You know the line about men and women thinking about sex n times per day? My digital life is more on my mind than sex.
I left my phone in the car. My folks and I arrived in Fairhaven, a neighborhood of Bellingham, Washington, to shop for children’s toys and browse the Village Books store. iPhone in coat, coat locked in car, I went iPhoneless for two hours.
A half-block from the car I had my first phantom limb experiences. I saw an abandoned London red phone booth and reached for my phone to take picture. I settled for a camera but I wouldn’t be able to twitpic that photo or share it with my telephony buddies.
Over the next 120 minutes I wanted to:
price compare books via Red Laser,
endorse an oil and vinegar tasting boutique on Yelp!,
check on expansion packs for Cataan (found something complex to level the playing field),
photograph some beautiful chutney at lunch,
look up Washington State’s counselor licensing (saw an office building full of therapists),
log how far off-diet my meal sent me,
check in from Village Books,
look up that indie-book-seller coalition they belong to,
read about their anti-Kindle campaign,
download the Fire & Ice four-pack to my Kindle app,
snapshot the cover of the last Gaiman book for friends in a science fiction Skype chat,
ask Quora a question about the DIY book industry,
remind myself to pack warmer next time,
read more about Washington State investigations into Whatcom County budget magic,
bookmark a book on business modeling for a friend,
check the hourly weather for that evening, and
peek at my sister’s family Amazon holiday wishlists.
That’s at least 18 reflexive reaches for my iPhone. 9 an hour, every 6 or 7 minutes. According to one recent study, this is more often than we think about sex. And this was just a casual family holiday stroll through a suburban shopping district.
Many of us are getting used to augmenting thought; in our ongoing internal dialog, conversations with others, shopping and working. Life is better with apps and live data. Heck, we think more complete thoughts, plan our future better, and interact with others in more informed ways with our digital life. Each time we reach, we’re getting mind candy, positive reinforcement. Our operant conditioning is strong.
So disconnecting causes withdrawal symptoms. How long offline does it take you to stop reaching for your laptop, tablet or mobile? For the conditioning to break down? Could observing a digital sabbath give us more freedom and control over our reflexes, more power to alter and adjust our behavior? Or should we not bother? Should we accept this new twitch response as an improvement?
This mind enhancement comes with strings and risks.
Does this new conditioning tie us to one company more than others, like mobile operating system publishers?
How can our new behavior shift power among corporations, governments, and individuals?
When you reach for your brain-augmentation-device, are you missing things because of that reach, causing new problems? Can the impulse to reach cause distracted driving, even without the gadget at hand?
At what point does personal dependence become a public necessity, like water, air, safety, and roads?
Can this behavior be exploited like sex? Sexy advertising bypasses our executive cognition and taps something more primal. Are printed www links and QR codes a first stab at triggering our digital reflex?
So here’s the test: Without hyperlinks in this post, how many times did you think to click on something? More times than you thought of sex? Aha!
UPDATE: Screenshots including one of my friends and text mentioning him have been altered to hide his identity.
Apple added Skype for iPad 1.0.1273 to the iPad’s App store last night. Skype soon tweeted they were not quite ready for the launch, tidying up web sites and such, but they are ready now. Here’s the YouTube announcement video. You can also pick up your copy using your iPad’s App Store app. This is Skype’s second iOS app, if you don’t include those from Qik. Mobile operators should love this; anything that drives up data plan charges replaces lost income from landlines and mobile voice minutes.
Let’s walk through the features, a long call, and talk about Skype’s editing of the design.
Product management has a natural tension between features and elegance, the richness of more and the simplicity of less. This is true for APIS as much as for user interfaces. Telecom technology is complex, a high learning curve for outsiders. In the last year I’ve seen Voxeo, TokBox, Skype and now Twilio expand their reach to web developers by simplifying the programming experience, hiding the details of making connections and streaming media.
With minor code variations you can build call center, conference call, intercom, softphone, audio recording apps, and text-to-speech apps in the browser. Promoting the launch, “five developers who write the most awesome Twilio Client apps in the next 2 weeks will win new Macbook Airs, tickets to the Twilio Conference, and Twilio Swag.” I’m loving the t-shirt. For those who use the Client, Twilio is cutting the cost of audio to a quarter penny per minute.
