One Web Is Here

Image via CrunchBase

So, that mobile web. First, called WAP with its WML and WMLScript, it was conceived to extend the very basic software that ran on phones a ta time the most sophisticated ones might have had grayscale screens, yet was to have worked equally well on simple pagers. Unfortunately, this system of using the data network to download pages and small application decks was labeled 'the mobile Web, and thus people expected the web on their mobile, and they didn't get it, and they ended up disappointed. Exit the first WAP technologies.

Then 'the mobile Web' was re-conceived to use XHTML and CSS with all kinds of extra switches called 'mobile profiles', which were all about leaving half of the styling out, and companies like Nokia pushed the idea that if we just use those technologies for the most important pages, we can make the Web, The One Web, easily scale up and down, without needing to split the web into one for big screens and a special mobile web. While at the same time sponsoring the idea of a whole top-level domain, .mobi, that was for special mobile websites only. Neither is working: I am seeing far more 'm.' or 'mobile.' sub-domains of .com sites than specialized .mobi sites, and few pages are designed to use the technologies to scale up and down well. It's not easy to create something that is both a general website for big screens and a highly individualized relevant experience on a mobile.

We are in hell, as web creators looking forward. Scaling both up and down is hard, it only works if your website has a totally simple proposition, or if you are willing to chuck 80% of your interactivity out when scaling down -- and your users will actually miss that 80%. Our tools, like static wireframes and IAs, don't help us, our clients mostly have visions only of the pretty pictures of rich sites and have a terrible time dealing with their brand having to not always be one huge whiz-bang festivity, and on top of all that we actually are chasing a moving target when we have to say how far to scale down, as phones get significantly better every 6 months and the upgrade cycle is 18 months. Look at Facebook's mobile site: all applications, groups, fan pages are either gone or hard to get to on its mobile site; there's just your news stream updates and the comments to them. Which is great on most phones now, but is actually leaving the high end phone users behind as too constrained and not interactive enough. Making something that works on the low end will look flat and boring on high-end phones.

Still, it has to be done. We have to go to One Web, with liquid layouts and sniffing what device is hitting your page and ready to switch from serving Big General Page to Personalized Small Chunk. And the reason is Twitter.

Twitter is a true One Web application: its proposition is so simple that it easily bridges mobile and Big Screen access. Twitter serves responses as easily to a web page as to an SMS as to a specialized desktop application, and users use all modalities, often switching seamlessly between them. It is also huge. Huge. Gigantic. Everyone's on it, and they are tweeting URLs to each other, URLs of other web pages they have seen. And their followers are as likely to click on those URLs from their computers as from their iPhones. And if that URL goes to your site, and your site can't adapt to the wild variety of devices people are using to get to you through a tweet, you are losing audience.

If you have a simple blog, you seriously need to check how your template looks on a Nokia E71 a BlackBerry Storm, an iPhone, a G1 (and yes, I need to do that myself for this blog). If you have a news or information site, sniff who is coming over and automatically redirect them to your mobile site for the same story (you have a mobile version of your site, right? I mean, you mostly serve text and pictures? They scale down beautifully). Get ready. Get a strategy.

Maybe we need to turn the process around: start out with sites that have really simple content suitable for low-end mobiles, and use AJAX and animation to bloom like flowers of interactivity when the site notices the screen is big enough, unfolding new modalities and content types to just the right size from very simple to mid-range to netbook to desktop to dual 30" cinema screens. It will require unlearning all we currently do for the average site on both the web and the mobile web, and using and creating all new tools, but it is time we tried. We need to do something. Because if our sites are hot they will be Tweeted, and people will try to get to them from their desktops and their pocket devices, and we will want to serve all those users. And as Twitter gets augmented or supplanted by more services around the globe with strong roots in phones and SMS, services that equally bridge access devices, it is only going to happen more, not less.

WAP failed because consumers didn't want two webs. They want One, everywhere, relevant, and accessible with what they are carrying.

The Messaging Is Actually More Difficult Than Designing The Product

Image via Wikipedia

While most non-Asian consumer electronics companies are either dead or a shell of their former selves after being unable to cope with razor-thin margins, at least one has tried to innovate itself out of the hole by leaving traditional kitchen machinery and living room HiFi behind. Philips, the originally Dutch consumer electronics giant that twenty years ago ruled by introducing the CD player and really only survived the 90s because of its lighting products portfolio, has been trying to stay relevant by stepping out of the race of me-too products they could not make a profit on anyway, and instead go for consumer electronics nobody else made.

