Yes/No/Cancel

I’ve just worked out how you could make a 3G iPhone yourself, even adding GPS support, and still get away with a lower cost than buying a regular iPhone. The solution:

1. Get an iPod Touch (from £199).
2. Get a Symbian smartphone, such as the N95, with an internet plan (on 3 you’d pay about £34 per month over 18 months for a N95 and a tariff roughly equivalent to O2’s iPhone tariff).
3. Download JoikuSpot and install it on the N95. Use it to create an ad-hoc wireless network, and connect the iPod Touch to that network.
4. Voilà. Total cost is about £811 over 18 months (compared to the iPhone total cost of £899), you get 3G or even HSDPA, and you get a whole additional handset with Nokia’s awesome features.

JoikuSpot is still a bit limited — rather than just routing packets, it proxies HTTP traffic and doesn’t support anything else, so e.g. IMAP isn’t going to work for the time being. I hope that will get fixed soon. I tested JoikuSpot briefly for plain web traffic on my E65 and it seems to be working.

I’m not going to rush out and buy all those things now, I just find this situation curious.

The Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona is an astonishing experience. And that has not so much to do with its size, its architecture, its intricate artwork or any such outward aspects, although they aren’t bad either. The astonishing thing is that the construction of the building started about 130 years ago, and they’ve still not even started building the main central towers. It isn’t scheduled to be completed for at least another 20 years, and to me as outsider it looks more like it’s going to be another 100 years. That is not because the builders are lazy — people were right there, working on the masonry as I was visiting — but because it is such a massively ambitious project.

Now in history it has not been unusual for the construction of cathedrals to take 600 years or longer, but most of those buildings are now completed (except for eternally ongoing maintenance work). When we are told that it took so many years to build a cathedral, that information usually just washes past us without us ever really contemplating what that means. It means that for about 30 generations, all people saw was a huge unfinished work in their town, a monument from their distant ancestors lost in history, and a heirloom to their distant descendants in a future time which would be very different from their own.

In each of those generations, many stonemasons, woodworkers, architects and others would spend their whole life assembling tiny pieces of a huge work. They would grow up, live, eat, drink, love, grow old and die, and during that time they would still only see a small incremental bit of progress towards achieving the vision of their ancestors. It is impossible to even imagine the amount of human soul which so many people have poured into the endeavour over such a long period of time.

It seems to me that we don’t think about many things on that sort of scale today. In fact, I think that if somebody was to propose to start such a massive undertaking today, like Antoni Gaudí and his colleagues did towards the end of the 19th century, they would only get laughed at. Hell, we can’t even sort out things like climate change and fossil fuels running out, and these are things which happen on a much shorter timescale than the construction of a cathedral like this. Is it possible that the 20th and 21st century, with their ever increasing pace of life, have caused us to lose sight of this big picture — this understanding of the world which includes not just ourselves, but our distant ancestors and our distant descendants also?

Gaudí is given a lot of credit for the Sagrada Familia. That is not because he did a record amount of stone-lifting, but because he had a vision, a vision of a massively ambitious project which would span far beyond his own lifetime, a vision which would inspire the ambition of many other people wanting to be part of the project. I wouldn’t say that Gaudí created the Sagrada Familia — of course it is being created by the large number of workers in the past, present and future. But these workers all have a common ambition, a desire to be part of something much greater than their own lives, and this ambition draws from Gaudí’s initial vision.

The important thing to realise here is that although Gaudí is famously associated with the project, it is not “his” project in any useful sense. The ambition of the many generations working towards its completion are not doing it because of Gaudí, so therefore he arguably has fairly little importance today. The workers are not doing it for their own sake either — if they wanted to show off, they would be better off choosing to work on something which they might see completed within their lifetime. They are not doing it because of competition, or because of any sort of necessity, and they are certainly not doing it because somebody is forcing them to. They might be doing it for the glory of God, I don’t know.