There are similar examples. A tiny Skype client powers Facebook’s first video calling app. Its API was also dramatically simplified, removing even usernames. TokBox embeds video calls and conferences with a few lines of javascript. Voxeo launched Phono last year, also a few lines of javascript to invoke their telecom APIs.
The gold standard for realtime communication: can you reduce your cloud service to a few lines in a language four million web programmers use every day? Can you simplify the object model, prune your parameters, and limit option so what is left is pure, elegant, beautiful and useful?
Photos of Skype’s Stockholm office in an old brewery by the architect. High Ikea, modest budget, open plan, balcony, brand-color accents, subtle we’re-in-the-audio-video-business iconography. 29,000 square feet (2700 square meters). Modern interior contrasted against classic exterior. Does the eye candy help people reach higher levels of personal productivity, social cohesion, and collective effectiveness? Does the layout support agile processes, virtual teaming, and wirearchic leadership? Will Skype’s codecs taste like hops or malt?via GigaOm, via Daily Icon.
Are you tired of Twilight romance? Of True Blood intrigue (the new season starts this weekend)? Then pick up The Strain. Hogan and Del Toro’s vampire trilogy is a dark, fast, medical thriller; an epidemiological Robin Cook meets Nosferatu’s creepy dread.
We meet The Strain’s vampires at New York’s JFK airport, a superbly evolved viral infection, spreading wildly through populations despite the best efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who are better prepared for a zombie apocalypse. When you are turned, you mindlessly return to your family to spread the vampire contagion. As you mature from a mindless, bloodthirsty revenant, you develop wit, self-control, focus and social organization. Society can’t take you down by killing some master vampire; every bit of your vampiric biological matter flourishes independently, finding niche after niche. Humans, dogs, vermin. The spread of this organism is so fast, wide, and effective, this could be an extinction event for the human species.
This is such a Skype story.
Consulting clients often ask me how Skype grew so well. I say virality was built into the product’s DNA from the start. You need two people to talk. So once you get the Skype bug, you drag your first circle into Skype, likely your family. Then you infect coworkers and friends. Finally entire institutions are in Skype’s thrall.
I was infected in 2003, shortly after Skype launched. I told my friends. I blogged about it. I invited colleagues. I bought webcams and installed Skype for my transcontinental family. Skype had a symbiotic relationship with me. I spread Skype and was rewarded with better calls, lower costs, more convenience, and more independence from phone companies.
Most social software manifests as an outbreak, burnt out quickly. Skype managed to become an epidemic, then a pandemic. Epidemic simulations model an infection’s success on multiple factors. Speed of transmission, the time until a new host becomes infectious, mortality or resistance rates, susceptibility distribution, isolation vs. connection of sub-populations, and reinfection rates.
The same analyses apply to Skype. Time until first call, loyalty rates, sharing rates, usage rates, peak social graph, time to first purchase, social graph diversity (a few strong vs. many weak ties), rates of use on more than one device, percent of time with active Skype dialtone.
Skype’s virality let it spread like a plague. Skype’s p2p tech meant it wouldn’t run out of food (cash) while it spread. Skype is still spreading after having touched nearly half of all Internet users.
The Strain is a compelling page turner. Can’t wait to read the second installment coming out in paper soon.
Mobile operator Three partnered with design studio B-Reel to bring the high-touch experience of in-store selling to the efficiency of centralized service. Three Sweden calls the service 3LiveShop, a blend of call center software, CRM, video calling, multitouch user interfaces, heads-up display, and in-store retail culture. It looks gorgeous.
Conversion rates in retail stores are very high, and are painfully lower in online stores. The Fireclick Index reports 74% of online shoppers abandon carts with products before checkout; only 2.3% of shoppers buy. This adds up when the lifetime value of a customer is high and switching costs are low.
Three things inspire me.
That a large phone company executive gave real budget to such a crazy idea and let it come to market. Was this a corporate culture hack or the product of a vibrant innovation system?
That the design process focused on both users: the sales rep and the customer. Too often design favors one or ignores the other.