Sure, they still make flat-panel TVs, but their TVs have a feature, or gimmick if you will, that they emit light to the sides that is the same color as the predominant color on the screen. They tried to turn color LEDs into a consumer product by releasing a flood light whose color could be changed by remote control. They create mobile phones with almost no features but batteries that last forever.

Their latest foray is trying to pull electronic sex toys out of the niche of candy-pink plastic ickyness of ugly cords and shapes that are either too crude for words (how many guys really want to see their partner play with an exaggerated enlarged cast model of some other guy's dick he can never match? Well I can kind of guess, but it still seems a small niche for a manufacturer) or a little too much on the humorous side (Yay dolphins. Bunnies. Or most often something that is best described as Shape by H. R. Geiger, Colors by Sanrio).

I think Philips is basically trying to put the 'adult' in 'adult toys'. Does the Audi-driving iPod generation really not deserve something that makes them feel sophisticated in the bedroom? Well, they are trying.

Philips' new range of 'Sensual Stimulators'. From left to right: the Warm Stimulator,
and the dual Sensual Stimulator set displayed inside and outside the case.

I couldn't find the press release in English, only in Dutch, and I will just discuss the highlights here.

They are introducing them under the product category of 'Relationship Care', and the Dutch prose for the press release tries very hard to take on an adult design-oriented tone about touchability, stimulation, design, and features like that the first one can be set to heat itself in the charging dock before use, the other two are made for Him and Her, they are all waterproof for use in showers and baths, and "made to get in the mood for more intimacy". Some copy-editors must have stayed up nights just to get this right. Interestingly enough from the gender-equality P.O.V, the clitoris is mentioned, but for men they only get as explicit as "his intimate contours". I can't help but wonder what the meeting was like in which this difference of approach to anatomy was settled on.

Anyway, more power to them. Philips wants to try to get sell these products through channels that are not traditionally associated with sex toys (like what, general product mail-order catalogs like Neckermann and Sears?) but has not disclosed price nor availability. Oddly enough, while the Dutch press release mentions a product website, at this time it is not live.

Steak-holding Stakeholders

Image via Wikipedia

I had just joined the line at my Tesco (supermarket chain in the UK on the cheaper end) for the self-service check-out, cursing that I would subject myself to those horrible machines yet again. The alternative was joining the staffed queues, each with a customer or 3 already waiting, shopping carts filled with enough food for an army regiment. I heard a voice calling from the 10-items-or-less line. That line is usually closed in the evenings, so I was surprised to see it was staffed right now.

-- "I am surprised, this line is usually closed."
"Yes, I am trying something new to make things better."
-- "If you really want to do that, fix your self-checkout machines."

They are a case study in how usability is more than logically placed buttons and clear pictures and even a friendly voice. Usability is not just going to be fixed with a nice sauce of wireframes and good visual designers if the underlying system does not support how humans act.

Humans want to get things done quickly in a supermarket. They want to scan quickly, put the item away, and go to the next. They don't want to have to wait for a slow scale that needs to have the item placed on the belt just right 5 times before it registers, they don't want to wait to go to the next step of paying and getting a bill until the voice loop has slowly and painfully spoken about what button you should touch and how it will give you clubcard points when the human already knows from previous times, they don't want to wait 5 seconds between pressing a touch screen button and the screen reacting for god knows what reason in an age their game computer at home will penalize them for clicking a millisecond too slow. I defy anyone to use these particular machines at that location more than three times without wanting to punch their screens out in a fit of hot rage. No amount of perfectly chosen colors will compensate for the aggravation of having to use a machine that expects to impose its own order and speed of doing things.

Especially when it is unnecessary. The self check-outs I used in the US were all fast, scanning and itemizing quickly, not needing to finish their display animations and prompts for one item when the user was already scanning the next or inserting coins, simply paying attention to its input and processing each as fast as it could. As a result, they never got as confused as the machines in my Tesco do, they never needed as much human attention and help, and one supervisor could indeed check all four of them without being overwhelmed. Actually, this goes for the self check-outs I saw at Boots (a UK drug store chain), which are obviously from the same manufacturer as the one in Tesco, yet did not get in the way of the actual checking out.

