The MIT Sloan Management Review has published Donald Norman’s paper ‘Designing Waits That Work‘ (available for $6.50). It is based on a 2008 paper by Norman, entitled ‘The Psychology of Waiting Lines‘ (which is freely available), but sections have been added on “Variations of basic waiting lines” (including triage, categorization of needs, and self-selection of queues) and “Deliberate Chaos.” According to Norman, “the original is better in the amount of detail and formal analyses, worse in the rough draft and inelegance of the writing as well as a lack of examples which I added for SMR.” Here is Norman’s introduction to the 2008 paper: Waiting is an inescapable part of life, but that doesn’t mean we enjoy it. But if the lines are truly inescapable, what can be done to make them less painful? Although there is a good deal of practical knowledge, usually known within the heads of corporate managers, very little has been published about the topic. One paper provides the classic treatment: David Maister’s The Psychology of Waiting Lines (1985). Maister suggested several principles for increasing the pleasantness of waiting. Although his paper provides an excellent start, it was published in 1985 and there have been considerable advances in our knowledge since then. In the PDF file, The Psychology of Waiting Lines, I bring the study of waiting lines up to date, following the spirit of Maister’s original publication, but with considerable revision in light of modern findings. I suggest eight design principles, starting with “emotions dominate” and ending with the principle that “the memory of an event is more important than the experience.” Examples of design solutions include double buffering, providing clear conceptual models of the events with continual feedback, providing positive memories and even why one might deliberately induce waits. These principles apply to all services, not just waiting in lines. Details will vary from situation to situation, industry to industry, but the fundamentals are, in truth, the fundamentals of sociable design for waiting lines, for products, and for service.

In a truly excellent article, entitled “You can’t innovate like Apple”, Alain Breillatt also discusses Apple’s approach to user research. “While I’m sure Jobs says he doesn’t do research, it’s pretty clear that his team goes out to thoroughly study behaviors and interests of those they think will be their early adopters. Call it talking to friends and family; but, honestly, you know that these guys live by immersing themselves in the hip culture of music, video, mobile, and computing. The point is not to go ask your customers what they want. If you ask that question in the formative stages, then you’re doing it wrong. The point is to go immerse yourself in their environment and ask lots of “why” questions until you have thoroughly explored the ins and outs of their decision making, needs, wants, and problems. At that point, you should be able to break their needs and the opportunities down into a few simple statements of truth. As Alan Cooper says, how can you help an end user achieve the goal if you don’t know what it is? You have to build a persona or model that accurately describes the objectives of your consumers and the problems they face with the existing solutions. The real benefit, as I saw in my years working at InstallShield and Macrovision, is that unless you put a face and expectations on that consumer, then disagreements about features or product positioning or design come down to who can pull the greatest political will—rather than who has the cleanest interpretation of the consumer’s need.” Read full story