My understanding is that they are working on this cathedral because it is something they think is worthwhile, something bigger than any single human being. This ambition is going to be successful because it is the collective goal of so many people. Ambition, viewed in this way, is a very selfless thing.

The word ambition has picked up negative connotations. It has become associated with ruthlessness, with striving for success at the expense of others, with egocentricity and self-importance. I found the Sagrada Familia a refreshing reminder that such a self-centered understanding of ambition is short-sighted, because it limits whatever you want to do to a single person’s lifetime, which isn’t very much in the grand scheme of things.

Instead, I see the Sagrada Familia as an example for a general pattern for doing amazing things. If you want to do something amazing, you first need somebody with a vision to inspire other people. Once that is done, the best thing that person can do is to step back, to surrender a lot of the ownership and control over the project to the people who will actually get it done, and of course let them take their reward.

The way Gaudí did this is by setting the scope of the project so large that it was way beyond his lifetime, and hence also way beyond his control. He is said to have commented on the expected duration of the construction: “My client is not in a hurry.”

A warm welcome to Johannes Hauser, who is joining me as a co-author of this blog. Johannes has contributed two posts and a number of comments so far, with a particular focus on the interaction between technology and everyday life. I hope that Johannes will give a bit of a balance to our content — if I head off on a technology tangent, he brings things back down to earth. I have worked with Johannes before and appreciate his well-founded and clearly articulated opinions. We are looking forward to reading more from him on Yes/No/Cancel over the coming weeks and months.

Having finished breakfast, I need to pack my stuff. It feels somewhat strange not to pack in the usual stuff like the mobile phone and the MP3 player. (I even remove the LED lamp from my key ring.) On locking the door, it comes to me that once I was even planning to install some electronic house access system which would render the house key obsolete. But it turned out that there is no fall-back system in case of a power cut. Who invents such a bullshit?

In the bus to work I have to show my monthly ticket to the conductor. I have to admit the ticket has an integrated chip, but that one is used on a self-service station only, not for daily routines. I guess we can turn a blind eye to that. But I know that some other bus companies give out smart cards which you have to check on a sensor on entering the bus. Luckily, mine hasn’t started that sort of stuff. Anyway, I could buy a single ticket which is printed on paper (by a onboard computer, sadly), paying with loose change. Dodging the fare is not advisable today because the controllers use some sort of handheld computers where they would enter my data, requiring me to subscribe with a digital pen on a touchpad.

While entering my workplace, I realized that usually I would have to check in - using a smart card again. Good thing is, we are allowed to note down the time as an alternative, if the check-in does not work or we’re working abroad. Today I declare it as ‘not working’, period. And now things are getting tricky: What do you do all day long if you are usually working on a computer or in a lab with high-tech equipment? First thing I do is to tidy up my desk and file away piles of old papers. This keeps me busy for about an hour and a half and leaves me with a certain good feeling and a blank desk. But there are at least two hours left until lunch break. Perfect time for the reading of some papers about my next task. I printed them the day before since after all paper is friendlier to read and easier to highlight. You see, I’m cheating again: It’s not like I’m not using computers at all, It’s just that I planned carefully to avoid computers today, having prepared for that before.

All the time I’m happy the phone doesn’t ring, because it is - you may guess already - some high-integrated Voice-over-IP-based digital telephone system bling bling. I am certain my phone possesses more computing power than the machines which controlled the first space flight. Only for comparison: The first working prototype of a telephone was constructed in 1861, and one of the first ever transferred sentences was “Das Pferd frißt keinen Gurkensalat” (The horse doesn’t eat any cucumber salad). Which has about the same amount of meaning as what usually comes out of my phone receiver.

Since it is Lent now, our roman-catholic friends are doing without meat for 40 days. I am protestant and vegetarian anyway, so this does not really mean much to me. Anyway, some of them asked me if I would also forswear something for that time. I usually answered that I’m trying to pass the days without golfing. This is not a great relinquishment since I’m not golfing anyway, but it usually leaves them sufficiently impressed.