"Yeah, we know about the machines. But we finally convinced the manager who is responsible for ordering them to stand at the supervising station for a full day. He will be ordering new ones."

That is the second lesson: nothing's gonna change about a painful system until the people with actual power experience the pain. Customers complaining, systems being down, staff overwhelmed -- doesn't matter; if customers can't use them they will just get in line for the manned check-out counters. Once they are inside the store and have full baskets they are captive anyway. But make the guy holding the purse actually feel what he is doing to his staff with that terrible equipment, and suddenly all kinds of upgrades are possible.

Stupid Recruiter Shenanigans

I could fill half of this blog with the 'fun' I have had with job recruiters since Disney Mobile imploded as I tried to find the next step in my career. In fact, when I was still in LA, I did, about insane location matching, ignorant lying automation, astounding lack of technical knowledge, and just plain incompetence and repetition. I haven't had as glaringly dumb moments in the UK, but there still have been, uh, 'fun' moments. My current gigs I found by going to meetups with a stack of moo cards and finding someone who needed my skills. We have been working well for the last 5 months now and want to do much more.

My latest beef is just mindless external recruiter inanity around the cloak-and-dagger game of trying to interest me for a job without telling me who the job is for. I understand why recruiters don't want to come out and say who they are recruiting for-- no wait, I actually don't. I see two options here:

1. The external recruiter has the commission from the company to be the people recruiting for that company. In that case, since I am not at the sooper-dooper CEO level where the knowledge the company is trying to find someone will send the stock crashing (but finding out they are after me of course will send the stock soaring), the recruiter should be able to simply tell me, because if I do a run around the recruiter, the company will send me right back and say 'please work through the recruiter'.
2. The external recruiter does not have the exclusive commission, so of course they can't tell me for which company they are recruiting, because I then actually will go do an end-run around them. The external recruiter is injecting themselves into a process between two parties where they haven't been asked to be, eating up a fee off my future work that could have gone into my pocket or kept the company in business longer, and, as is obvious from my examples, overwhelmingly not giving much value in return: no feedback on how to increase my chances, and as I have found, terrible skills-matching. In that case, get out of my life and stop making this process harder.
   

But, that aside, the modern way of working seems to be this, often somewhat coquettish-looking, hiding of the employer. Ok, let's take that as a given. In that case, dear external recruiters, if you must, could you at least stop being outright dumb about it? Example: I recently got an email inquiring whether I wanted to work for 'a global leading electronics consumer brand' in Eindhoven.

No, seriously. I am Dutch. My CV very clearly states so. Thus, I know the Netherlands. There ain't that many brands there, people.

Ok, for those who don't get it because they do not know this part of the world well, it's like describing a job for 'a leading global software powerhouse' located in Redmond, or 'a well-known mobile-phone manufacturer' in Finland. What is up with this kind of coded communication when the answer is so obvious? Are these recruiters -- yes, stuff like this happened more than once -- assuming I do not know my own industry that well? Or that I need to have what is blindingly obvious sent to me in code? The scarier thought: this recruiter does not know how insanely obvious his 'riddle' is.

Standard disclaimer here how not all external recruiters are bad, I actually have -- no really -- worked with one or two that impressed me, of which one even got me two gigs. And the internal recruiters I worked with, at Nokia and Disney Mobile, are astonishing people that I would want to have work for me if I ever ran a big software company. But that this field is now filled with dross is not a secret. That they are actually introducing friction in a market that thanks to Monster and Dice and CWJobs should have been significantly disintermediated by now is not a secret either. I often wonder if the companies hiring them know just what tremendous shit they sometimes send to job-seekers: ads that disrespect our intellect as I stated above, terrible terrible matching of the job to the person, outright misspellings or lack of grammar that at the same time they will turn around and say they will not tolerate from job seekers. Employers, do you know how bad these people make you look? How so few of them are actually finding you the best talent?

Maybe I Am Not Crazy

When I posted that I wanted Google Chrome's thumbnails feature to be gone lest it be embarrassing, half of the comments I got were very negative on that idea.

Now it turns out that being able to turn the thumbnails off was one of the most requested improvements.