Interesting elsewhere – 9 November 2010

Posted by

0

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • open data doesn’t empower communities | internet.artizans I’m inspired by the idea that nuggets of opened data could seed guerilla public services, plugging gaps left by government, but i don’t see any of that in the data.gov.uk apps list. The reasons aren’t technical but psychosocial – the people and communities who could use this data to help tackle their own disadvantage and marginalisation don’t have the self-confident sense of entitlement that makes for successful civic hacktivism.
  • Shelf-stackers in the intranet supermarket (Intranet diary) In the intranet supermarket, we need more than just shelf-stackers. We need intelligent people who care about their customers. products, keen to find out if customers can find products easily. We need people with the good business sense to only stock what the customers want, eager and ready to tidy up messy aisles and to be more questioning about stacking whatever they are given, wherever they fancy.
  • Finding the best ideas in the world | Freedom to Tinker Visitors to their idea marketplace were presented with the question “Which is the more important action we need to take in education today?” and two ideas from the pool. The visitors voted for one of the ideas, and then another pair of ideas was presented. This process of pairwise voting continued for as the long as the visitor wished. Also, at any time the visitor could upload an idea which would then go into the pool of ideas to be voted on by others. In this way the idea marketplace allowed the OECD to collect ideas from the community and have the community prioritize them. Both of these steps–collection and prioritization–are needed for a successful “crowdsourcing” of ideas.
  • Memex 1.1 » Blog Archive » Towards the intelligent use of human beings Why don’t we do this? Mainly because we’re still operating with a hard-copy, print mindset. Once upon a time we sent one another typed drafts, so the university’s internal mail system resembled a freight-transportation network designed for shipping atoms (as Nicholas Negroponte would put it). The fact that we are now shipping bits ought to have caused us to rethink what we were doing, but it hasn’t. Instead we are just repeating in electronic form what we did with physical typescripts. And it’s daft.
    Another process that happens in any large outfits (and especially in universities) is the organisation of meetings. Getting busy people together can be nightmarishly difficult. Or, rather, it is if you do it the way many organisations do it — by email. I’ve lost count of the number of interminable email exchanges I’ve been involved in where ten people try and agree on a date and time for a meeting, when the obvious way to do it is via an online polling system like that provided by Doodle.
  • Gov 2.0 Andrew Stott
  • Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely
    Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential

Design Jam

Posted by

3

I have written a couple of times about the gap I see between the brilliance of hack days, as exemplified by Rewired State, and the need to build customer needs and user experience into the mix:

These projects can get off to a great start using their originators as their own use case, but they won’t become sustainable on that basis. Government has painfully learned – or, rather, is painfully learning – that starting off with the assumption that you know what is best for people doesn’t deliver the greatest results. I am not quite sure where the tipping point comes between creator-evangelists and customer-centred design, but I am sure it has to come somewhere.

So I was delighted to spot this flowing through the twitter time line:

Great to see London Design Jam #1 getting off the ground - similar to a hack day but for UX folks! Looking forward to more info.
6 November 2010 4:35 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@micheleidesmith
micheleidesmith
Announcing first @designjamlondon, Sat Nov 20: http://designjamlondon.eventbrite.com/ Supported by @MozConcept and City University London
6 November 2010 3:58 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@johannakoll
johanna kollmann

The concept of a design jam is a new one to me, but it sounds as though it’s a cross between a hack day and an unconference/barcamp:

Design Jams are one-day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging UX challenges.

While conferences and talks are very popular in the UX community, we don’t have many events for actual collaboration, like the ‘hackdays’ enjoyed by the development community. Design Jams get designers together to learn from each other while working on actual problems. The sessions champion open-source thinking and are non-profit, run by local volunteers.

Sounds like a fantastic idea, even though I am left slightly wondering how you do user experience design without involving some users. I am not remotely qualified to go myself, but would be fascinated to see the final presentations – it would be great if the organisers were to open those up to interested non-participants.

Tickets are available from 1pm on Monday.

