Hulu Award – Watch more Funny Videos

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Sketching mobile application concepts on paper

Posted on 26/04/2010 by lgalli

Sometimes I am faced with a little bit of wonder or surprise when I suggest to sketch application concepts on paper — even from expert professionals. So the video below comes handy; I just found it by chance on Pixelthread‘s blog, a London agency, and the video itself is from Adaptive Path.

PS: students often hear me talking about the new meaning of sketching in the digital/ubicomp realm, a discourse largely drawn on the work of Bill Buxton; still, it’s nice to see here something in the more literal sense (of course, sketching as drawing is also part of the analysis of Buxton).

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“Which [mobile] operating system does your future device run?” (RTM survey results)

Posted on 17/03/2010 by lgalli

RTM-Remember the Milk has published the results of their Mobile Survey, addressed to the RTM users’ base. With 3.300 respondents recruited only through RTM and no incentives I think that this is an original and very interesting piece of research even beyond the scope of mobile RTM evolution (I joined the survey too as an RTM pro (!) user).

See here the table concerning the question cited in the post title, one of general interest.

This table is Copyright Remember The Milk!

A previos question on the mobile OS currently in use has Apple first and Google second. So, the very short brutal synthesis about mobile OS evolution could be:

  • iPhone first and Android second, the rest is just fragmentation;
  • then, Android first and iPhone second, same as above, that’s it.

Or is this oversimplification?

PS As noted by the RTM guys, the survey has been held before recent major industry announcements such as Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series and Meego (Maemo + Moblin).

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