That the results found human eye contact and rapport were as crucial to success as navigating all the information overload. Video is the real value add, building trust and keeping attention. Touch means operators can respond quickly, within the timeframe of a live conversation.
Here’s hoping a future phase gives some of the touch-screen magic to the customer, for some deep co-creation and collaboration. And that the Swedes get the go ahead to roll this out to the rest Three.
P.S. They built the user experiences in Adobe Flash. Why not Skype? Skype is already a partner with Three.
First, Skype requires each party to a call to use Skype-provided identities. That just doesn’t work for walk-in-off-the-street relationships. Selling starts off anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) for both the customer and sales assistant until you are ready to pay.
Second, today’s Skype doesn’t offer a way to build a video call into a browser-centered retail experience. Even if the developers chose to build the CRM station with SkypeKit, the customer would still have to download a full Skype client or a customized SkypeKit app. That’s serious friction, an unwanted step.
Third, early versions of SkypeKit’s private beta license requires you to share business secrets with Skype about your use of SkypeKit, and give Skype veto power over release of your “Plugged-into-Skype” product or service. That’s a lot of outside control to cede when you can easily, cheaply choose other tools.
“The new interface is faster than before, and lets you see more content in the same amount of screen space.” I haven’t seen it in my client but maybe it’ll show up later. What do you think of this Skype art?
Update: I had to restart Skype to see it. First I was asked to reauthorize the Skype app.
I logged in to Facebook and was asked to for permission.
I allowed Skype to do the usual, but with more of my Facebook personal data and social graph.
I get a glimpse of the new tab, just for a second…
Flipboard shows user experience innovation brings joy and utility to content.Frédéric Filloux explains the strategic import of Flipboard’s disintermediation of publishers and other aggregators. But their power starts with a simple before and after:
Google Reader on the left becomes Flipboard(Google Reader) on the right. It uses visual mass to show the relative weights of stories. It uses white space, typography, and page layout to offer simple choices. Flipboarders fluidly swing between stories and the stream. We can dive deep; we easily shift from “lean back” news snacks to “lean forward” news curation and sharing.
Skypelandia is holding our collective breath, waiting for hundreds of UI experiments based on SkypeKit. Some of us whine over Skype for Mac, but that’s just a symptom. We’re desperate.
We’ve seen Skype wrestle one IM app (with voice and video bolted on) onto many devices (mobile, desktop, television), modes (text, audio, video), and platforms (Mac, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android). Now we need something qualitatively different.
Hundreds of millions of Skype users need a reinvigorated experience. An experience that brings to the fore the tasks we perform, the relationships we cultivate, our contexts and plans for conversation, and conversations themselves. An experience that adjusts as we shift from “lean back” social surveillance to “lean forward” discourse, group forming, decision making, and leadership. Skype can free itself to innovate its core concepts, and set user interfaces free to follow new functions.
So much has been learned from mobility, multitouch surfaces, artificial reality (and virtual worlds, AR’s inverse), and the social sciences. Now, while Skype’s blood is hot, now is the time to experiment. Now is a time to imagine a new soul for Skype. New paths to give users mastery and accomplishment. New reasons for Skype to be loved for the joys brought to daily life.
Skype’s 8th birthday is this summer. Eight years is forever in web years. You make Skype’s plumbing work seamlessly at scale. Upon that foundation, pursue art. Give our global chorus, our humanity, full flight.
Engadget published this slide from a MIX11 presentation by Microsoft. And then Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore confirms: Skype coming to Windows Phone 7 ‘this fall.’ Skype hasn’t said anything in public since they backed away from the first Windows Phone 7 release. New technology coming from Microsoft could change that. “Application multitasking for background processing, audio and file transfer, and fast application switching” makes or breaks the Skype mobile experience.
Microsoft: “The free Windows Phone Developer Tools for the new Windows Phone OS will be available to developers in May. … Today, Microsoft also provided an early glimpse of app concepts for the next version of Windows Phone OS with new experiences from Skype, Spotify, Layar, Qantas, Amazon Shopping and Kik Messenger.”
