I Love My Car. For Now.

I keep forgetting my goal to write here more often. Oops. It's especially hard when there are so many things in the world to talk about (this of course is what makes design so necessary and incredible, but I've lost track of so many little things I've observed. I really need to start writing this down).

My car is a beautiful Toyota RAV4. I'm very fond of my car, it's sentimental to me because of all the trips I've taken in it with my parents and the little things that remind me of home. But I've found myself guiltily checking out other cars in the past year or so. It's not that I'm particularly a car person, but it's the fact that cars have been evolving much like all sectors of technology. When I saw first saw pictures of the Ford Focus and then recently the Santa Fe, I got the sudden itch to find a Ford dealer.

Touch interfaces in cars. Who knew that would happen a decade ago?

My car is very much not tappable. I have knobs, buttons, and toggles all over to navigate my heating and sound systems - they're eve on the steering wheel so I can adjust the volume and change the radio without taking my eyes off the road. Coming back to my car to fiddle with the cords and buttons of the physical world is strange.

I'm pretty okay with that though. I haven't really experienced touch screens as a driver much, but my mom's car has a pretty rudimentary touch screen. I've tried manipulating it (safely) and the fact is that whether or not your controls are manual or touchscreen, there's a whole realm of interface design left for cars.

Being in healthcare has taught me one fundamental thing: Do everything you can to not kill people. Follow good design, yes, but an okay design that doesn't cause potentially life threatening mistakes is far preferred to a great design that could go south (best case scenario is that we design something excellent that also avoid endangering patients). Car designers have this same problem I think; whether the car has touch capability or not, that primary goal of keeping people out of danger is still there. Looking away to fiddle with a part of the car is still a distraction.

There is voice recognition, yes, but the way that my car's voice navigation is designed is a rudimentary long list of commands that the user has to sort through to get to where they want to go. From an interaction perspective, it should be simple to say "Play <Playlist Name> on repeat". There is headway being made in that direction with iOS's Siri and the voice recognition capability on Android. I wouldn't be surprised if there was exploration into being able to plug your phone directly into a car system and have it power most (if not all) of the entertainment system. My One X has a car mode, but I currently stick it into a cupholder while I'm driving, so it's a little lost on me. That said, it's a pretty small set of tap targets while driving. I'm better off scrambling for the dials of my car.

People pictured flying cars in the future long ago. Me, I picture cars pretty much as they are today, but with the chance to really innovate in interaction beyond touch. A little strange for someone who works in mobile which is all about touch interaction, but I think it's an amazing challenge. So when I think about that moment far in the future where I'm trading in my RAV4 for some shiny new car, I hope that it's something that doesn't even involve touch - what if I could wave my hand to skip to my other favorite radio station? Could gesture based interaction work as a viable alternative to manual/touch? Pairing it with voice could be interesting. I saw some really amazing prototypes done by some of the designers I've worked with previously, and while testing it would be a little precarious, it opens a new door for designing interfaces in cars.

For now? I'm good with fiddling with 3D dials and buttons if at all I'm messing with my system. Tapping on a screen has probably evolved from what it was when my mother bought her car, but at the end of the day after breaking mobile applications, it's nice to feel the physical feedback of a pushed button. Call it a crazy personal preference.

Ask me about it again when I buy another car.

Two Months with a One X

I was an early adopter of Windows Phone 7 with the Samsung Focus (I would have gotten an HTC device if I could have, but I wasn't impressed with the HTC Surround, AT&T's only HTC device running WP7), and by the time I was done with it the poor device had been dropped and thrown around and put through the paces of a power user adjusting to the growing pains of a fresh product. I like Metro quite a lot; as annoyed as I was with it as time went on, it is a beautiful visual style and I think that once Microsoft has taken the next two or three product cycles to refine it that it will definitely attract enough users away from the aged feel of iOS and developers to build a robust enough app store to seal the deal. Needless to say, I was very happy to go back to Android - ICS is much more appealing  visually than Froyo, and it was time to try something new. I say new only because the last time I was on Android was on the developer G1 waaaay back in 2009 when Android was first released. Being a big fan of HTC, I was so glad that AT&T finally announced the One X and got it when my upgrade was available. I call my beauty Trinity.