Interesting elsewhere – 5 November 2010

Posted by

0

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • The power of infographics
  • Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers – Harvard Business Review Two critical findings emerged that should affect every company’s customer service strategy. First, delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does. Second, acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.
  • Importance of workflow in social technology | DavePress it’s all about workflow.The best software keeps out the way and just lets you do stuff. There shouldn’t be anything new to learn, and the process should be completed within one or two clicks of a mouse.
  • Innovation functions in large organisations | Kate Bennet You need some very experienced people in the team: People who know the organisation inside out and are aware of what’s been tried before are invaluable. They’ll have the contacts to move things forward, the know-how to understand when to stop, and a full understanding of navigating complex governance to implement projects.… and people who are fresh to the organisation: New ideas/ perspectives, fresh insights, and constant questioning will help keep the innovation function challenged and on the ball. Employ additional interns and apprentices where possible, give them responsibility and see what they create.
  • Small mercies – honestlyreal No drama though – no letters to the Trust, no official complaints, certainly no raised voices or threats. Just a bit of wasted medicine, a heart-rending sense of frustration, and quite a lot of avoidable pain. Life goes on.
  • Stories vs. Statistics – NYTimes.com There is a tension between stories and statistics, and one under-appreciated contrast between them is simply the mindset with which we approach them. In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled
  • A Shiny World: The hacker ethic: or work as play Big ideas don’t happen in offices. Offices don’t encourage thinking. I sit in front of my desk and I look at my screen and I feel guilty for reading my RSS feeds for research, or reading Twitter to catch others sparks which fuel my ideas, because it feels as if it’s playing, not valuable, not quantifiable, and therefore not justifiable. But all my ideas, all the things we will be implementing in the near future, all of these things were not ideas I got from sitting at my desk at work. [...]Work is not for play. But in playing with things, testing things, discussing them, wrestling with them, yes I know pontificating about them, comes understanding, then quietness and then spirals of ideas coming from the understanding. Play has it’s value.
  • Open data, fraud… and some worrying advice Government/big-company bureaucrats not only think like government/big-company bureaucrats, they build processes that assumes everyone else does. The problem is that that both makes more difficult for ordinary citizens (as most encounters with bureaucracy make clear), and also makes it easy for criminals (who by definition don’t follow the rules).

The networked world depends on there being networks

Posted by

1

Networked societies and networked economies rather depend on there being a network.

We only tend to notice them when they are not there or not working. On my wired connection at home, there is decent bandwidth with very occasional catastrophic failure. On my wired connection at work, there is what feels like very limited bandwidth shared among a very large number of people – the electrons occasionally approach the speed of sound but rarely, it feels, the speed of light.

Then there is my mobile connection.  My phone often tells me it has a 3G connection, but in central London, it only does that when there is no actual data being moved about. The second I try to use the connection, it degrades to something dramatically slower. Not infrequently, it degrades to nothing at all.

The internet, of course, was famously to interpret censorship as damage and route around it. The trouble is that, in some very important ways, it can’t even treat damage as damage. If the final connection is missing, the health of the rest of the network is slightly beside the point (the main backbone is not as resilient and redundant as it looks either, but that’s another story). This has been a long running issue for the so-called final third: the mostly rural areas where there is not yet any semblance of any kind of broadband, with an active campaign to put the final third first. But it is also increasingly acute in the health of mobile networks, where the sudden growth in data dense traffic has left the operators floundering. There is an interesting article in the current New Scientist (but sadly behind a subscription wall) which argues that it is pretty much impossible for supply to meet rising demand in the short to medium term

Data gobbling smart phones are of course the source of the problem, as they overload networks with requests for web pages, email and video streaming 24/7.  If the use of these devices grows as expected, cellphone networks across the world could grind to a halt by 2013 – and since many core services depend on wireless communication, the results could be devastating. The only solution will be an overhaul of the way mobile communications are delivered.

Of course malthusian predictions of the doom laden consequences of growth have been with us since, well, Malthus.  His main claim to fame these days is to have spent two hundred years being wrong – though the past is no more a guide to the future in that than in anything else.  But this does serve to underline that the service visible to customers at the top of the stack is the result of the complex interaction of many factors, not all of which are susceptible to rapid change. The shape of the 3G network in the UK was set by the process which culminated in the spectrum auction in early 2000, a time when nobody had the faintest idea what all this bandwidth might be for, beyond some some vague and misplaced thoughts about videophones and football highlights. The technology due to be implemented over the next few years to squeeze more capacity into 3G is the result of concerted development which itself was well underway before smartphones were anything but a rarity.

There is already some very visible frustration around. As I write this paragraph, Paul Clarke is tweeting:

No signal between London Bridge and East Croydon. None. And with rebooting the phone. This is the last straw @O2. We are finished here.
3 November 2010 9:43 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite
@paul_clarke
Paul Clarke

With some trepidation, I wonder whether he is slightly missing the bigger picture. Perhaps between London Bridge and East Croydon there are other operators with better signals, but I suspect everybody on every network has had the experience of sitting on a train looking glumly at their phone with no signal while else is chatting merrily away. Of course, often it is the very fact that everybody else is chatting merrily away which blocks the next connection. I have frequently marvelled that Vodafone does not seem to have spotted that the presence of steel rails stretching for long distances away from London indicates the predictable location of large numbers of people who are somewhere between keen and desperate to make contact with the world outside their train, but in my less frustrated moments I am ready to recognise that keeping somewhere between dozens and hundreds of people connected in a small dense clump through what is presumably at least a partial Faraday cage moving at over a hundred miles an hour is probably not the easiest engineering challenge to have to solve.

