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. 

Teletechnophiliac 2.0/Silence Will Fall

It's been a long time since I've written in here, and I realized that the way I was approaching this blog wasn't quite working for me - it ended being less of the spontaneous user experience talk and more of a research-a-topic-and-analyze.

So I'm starting again, and this time I hope I'll be more successful in keeping up with this.

A lot of my devices have changed since I last posted - I'm currently rocking a beautiful HTC One X (I call her Trinity) and have taken quite a liking to the iPad 3 I'm using for my job. The majority of the time I'm actually on one of these devices - the only reason I turn to my Mac is for instant messaging in the evening.

My phone is usually at my side all the time no matter what I'm doing or what device I'm working with, but I've got it on silent all the time since most of the day I'm at work in meetings. This has led to quite a few missed calls from concerned parents, hurried searches around the apartment, and desperate requests to friends to call me so I can locate it.

I wish my phone were smart enough to know when to pipe up and when not to.

Setting sounds is a manual operation on the major mobile OSes, whether it's dedicated hardware buttons or diving into the Settings app and turning the phone on silent. How often do people remember to turn it back on though? People are currently forced to remember that their phone is on silent and to undo it when they're okay with getting audio alerts.

Well then why not make the smartphone 'smarter' and have the user experience seem like the phone can learn when to turn sound on or off? If I'm in a meeting with my boss for example, I probably don't want to know about the text message about my plans for the weekend. It's one of the most common use cases I can think of off the top of my head, but the only way I could see it working is having audio settings as an option in my Calendar events on the phone. In this way, I could tie my phone's silence to a time period.

But that's not the whole picture there: when I take a step back and think about, the first question to ask is "why do people turn their phones on silent?". There are a ton of answers to that boil down to "I'm busy and I can't be interrupted". But there are different things that people are willing to be interrupted for, and what happens when they stop being busy?

Oh the research possibilities.

For the time being, getting my phone to turn the ringer on automatically not baked into my phone, so I'll just have to keep hunting for Trinity and keep trying to remember to turn the ringer on in the evening.

It's Not You, It's Me.

Dear Grooveshark-

A while ago, I wrote a brief blog post about the split music library. While it didn’t delve deeply into the core problem I wanted to address (my bad, I’m hoping this will help to explain what it is I really wanted to get at), the fact remained that I had a problem. My music was everywhere. The way I picture it is like having a very messy closet. I had songs strewn everywhere. I had the same song twice in a few places, and organizing my entire music library feels impossible.

And then I met Spotify.

Don’t get me wrong, Spotify is not perfect. I’m incredibly frustrated with a few things - for example, I have yet to figure out if it’s possible to push my own personal library to any other device that I have Spotify on (I’m guessing it’s not possible). Instead, I found myself having to recreate my library using Spotify’s catalog so I could get to my library elsewhere. Not cool, especially when I’m used to being able to just log into Grooveshark and find everything there.

(Plus, they don’t have Asian Kung Fu Generation)

But the big reason why I’m moving onto Spotify completely is best explained when we take a look at what I really do with my music:

• Listen to a song/playlist: I really like the visualization of the playlist in Grooveshark. It’s nice to know when my playlist ends, but that really matters to me when I’m actively listening to my song or playlist (versus having it on in the background while I do something else), which is pretty rare for me.
• Search for new songs: The way I really discover music is through Last.FM’s recommended radio. When I find a song I really like... unfortunately I check Spotify first. If it’s not there, I check Grooveshark second. This is because Spotify stores the majority of my music (and my personal library if I’m on my home device). Grooveshark is usually better for choices like Japanese music.
• Music organization: I’m a little crazy about organization of my music. The way I view it is this:
• My personal library: this is everything I’ve collected over the years that is stored locally on my device. Some of it I listen to still, some of it collects dust
• The supplements: This is every other song that I have. It doesn’t exist on my device, but it’s associated with an account that I have with either Grooveshark, Last.FM, or Spotify.
• Earworms: my current addictions. They can be either a supplement or in my personal library. I play them over and over.

So that’s the first level of organization. And then there are my playlists. Like my earworms, what I would like for my playlists to do is be able to contain music from both the supplements and my library. Trouble is, I can’t do that on Grooveshark because that would mean having to import my entire library. While having access to everything wherever I go is nice, I’m not sure I want to invest the time on doing that. Spotify on the other hand imported my playlists from iTunes directly, and I was able to add on my songs there. But even that’s not a perfect experience, because the task that I perform the most often is...

