How to Run Into Fit Women

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Sabin Speiser

People out running in Copenhagen

When I was younger, I’d go running with my girlfriend in the park. When I chose our route, I would mix in hills (they are hard to avoid), and maybe stretch the distance a bit. She was a runner, but hated running hills, and often took the difficulty of my chosen route personally, as if I was tricking her. There were times when she was downright pissed. I would say, “I didn’t put that hill there.” That went over like a lead balloon.

As a solution, we decided to map our routes together. So, we measured the distance and mapped the route the old-fashioned way. We’d take the car to the top of the Golden Gate Park. Watching the odometer, we’d drive to the one mile point, get out of the car and mark a line on the road in chalk. We’d continue marking the miles off all the way to the beach and back up. In less than a week, all the chalk marks would be gone. Street sweeping, overspray from the sprinklers and foot traffic would wipe it all away. Even spray paint didn’t last more than a couple of weeks. We also tried noting landmarks like a tree or a no parking sign that corresponded with the mile distances, but these things changed as well.

Now I have my choice of run tracker apps to use for this purpose. They not only mark the distance, but the overall time, lap time, elevation and even the playlist you listen to. I have installed a bunch. On my android phone, I have endomondo, runkeeper, immapmyfitness, google tracks, runstar, recordbeater, and rhythmrunner. I’ve tried each of them at least once. They all purport to track your run and give you precise records of your performance.

That’s the theory. GPS on my Droid X is a little dodgy, however. Sometimes all I have to do is to turn the GPS off and back on again. Other times I have to turn off the whole phone. Once I’ve gone through the reboot cycle and the phone has my GPS position. I can start and do the run.

Phones are amazing. They have all the sensors in them to track and respond to your location speed, cadence and the processing power to be an excellent sports tracker. Except for one thing, that capacitance touch screen is really not good. First, when you are running, it is easy to hit the wrong button or part of the screen. You are bouncing up and down, glancing away to make sure you don’t run into anything, and you are maybe a little short on breath. The odds of hitting the wrong button are pretty high. The wrong button may end your workout prematurely, pause your workout so you end up not recording the last mile that you ran, or call your boss. That’s not the worst part. Sweat. Touch screens don’t work so well when they are wet. One drop of sweat on the screen and the phone goes in paroxysm, randomly triggering buttons, bouncing around screens and not responding to touches. The fit is irreversible. The only cure is to wipe the sweat off the screen and reboot. This messes up my running rhythm, and it happens with every running app. This may have skewed my opinion of some of them.

Regardless, I’m sticking with endomondo. The interface is really good. I can’t remember if I had to login the first time or not. But now I just hit start and run. It tells you when you hit the mile laps and your pace. You can pause anytime and it stops adding to your time. You resume and it picks up where you left off without penalizing you for the time off. You can automatically have it pause when you stop moving. I turned this off because my cranky GPS, but I like the idea. Although it records your workouts on your phone including the route maps, there are a whole bunch of other goodies on the website. You can see all your workouts, participate in distance and speed challenges and find other runners in your area.

There may be 6 million users worldwide, but they aren’t in San Francisco. That’s disappointing, because the social features on the website are awesome. You can see the profiles, pics, routes and workouts of other people in your area (should they choose to share their information). You can view who is running or cycling right now and track their progress in real-time. Of all the location-based apps, this one is delivers tremendous functionality. Just for kicks, I picked a place with a lot of users, Copenhagen to see who was doing what. There were at least 50 people running or cycling around. If you’re single, you could scan for attractive fitness buffs to coincidentally run into on the path.

And, to really enjoy the benefits of these apps, there needs to be a solution to the sweat problem. My new invention idea for this is the Running Rag. It is a square of super-absorbent fabric that you clip to your running gear. When you want to mess with your phone to skip a song, take a look at your vitals, or see which single prospect is coming your way, you wipe your forehead and hands on it to keep any moisture from messing up your screen. It becomes a fashion statement, your Running Rag. There is ample precedent. Golf towels are ubiquitous and carry the same branding opportunities. Think on it.

Master Widget

Aside

With powerful applications you run into design challenges which defy rules of simplicity. I was working on a hefty networking management system application which spit out unfathomable amounts of log data. There were several different classes of users who needed individualized views. I didn’t have all the scenarios documented, so I had to make a general purpose interface that would accommodate all of them without knowing exactly what they would be. The solution was a design pattern directly from Excel. I scored this off Balsamiq’s mockupstogo site. The table design data filter and sort pop-up window offer a compact helping of functionality that would be totally cryptic to users except for the fact that they see it every day already in one of the most common productivity apps in the market.

By the way, the wireframe app I’m using is also from Balsamiq. Awesome. I’m likewise digging the UI Patterns and Patternry libraries of solutions to common interaction problems.

