My phone is faster than my car...

I have been meaning to write about this for a while, and as ever, didn’t want to simply moan about what was wrong, but to suggest what could be done about it. What prompted me to pen this has been the Detroit Auto Show and CES, and the myriad of press releases and blogs about the convergence of cons tech and in car controls.

Perhaps the one that tipped me over the edge was a short blog by the esteemed Helen Walters, see her blog here. She, and many others, make the point that this convergence is going to throw up some real challenges.

I bought a Ford just over a year ago. I bought it because I wanted a car that would have the 'entertainment' that would make my regular 3 hr commute more bearable (1.5 hrs each way). – I didn’t need performance as most of my driving is essentially a fast moving queue. I chose Ford as it offered all the automation & connectivity I needed – (supposedly).

The truth is far from that. Sure, it has multiple colour screens, and a LOT of buttons (16 on the steering wheel alone, with a further 45 on the radio / air con console). This is where I should have walked away – those numbers alone shout “unresolved”, but no. Like a Blackbird I saw shiny things, and dove straight in.

Some simple examples of this unresolved interface are that I have cancelled cruise control when meaning to turn the volume down, and turned the volume up when I wanted to slow down cruise control… Neither good outcomes.

What really got my goat was the iPod connectivity – Bluetooth integration ranges from patchy to non-functioning. My address book, recent calls etc are rarely shown on screen, and I needed to buy a ‘Ford iPod connector’ to play music in my car. This is a triumph of stupidity, seen below.

Fords’ Flux Capacitor

It’s only when you actually plug it in do you realise how silly it is.

upside down reading skills required

The fact that I have to have my phone in my glovebox is annoying. I cant read texts or emails without having to first unplug it. Who thought that a wire that is too long to fit comfortably into the glovebox, but too short to actually extend to the seat is a good outcome ??

My solution is to use the iPad, as it seems to be a little more stable than my iPhone (classy, I know). The really bad thing is that once plugged in, I cannot control my music from the device. Instead I have to go through the Ford UI…..

Living the convergence dream

The Ford UI only lets me listen to the current playlist, so if I am listening to a particular podcast, I can only listen to that – no others, no music, no choice.

Why would a company believe that the best way to integrate with a device lauded for its UI is to disable such a function ? I am sure that someone at Ford can provide a reasonable, logical reason for this, but still…

For example, I can understand people citing the varying product development lifecycles –cars take about 5 years or so to move from concept to market launch. (Although next week marks 5 years since Apple first announced the iPhone). As others have pointed out, the increase in processing speed, screen resolution and functionality of smartphones has outpaced almost every other industry, so in car interaction is not alone in being behind the curve.

so what can we do about this ?
All comms / entertainment interaction in a car is a distinctly secondary consideration. The overriding objective is safety, which is interpreted as minimising distractions (generally keeping your eyes and mind on the road).

Clearly voice control is the best option, but what can we use until we crack voice control ?

The decision to develop auto touchscreen interfaces seems to have been driven by some kind of tech gravity (“everyone else is doing this, therefore it must be good for us..”). Yet even the most cursory use of any touchscreen device shows us that they require more visual attention than physical / hard buttons. Touchscreens aren’t really the natural platform for cars.

I remember a mobile phone project completed for Nokia Japan back in the 90’s where a key insight was that students were able to text in their pocket using a standard alpha-numeric keypad, you can’t do this on a touchscreen device (have a go, its worthwhile).

This is a big problem – mobiles aren’t really mobile anymore. We developed the Fuse concept with Synaptics and others in response to this challenge. The key insight was that people had to stop walking and had to concentrate on the screen to use the device. Which prompted the question why is touch so focused on screens ?

I think the car is perhaps the least developed element of my connected life, and it should be central – it is the common link between home and elsewhere.

In fact, convergence is the reason for both the causes and the resolution to this problem. Convergence has highlighted the lack of innovation within the auto industry, yet convergence has also shown how standards, and a more open form of innovation can drive innovation at an industry level.

Here’s the rub – the auto industry pioneered this stuff. It used standards (gear change, pedal positions) to drive market growth. It also created highly integrated value chains with key partner organisations – a kind of open innovation. So it’s not as if this is a foreign concept to them. I think what caught them out is the increasing speed of innovation. Our interconnectedness (in part driven by the auto industry !) means adoption of innovations happens at a hugely increased rate, and they haven’t sped up.

We’ve had companies from missile manufacturers to professional telecoms asking us to help them to launch products that can sit alongside the latest smartphone / tablet. These devices have become a key element of our personality, the question is when they will replace the car as the key artefact we use to embody the ego, and that has dramatic implications on pricing and branding the vehicles of the future.

Better user engagement enabled by the Internet of Things.