My overall verdict? I'm pretty happy, but not as happy as I wish I was.

Here's what I really use my phone for:

• Music: I use Spotify, Last.FM, and Google Play daily. Whether I'm at the gym or driving to work, I'm relying on Trinity to blast my tunes.
• Email: Work and personal get pushed to Trinity so I can keep up with the latest bug fixes and keep an eye on my personal account for any messages from my dad and other important people.
• Browsing: I was surprised to find that this is the thing I do most on the phone. During the work day, I find articles that I want to read, so I push it to Trinity using the Chrome to Phone extension to read it later. Makes waiting go much slower. 
• Gaming: Temple Run and Fruit Ninja are my games of choice when I'm bored, but this is more like a secondary task.

I can do everything I want, but I'm not happy with my phone. In terms of the hardware, my only complaint is the lack of a dedicated hardware camera button - it takes several steps to actually take a picture on Trinity (unlock phone, tap on camera app, take the picture), and if there's a better way, I have yet to discover it. Admittedly, I do like the fact that my camera doesn't sometimes get activated in my pocket the way my Samsung Focus used to do.

But the software...

WebOS has forever ruined all notification systems for me. Jellybean's notifications might come close to it (I'll have to confirm this since Trinity is still on ICS), but the simplicity of webOS notifications in the lock screen and while the phone is in use is just beautiful. Windows Phone's lock screen notifications weren't as useful since they were icons, but displaying my next meeting and the music player are above and beyond Sense's implementation.

I like Android overall. Any apps I have found on the Apple App Store have mostly been available on Google Play. But I am still left feeling dissatisfied with my phone, something I chalk up to HTC's skinning of Android. Were I a braver person I'd root the device and push stock Android on there, but I seem to be very good at screwing up things like that. So for now, I'll keep using Trinity while secretly lusting after the Galaxy Nexus and its pure Jellybean experience. 

No Tuition? Sweet!

One of my personal goals in the post-college world was to continue to my education in some way, both for programming and design. Previously, I would simply search for a tutorial on the topic in mind and follow it, but I've come across a few different sites that specialize in education. There exist a lot of online programming education websites, each with their own style, but they all have one thing in common: it's on the user to drive their education.

So here's what I used:

1. Lynda.com (www.lynda.com) - a paid subscription based site that is essentially a library of videos for a large variety of subjects, not just programming. Depending on your subscription, you can access different resources such as source files to follow along with the videos.
2. Code School (www.codeschool.com) - a freemium site that specializes in programming languages. A lot of their introductory courses are free, and they operate in a achievement/gaming model - you can earn badges for completing courses and get discounts on their intermediate courses if you complete courses. 
3. Codecademy (www.codecademy.com) - a currently free site that, like Code School, gives you badges as achievements for courses. They're currently building out their site.
4. Coursera (www.coursera.com) - a free site that hosts classes from multiple universities online.

One that I wish I could have used was Team Treehouse (www.teamtreehouse.com) because of their beautiful visual design, but they are completely subscription based. But the four I used kept me plenty occupied

We'll start with Lynda, the first site that I used. Lynda reminded me a lot of some of my college lectures - some of the courses were a mix of Powerpoint presentation recordings and demos of the product/code in action. I found myself taking notes on the side and pausing the video at multiple points to digest what I had just learned. But I didn't quite connect with the material as well - rewinding and rewatching portions of the video turned out to be a much more common task than I expected (or perhaps I'm just not the brightest bulb in the box...). Getting around the site itself was pretty okay, but the big problem with Lynda for me was that I just wasn't engaged with the video.

Code School and Codecademy on the other hand were definitely more entertaining. Code School's Rails for Zombies is the course I started doing, and it was far more interesting than just watching videos. But I found that what really drew me to both these sites was the hands on interactive exercises. I found that I retained a lot more information and was able to connect it to what I already knew (granted, I was doing exercises in Javascript which I'd had some experience with, so I'll have to retest again with some of Codecademy's new exercises available for beta testers).

