Just back from a trip to Germany, while over there I ended up in several serendipitous conversations about our increasing embrace of technology to help organize and memorize our everyday lives.

From the many appointments and conversations to ad-hoc thought streams, new log-ins, phone numbers or email addresses, we increasingly love to tether ourselves to nearby hardware and software managing our lifes’ personal and professional data streams – preferably instantly and on the go.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have a few  friends who’ve had ID chips implanted in their expensive purebred pets over the years.  I’d always thought of it as a vaguely creepy, almost comically yuppie thing to do – until we found ourselves having to do just that in order to legally bring our cat (of somewhat more humble animal shelter rescue origins) with us when we moved here to Berlin.

Since the chip in question is only about the size of a grain of rice and is completely undetectable lying somewhere under the loose skin behind his neck, I had completely forgotten about it.

Until I noticed the uniforms worn by the wait staff at a trendy Berlin café I was at the other day, that is…

QR code  Originally developed on Japanese automobile assembly lines to keep track of individual parts, QR code represents the state of the art in bar code technology, and is capable of storing textual information much more densely than the old-school vertical bar codes found on your groceries.  With the advent of high-quality smartphone cameras and QR code-scanning mobile apps, the square pixelated images have started showing up in print ads, billboards, catalogs, and signs everywhere, as consumer-facing businesses have co-opted the technology for marketing purposes.

Technical takeaway?  QR code makes the transfer of a small but meaningful amount of data from a physical object to a machine over the air possible.

User experience takeaway? Your cellphone is learning to read.

All well and good – but seeing these codes plastered across uniforms worn by humans rather than on inanimate physical objects – well, it reminded me a little bit of that chip inside our cat.

After thinking it over a bit, though, I think it’s just an example of technology as fashion statement – like simulated “shark fin” car antennas, merely an affectation more about conveying a certain level of affluence and technological hipness than anything having to do with actual functionality.

That would make the whole thing a bit silly, wouldn’t it?  Still, less silly than the alternative: imagine patrons actually trying to use these codes, frantically pointing their smartphone cameras at the backs of waiters and waitresses as they quickly pass by, hard at work in a busy café – all in an effort to get the menu or website URL onto their mobile devices.

That, to me, would be not only silly, but a little sad, too – and might just be what too much technology would look a little something like.

Some people are really bothered by imperfect grammar.  Other people can’t stand the sight of people chewing gum.  I don’t share either of those particular pet peeves, but there is something that really gets under my skin: usability-challenged software.

Which brings me to Microsoft Outlook, an application a lot of us spend the better part of our adult waking hours using (I know – kinda sad).  While setting an Out of Office message on the 2010 Mac version the other day, I was struck once again by how even a simple operation can be made needlessly limited and confusing.

In Outlook, the sending of auto-reply messages to internal and external senders is independently configurable – well, sort of.  See the “Send replies outside my company to:” checkbox to the left?  It’s greyed out unless the user has first selected “Send out of office messages“.  In other words, the assumption has been made that nobody could ever possibly need to auto-reply to an external sender if they weren’t already auto-replying to internal senders.

Two things…

• First of all, what a curious and arbitrary assumption to make.  Imagine you’re a worker who typically gets a lot of external email traffic, but those emails need to go unanswered while you work against deadline on an important internal project that demands routine and timely internal email.  Now imagine that as a courtesy to your clients, you’d like to send them an auto-reply for a day or two until the deadline is past.  Not an unreasonable scenario – and just the thing for an enterprise email client that allows independent external and internal auto-replies, right?  Well, with Outlook you’re still out of luck.  Memo to designers: before you impose an operational hierarchy on the user, make sure there’s a reason for it.
• And how about at least clearly naming the options as implemented?  Would it have been too much trouble to correctly label the  “Send Out of Office messages” option “Send Out of Office messages inside my company“?  That would provide a helpful hint to all the harried office workers out there that the options towards the bottom still need to be checked and filled out before heading out on that vacation.  And another thing: if you take the trouble to inform the user that external senders will only receive one auto-reply, why not display whether or not the same is true regarding email coming from internal senders?

How big a deal is this in the grand scheme of things?  OK, not too big – but maybe this kind bothers me only because it’s so unnecessary.  I mean, here’s the thing:  software development, like math, is hard.  The folks creating these applications are highly intelligent.  Why is it that all too often (this is by no means limited to Microsoft, by the way) the easy things – the ‘low hanging fruit’ of simple usability considerations – are overlooked by engineers?

It’s even more difficult to explain in the face of abundant evidence that when a product does get usability right (dropbox and iOS come to mind), it turns out to be not only good for users, but good for business as well (for more on that, see our recent post on Sony and Apple).

Google+ has been around for a few months now, and while the company is keeping typically quiet regarding the hard numbers, most web traffic analysts estimate that as of November of this year, something north of 50 million users will have created Google+ profiles.

How many of those users are actually active on the service, though, is another story: in our (admittedly anecdotal) experience, a lot of these initially enthusiastic early adapters have tapered off on their Google+ usage pretty dramatically (and even if every single one of these 50 million users were still highly active, that’s still only a 10th of Facebook’s user base).

Inertia?  …strongly in Facebook’s favor.

What’s a scrappy little upstart like Google to do?

Read the rest of this entry »

Here we are. You and I, plus another 6,999,999,998 more people. Today statistically we’ve reached the 7 billion population mark. What matters now is what is next.

As part of my Deutsche Telekom responsibilities, I recently took part in helping to shape what has become the 7 Billion Actions campaign under the auspices of the United Nations Population Fund - an innovative campaign that is building awareness around the opportunities and challenges of a world of seven billion.

As an individual as much as a representative of a large, multi-national communications provider, population-relevant issues and causes matter to me probably as much as they do to you.

To that end, the social media team at the UNFPA sent along the following tips how everyone across the social graph and blogosphere can help contribute to the cause:

Read the rest of this entry »