The following is the narrative from a speech made by Gus Desbarats, Chairman, Alloy at a recent Technology Strategy Board conference.

The intersection of ICT and the health care sector isn’t a very happy place these days. Talk of ‘huge national failure’ tends to dominate the media, and for many innovative technology companies the sector is impossibly complex and resistant to change.

The obvious need for progress in this area is an opportunity for the Creative Industries which is why CI KTN sponsored the event and my participation as Keynote speaker. 

The reality is that there is plenty of innovation in health care, it just tends to be focused on what clinical professionals, quite rightly, consider to be ‘job1’: keeping people alive longer. A good example is keyhole surgery which has transformed the vast majority of surgical procedures in over the last few decades. 

ICT in Healthcare has tended to sit in the ‘job2’ camp: administrative information, where paper based processes still bear a remarkable resemblance to those in use 50 years ago. There are many reasons for this, the ‘life saving’ clinical effectiveness of health infomatics is much harder to prove and past solutions, frankly, haven’t inspired the clinical leaders who drive the health care agenda.

ICT also represents change, and change isn’t always automatically a great thing, especially when it is driven by over simplistic ‘visions’. Communism and Council tower blocks are two of my favourite examples of what happens when the rich complexity of human nature is somewhat oversimplified in the interest of ‘leaders doing good’. To these ‘top down’ examples, we can now add ‘Lorenzo’ the national NHS system which, according to the head of the British Medical Association was developed ‘without consulting the doctors who were supposed to use it, to an accelerated development timescale set by that renowned IT specialist, Tony Blair. The technology industry has a bit of a track record here. This isn’t the first time new software has failed to deliver promised productivity gains when exposed to the weird, often overlooked, ‘failure mode’ of human behaviour. If there is no obviously apparent benefit ‘on the job’, is it any great surprise that the Health care sector often chooses to reject change? 

But the context in which healthcare operates is changing, to a degree that means ‘do nothing’ is no longer an option:

Ironically, thanks to advances in health care, more us are being kept alive longer by expensive healthcare while at the same time, we are producing fewer young to pay the taxes needed to fund this extra care burden. This chilling demographic effect is called the ‘dependency ratio’. Not too long ago there were 24 working age adults available to fund every old person, in the not too distant future there will only be two. 

The growing percentage that is old, is also from the 60’s ‘me’ generation that expects a much higher level of service, in all things, compared to the ‘make do’ wartime generations.

And of course, medical science isn’t standing still. New drugs and treatments are being rolled out constantly, and ‘Job 1’is still the priority. 

So in the best of times, health care spending would have to go up. But of course this isn’t the best of times, as a nation we are already in debt up to our eyeballs from the massive increase in government spending over the past decade.

Luckily, the drivers for change in HealthCare trends aren’t all bad. The over numerous and picky baby boom generation is also thankfully discovering that simply being kept alive by medical science isn’t much of an end of life to aspire to. What matters is the quality of that life. In short, more people are seeing the benefit of keeping fit and active and eating well. The availability of information, (things like heart rate monitoring on a run combined with GPS ‘no lies’ tracking of how long the run was) is key to motivating and guiding this quest for wellness. The Who famously announced they wanted to die before they get old, in fact, the boomers wish to die before they feel old may, just may, help to reduce the cost of end of life care. 

Genetics is also bringing infomatics into core ‘job 1’ medicine. Personal medicine is the future, driven by massive number crunching of personal Genomes. Likewise faster collection and analysis of vast databases containing information from millions of people will create powerful new insight, just as mapping the location of cases helped to identify the link between sewers and Cholera in London in the 19th century, but on vast scale.   

Where else can ICT help? It is, after all, a family of technologies with huge transformational power: conquering huge distances at lightspeed, connecting billions of information artefacts and conducting an unfathomable number of complex calculations every instant. It is enabling the creation of a parallel virtual universe where useful new stuff can happen.

But ICT has an equal ability to frustrate and disappoint the people who have to use it. The benefits aren’t guaranteed, the new virtual universe can be a cold, unfriendly place but it can only help us all if we are all willing to interact there. 

 This is why user experience is such a hot topic in ITC. Progress these days is less about knowing how to do things and more about knowing what to do to go with the flow of human nature, to grow willing engagement and eliminate new frustrations.

This is why Apple was briefly the world’s most valuable company. They know how to innovate from an experience led perspective. It is in fact at the main core belief that will prove to be the enduring legacy of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs. 

Another great example of new ICT working well is Amazon, and more specifically the Kindle. The hottest product for sale on the website is the physical dispenser used to buy yet more stuff from the website. Commercial life doesn’t get any sweeter than that. 

