Earlier today Andy tweeted:

No train journey is complete without strangers wanting to play with my iPad.

Quickly followed by:

If you don’t know how to use an iPad, you’re probably still figuring out how soup works.

I can only assume that the second tweet came about due to one of the aforementioned strangers having a tough time picking up the UI.

Bearing in mind that the iOS UI is regarded as the finest in the world, it would be reasonable to junp to the conclusion that the nameless stranger was, in fact in the business of eating soup with chopsticks. I mean, it’s simple right? Touch what you want to use and hit the home key to go back. Easy.

Or is it? Let’s not forget that this kind of rich, intuitive touch UI is still very much in its infancy and there are precious few, the likes of Apple and HTC that have come anywhere near getting it right. The market is still flooded with inferior, complicated touch and button based UIs. With this in mind the issue becomes a lot less black and white. Allow me to illustrate. I’ve handed my iPhone to a number of friends and family members who I would never think of as stupid. Some of them are even fairly competent when it comes to technology and more than a few of them have stuttered or struggled in its initial use. Interestingly, the constant with all of these people is that they owned older or inferior mobile phones with complicated button based UIs.

This got me thinking, it’s probably not the people being stupid, more a case of them being conditioned, over time to use mobile devices via complex key combinations and menus within menus within menus. When handed a device where carrying out a task is as simple as touching the icon it is totally understandable that it would appear alien to them. After all we only regard things as intuitive if our past experiences with similar things condition us to have compatible expectations. Not everyone has used a touch enabled phone before. As such, however slight, there is still a learning curve. And let’s not forget; this is just with mobile phones. There are many similarities between an old Nokia and an iPhone (the way you hold it and use your fingers and thumbs to type, for example.) An iPad is a totally new way of computing. No desktop, laptop or Netbook has worked quite like an iPad before and as such no one will have any subconscious expectations.

We need to apply this thinking when crafting UIs for anything from a simple brochure site to a fully featured complex web application. What might seem like second nature to us will be perceived and picked up differently by others depending on their experiences with similar things in the past. We need to be patient and sympathetic towards those who are not as fast to pick up a UI as we are. Moreover we must constantly think of them when we make things. Failure to do so will always come at the cost of the end user.

I had to rack my brains and do some serious internet combing to find model numbers and pictures of them all but I think I’ve documented them fairly well. So have a read… if you’re a total nerd like me.

Motorola AM3180 – Vodafone

Everyone remembers the first phone they ever had and I’m no exception. This unwieldy heavy beast made the pocket of my school trousers bulge when I was in year 11 (1999). It was one of the earliest PAYG handsets and typical of its time was very light on features. Alas it did all the jobs it was meant to do (calls and texts) perfectly well.

I was the only one I knew at that time with a Motorola. Cool when you consider that around this time the company was releasing its game-changing Star-Tac line of clam shell phones and the world was going mad for them. And so what if someone didn’t appreciate it. You could throw it at them for a quick hospitalisation.

Pros: Street cred, handy weapon.
Cons: Big, heavy, devoid of features

Sony CMD J6 – Vodafone

I got this sweet baby in my first year of college and kept it for the whole duration of my A Levels (1999-2001). Its sleek, lightweight design and refreshingly different, jog dial based UI made it stand out to me. At a time when the “cool kids” all had blocky, bland old Nokias I felt like a champion of good design.

It was really well built being Sony and was packed with decent features such as the newly emerging WAP and great sounding ring tones. Sadly the talk-time battery life was a bit of a let down, flat-lining around the 3 hour mark. For its time the J6 had a very high resolution display, albeit still monochrome. After pixelated green/black WAP porn sites lost their novelty factor, however the J6 didn’t offer much in the way of fun. Games were limited and a bit pants.

Pros: Compact, sleek, light, good UI, good build quality
Cons: Low talk-time battery life, poor games

Nokia 6510 – O2

This miniscule little phone was my first contract phone and also my first Nokia. Not only that, it was the smallest handset I’ve ever owned. Based loosely on the iconic 8210, the 6510 was geared more towards the executive market with its non-offensive colours and blue back-light instead of the usual green or white. What was also pretty awesome was that the LEDs behind the keypad were stupidly bright so you could pop the cover off and have a pretty sweet flashlight.

The 6510 sported the same great Nokia UI that had become famous with phones like the classic 3210 and games like snake and free cell were all there too. Where it fell short, however was with its lack of modern features such as polyphonic ring tones. These features were just starting to appear on phones released around the same time and would have been more than welcome on the 6510.