The selling point of online services – from Amazon to tax discs – is that they are better, faster and cheaper than the online alternative. That’s a very powerful selling point, because they are all three of those things. The customer experience, though, is a product of the infrastructure as much as it is the service which runs on top of that infrastructure. For an increasing number of people, the quality of mobile connections is one of the critical drivers of their service experience. Ofcom research shows that:

In the early stages of mobile broadband take-up, most people used it as a complement to an existing fixed-broadband service. However, by Q1 2010 there are some indications that more households are using mobile broadband as their only internet connection. Ofcom research finds that 60% of mobile users also had a fixed-line connection in Q1 2010, compared to 75% a year previously (see Figure 5.15), and our research suggests that the number of households which only had a mobile broadband connection doubled from 3% of all households in Q1 2009 to 6% of all households in Q1 2010 (note, however, that this should be treated as indicative only, as there is a margin of error associated with this consumer survey research) . With fixed-line broadband levelling off at around 65%, it appears that the growth in overall household broadband take-up (up 68% to 71% in Q1 2010) is now being driven by households getting online for the first time via mobile broadband, mainly by purchasing lower-priced contract plans or pre-pay offerings, but also potentially by purchasing a computer for the first time, with a mobile broadband tariff that includes the price of a laptop or netbook PC within the monthly contract. [my emphasis]

The power of the network depends on the power of the network. Perhaps we need a bit less attention on the first and a bit more attention on the second.

And as a footnote to all that, the same edition of the New Scientist suggests that we may not need to worry too much about the network congestion caused by the proliferation of devices, if we run out of the raw materials necessary to make them in the first place, though their article concludes in a splendid piece of technocratic optimism, quoting Kazuhiro Hono of Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science, “The important thing is to recognise the importance worldwide,” he says. With efforts focused on innovation, he adds, “the solution to this problem will come out in the future”.

Invention as crystallisation, not inspiration

Posted by

1

People set themselves curious challenges. Doogie Hooner’s is to explain everything through flowcharts, and his book doing precisely that is published today. One of the tasks he sets himself is to explain the internet to a nineteenth century street urchin.  A small extract from the resulting flow chart is shown below, click on it to see the full thing.

It’s nicely done, and it’s probably not giving too much of the plot away to say that the urchin doesn’t end up a great deal the wiser.  It is next to impossible to understand the internet in 1835 because it is next to impossible to understand the predecessor concepts. The things you need to understand in order to understand the internet don’t exist yet. Or to put it the other way round, the internet could be invented when it was because the conditions for its existence were already in place. And that in turn is one of the reasons why words like ‘invented’ don’t seem terribly useful when talking about things like the internet: the internet emerged when it did at the point when it was a small step on from all the things which existed already.

That can be a local effect as well as a global one. I had a fascinating conversation a couple of weeks ago, discussing whether a particular innovation could take root in a particular organisation. The conclusion was that it couldn’t, not because the innovation wasn’t there for the taking, but because the way that organisation thought about the relevant problem would not allow it to see the innovation as a potential solution. William Gibson’s famous dictum, ‘The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet,’ is in part a consequence of that too. The future emerges at times and in places where the conditions exist to support it.

That’s not to argue for some crude form of historical determinism. Our specific presents and futures are the result of specific people doing specific things. It is, though, to make the point that invention and innovation are much more the crystallisation of current possibilities in new arrangements than they ever are the plucking from nowhere of what had hitherto been unknown.

History is written by those who write history

Posted by

0

I went to a fascinating discussion on the use and abuse of contemporary history at the RSA this evening.  Andrew Rawnsley was in the chair, with Peter Hennessy, Timothy Garton Ash and Tessa Jowell all on fine thought provoking form.

Part of the discussion touched on the abundance of near contemporary sources compared with even the recent past, with the effective death of the thirty year rule being proclaimed. Timothy Garton Ash argued passionately for the primacy of the first draft of history, written by those able to observe events directly.

I admire his work and writing enormously, but I fear that this is romantic self-delusion. The growth in availability of contemporary and near contemporary accounts, memoirs and diaries appearing in weeks rather than decades certainly gives the illusion of plenty. But I am not convinced that it provides the reality.

I have been an observer and a bit player in enough political events to be able to compare direct observation with daily and weekly press coverage. I cannot think of an occasion when the description matched the reality I had observed.