Everyone involved with Lorenzo and other recent healthcare IT needs to study and understand what Amazon calls their ‘backwards’ innovation process which they describe as follows: step 1 write the launch press release, step 2 anticipate and answer FAQs (frequently asked questions), Step 3 Design the experience, Step 4: technical development. A more ‘Experience Led’ Innovation process is hard to achieve. 

The Amazon example is also indicative of another big trend: web services. Closed vertically integrated software database systems face as big an extinction risk as paper books. 

The driving momentum of progress in ICT is swinging from technology led ‘systems in boxes’ and ‘closed databases’ towards ‘human behaviour inspired’ wide area web service systems. 

ICT is starting to look more like the rest of industry where ‘things the customer doesn’t see’ are planned with maximum economies of scale in mind, (the fate of engines both physical and virtual) and the user experience is tailored to be precisely as personalised as they desire. ( the screen on your I-Pad). 

This commercial trend towards web architectures is morphing at light speed into the next big shift in ICT thinking: The Internet of Things.

In a nutshell, the number of things connected to the internet is growing exponentially as the cost and size of sensors and ‘connectivity’ processing plummets. We are moving rapidly toward a world where pretty much anything can be detected and shared anywhere in the world, from the location of a wheelchair to the body temperature of thousands of pensioners across a region.

The internet of things can enable so many new ways for information flows to improve things that technologists themselves are already so swamped with potential applications they are finding it hard to identify individual ‘killer apps’ onto which they can focus any kind of traditional ‘top down tech’ approach.

This is good news for healthcare, it creates a fertile ground for new, ‘experience led’ thinking on the big healthcare challenges, this is also good news for the experience led designers in the creative industries. It is also worth noting that the TSB is planning a number of calls around the ‘Internet of Things’ in the new year. Innovation proposals that also address big ‘national challenge areas’, like Healthcare, tick a lot of extra boxes. 

So what are the specific Healthcare challenges that modern ICT (the internet of things in particular), is well placed to help with? 

• Improving clinical productivity: doctors and nurses are swamped with data and hate ‘entering’ things. They are hungry for anything that ‘captures’ information automatically and converts it into useful presentations that cut the time they spend on administrative decision making.

• Fewer and shorter hospital visits: Hospitals are expensive and dangerous places, the more they can be avoided the better for all. New information flows can help reduce the need to go, speed up passage through, and make it possible to go home sooner, under remote supervision.

• Health and Quality of life in old age: New information flows can help us manage our own conditions and maintain our independence by keeping us more connected to the outside world. The TSBs recent ‘whole system demonstrator’ project has just provided the first ‘clinically valid’ evidence that ‘connected e-health’ saves lives. This will stimulate interest and belief in the health care community.

• Joining up a multi-stake holder world: The Healthcare world is a warren of poorly connected information silo’s that are looking to communicate better. This has been the ‘good intention’ at the heart of the large ‘top down’ national initiatives. The internet of things can help ‘join up’ a complex world with looser, more ‘bottom up’ web-service systems.

• ‘Experience Led’ solutions: Success with all these challenges depends totally on the willing and motivated engagement of end users. Each and every stakeholder involved in any health care scenario, from the overburdened theatre nurse to the retired pensioner taking his own blood sugar reading, must find their new interactions to be totally natural and useful, this won’t happen without the empathy and vision of Experience Led Designers.

The UK’s creative industries, Industrial Design and Computer gaming in particular, have a world leading track record in the development of this kind of ‘experience led’ solution.

This is why the HealthCare challenge is such a great opportunity for the Creative Industries, especially so in the context of the Internet of Things.

We need smarter implementation/interpretation of accessibility standards to deliver truly inclusive on-line content

by Ben Griffin, Principal Designer, TheAlloy

I recently received a HTML newsletter that was "…laid out in accordance with The Email Newsletter (TEN) standard for access technology users”. Great. Only, it’s wasn't inclusive, because the message it seemed to send was “It’s OK that this newsletter looks dull & ugly, because it’s designed for visually impaired people”.

Would we (or any brand) want our corporate communications to look like this? If we really believe that users with visual (or other) impairments have the same emotional needs and aspirations as anyone else, then we should strive to maintain the design language of the brand – intended to communicate specific messages and appeal to those user needs. We can’t simply discard it in the name of accessibility. This is not easy. It requires designers to take a much more intelligent approach to standard implementation (possibly to the standards themselves) that delivers usability whilst still allowing expression of brand messages beyond just “we made this accessible to visually impaired people – aren’t we great?”.

I’m not criticizing the standard outlined here – reading through it, it appears very thorough and well considered. Rather, the challenge for designers is more intelligent and inclusive implementation. Accessibility standards should be part of a broader design strategy – they are not a design strategy in themselves. The implementation below has resulted in a document that is actually very difficult to navigate/read without screen reader software!