Pros: Small, light, executive look, great UI, doubles as flashlight
Cons: A bit light on cool features

Nokia 6600 – O2

Ah, my first “smartphone”. To this day I still love this phone and consider it to be one of my favourite nokia designs of all time. The 6600 was one of Nokias first widely adopted S60 camera phones, mainly because of its compact, stylish design and wealth of clever features such as video recording out of the box.

Although the design was lovely, the build quality left a little to be desired. The fit and finish was a little bit crappy and dirt worked its way into the seams and onto the screen. Not a huge deal but it did start to piss me off. Also, the series 60 OS, still in relative infancy was pretty buggy and the phone seemed to crash more than it should.

Pros: It sure was a looker, camera with video
Cons; Poor build quality, Buggy OS

Nokia 3230 – O2

I traded in my 6600 for something similar in features but smaller and with a better camera. The 3230 had a nice part-aluminium case and a modern screen orientated design. It ran S60 again but featured a supposed faster processor and more memory.

The reality of this phone was a nightmare. It was one of the slowest phones I’ve ever had the misfortune of using and it crashed like every 5 minutes. It took 20-30 seconds to capture a photo and the screen became caked in pocket dust inside 48 hours. No interchangeable covers meant that you had to dismantle the phone to get this crap out. 3-4 times a week.

One cool thing about this phone though, was the games. It came with a rally game and the first augmented reality app I’d ever seen in the form of a space invaders type game that used the camera to make an image for the background.

Pros: Kinda cool games
Cons: Slow, buggy, crappy fit and finish resulting in screen dust

Nokia 6310i – Orange

Now I didn’t actually own this phone, it was given to me as a work phone to use when I was on callout. It was a strictly business, function over fashion handset with no colour screen, no camera and a basic design.

That’s not to say it was a bad phone, far from it. The battery life was bordering on supernatural. I’d regularly exceed 2 weeks of standby time on a single charge. Also, everything about it was super-robust. It was built tough, the OS never crashed and it had one of the most stable Bluetooth implementations I’ve ever seen.

Pros: Massive batter life, good build quality, stable software
Cons: Only very basic features

Nokia N80 – Orange

After suffering the horrible 3230 for a year I looked for a phone that actually delivered on its promises. One of the original lineup of Nokia’s N Series, the N80 boasted 3G, 2 cameras including an unheard of 3 megapixel beast in the back and a beautiful high res screen.

Aside from a few minor crashes and a slightly cheap feel to the slide action this phone was a belter. The OS was stable, the UI was really nice and the camera took surprisingly crisp photos. The battery life was not the best but I’d regularly get 3-4 days out of a charge which is all I could really ever need. I liked this phone so much that I kept it for longer than my minimum contract.

The only thing that pissed me off was the fact that a beautiful all black version was released a few months after I got my silver one.

Pros: Cutting edge features (for the time), high res screen, fast and stable OS
Cons: Cheap feel to the slide action, underwhelming battery life

Nokia 6500 Slide – Orange

I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t choose this phone because of its features. The main reason I got this phone was because Orange gave me an iPod touch for free. On paper the phone was an upgrade… it had similar features to my N80 but they were all slightly improved. The camera shot the same resolution but Carl Zeiss optics made the images way clearer. The phone was built better, was smaller and the slide action felt reassuringly solid. So solid in fact that the phone was actually notably heavier than the N80.

It was a looker, too. Gloss black and brushed stainless steel made it look and feel really nice.

The downside to this phone was the UI. It lacked the intuitive simplicity that the N80 had and certain parts looked jagged and unfinished. Using the phone just wasn’t as pleasurable as it had been with the N80. I don’t regret having it though; the iPod touch made my mind up about what the next phone I bought would be.

Pros: Solid build, good camera
Cons: Nasty UI, heavy

Apple iPhone 3GS 16GB – O2

This brings us up to date. The phone I currently have is the iPhone 3GS. I gave the previous two versions of the iPhone a miss because, although they were good phones, they lacked some pretty fundamental features such as 3G and video capture. When the 3GS was launched with video, improvd camera with tap-to-focus and improved GPS with the added compass I only had a few months left on my 6500 contract so come December I got myself one.

Quite simply the best phone I’ve ever owned, the iPhone takes smartphone power and makes it easier to use than any other device on the market. Tens of thousands of apps mean that each phone is unique to the requirements of the user but the cutting edge UI means that the ease-of-use never suffers. And with each hardware and software release, the iphone just keeps getting better.

Pros: Best UI on earth, unparalleled app market, shaped the landscape for future mobile devices
Cons: Hard to name any but the battery life is pretty bad and the lack of flash *can* be annoying.

The timeline.

So there you have it. It’s not many phones by any means but I think it tells a story. What are your favourite/least favourite phones. What have you got now?