Sometimes that is the result of the inevitable incompleteness of a necessarily brief account. Often though, things are stated as facts which are simply wrong. Garton Ash stood at Vaclav Havel’s side to watch the velvet revolution unfold. But that is not the vantage point most journalists and historians enjoy for most events. Politics unfolds on the streets by exception, not as a norm. The second hand account is dominant, the contemporary first hand account a rarity, and the disinterested first hand account not much more than a theoretical possibility.

I am a civil servant. I am not going to write the first draft – or any draft – of history. But I can compare the draft I could write with the draft others do write, and know there is an important gap.

I am not ascribing any malice here. All of us shade our accounts, and the account I do not give is no better than the accounts which others do.  But if the accounts which are given have consistent characteristics which separate them from the accounts which are never given, the history which emerges from them will have a consistent distortion. Of course good enough history – and good enough journalism – is infinitely better than none at all. The skills of both journalist and historian are vital to an open society and both Hennessy and Garton Ash – and indeed Rawnsley – are exemplars of what can be done, reaching standards which are well beyond good enough. Perhaps, as Hennessy said, the best use of history is a sceptical state of mind.

In a recursive way, this is of course itself a piece of contemporary history.  I wrote most of it on the bus in the half hour immediately after the event. I hope those who were at the RSA will recognise it as prompted by an experience they shared.  But I warn those who were not, that as an account of that event, it is partial, incomplete and almost certainly inaccurate.

Perhaps in the end I am doing no more than indulging in a bit of post-structuralist whimsy. But it is always worth remembering that history is written by those who write history.

Barriers and trade offs

Posted by

0

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about some barriers across a footpath as a simple illustration of how easy it is to skew public decision making if the question is defined too narrowly.  Since then I have come across a number of things which add up to much clearer thinking on this than I managed then.  

The first was a piece by Mike Masnick on the not obviously similar question of whether governments should have the ability to tap internet-based phone calls in the same way that they have long been able to do for POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service – excuse for gratuitous use of one of my favourite abbreviations).  In the POTS world, it’s easy because there are telephone exchanges.  In the Skype world it’s impossible:  

Calls are encrypted end-to-end, meaning that only the end users who are parties to a call hold the secret keys to secure the conversation against online snoops. There’s no device Skype can install at their headquarters that would let them provide police with access to the unencrypted communications; to comply with such a mandate, they’d have to wholly redesign the network along a more centralized model, rendering it less flexible, adaptable, and reliable as well as less secure.  

So the question becomes how far it is appropriate to require Skype to change its business model and technical architecture for its many millions of customers in order to allow the interception of the conversations of what is presumably a very small proportion of those customers. It is clearly possible to argue the point either way, but the point here is not to resolve, or even engage with, that argument, but to draw out the nature of the trade off being made.  

Now here’s another example, this time from Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research in a paper with the splendid title, So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users [pdf]: 

We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort. Looking at various examples of security advice we find that the advice is complex and growing, but the benefit is largely speculative or moot.  

The argument is essentially that looked at at system level, the aggregate costs to users of complying with security requirements may well outweigh the aggregate benefit to them of doing so, and that therefore non-compliance is a rational response.  As Herley stresses later in the paper: 

While we argue that it is rational for users to ignore security advice this does not mean that the advice is bad. In fact much, or even most of it is beneficial. It’s better for users to have strong passwords than weak ones, to change them often, and to have a different one for each account. That there is benefit is not in question. However, there is also cost, in the form of user effort. In equilibrium, the benefit, to the user population, is balanced against the cost, to the user population. If observed user behavior forms the scales, then the decision has been unambiguous: users have decided that the cost is far too great for the benefit offered. If we want a different outcome we have to offer a better tradeoff. 

It follows that understanding the cost of compliance is essential to understanding the net value of the policy.  Herley does a rough and ready calculation of the cost in the USA from multiplying the number of users by an hourly value of their time: 

This places things in an entirely new light. We suggest that the main reason security advice is ignored is that it makes an enormous miscalculation: it treats as free a resource that is actually worth $2.6 billion an hour [...] 

When we ignore the costs of security advice we treat the user’s attention and effort as an unlimited resource. Advice, policies and mandates thus proliferate. Each individual piece of advice may carry benefit, but the burden is cumulative. Just as villagers will overgraze a commonly held pasture, advice-givers and policy-mandaters demand far more effort than any user can give. 

Then finally, along comes Paul Clarke being authenticated over the phone by an insurance company.  It does not go well. 