Consumer Electronics 3.0 is the name Intel has chosen for a new concept of seamless integration of internet and television. The CE 3.0 website is rich in content, but more than that, it exemplifies the relevance of a user-centred approach in the design of new and innovative technology-based products and services. A few weeks ago, I reported on a few articles that dealt with the problems and challenges related to digital storage in the home. Today, I will provide some user-centred design links on the topic of the changing TV experience: Usage models in the digital home: some simple advice by Dr. Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and director of Intel’s User Experience Group “Our findings show, at the broadest level, something many of us knew intuitively—people love their televisions. In many different cultures, in many families, TVs emerged as a beloved, if not sometimes annoying, companion, friend, and constant in the home. Wherever we live, TV content engages us at an emotional and visceral level—it is more than simply entertainment, it is about a kind of engagement and about nurturing us as people. TV has our stories, and the characters become extensions of our families. The irony is that while the industry tends to talk about new technology, consumers want to talk about their family, their constant companions, and the comfort and nurturing that TVs bring. To avoid unintended consequences, we as an industry must learn to listen to people, and to be clear about their perspectives. We need to be clear about the single purpose of an object—why people use it, care about it, desire it, buy it and keep it. The lesson here is not to be seduced by the impulse to increase the number of things any piece of technology can do, or to confuse its purpose with the functions it could incorporate. We must be very careful to identify the purpose of CE devices from a consumer perspective. It would be bad if we broke what people liked most about the television experience. In making consumer electronics devices smarter for instance, potentially increasing their number of functions and features, we should also keep their purpose in mind. Violating this principle is a recipe for disaster.” Opening a window into the lives of TV viewers Q&A with Brian David Johnson, consumer experience architect within Intel’s Digital Home Group “Our group includes two teams. The first team consists of social science and design researchers who spend time in people’s homes all over the world. This team is really dedicated to getting a sense of what makes people tick, what they care about, what frustrates them, what they aspire to. This research is focused around getting a sense of the larger cultural patterns and practices that shape people’s relationships to and uses of new technologies. [...] After we have observed people in their homes, our ethnographers get together with our second team, the human factors engineers and research designers. This group takes the data, and the opportunities we have identified, and begins to build them into platform requirements and product specifications. Through a set of rigorous processes and methods, the team creates personas, usage models and experience assessments that help drive the development of genuinely user-inspired and user-centric technologies. This process provides Intel with a uniquely valuable reference for our long-term product roadmap as well as a means of validating that our product development will meet the consumers’ needs.” The changing TV experience - Recent findings from the Intel User Experience Group This article by Françoise Bourdonnec, director of Home Experience Research & Exploration at Intel’s Digital Home Group, looks at what recent Intel research tells us about how Internet technology may change the TV experience – and some of the important questions that remain to be answered. Listening to the ‘Voice of the Customer’ helps Intel Design to redefine new digital home experiences Q&A with Jason Busta, a Voice of the Customer (VOC) researcher for Intel’s Mobility Group, and Kimberly Swank, primary VOC researcher for the Digital Home Group Catalyst for the digital home: 1. Evolution of the fourth-generation user interface In this first article in a two-part series, Gary Palangian and Randy Dunton of Intel’s Digital Home Innovations Team discuss the evolution of Consumer Electronics user interface. Catalyst for the digital home: 2. Intel’s fourth-generation UI research In this second article in a two-part series, Gary Palangian and Randy Dunton of Intel’s Digital Home Innovations Team describe Intel’s ongoing UI R&D program, and share some of the results to date. Making the leap: the internet comes to the living room Excerpts from a keynote address by William O. Leszinske, Jr., general manager of Intel’s Consumer Electronics Group, at the Digital Living Room Conference, March, 2008 The next-generation TV experience (video) Interview with William O. Leszinske, Jr., general manager of Intel’s Consumer Electronics Group Widget Channel: Personalize, enjoy & share your favorite Internet experiences on TV In collaboration with Yahoo! Inc., Intel has developed a full-featured software framework named Widget Channel, that allows TV viewers to enjoy rich Internet applications called TV Widgets while watching their favorite programs.

The blog series on New Media Practices in International Contexts, which I announced in January, is now complete. It covers the unique characteristics of digital media user behaviours in very different socio-cultural contexts of China, Korea, India, Brazil, Japan and Ghana, with a particular interest in the intersection of youth, new media and learning.
The authors, a group of people around Mimi Ito, believe that examining new media practices from an international (and, in some cases, transnational) perspective will enhance their current efforts to theorise youth, new media and learning, a wider MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative. China (by Cara Wallis): introduction - mobile phones - gaming - internet - new media production - conclusion Korea (by HyeRyoung Ok): introduction - internet - gaming - mobile phones - new media production - conclusion India (by Anke Schwittay): introduction - mobile phones - gaming - internet - new media production - conclusion Brazil (by Heather Horst): introduction - internet - new media production - games - mobile phones - conclusion Japan (by Mimi Ito and Daisuke Okabe): introduction - internet - mobile phones - new media production - gaming - conclusion Ghana (by Araba Sey): introduction - mobile phones - internet - new media production - gaming - conclusion Each case study focuses upon the telecommunications landscape, internet and mobile phone practices, gaming, and new media production, and provides a unique perspective on the ways in which infrastructure, institutions and culture (among other factors) shape contemporary new media practices.