Pomodoro Time Management

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Sabin Speiser

cc/flickr/mlpeixoto

If you’re like me you just wrote down some New Year’s resolutions. I was on the site 43Things, and I noted that someone had listed using the Pomodoro Technique as one of theirs. I looked it up and was intrigued. I’ve tried Getting Things Done and a few other list-making methods that promised to make me more efficient, but I found it very hard to incorporate any of them sustainably into my practice. Pomodoro, on the other hand, has been an immediate win. It works like this: First, you list all the things you want to complete in the day. Then, you break your day into 25-minute time chunks, and assign the tasks you want to complete across them (estimating, in 25-minute intervals, how long it will take to complete each). Time chunks are indivisible. If something takes longer than 25 minutes, you break it into multiple 25-minute time chunks. If a task takes less, you aggregate the task with another in that takes less so to make a 25 minute chunk. On your task list, these chunks of time are called pomodoros, after the tomato-shape of the kitchen timer that the originator of the technique used to keep track of the 25 minutes cycles.

During that 25-minute chunk, the pomodoro, you focus intently on the one task you’ve assigned to that time. Distractions, whether self-created or external, are brushed away, duly noted on your list of things to do, or assigned their own pomodoro to complete.

You then race to complete each task within the 25 minutes allotted. No more “5 minutes more.“ If something takes longer than the 25-minute chunk you allotted, you then allocate another 25 minutes. The system focuses your efforts on completing parts of tasks, breaking it down into digestible chunks. You give things their due. The net result is that you end up being either really efficient and getting things done within the allotted time, or, spending more time than you ordinarily would and increasing the quality of the work.

The biggest difference I noticed is the change from a rollercoaster of guilt, fear, shame and elation as burdens are taken on and lifted off. Instead, you launch a series of sprints with clear deadlines that give continual satisfaction of continual progress toward a worthy goal.

I have made a commitment to do Pomodoro for a week. We’ll see how it goes. For someone like me, with the attention span of a cracked-out hamster, this kind of atomic organization is very helpful. I’m all checked out on lists. I have an extraordinary ability to focus. I have 360-degree awareness. What I have a hard time doing is staying in the moment. Perfectionism and fear of doing less than the best possible job can be paralyzing. Pomodoro is looking promising enough to get me over these hurdles.

Perhaps this blog post is the best example of what I am talking about. It usually takes me about 3 hours to write a blog post. I do three drafts. I agonize over the grammar. This blog post, on the other hand, was completed in 25 minutes.

Oh Behave!

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Sabin Speiser

Oh Behave! may be the simplest and easiest way to parenting an obedient child. One of the age-old problems with discipline is not knowing what to do, it’s being consistent. Giving a kid a two minute timeout should be easy. It’s not. First, you need a clock. You must watch it diligently to catch when two minutes have passed. If you’re like me, devoting two minutes to clockwatching is not really what you want to be doing. Especially since the misbehavior or outburst that earned a timeout already kept you from something you wanted to do. Consistently promoting good behavior in your children just gets even more complicated. The available tools like point and reward programs just add complexity. I can barely find my childrens’ jackets, how am I going to regularly keep tally of their behavior points?

When I am putting together a project, I usually focus on describing a system on paper before automating it. The odds of my coming up with something genuinely useful without it having been fully expressed using paper and pencil first is pretty low. But child discipline is all verbal.

The problem is coming up with a suitable consequence on the spot, remembering what you said, and carrying through with it. Even more difficult is staying in synch with the other parent. If you two show the slightest bit of uncertainty, your smart child will quickly learn to play you off each other. And, most parents don’t do all that reward-chart-points-off-for-misbehavior stuff because it’s just freakin’ more work! Note re: above on the chaos that is parenting!

Enter Oh Behave. Timeouts, rewards, misbehaviors, consequences, points, tracking and communication all in one easy, coherent and simple app. You’ll remember every misbehavior, timeout and consequence. Your partner will know all the bad and good stuff your child did when he or she was with you. Problem solved. How much would you pay for such a miracle? Let me know!

Typography coming to the web at last

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Sabin Speiser

It seems as though the long drought of typography on the web is finally over. Type foundries and browser makers have come to an entente for the distribution of type faces over the web.

The Babbage Blog at the Economist details the new WOFF File Format 1.0 which utilizes data streaming and online repositories rather than DRM to deliver type faces to web sites in a orderly fashion. I’ve used SIFR and flash to set type online but this has always been a bit clumsy and difficult to guarantee proper rendering on all the browser and platform configurations. I believe that the standard will be adopting rapidly.

Social Proof or Mob Rule?

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Sabin Speiser

Coachella phone: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrethegiant/

When I first saw Twitter in 2008 at the Web 2.0 show, I didn’t get it. I still don’t. And apparently I am not alone. A recent Yahoo Research Study showed that .05% of Twitter users generate over half of all Tweets. I’m talking about you Justin Bieber. (#winning.) Being in the social media marketing space, I have to think of how to leverage all the social media channels, every mention of Twitter makes my head hurt. After years of suffering I think I might have found some relief.

Enter the Color iPhone app. No, it doesn’t provide any relief. What it does is give me some insight on why I can’t understand the appeal of Twitter. Here goes.