Having the app installed is no more handy than having a clubcard attached to your keys, in fact the process of finding the app, tapping it and waiting for it to load makes it marginally less handy. The beauty of smartphones is that they are two-way media. You can both send and receive information on the fly. Because of this, Tesco could, and should, implement the following features:

1. The ability to check your points balance from the app. EDIT: Literally the day after I posted this, Tesco released version 2.1 of the app that now allows the user to check points balance.
2. Special, app only offers and coupons delivered to the screen in the form of scannable barcodes.
3. The ability for customers to redeem their points balance in the form of a clubcard voucher on the screen.
4. The ability to pass points vouchers directly from the app to the tesco online store. (may only be possible in iPhone OS 4. I’m no expert)

These features, although not groundbreaking, would take a half decent app and make it outstanding. Chances are it would be fairly expensive to implement the infrastructure for these features but once it’s in place there’s no reason it has to be limited to iPhone users. Android and Windows mobile could have apps and even a simple mobile site could provide the same functionality to other phones. Low end phone users could even have the info and offer codes texted to them.

Although I’ve singled out Tesco, any outlet with a loyalty card system could jump on this bandwagon and improve the experience for all customers. So bloody get on with it!

DIBI, an acronym for “Design it, Build it” is a two-track conference meaning that there was one schedule for design talks (the ones I attended) and another for development talks with the option to move between tracks if you so wished.

Let me say, right from the off that the event was just excellent! Gavin Elliott and the team did an insanely great job of putting it together, not just in terms of the speaker line-up, which was superb but all the extras too. We were provided food, drink and stationary in the form of a field notes notebook not to mention a great after party with a free bar and free pizza. I heard from many people who had been to the likes of FOWD and dConstruct that DIBI blew them out of the water in terms of talks, atmosphere, professionalism and of course price and value.

The Talks

These were all great. The organisers couldn’t have got together a more wonderful group of speakers. Adii, Sarah Parmenter, Tim Van Damme, Simon Collison, Dan Rubin and Andy Clarke all gave inspiring, in some cases surprisingly helpful talks about a variety of web design issues from how to involve design in your startup from day one all the way through to taking a “hardboiled” approach to browser and device support.

I found all of the talks to be relevant but I did come away with some personal highlights. Simon Collison’s unparalleled obsession with design theory was beyond inspiring. He took a single dot and through manipulating it in various ways explored how the most basic shapes or colours can communicate so much more than what most would believe. I also found myself hugely surprised at how useful I found Sarah Parmenter’s talk about the principles of iPhone UI design. I learned things about Apple’s UI guidelines and app store entry requirements than I ever thought existed.

My favourite talk of the day, though had to be Hardboiled Web Design with Andy Clarke. I’ve always been a fan of his direct, uncompromising approach to browser support and his ethos of build for the best browser then strip back layers of eye candy accordingly for the older ones. In that respect, his talk didn’t really cover anything new but what it did push, and very well, was the “why” in all of this. He spoke about how when it comes to users, ignorance is bliss and that we should all wake up to the fact that most clients don’t even know what a browser is, let alone know that there are many available. As long as what they see in the browser is appropriate for purpose, they’ll enjoy the eye candy if their browser supports it and won’t miss it if they’re running IE it doesn’t. I certainly left inspired to push the boundaries in my next project and also to make Safari my default browser.

The Extra Bits

Like I mentioned before the organisers made sure everyone was well looked after. We all got field notes notebooks, as much coffee and juice as we wanted and ice cream and free Red Bull in the afternoon. On top of this, lunch was thrown in as well. Parking? Yeah they made sure it only cost me £3 for the whole day. Blam!

DIBI provided attendees with not one but two parties and although I didn’t make the first one I’m told it was excellent. The after party with open bar and free pizza was nothing short of legendary. The venue was a little hot and a little cramped but I’d be a dick if I said that made a difference. There was poker, roulette and blackjack tables (all playing for funny money, of course) and of course it was an excellent opportunity to meet great people and put faces to @names.

These guys clearly believe that it’s the little things that make a big difference.

Shout Outs.

Well here’s where I name drop a little bit. Firstly, a massive virtual pat on the back to Gavin Elliott and the team for pulling off an event with such gloss and precision. You’d think they’d been doing it for years. Now on to the excellent people I met. Ash Baxter, Paul Stanton, Chris Spooner, Amy Mahon, John O’Nolan, Adii (and the rest of the WooTeam) David Appleyard, Sam Brown, Jack Osborne, Sean Hood, Emma Persky, Hector Simpson, Andrzej Kała, and so many others who I’m struggling to name as my brain reached capacity about 7pm, you guys were great too.

