Wednesday 12 September 2012

YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 211 07/02/2012

My partner, along with thousands of others, received an iPad for Christmas this year. She's fairly computerphobic (though copes with her Windows XP netbook) and so she's pretty pleased with the device, and I'd have to say that I am too. The minimal user interface works very well, and the clean graphics put current Android-based competitors to shame. I'd like a hardware Back button like Android's, and a USB port would be nice too, but as a portable email client and e-book reader it's hard to beat.

What I've learnt from my iPad experience so far is the significance of its large form factor. I've used plenty of touch screens before - Palm Pilots right from the 1996 launch and an Android phone for more than year - and I've even written simple apps for both, but I've never until now used an A4-sized touch-only device for any length of time. It's a game changer. Size really does matter. The reason is simple physiology: a mobile phone's screen is small enough to fall wholly within your visual attention zone, but an A4-sized screen is more like a magazine or newspaper page where attention can only take in one section at a time. That makes design into a battle to direct attention. Now there's quite a lot known about this class of problem, and if you're planning to write apps for full-sized tablet computers you'd do well to acquaint yourself with this knowledge.

Obviously cognitive scientists have been studying the subject for years, driven by the needs of the aviation and automobile industries to accomodate more and more instruments into cockpit displays. They need to strike the right balance between grabbing immediate attention for high-priority alerts while retaining appropriate visibility for stuff you need to monitor continually. Equally obviously there's a huge reservoir of expertise in the graphic design profession, especially in the magazine and news trade. We get a head start in iPad app design thanks to our in-house art people, but all the tools of the trade from "White Out Box" to "News in Brief" will need tweaking to become suitable for the tablet screen.

You can stumble across further lessons in attention-seeking in the oddest of places. Last week's Guardian Food Blog featured an article entitled "The hidden messages in menus: Some restaurant menus can tell the diner as much about themselves as what's for dinner". The gist was that researchers at San Francisco State University recently overturned conventional wisdom about restaurant menu design, which was that diners start to read at the middle of the right-hand column, then jump to top left and read downwards. This belief has governed where restaurants position their special offers for years, and hence directly affects their turnover, but eye-movement sensors showed the SFSU team that it's not true - in fact diners read menus just like any book, down from top left and up again. This may cause a boom among US local print shops, to reprint billions of menus. The rest of the article describes how professional menu designers can manipulate diners emotionally, making certain options feel like bargains, while others provoke cheapskate guilt or flatter generosity.

I'm currently reading a fascinating book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by a great guru of cognitive psychology, Daniel Kahneman, Princeton professor and Nobel laureate, in which he summarises a lifetime of study into the role of intuition in psychology. He's identified two independent thought mechanisms within the human brain. What he calls System 1 is intuitive, jumps to conclusions, is fast, amoral and fairly inaccurate: it's what saves us from hidden tigers and falling rocks. The other, System 2, is slower, deliberative, moral and responsible for self-restraint and future planning: it's who we think we are, though in fact System 1 is in charge most of the time. I already knew this because of my ability (which I'm sure I share with many others) to instantly re-find my place in a long text after taking a break - it only works if I *completely* trust where my eyes first fall, and if try to remember or think about it at all, it's lost. System 1 is also what makes me, temporarily, improve at darts or pool between my third and fourth pints. Kahneman's book is a goldmine of information about cognitive capabilities, delusions, illusions and misconceptions that ought to be a great help in UI design, given that System 1 is almost always in charge of such interactions.   

A Windows PC is pretty much a System 2 device, its plethora of menus, tabs and control panels forcing you to think about what you're doing for much of the time. I don't mind that but it appears that millions of people do, hence the success of the iPad. In effect Apple's device is a portable laboratory for cognitive science experiments, controlled entirely by gesture and sub-concious perception. I expect the revolution in UI design that it provoked to develop in quite unexpected directions over the next few years, which should put a lot of the fun back into computing. Will I be buying my own iPad? Perhaps not, but I can now afford to wait till Android tab vendors get it right (which may take some while, to judge by present form). 