UPDATE 0730 Pacific: A Skype spokesperson wrote “Skype is committed to supporting mobile platforms globally, and we welcome the opportunity to work with any platform developer. At the MIX11 conference, Microsoft shared a visual that represents an early design of what the Skype app for Windows Phone could look like. We look forward to having an opportunity to work with Microsoft to help optimize the Skype for mobile experience as Microsoft develops its new platform.” Microsoft said these pictures were from “an early motion study that we’ve been working with Skype on that shows what Skype could look like on Windows Phone.” This sounds like corporate flirting to me.
An information architecture thought: isn’t there something (anything!) more important to show a Skype user on the home screen? Presence updates of my closest friends? List of recent conversations? Missed calls or conversations? New voicemails to play? The mood and avatar I’m showing to my Skype peeps? Shouldn’t the app home page be less menu and more relationship infographic, communication dashboard or collaboration steering wheel? Is the home page for navigation? Or action?
It looks wasteful to me. I want my home page brimming with freshness. Provoke insight and action. Bring the app’s context to the fore.
Tell me the next thing I must do.
the person to IM or call back.
the conversation to continue.
invites that matter.
scheduled calls coming soon.
contacts with changed presence/profiles/relationships.
moderator responsibilities.
chats i should join.
account issues.
imho, I think that’s what gripingMacUsers kvetch about most. Skype 5 can make the next step, choosing the most important trigger, more opaque. It makes us think, a barrier to decisive (rewarding) action.
There are a bunch of social news discovery services out there that use my current reading history to determine a "news/interest graph" implicitly in real time.
This is the next frontier in social networking for a bunch of reasons. First, curating social graphs is a pain. It takes work. And simply importing your Facebook or Twitter graph is suboptimal for most social services. You then need to add and delete to get the right graph for the right app. And second graphs change over time. Who has time to constantly manage their social graphs. So they get stale and one day you say "why I am following this person?" or "why is this person a friend on Facebook?" And maybe most importantly, sometimes you only want a social graph for a weekend, a day, an hour, or a minute. The only way to make that work is to construct it implicitly.
Fred says you just don’t know in advance which people will be important in every context. Since you can’t plan and map the relevant contacts a priori, your tools should search and find whom they can, using the best available data.
That’s why he calls it the implicit social graph. These are search results, not a hand-carved selection. Their relevance emerges from a temporary context. And aren’t most contexts temporary?
So tools enhancing contextual experiences – on a web site, in an airplane, in a scrum, in the classroom – will start to offer clues to help you find the right people, at the right time, for the right activity.
Being near, in space and time, is useful only when combined with context. Sharing this elevator doesn’t mean we’re both on our way to date the same person, holding our flowers, and then – OMG, you’re getting out on the same floor and OMG you’re turning RIGHT and OMG!!!! </romcom> Nearly all of the time, strangers in an elevator share neither common friends nor common purpose.
People manually publish contextual clues by checking into Meetups, rating restaurants, liking videos. And Fred is right: manual checkins just barely cut it. The tipping points occur when robots take over humans, the way Google’s spiders and PageRank engines took retired Yahoo!’s curation cadres. Instant matters. Frictionless efficiency matters. Pinpoint relevance matters.
Do you want new human behavior? Lower the cognitive burden. Get the additional effort near or below zero. So you’re going to build killer social graph algorithms. Yesterday I shared some thoughts on attributes of a relationship you might infer from calling patterns. These included:
Frequency (n calls per month or per year),
Regularity (frequency varies little over time),
Duration (minutes per month),
Spice (some intense or long conversations every so often since each call plays a different role in the relationship),
Endurance (how long have you known each other).
These are time based, context-free measures. How much better will you discover, employ, cultivate, and discard your social graphs when they are informed by other dimensions?
I listed
Social Proximity (knowing the same people),
Physical proximity (being in or having been in the same places), and
Co-Affiliation (belonging to the same groups of people or organizations)
as examples. Let’s build on that list.
Stated intentions, like people pursuing the same (degrees of similarity?) educational objective, career objective, parenting objective, shopping list, or travel destination.
Interests and tastes in common, such as Smurfs, Shakespeare, or clog dancing.
Complementary or shared capabilities, such as the ability to sing opera (perhaps in duets) or to make mobile shopping experiences (a designer and a coder).