Next year? Oh hell yeah!

Case in point, the one where the woman starts by saying “So you receive an email that looks like it’s from your bank, you click on it…” Woah, woah WOAH!! What the fuck!? So now you’re saying “it’s fine to be a complete fucking idiot, your browser will stop all the nasty Internet scammers from running a train on your bank account”?? Jee, thanks for the mixed messages there Microsoft. One minute your software is so paranoid you can’t even run a program without it freaking out like Rainman at the airport and the next you’re saying, “you know what, that message from ‘your bank’… go ahead and click on it, it’s all fine”.

There’s another one where the woman (sexist overtones?) starts by saying “So you click to get this free download and…” Now I admit that it’s less moronic to be duped by a dodgy site offering wallpapers and screen-savers than it is to get caught on a phisherman’s hook but still you have to be pretty dim-witted to fall victim to either.

The really worrying thing is that the adverts are probably pretty effective. People are probably now thinking “it’s okay I’m using that there Internet Explorer, I’m safe online because the man on the TV says so.” when there’s a very real chance that they aren’t even running the latest version and an even realer (more real?) chance that they have out-of-date or no antivirus solution installed. Let’s not forget that IE8 is still an unconscionably awful browser that EIGHT VRSIONS IN still can’t render a rounded corner or a fucking shadow!

Seriously, Microsoft. Pull your heads out of your arses and get real! It’s not like you make any money from IE so why put all that money into bullshit advertising. Do what other vendors do and put the money into developing great standards support and actually making websites look good. If you still feel the need to parade a bunch of over-happy fuck-wits on the TV why not spend 8 seconds with one saying “So you receive an email that looks like it’s from your bank. You should delete it immediately as 99 times out of 100 it’ll be a virus or a scam. If your bank really want to give something to you, they’ll use the post.”

/sigh. Rant over. Next: “Windows 7 was NOT your fucking idea, cocknose. And even if it was, that’s not something to be proud of! Now get back on your fucking treadmill!”

What the hell kind of book would you write!? I hear you ask. You see, I’m a cynical fucker. I make observations of the world’s shortcomings that people with a normal brain wouldn’t notice or ever care about. In a way I’m the bitter old bastard that yells at kids for doing something that affects him in no way what so ever. I see problems and annoyances where others don’t. So the “book” would be a sort of Clarksonesque indictment of the world as I see it. I think I’d split it up into chapters based on what I was talking about (the web, TV, movies, people etc.) however, seeing as it will more than likely be a website, I’m thinking of doing something along the lines of an art-directed blog. Sort of like how Sam Hardacre and Greg Wood and Jason Santa Maria do it with each “article” being styled in such a way that it would compliment the theme and subject.

Exactly how I’d execute it is still up for debate. I don’t intend on having comments open so maybe I could hard code the lot. That, however would present the problem of it requiring quite a lot of tinkering each time I posted a new page. Ollie Kavanagh’s Hip Hop Quoted site seems to do exactly what I’m after and it’s built on WordPress (win) but what that dude’s development skills make me look proper retarded. It’s all a learning curve, though and I think I’ll get there one way or the other. Maybe this will help… If you have any resources to share or tips that will help me cut my art direction teeth then please get in touch.

As for web standards, the site will be highly experimental. It will take much inspiration from the Sam Brown school of thought and will include fancy CSS3, HTML5 and browser specific pretties that mean it will not look the same in every browser. (Read: if you use IE you’ll probably be shit outta luck.)

There is no signing up, no lengthly login procedures and no bullshit. You land on a page to choose your channel and once you do that, the QuickTime player loads and you’re watching (nearly) live TV. You can, like with all websites, add a link to your home screen and use it like an app (see above next to the iPlayer). Obviously I’ve only tested it over Wi-Fi (I only have an iPod Touch) but I hear on good authority that, provided you have a decent 3G signal you shouldn’t have much of a problem viewing on the go.

The picture and sound quality are great with only Channel 4 and E4 giving me audio issues (possibly encrypted, or copyright issue) and it behaves like any other video you watch. you can view it in landscape or portrait and double tapping will toggle full screen/wide screen cropping. So all in all this little service is very very cool. At the very least it’ll mean I’ll never miss Bargain Hunt again!

EDIT: After initially broadcasting with no sound, Channel 4 and E4 both regained full audio later in the afternoon.

Here’s the quote that Dennis used in his article. It’s from former chief of Sony Pictures, Peter Gruber (Maybe he’s pissed about John McClane killing his two brothers):

“You look around the theatre and can see the glow, not on people’s faces from watching the movie, but on their chins – from the BlackBerrys and iPhones. They are immediately telling their friends whether it’s worth their time. And the answer to that, more often than not, seems to be no.”