Finally, there's Coursera. Like Lynda, it relied heavily on videos, but I felt like I was actually back in school - the course I took was HCI from Stanford. It was a great refresher course, and I definitely learned a lot of new things. What was interesting was keeping up with the homework and quizzes, especially the peer grading. It forced the students to go through an exercise where they learned what a good and bad homework sample looked like so that when they went back to review their own assignment, they would be (in theory) honest about their self evaluations and fair in evaluating others.

Exploring these sites was a great exercise in user experience, but it also taught me about myself. My learning style was refined along the way, and I found that there were things that worked for me much more. There are many different interpretations of online education, but it's a field that's still evolving as technology keeps growing and more classes become less about the traditional desk and chairs and more about having a decent Internet connection. In the end, I think that the site that worked best for me was Codecademy - the interactive exercises are what did it for me along with the site's clean design and easy learning curve. I highly recommend all four sites though - what worked for me may not work for you though.

The Awkward Record Scratch

I love music. I can't go a day without it - my current addiction is Tron: Legacy from Daft Punk. Much like my music evolved, my music programs have changed. Here's a history of what I use*:

Kinda complicated, huh?

When I was in high school, I started off with iTunes and YouTube, and it's evolved over the years. Part of that is the evolution in the technology I use - iTunes became pretty entrenched in my music system due to syncing with my iPods. YouTube was the way I discovered new music, but now, there are many ways to discover it.

With this, my library of music has become extremely fragmented. It lives locally and in the cloud, but there's no way to access all of it at once.

A lot of it has to do with the basic positioning of each program:

• Last.FM - It's a radio station with social underpinnings - a good portion of programs out there allow you to scrobble to Last.FM, thus building your library there. Unfortunately, it's luck of the draw on your radio - you can't access a song directly. 
• Grooveshark - Store your music online via the cloud - you could potentially recreate your entire library onto Grooveshark and access it via the web, your desktop, and your smartphone. The cons here is that Android and iOS do not have *sanctioned* Grooveshark applications and Grooveshark doesn't have every song . 
• Spotify - Spotify allows you to supplement your library with licensed offerings and provides an alternative music management system 
• YouTube - it's a video service. Yes, this includes music videos, but YouTube's focus is on social sharing. Plus... I'm not entirely sure these videos are legal....

The focus that each program accomplishes is fairly different from each other - at the core, a user can listen to music, but each program is now focused on answering 'what else can you do with music players?'. 

I started this post a while ago, so while this was percolating, Google Music came out of beta. Like iTunes, Google Music will lock you (more) into Google's ecosystem, which fits into the company's strategy. This is why it will be hard to make a unified experience for your music - in creating this experience, you create an escape from using the music services directly. 

Of the services that I use, Spotify comes the closest to what I want - it's a free cross-platform service and I can import almost all my music to varying degrees of difficulty (easy from iTunes, headache inducing from Grooveshark). I don't have to spend money on a Zune Pass, more space from Google Music, or music from iTunes, but that means I'm dealing with Spotify's UI, which is not perfect. But the question of music 'synergy', to borrow a term from webOS, still remains as a pretty interesting design question, and I hope that I can help solve it some day. There's a lot left to be said, from the possible effect on the music industry to playing nicely with competing companies, but I'll stop here.

*This graphic was created right before I discovered MOG - it should be under the category of 'Not Used Yet'

What's with my title?

Tele - Greek prefix meaning distant
Techno - prefix to indicate words related to technology
philia - Greek suffix for love

In short, hi my name is Sweta and I'm a phone nerd.

My first love is mobile user experience, and in the past few years I've used many mobile platforms. There are experiences that I've loved and some that I've learned from, and all have shaped my thoughts on design.

However, I also have an appreciation for web design and user experience in general. So the point of this is to stop pestering my social networks with 'Gosh, check out this eye bleeding UI' and instead collect my thoughts here.

My current collection of devices as a baseline:

- Phone: HP Veer
- Phone: Samsung Focus (WP7)
- Computer: Dell Vostro (Windows 7)
- Computer: Macbook Pro (OS X Lion - more to follow)
- Tablet: HP Touchpad

Disclaimer: my opinions are mine alone and belong to/reflect the opinions of no one else.

And with that, good morning