I’ve been using Color for the last few weeks. I take pictures that the people who are in my immediate vicinity can see and comment on. And vice-versa. Cool. Why do I need that? I don’t know. The pictures in my local Color group are of SOMA traffic intersections, grubby 20 something hipsters perched around a conference table, computer screens and coffee mugs. Meh.

Maybe I’m missing something. My underwhelming experience with color got me thinking about the other kind of social-mobile-location-based-sharing apps. With a little bit of breathing room today, I decided I would check them out too. I installed Yobongo, (a neighbor here at Pier 38), Groupme, Beluga, and Instagram. Yobongo – like an AOL chat room except of geeky 20 somethings instead of 13-year-old girls and 50 men masquerading as 13-year-old girls. On Yobongo, I have a total of 2 girls who are discussing a gross-out Japanese game show. I work in an office with 40 companies all in the Web 2.0 tech space and that’s the total action going on. Groupme – can’t tell you, it wants a phone number, but the iPhone I am using is doesn’t have cell service, only Wi-Fi, so can’t use it. Beluga – I don’t have a bunch of people I want to text at the same time. Instagram – I’m kind of stuck with taking pictures of my desktop, or the window, or the coffee machine. I can’t see how I am going to use these things.

I’m probably harsher than I ought to be because I don’t like crowds. I become uncomfortable whenever I am in the midst of more than 200-300 people. Going to the opera is a strain for me. And the real value of apps like these three is that they allow people to share their impressions of shared experience at events that are spread out and have many facets. At Coachella or SXSW, these kinds of apps would have an immediate application. Where you have lots of very specific discreet experiences. There may be 10 must see presentations or performances going on simultaneously. Since individual participants can’t be all places at once, sharing media to communicate impressions of the fragmented experience is of immediate and significant value. I avoid events like that. The ones I do go to don’t lend themselves to the application of technology.

For example, I am a fair-weather baseball fan. I’ll admit it. My fandom for the Giants began last year when they spanked the Braves. But I did go to some ball games. A Giants game may have 26,000 people at it, but I don’t need any technology of an iPhone app to mediate that experience. I can hear the roar of the crowd. It’s clear what the general and the immediate experience is. The crowd roars or boos or heckles depending on the action. If I want a more substantive conversation, I can consult with the fans immediately around me.

One place where I think this kind of functionality could play a big role is at Burningman. At Burningman, there are not dozens but hundreds of very high engagement experiences going on simultaneously. No one can see them all or even be aware that they are happening. Every year my friends’ photos from the event show art and spectacles that I had not even an inkling of. It is just too massive to take it all in.

Which is a long way around to my thesis, which is: The events at which these kinds of apps gain their loudest buzz may be the only place where they provide any value. Twitter, Yobongo and Groupme shine at SXSW, because this event has the precise conditions where the app can deliver value. Take it out of its native habitat and you get streams of pictures of coffee mugs.

If I’m right about this then there should be significant doubts about the viability of the use case for these apps. An application, which is only useful 2, or 3 times a year when the user is at a large eclectic event is maybe too much solution for the problem. At the same time, the applications Color, Yobongo etc. all require a abdication of the principle of privacy and relevance that operate in the regular world. Showing you pictures to everyone, broadcasting your texts to anyone in the vicinity flys in the face of what we consider normal discourse here in the real world. I propose that this might be a manifestation of a cyber “mob mentality”. That is the phenomenon whereby people cast off their inhibitions and relax their moral principles in the context of a large crowd. Perhaps this is why these apps don’t make much sense to me in my everyday life.

Contrast color to Pixamid, which instead of broadcasting picture to the most proximate users, focuses on delivering a timeline of your images to your friends on whatever photo service or social network they use. Finding ubiquity in social networks and providing the tools to reach your friends on the channels that they prefer to communicate seems to me to be a more useful enabling technology than the unfettered broadcast to ad hoc communities that is the feature of Color.

Here at Bizily, we are in the introductions space. In this space, the same principle applies. On the mob mentality end of the spectrum, are companies like Hashable. Hashable provides a way for you to broadcast your meetings using Twitter. Hash tags characterize the meeting and the application keeps a record of your tweets about your encounters. Users can keep track of with whom they are meeting and let their friends know. There is also an introduction feature where you can hook up two people that you think should know each other. Although you don’t necessarily broadcast to the world, Hashable is like Color in that privacy or relevance are not considerations of the tweets and posts you create from these encounters. And Hashable is designed for the real world without the benefit of a mega-festival milieu to justify the loss of privacy or the mob mentality effect to compel it. For real life everyday use outside the unique conditions of the mega event, an approach to introductions that follows Pixamid’s angle is perhaps better. Make it easy to reach out to friends using all the networks, channels or devices that they prefer. Users are on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Email. They may be in your address book or your phone. Facilitating easy introductions is more dependent on bringing all these profiles and contact information together than it is on the complete abdication of social norms about privacy and relevance. That’s kind of where we are going at Bizily.

sabin@speiser.com

Experience Architect