First, let’s look at the difference between this insta-publicity and run of the mill movie reviews. When I read a movie review in a newspaper or magazine I actively try to take it with a small pinch of salt. Movies, as with any art form, are subjective. A movie I may absolutely love, may get a total pasting by a professional critic, or vice versa. I don’t take this same pinch of salt with opinions on Twitter. The people I follow are my friends. We share interests. Many of them, I know for a fact, have a near identical taste in movies to me so when they say a movie sucks or a movie is outstanding, I believe them. I didn’t see X-Men Origins: Wolverine at the cinema, in part because my Twitter friends had given it such a monumental kicking. Of course this pattern isn’t always true (I liked Transformers 2 where many of my Tweeps hated it) but it does tend to bear more fruit than heeding the opinions of press critics.

So if this holds true for the rest of the twitterverse then you can kind of see why these Hollywood hot-shots are starting to sweat. In this time of economic gloom the last thing they need is another reason for people not to go and see their latest release.

But I think this is the wrong view, a sort of glass-half-empty kind of view. I actually think that this could be a very good thing for modern cinema. Studios have been given an unfathomable resource from which to draw constructive criticism. They can see, in real terms, what the general public think of their movies, without waffle and without pretense. If that isn’t something that can guide studios toward making better movies I don’t know what is! Let’s not forget that good things get posted too, Mr. Gruber. Look at the trending topic #district9 for example. Christ, Twitter loves that movie! Let us not also overlook that in the period approaching the release date, assuming you’ve marketed the thing right, Twitter will be awash with eager anticipation (see Avatar).

If anyone should be sweating, and brushing up their CVs it should be the media critics. Twitter is having enough of an impact to get Hollywood execs fidgeting in their chairs which is more than can be said for even the most highly thought of film critics, these days. I mean, who are you going to trust more; your circle of friends or some pretentious sandal wearing hippy with a masters in journalism and a penchant for foreign period dramas that anyone except for James William Bottomtooth would find insufferable?

Come on, Hollywood. Embrace this gift that has been given to you, don’t be frightened of it. Let it be your muse, your taskmaster, your key to getting butts in seats and dollars in your pockets.

I work in IT support. I see it every day. Other people I know in IT support see it too, some to a worse degree than me. I know people who have more than adequate IT skills who are either out of work or stuck in a job far below their station. But who is to blame? Well it’s not the computer illiterate, oh no. I accept that some people will never be able to use a computer. I suck at sports. I always have and I always will. It’s the companies that are to blame here. So many companies only consider computer literacy as an afterthought when hiring new staff which begs the question; if they had run some kind of computer literacy test prior to hiring people how much more productive would the staff and, in turn, the company be? I would wager a noticeable amount.

There needs to be some sort of  international standard computer literacy test that companies can use to test potential employees. I’m not talking about difficult stuff here. I mean the basics. It wouldn’t be a hard thing to impliment either. At the time of the second interview your applicant would sit down at a computer and carry out a series of pre-determined tasks under the watchful eye of a manager and perhaps, if the company can spare them, a member of the IT department. Of course the manager of the potential employee’s department would be able to make the final call but the information provided by the test and the official opinion of the IT department would give a vital insight into the person’s potential productivity.

Test tasks could be as simple as the following:

• Correctly start up, log on to and shut down the computer.
• Copy and paste a file into a pre-determined folder. Repeat with multiple files.
• Re-name a file in a pre-determined folder.
• Minimise, maximise and re-size a window.
• Save a document from a Microsoft Office application into a pre-determined folder and Save another copy with a different name somewhere else. (Demonstrating an understanding of “Save” and “Save as…” )
• Print a Microsoft Office document to a pre-determined printer (may or may not be the default printer).
• Send an e-mail with an attachment.
• Open a web browser and navigate to a pre-determined website.
• Copy and paste text into a document or e-mail.
• Switch between open applications.
• Connect to a wireless network (if this will be a common task in the applicant’s role, i.e if they are going to be a mobile/laptop user)
• Identify a USB port.

It should take no longer than 10 minutes to run through that test but the insight it will provide will be invaluable. All the tasks in that list are things the average 12 year old would be able to do without much of a problem and they can be applied to either PC or Mac. It’s very much a win/win scenario. People with good IT skills will be able to get the jobs they deserve and companies will get efficient, productive staff. Changes or advances in the IT infrastructure would be a lot less painful and would take less time. IT departments would be free to concentrate on their core responsibilities rather than endure hours of hand-holding.

Discuss.