But all that made me think of one thing: Would it be possible to spend at least one day without computers, integrated circuits, digital devices and all that? Let’s think it through. I use the following rule: I may not use any semiconductor-operated device at all. Other electric devices will do ok, although I will try to avoid them. Also I will let others use digital devices for me. You may call that cheating, but I can only control myself, not others as well, and I cannot entirely shut down public life.

First, I would have to replace my radio controlled alarm clock by some good old mechanical device. And there’s the first drawback: I can impossibly sleep with a ticking clock around. Of course, I might wrap it in lots of fabric, but then its ringing will also be muffled. Not good. Also I would have to rewind it from time to time, but that’s a minor problem - at least if it doesn’t stop in the middle of the night, which according to Murphy’s Law it will do the nights before important meetings and stuff. But my digital clock once let me down also, because I failed to program not only the time but also the weekday. (Let’s call that a draw.)

Luckily my bathroom works on a somewhat hydraulic base, I even switched back to shaving foam some years ago since the electric razor broke and left me half-bearded one morning. But on the breakfast table I am unsure again about whether toasters and coffee machines are usually IC-controlled or not. On closer examination, the toaster has a simple bi-metal control, so I can use it safely. About the coffee machine, I still don’t know, so I decide to postpone the coffee to when I am at work. (The machine there is certainly not under digital control, and even if it would be: it’s usually my roommate who’s handling it because in earlier times I never got the amount of coffee powder right. But that’s another story.) Looking around in the kitchen, I notice that nearly all devices have at least an LCD display which means there are semiconductors at work. Well, except for the fridge which is that old it’s even strange it works on electricity and not on steam power. By its energy consumption and noise radiation, it wasn’t invented long after that. Usually this annoys me but this morning I even feel something like gratitude. Good old fridge.

Note to self: Replace it.

John Crowcroft (a leading authority on communication systems, and a former lecturer of mine in Cambridge) has written a short informal paper on new directions in mobile communications. It is sub-titled “How to Learn to Stop Hating the Cellular Telephone Industry”, and more informally sub-titled “Rant about the cellphone industry’s failure of imagination”.

The paper draws analogies between the history of the internet (which has been absolutely astonishing over the last 30 years) and what the mobile phone industry could have done in the same time, had it taken the same sort of approach to innovation. Instead, the mobile telephone operators chose to lock down their systems, tightly control everything which goes in and out of them, and as a result have hardly experienced any innovation at all.

The key problem appears to be the fact that the telecoms companies have made a LOT of money from massively restricted services in the past, and they are continuing to do so today. If they open their systems and make it easy for third parties to provide services on top of them, they are probably going to lose some of that revenue in the short term. What they don’t realise (or do realise, but don’t want to face, for business or organisational reasons) is that they could make MUCH MORE money in the longer term by having an open system and providing great innovative services on top which people will happily pay for! The internet has proved that there are thousands of business models which are not only viable but actually extremely lucrative. You just need to be bold enough to take the risk of opening your systems to the competition.

Fortunately, there is a bit of movement — European mobile networks have at least made a few attempts at being reasonably open, and the US is gradually catching up too. But still it’s two steps forward and one back. Plenty of new devices (notably the iPhone) are still locked to one operator and don’t allow third-party software to be installed (unless you jailbreak it, of course). Eventually, we will probably get the same sort of innovation on mobile as we are getting on the internet, but it’s not going to be that quick.

Check Jon’s paper for a few business ideas, and then form a start-up. The more people try to make it happen, the more pressure there will be on the operators to open up, on the handset manufacturers to become compatible, etc.

Mobile internet usage is one of those areas which is hyped a lot, but it’s actually pretty hard to lay your hands on some real figures detailing the number of users. In this week’s NMA, there’s an article by Tim Barber of Continental Research which gives a few useful figures to quote.

If you add up the figures, you see that there are currently a total of 7.4 million mobile internet users in the UK, which corresponds to 12% of all mobile phone users. I think that’s a pretty impressive figure already — it shows that mobile internet use isn’t just a toy for a small number of geeks, but it’s actually fast en route to mainstream adoption. (I don’t have an up-to-date growth figure, but I do know that from 2006–2007 the number of page views from mobile devices went up by 16%, according to the Mobile Data Association.)

