I did a few days working with the Good Night Lamp team this week, on some interaction design explorations. A couple of days of talking, thinking and sketching with Adrian and Alex led to some writing, wireframes, storyboards, and animatics.

Alex asked me to write a bit more about the work, for the Good Night Lamp blog, and there’s now a post over there about it.

Out of all this work, common strands emerged; in particular, a focus on the vocabulary of the product. One of the things I find most important to pin down early in projects – and which design exploration like this helps with a lot – is the naming of things. How are core product concepts communicated to an end-user? How are they made explained? Making sure nomenclature is clear, understandable, and doesn’t raise the wrong associations in a user’s mind, is, for me, a really core part of product design. Even though many of the core concepts of GNL were clear in our head, by sitting down and drawing things out in detail, I started having to discover what to call things, often bringing Alex and Adrian back to my screen to discuss those ideas.

This kind of design work initially appears very tactical. It focuses on small areas almost in isolation from one another, exploring the edges and seams of the product. But by forcing oneself to confirm what things are called, confirm what interactions or graphic language are repeated throughout the product, it turns into a much more strategic form of design, which impacts many areas of a product.

You can read more at the Good Night Lamp site. It was a pleasure working with Adrian and Alex. If this kind of work is something you’re looking for, do get in touch.

ghostcar

30 July 2012

There’s a copy of me running around London. It runs at the right speed, but it’s unstuck in time: unstuck by 365 days, in fact.

Tom Armitage In The Past is a foursquare user. He checks in where I was a year ago. He says what I said a year ago. As long as the game systems haven’t changed, he gets the badges I got a year ago. (And, if the game rules do change, he’ll start to deviate from me).

He’s maintained by a piece of software I wrote called ghostcar.

In racing games like Ridge Racer, your previous time attack high score is often represented by a 3D outline of a car rendered into the same world as you – a “ghost car”. Matt Jones reminded me of this at the pub one night, as I explained my idea, and the project had a name.

It’s not a spambot. I’m its only friend; it’s invisible to people who aren’t its friend. It’s invisible to venue owners – ie, it’s not generating false marketing data. Honesty is Foursquare’s main currency: saying where you really are, being who you really say.

I’m not breaking the terms of service. When I wrote it, the Foursquare terms of service told me I couldn’t impersonate other people.

But I’m not impersonating other people. I’m impersonating myself. That’s got to be OK, right?

So: why did I do this?

There were two main inspirations. Firstly, James Wheare’s Twitshift (now sadly closed). Twitshift works because its output is in the same medium as the source data. I didn’t warm to Timehop because it was just an email. Email is good, and there’s value in juxtaposition – but anyone can send an email. Email dilutes the notion of “being”, however. Foursquare is not, precisely, about presence – it’s just about saying you were somewhere – but email about foursquare feels like another abstraction layer. I wanted to minimise abstraction. And so, to do that, I’d need to build a Foursquare timeshifted-echo service that itself output to Foursquare.

Secondly, I remember Kevin Slavin talking about Area/Code’s wide, GPS-enabled game Crossroads at dConstruct a few years back – and how, once, when testing, it the game’s entirely digital antagonist “Papa Bones” moved through their office, and every GPS-enabled phone they were testing the game on suddenly jumped. What made the virtual “ghost” interesting was when it manifested in the world. Even though it wasn’t real – and everybody knew it wasn’t real – it still made you jump when you were there; the juxtaposition of knowing something is right where you are, even if it isn’t a real thing, is highly striking. I wanted to explore that a little with my own data.

I don’t check up on Mr Armitage In The Past very much. The idea, rather, is that I might bump into him some time. How strange: to be in one of my usual haunts, and know that a ghost of me, a year in the past, is also there, watching a movie, having a drink. Sometimes, those memories are less cheery than others. Sometimes, they’re brilliant. It gives me a visceral memory: reminds my bones, my heart, what they felt. (That, for reference, is my defence against nostalgia. This isn’t just about nostalgia, because you might not like what it makes you feel. It’s just about remembering feelings; stopping to pause and remember the passage of time).

It’s also made me check in to Foursquare a bit more. The moment I fired ghostcar up, I realised I needed to start giving it better data so that it’d continue to have meaning a year in the future. So that’s a strange, interesting takeaway: changing my behaviour because I want the fossil record to be more accurate.

I was only going to find out what it felt like by making it, so I made it. It chugs away on my server in private. I run ghostcars for a few friends, too. It’s not particularly elegant, and I don’t think it’d scale to loads of users, so for now, it’s a private distraction. But I thought I should write it up. If you’d like to run your own install, the code is on Github. It’s a minimally documented Rails app, because it was made just for me, but you might enjoy it.

In the meantime: I go about my business, and an echo of me in the past will do one day, too.

I had the great pleasure to get to Galy Tots at Kemistry last week: a lovely, tiny retrospective of Ken Garland Associates’ work for Galt Toys. It was lovely: lots of nice examples of graphic design and photography, as well as lots of items on display, including a prototype of knock-down furniture for playgroups, that was just beautiful.

There were several particularly lovely touches: firstly, that all the toys and games on display were set up to be played with – indeed, that they were set up so that children as well as adults could play.

And secondly: all the exhibition copy was written by Garland himself, which gave it a tone that was both very honest but also charming and subtle.

There were two quotation I took down, because they made an impact, and I wanted to share them.

Garland wrote about Edward Newmark, who had been manager of Paul and Marjorie Abbatt’s toyshop before he went to Galt.

Edward brought with him the conviction that play is a serious business, and toys are the tools of the child.

Talking about their time working for Galt, Garland said:

Most especially, it is rare for designers to have the experience of their work being enjoyed before their very eyes. I have had the greatest delight in seeing children playing our most successful game, Connect, in many parts of the world.

Watching something being enjoyed before your eyes is one of the great pleasures of designing things to be played or interacted with.

(And, by corollary, nothing hurts more, or reminds you to up your game, than watching somebody not have fun with something assumed they would enjoy).

  • "There are 1868 cars on the highway right now. You can watch them drive by, or draw your own and it will join the front of the line. Where are they going? The journey is yours." Progressive's annual report is done vy an artist each year; this year's is a lovely Aaron Koblin piece.
  • "The choice for light as a medium is the result of a systematic exploration of what kinds of stimuli pigs respond to. We were aware of some evidence indicating pigs enjoy light. But when we saw how they reacted to a laser pointer, we knew we were on to something." Kars' frankly crazy game for pigs and people is in video form now, but he's deadly serious about it existing. I'm quite excited for him.

The point of Twitter

09 December 2011

John Gruber on the new Twitter iPhone app:

What also worries me is that these changes suggest not only a difference in opinion regarding how a Twitter client should work, but also regarding just what the point is of Twitter as a service. The Twitter service I signed up for is one where people tweet 140-character posts, you follow those people whose tweets you tend to enjoy, and that’s it. The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content. It’s trying to make Twitter work for people who don’t see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be.

Yes, that. It increasingly turns out that the Twitter I signed up for – the Twitter in my head, as it were – is the MVP of something else. And now, the MVP is fading away and the something else is taking over. Which is fine for acquiring new users – after all, by and large, it’s a given that most people don’t use your product. But my mental model is stuck around five years ago, when I signed up.

I signed up for this product because it made mass-texting people when I was in town easy, and led to lots of serendipitous drinking and hanging out when I was in the city. On the radio last year, I heard someone explain Twitter as “a tool for following famous people and seeing what they’re up to“. It’s interesting how the product described in the new app feels like the product described by that radio pundit: a consumption tool.

For me, it was always about the permanent backchannel with my friends. I guess I’m looking for a new mobile client now.