Financial behavior, like how often/much we pay each other (“thanks for fixing my taillight”), or that we both pay a third-party (“you use Acme Car Repair too?”).
Color is like a chewing gum that changes flavor as you chew. It starts its value through physical proximity, then shifts to visual interests (it’s a photography app), and then to social graph exploration (the photos found interesting by a person who makes photos you find interesting).
We can build connections of these types programmatically, automatically, in real time, as we need them. We’ll swim in the relevance of the contexts. And that compounding and multiplying of contexts heightens the value of being more public with our data.
Especially when services derive it from my behavior.
[We can discuss how we achieve power over data another time, but note that this post about the contexts of technology and social behavior shifted unexpectedly to dimensions of social graph measurement and now suggests a further context of public policy. Follow the bouncing context.]
I won’t suggest I have answers. That’s why I’m going to STL’s Personal Data2.0 workshop on Thursday to work on trust frameworks, a conference call on the future evolution of laws related to personal data this Friday through the Identity Commons, discussions of NSTIC (NIST’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace) next week, and the twelfth Internet identity Workshop next month.
Ping me at +1-510-316-9773 or skype me if you’d like to learn more or bring your work into this conversation.
Jason Asbahr is CEO of iOS game publisher Monstrous Company. Design defects in Skype’s persistent chat drove his whole firm to switch back from Skype for Mac 5 to the older 2.8. Still has love for Skype’s group video chat and hotspot payment services.
Millions of people use Skype to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files. 80/20 worked with Skype to transform the user experience of its products, starting with the popular Mac client.
OVERVIEW
Skype’s Mac application was beginning to show its age as it packed in an ever-growing number of features. As a result, users were having a difficult time understanding and using the full breadth of its capabilities. Additionally, Skype saw the need to consolidate its product development efforts and drive user experience consistency across platforms. 80/20 worked with Skype on a ground-up redesign of its Mac client, which would set the stage for unification across its product lineup.
So the brief was to fix feature bloat, leaving room for future bloat. Oh, and to save on programming time by having one body of code/design.
SOLUTION
User testing and audits of the Mac client highlighted issues with window management, contact management and revealed that features didn’t have enough real estate to be articulated effectively. The new single-window design improves work flows between calling and messaging while supporting the common behavior of using the “call log” to initiate communication.
The cramped design didn’t offer enough screen space for all those features.
RESULT
The next-generation user experience for Skype Mac increases use of core features while providing a clean slate for growth. The success of the redesign is seen not only in the Mac client itself but in the design’s ability scale to touch-screen devices and beyond.
So:
More pixels per feature.
No features subtracted.
One-window to hold everything.
And a happy client.
Design is hard.
Harder still when you strive to run on every operating system, in every device, with all your features. You want to be true to the nuances that make a Mac app feel like it is native to the Mac. To Android like it was born there.
Yet those many flavors slow Skype’s time-to-market.
How do you hold fast to your core Skypiness, to what made people love you, and support new features for new markets, new use cases, new business models? Your backlogs overflow. The pressure is intense. Heck, I add to my Skype wishlist daily so I can only imagine what your iceboxes look like.
The tension between simple and power is killing you.
I know this. You know this. Everyone at Skype knows this.
The shrieks from Apple users? That’s the anguish of the stricken, losing their love for the Mac-like spare brilliance of their beloved 2.8 client. They forget they’ve been calling for feature and release parity with Windows users for years. Skype gave in to feature creep and bought in to a universal design for desktops, perhaps for tablets and mobiles too.
So here we are.
Seething.
Hoping.
Please see this moment as opportunity.
Take bold risks. Forget our gripes and take us someplace new in a way we hadn’t imagined that makes our hearts swell with pride.
Believe today’s minimalism pays later. You want a diverse developer ecosystem, yes? All those use cases cluttering your inbox? Leave those to third-parties. Let them build upon your ruthless simplicity.
Reconsider fundamental assumptions of what it means to Skype, to be Skype, to belong to Skype, to play Skype, to have Skype. The last seven years are merely prelude.
Join the Skype 6.X Text Chat Room