Speaking of geeks, the data from Continental Research breaks the population into four rough categories: whether or not they are interested in technology, and whether or not they are interested in style. Considering just the former criterion:

• Those interested in technology (the ‘geeks’) constitute 25% of mobile users, and of these people, 28% use the mobile internet. In this group, we therefore have 4.4 million mobile internet users.
• Those not interested in technology constitute 75% of mobile users, and of these people, 6% use the mobile internet. In this group, we therefore have 3 million mobile internet users.

Spot something? A techie is 4 or 5 times more likely to use the internet on a mobile phone than a non-techie. However, the reality is that there are also 3 times as many non-techies as there are techies. This means they almost cancel out — right now, there are already plenty of people using mobile internet services even though they don’t care about gadgets and technology toys.

This is pretty good news: it shows that the general population has a genuine need which mobile internet access can address. It’s not just a toy, and we don’t simply use it just because we can. It’s actually something which can make our lives better.

Viewed in terms of Gartner’s Hype Cycle, right now, the mobile web and mobile internet are stepping out of the Trough of Disillusionment (into which they fell with the failure of WAP to match expectations) onto the Slope of Enlightenment.

I think this calls for a graph.

We received a phone book. It appeared on our doorstep. It was heavy and printed on paper and wrapped in plastic.

I looked at it like someone from a different planet. I hadn’t touched a phone book in years! Why on earth would somebody still want one?

My friends all have mobile phones, not landlines; and I have their numbers stored in my phone anyway, so I don’t need to look them up. For business contacts I have their business cards, which I store in a contact management database, which is also easily searchable. And if for some reason I don’t have somebody’s number, I would look it up in an online phone book which contains all people in the whole of the UK, not just Cambridge.

When I have children, they will probably fail to grasp why anybody could have possibly wanted a big heavy book with their neighbours’ phone numbers. And I will feel like someone from the middle ages because I still remember using them (back in the day when it took 2 minutes to connect to the internet by modem, so it was actually faster to use the paper phonebook). And hey, I’m 24 — how are my parents’ generation going to feel?

But then, take a step back. Why are they still distributing paper phone books for free? Because there are still many, many people who do not have internet access. Many millions in the UK — and outside the industrialised world it’s the vast majority of people. That online oxygen which I take so completely for granted, it’s not actually as omnipresent as I would like to think.

The internet has completely changed the world, I can hardly repeat it often enough — it is the same kind of massive shake-up as the industrial revolution or the invention of the printing press. But we who are involved in making that technology must not forget about those people who lack internet access. There is a divide between those who are part of the communication and democratisation which the internet is bringing, and those who are “digitally excluded”. We must not forget them, and we must do our best to get everybody online, anywhere on the planet, by making technology accessible, usable, and affordable.

Someone put a lot of money, time and effort into printing that phone book. Although it probably didn’t require a tree to be felled, it has still consumed a lot of recycled paper. I would have felt bad to put it in the recycling immediately, even though I know that we are never going to use it. So I stripped off the plastic wrapper and placed the book carefully in the drawer under the living room table. Last year’s phone book was there too, just as unused. At least now, the two phone books can keep each other company.

A while ago I wrote some posts about the user interfaces of ticket machines in Germany (article 1, article 2). Meanwhile I am told that they have been improved considerably: the ‘Fast purchase’ route is now considerably faster, requiring a minimum of only 4 or 5 clicks to buy a standard ticket (compare that to 16 clicks previously!). The way they have done that is to skip the whole timetable thing; instead you only select whether or not you want to take the fast trains (which has an effect on the price). That’s a very good start, since it optimises the common case: people who routinely buy the same ticket and know exactly what they need. And for those with unusual requirements, there’s still the long route with its multitude of different options to choose from.