• Play music on my phone: About 50-90% of my music consumption is done on my beautiful Samsung Focus. Like Grooveshark, Spotify’s mobile app requires having a paid account, but unfortunately, there isn’t a Grooveshark app on Windows Phone. Actually, the only devices I had a Grooveshark app on were my Palm devices, but that’s another story (sob). I can’t justify paying for both a Spotify and Grooveshark premium account when Spotify fits my mobile needs.

Which brings us to this moment. I’m sorry, Grooveshark, I like you a lot and I like where you’re going, but it’s time for me to move on. I’m trying to unify my music as much as possible and make it accessible to me anywhere and everywhere... that means I have to pick an app that will get me there.

For right now, it’s Spotify.

I’ll be by even after I move over since there’re a few songs left over, but for now... so long.

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.

Dieter Rams Exhibit @ SFMOMA

I had the amazing opportunity to go see the Dieter Rams exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and I can't even begin to describe how amazing the experience was. If you're looking for inspiration of any kind, I highly recommend this exhibit. Prior to going, I would recommend viewing the documentary 'Objectified' - I just discovered it recently and it includes a section on Dieter Rams himself. A lot of today's most popular designers, including Apple's Jonathan Ives, attribute their insights to Dieter Rams in it, and it will give you some pretty good background to the exhibit.

The first thing I saw when I got into the exhibit: a display of some of the furniture he's worked on, and the first thought was "so that's where IKEA got their ideas from". The pieces on display were more than just beautiful, but they were somehow timeless - for pieces that were designed between 1960 and 1970, these were pieces that could fit into today's design.
But the part that resounded with me the most was a room with a display on one side and writing printed all across the wall on the other. The writing on the wall was the Ten Principles of Good Design:

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is honest
6. Good design is unobtrusive
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible

The beauty of these principles is that they apply to the design of most things irregardless of the product you're working on . You can find these themes in every piece of his work - from furniture to software to lighters and vacuums, and I can't tell you how inspiring it was to see. You'll have to come see it for yourself.

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'

I'm a... well, I don't know: Part I

Most folks I've met are firmly in one camp or another when it comes to the never ending debate that is PC vs Mac. I used to be staunchly PC - I grew up with them and my family's choice of poison is Dell. It wasn't until recently when my Dell suddenly refused to charge and I got completely surrounded by Mac people that I even contemplated crossing over. I finally bit the bullet and purchased a 13 inch Macbook Pro which comes with Lion.

Let's just say I'm not so sure about the PC camp anymore.

I've never been one for mice - it's another piece of equipment to carry (tiny, but as a student, I was already lugging around enough stuff). By enabling gestures, the trackpad allows me so much more functionality at the tip of my fingers (literally) than the mouse and PC trackpad combo ever did. While some of my gestures are already keyboard shortcuts, I find it more natural to use the gestures (it might be my webOS background). Unfortunately, the tradeoff here is that I've found the contextual menu harder to get to - with a PC, I got to it with a simple right click or the contextual menu shortcut button that's part of the keyboard. On a Mac however, the equivalent is the two finger tap on the trackpad. This means that I have to press and hold with two fingers with my right hand and navigate with my left through the menu - if I let go, the menu disappears. An alternative I've found is pressing the Command button and then tapping, but this has been inconsistent.

I haven't really put my Mac through its paces yet - the majority of the time, I live on phones, my Touchpad, and my work laptop. Thus, the majority of my software is free downloads from the App Store. This is a big bonus for me, because there's no PC equivalent (yet...). I'm enjoying the apps that live in the status bar mainly - I have 1 click access to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ simply from my status bar. In addition to those, I don't have to hunt around the Internet for applications - my first stop is the App Store, which I found pretty familiar from iOS.

It's slightly unfair to be comparing my four year old Dell with Windows 7 to my Mac because I've lived with my PC longer. The constant concern of it crashing (old hardware + new OS optimized for better hardware specs = frequent BSoD) is still fresh in my mind, and I'm less likely to put up with my very short battery life. However, I find that I still return to my PC sometimes. Old habits die hard, and designers know that an effective product is one that a user can easily assimilate into their routines or methods of performing tasks. My Mac is super effective, but some basic tasks are still easier on the PC for me, such as word processing. I have not purchased any software that is better than the standard Mac option for it, but I have played with Microsoft Office on a Mac, and MS Office is much better as an experience on PCs (go figure).

All in all, I highly doubt I will ever return to a PC given a choice. I admit to wanting to throw my work PC out a window when I try to do a gesture on the trackpad. But I'm not entirely a Mac either.

I guess that makes me a fence straddler for now.