THE WALLS HAVE EARS

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 210 - 18/01/2012

I'm very far from being an online privacy nut. I don't pay for fancy password storage services, I often click buttons to give feedback or share things like playlists, and none of my time is spent ranting against Google and Facebook on online forums. However events over the last couple of weeks have possibly pushed me over some threshold of tolerance. But perhaps it's best if I tell the story from the beginning.

I went away for two weeks over the New Year, and made the stupid mistake of trying to be a responsible citizen by turning off all my electrical appliances before leaving. That included my BT broadband router, but when I returned last week I discovered that my internet service had not actually gone away entirely but was being throttled down to an unusable 200kbps, up and down. This has actually happened to me once before, last autumn after a far longer period of disuse, but that time it came back of its own accord overnight. This time it didn't and so on the second day I rang BT Broadband support to report a fault. I'm happy to report that both the Indian gentlemen who handled my problem were models of politeness and efficiency, displayed a full technical grasp of the problem, rang back when they promised and escalated the fault to its proper level. (Why BT permits it to happen in the first place is for a future column and isn't my topic here).

Once the engineers have reset your ADSL line it takes several days to re-train the local DSLAM before full speed is achieved again, and so I emailed our own RWC net guru Cassidy to gripe about things in general. He advised me to use the line heavily during the retraining process because "the more data it moves the more retrain info it has to go on". I thought for a while about the best way to achieve unattended line loading, and decided that Spotify, set to repeat the same playlist, is the easiest way for downloads while syncing a huge directory of photographs up to DropBox is a reasonable way to occupy the uplink overnight. That's when things started to get weird.

Next day I received an email from my sister in the far north of Scotland inquiring whether everything was all right. It read "Maggie Pountain commented on a playlist you listened to: AndrĂ¡s Schiff - Bach: Goldberg Variations. Maggie wrote: 'Haven't you turned this off or can't you sleep.'" She was clearly able to see what was playing on my Spotify account in real time, and worried because it hadn't changed for 12 hours or more. Next day I had more mails from various friends commenting on my listening habits, worried that I was becoming obsessed by Ravel and Debussy. Now much as I love Bach, Ravel and Debussy's piano music, I had of course chosen these particular playlists for their length rather than quality on this occasion, and was only actually listening in short bursts whenever I happened to be at the keyboard. The main point though was that, all of a sudden, everyone in the world seemed to know what I was listening to.

In my devil-may-care, I'm-not-a-privacy-nut mode I had indeed voluntarily agreed to link my Spotify and Facebook accounts so that friends could see and share my playlists (and vice versa), but that's not at all the same as everyone knowing what you're listening to right now in real time, which is decidedly creepy. Then I realised some of the friends who'd mailed weren't even on Facebook. I logged into my Spotify preferences, which I hadn't touched for several years, and discovered two tick boxes called "Share my activity on Spotify Social" and "Show what I listen to on Facebook" which I don't recall seeing before and which were both ticked. I unticked them both. A rootle around among the preferences also explained that "Private Session" option which had started to appear on the pull-down menu for my account: if you don't want everyone to see what you're listening to you can choose to make this session private, but the default is public and your private session will terminate each time you restart the Spotify client. This is pretty much the sort of behaviour that makes real privacy nuts rant against Facebook, and even if Spotify did catch the disease from Facebook that's really not any sort of an excuse.

I can't really say why people listening-in to what I'm playing right now is more disturbing to me than any of the similar stunts Facebook pulls, it just is. It's not as though I spend a lot of time furtively listening to Hitler's speeches, Lloyd-Webber musicals or porno-music (is there such a thing?), but music is important to me and my current choice feels far more intimate than, say, my political opinions, which I'm happy to share with anyone who'll stand still for long enough. A nagging feeling persists that this episode has tipped me over some threshold, into becoming an antisocial networker: I find myself ever more irritated with Facebook and have been poised on the verge of closing my account several times recently. Spotify though I can't do without.

SOCIAL UNEASE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 350/ 07 Sep 2023 10:58 Ten years ago this column might have listed a handful of online apps that assist my everyday...