Match the process to the risk. That’s all I ask, as a process rationalist. It works. The one really gold-standard online transaction that government offers – the tax disc – works so beautifully because just such a risk-based decision was made. You don’t have to exhaustively prove that you are the person connected to the licence reminder or the car. You just have to have the reference number in your hand, and a means of payment. 

Paul has put his finger on something important there.  I too have found over the years – rather to my disappointment – that nobody has tried to pay my bills fraudulently. I remember arguing when plans were first being made to put VAT online that the point at which strong verification was needed was the point at which a trader was applying for a refund.  At that stage with very low levels  of adoption, putting equivalent obstacles in the way of somebody trying to make a payment (this was at a time when companies were being encouraged to buy digital certificates at £50 a time) didn’t make a great deal of sense. 

But it is a comment to Paul’s post from Adrian Short which sums all this up in the neatest form I have seen: 

Firstly, you need to get the balance right between having false positives (letting the wrong people in) and false negatives (keeping the right people out). Where that line is drawn very much depends on the underlying value of the data/transaction. 

Secondly, you must acknowledge that your security measures have a cost both for the organisation and its customers. This cost must be offset against the value of the transaction, including the cost as described above that legitimate customers may not be able to complete the transaction at all.

There is a “security” mentality that says that every process should have as much security as possible, whereas it should actually have as little security as necessary. Good security is proportionate and as far as possible, unobtrusive. 

All those examples – except the pavement barrier I started with – are about security in one way or another.  That’s not an accident, but it’s not the complete story either.   The real point is that missing the balance of costs and benefits in the widest sense leads to skewed decision making and it applies to every aspect of service design.  The reason why security issues so often come up as examples is, I suspect, not because that basic principle operates any differently, but because in a wide range of organisations and services in both private and public sectors, security is applied as an overlay from a perspective which, as Cormac Herley observed, tends to see the benefits of greater security more clearly than the costs.  I am definitely not arguing that we should ignore or neglect security: money and personal data are valuable commodities which attract serious criminal interest and it would be complete folly not to have appropriate defences in place.

But the basic point remains the same:  the costs of design decisions need to be understood as clearly as the benefits.  And if the costs fall externally while the benefits are felt internally, there is no incentive to reduce the costs and a continuing risk that the balance will be struck inappopriately. Managing that risk is an important job for any service designer.

How soon is it right to ride the trend?

Posted by

4

Truncating the axes is the oldest trick in the book, so the story this chart is telling is not quite as dramatic as the initial visual impression, but that story is still striking and important.

The proportion of internet usage from mobile devices is tiny, less than 3%.  That’s almost certainly an understatement, since the chart measures operating systems, not connection types, so includes mobile devices rather than devices which happen to be mobile, but the absolute numbers are still pretty much insignificant.

The trend is, quite obviously, another matter. The share of internet usage from mobile operating systems has gone up thirteen fold in the last two years, and the slope of the line is robustly upwards. For all we know, the line might hit some natural ceiling in the next few weeks and never break the 3% barrier. That seems remarkably unlikely, though: if absolutely nothing else were happening, the simple pattern of device renewal which characterises phones as opposed to computers, bakes in substantial future growth to come – and in any case there is no reason to suppose that nothing else is happening.

I thought the chart – which I have lifted from a wider analysis of operating system usage data by Ed Bott – was striking enough to be worth a post in its own right. But then it made me think of an exchange on twitter earlier today:

@Directgov: The Guardian’s Consumer App of the Week features the #jobcentreplus #app from @directgov #iPhone #iPodTouch #iPad http://bit.ly/dgov-app

@Marthalanefox: @Directgov how many ppl going into a jcp have an iphone?

@Pubstrat: @Marthalanefox @Directgov Some certainly do – and the app is also available on android. It’s one more way in to accessing the info online.

@DavidCotterill: @pubstrat @marthalanefox @directgov a few months back the figures were 80k job searches a month from iPhone. Small, but growing…

We seem to be back with the question of whether government should be dabbling with minority interest technology at all. I wrote quite a lot about that in two posts last August - Apps for Elephants and More on Apps for Elephants – and I am not going to go over that ground again. But I think this graph and the challenge implied by Martha Lane Fox’s tweet encapsulate one aspect of that debate very neatly. In essence, the question is whether we should pay more attention to the fact that the absolute figure is still very low, or to the fact that it is growing so rapidly?

There is no inherently right answer to that, no simple rule which automatically determines the right answer. I think government should be very cautious about spending time and money developing at the purely experimental end of the scale. But that’s not where the mobile internet is any more, and it seems pretty clear that we have got to the stage where we should pay serious attention to its rate of growth.

And in the meantime, if you are on the move and looking for a job, you can get the Jobcentre Plus app for iphone/pod/pad or in the android market.