Despite these changes, plenty of usability challenges remain. For example, my friend told me that he didn’t realise when using the machine when he had reached the payment screen: he could have just inserted his card, but instead found himself looking around for the “next” button to press. There was just some small and non-obvious bit of text on screen explaining that you were now ready to pay.

In fact the usability problems of German train ticket machines are still so pronounced that the national rail company (DB) is now offering courses to teach people how to use them. (See the scanned newspaper article, taken from Aalener Nachrichten/Schwäbische Zeitung, Tuesday 18th December 2007. Sorry that it’s more than a month old, I’ve not had much time to blog recently.)

This article is somehow slightly scary and hilarious at the same time, in the way how the train staff systematically blame the users for their inability to use the system, rather than seeking the blame with the system itself. Hilarious because it’s so stereotypical, and scary because such a big organisation can get away with it without people putting up a fuss and explaining that this is just not acceptable.

Some highlights from the article:

Moschner [the course instructor] says that the new ticket machines have a more visible display and also accept cash besides credit and debit cards. “Are they just as cumbersome as the old ones?” an over-70-year-old lady enquires. The course instructor remains calm: “They are not cumbersome.”

Hmm. Complete denial of the existence of problems. Two more quotes indicate that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of user behaviour going on:

“Read what it says there. It is important.”

“The ticket machine really does tell you what it wants, you just have to look.”

Why should I be trying to find out what the ticket machine wants? It should be trying to find out what I want! Also, I shouldn’t have to read every word on the screen. That’s simply not what people do. People don’t even read whether doors are labelled ‘PUSH’ or ‘PULL’ before trying one or the other. People just press random buttons in the hope of getting somewhere quickly, and the system should be designed to cope with this sort of behaviour. Anything else is just unrealistic and designed for robots rather than humans.

Fortunately this course is a positive initiative, probably with a thought along the lines of “well, if we can’t get the design right, at least we can teach people how to use the broken design”. I guess that’s a valid approach to the problem. And hey, 8 people turned up to that course, maybe that’s 8 fewer people who get frustrated with the machines. Sounds a bit like a drop in an ocean to me though.

Netlife Research, a usability consultancy from Norway, has come up with a neat humorous way of pointing out some design elements which can help improve usability (or rather, design errors which can render a product pointless for most of its potential users). They have put these handy hints together in the form of a calendar — the Bad Usability Calendar. You can download it and print out a copy for yourself. Such as I have done, see the photo (which includes a gratuitous reference to potted plants). Thanks to Johannes for pointing it out to me.

Amusing though the exercise is, it proves once again how hard it can be to practise what you preach. The Bad Usability Calendar website, although apparently designed by usability experts, doesn’t actually work. I was going to enter their prize draw for an Amazon voucher, for which a required step is to provide your address. This address appears to be used to look up your longitude and latitude, so that they can plot a little pin on a map. I tried four or five variations of my UK address, but unfortunately none of them was accepted by the site. It failed with a badly written error message which gave me no clear indication as to how I would have to construct the address so that it would be accepted. Well, I would have even been perfectly happy to find Cambridge on the map myself and stick a virtual pin into it, but no, that wasn’t a foreseen option. Moreover, the option for uploading a photo didn’t appear to work either — and there wasn’t any error message at all, just no picture. So unfortunately I was excluded from the prize draw.

At least I’m glad to see that nobody else from the UK has managed to place a pin yet. You know, bad usability always makes you feel stupid (even if it’s clearly somebody else’s fault, not your own), so it’s a bit of a consolation that nobody else has figured out how to make the site accept a UK address. Now I am wondering whether something like that could be incorporated into other products. Some means by which users can see that they are not the only ones who are grappling with a dysfunctional product, maybe by social network or something like that. Not that it makes the product any better; it just makes its users feel slightly better.

Edit (29 January 2008): Meanwhile the issue has been sorted out and we have been placed on the map manually. The address search also seems to be working now, and we’ve even been joined by another UK pin in London. Netlife handled the matter very quickly and nicely — thanks!