Further on my earlier theme of “we are all hackers now“, here is a long feature on user-generated devices by Fumitada Takahashi and Phil Keys in the Nikkei Electronics Asia magazine (Japan). “User-Generated Devices (UGD), allowing people to enjoy themselves making their own equipment with friends, are making a showing in the electronics industry, fueled by the outsourcing of development and manufacturing, open constituent technologies, and other trends. Only companies capable of discarding the paradigm of volume production will be able to evolve apace with this new dimension in user participation.” The article cites Sir Howard Stringer, chief executive officer (CEO) of Sony. In an interview with Stringer, he endorses customer understanding and open technology: “Consumers today are a lot different from how they were 20 years ago. They aren’t passive any more. The spread of the Internet has given them the power to dictate how products are used, and an increasing number of people are discovering new ways to have fun, such as by creating their own content. A diverse range of electronics will be connecting to the Internet in the near future, tapping Web-based services, and we have to think about what we need to do to make our customers - the king - like our products. I think the key to this lies in watching our customers. If a Sony employee were to ask me what a reasonable market price might be for distributing video to the home, I would tell him, “Don’t listen to me; watch our customers.” Understanding customers will also help us uncover hidden customers. The Wii from Nintendo Co Ltd of Japan is an excellent example. They didn’t develop any unique technology; they just realized that there was potential demand out there for something different from conventional games, and thought about how to satisfy different demands from different age groups.” Read article: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 (via Pachube)

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) Foundation has published a report on a study on how teenagers use news sites. “The NAA Foundation and the Media Management Center at Northwestern University have teamed up to explore and put to the test better ways to match the online news preferences of teens. We developed prototypes of home pages and story-level pages, then tested them in focus groups across the United States. Teens’ responses were remarkably and overwhelmingly consistent, regardless of market size or location. We found that there are better ways to serve teens with online news. The answer isn’t to dilute the news, but to be bolder. This doesn’t mean that news organizations should necessarily create sites just for teens. The term “youth news Web site” conjures up visions of a site heavy with lifestyle and entertainment content, with a little news on the side. But what these teens said they want are news sites that do news well, not dumb it down or pose as experts in teen culture. Given that teen responses were very similar to those of adults who are light readers, we recommend creating a new type of site – not just for teens, but for all people who lack experience with news and have a limited amount of time to get engaged with it.” - Executive summary - Full report - Presentation at the NAA Annual Convention in April 2009

UCL (which is the abbreviation for “University College London” although you have to look at the site’s footer to find out) is starting a new MA in Digital Anthropology. And it seems serious stuff. Digital technologies have become ubiquitous. From Facebook, Youtube and Flickr to PowerPoint and Second Life. Museum displays migrate to the internet, family communication in the Diaspora is dominated by new media, artists work with digital films and images. Anthropology and ethnographic research is fundamental to understanding the local consequences of these innovations, and to create theories that help us acknowledge, understand and engage with them. Today’s students need to become proficient with digital technologies as research and communication tools. Through combining technical skills with appreciation of social effects, students will be trained for further research and involvement in this emergent world. This MA brings together three key components in the study of digital culture: 1. Skills training in digital technologies, including our own Digital Lab, from internet and visual arts to e-curation and digital ethnography. 2. Anthropological theories of virtualism, materiality/immateriality and digitisation. 3. Understanding the consequences of digital culture through the ethnographic study of its social and regional impact. And what’s more: The Ma will be run by Danny Miller, one of the most outstanding anthropologists today, renowned for his book on the use of cellphones in Jamaica, and specialist on material culture. And no other than Stefana Broadbent (former chief anthropologist at Swisscom and featured as such in The Economist) is a fellow in the programme. The MA starts in September 2009. Read more