In a world of ever greater device integration, ebook readers seem to be anachronisms. iPhones enable phone calls, taking pictures, web browsing, gaming, reading and much more… all in one device!
What do ebook Readers do? Well, they allow their users to … read books. So, what is so special about ebook readers that makes them an item of choice for many? And how can the ebook experience be pushed further to lure more people into purchasing them? These are the two questions I’ll focus on in this first post.
In a second post, I will focus more specifically on the Kindle interface design with its goods and bads.
Why ebook readers?
I remember two specific conversations I had after purchasing my Kindle. In one over MSN, a friend of mine showed his total incomprehension when I said I had bought a device entirely dedicated to reading books. His iPhone could be used to read documents and books. Why would anyone buy an ebook reader? And in another instance, another friend as we were discussing the Kindle with other IxDA members took out the book she was carrying and said that she could never switch from physical books to electronic ones. She mentioned the much wider array of sensory stimuli she felt as she was reading her book – its smell, the coffee stains on it, etc. (More on this in my previous post about Steve Portigal’s research) Continue reading »
I just could not wait any longer to relaunch my blog with its new design. There are still quite a number of things I want to work on and improve, but the basics are here… so it’s live.
Along with this new design, I aim at changing a bit the topics I blog about to re-centre myself on the web a lot more. As a result, expect to see more posts about web strategy, start ups, online user experience and behaviour and web design. Of course, as all good rules mean to be broken, my first posts (still being worked on) will be about the Kindle, which was released internationally about a month ago. But as Amazon released Kindle for PC, talking about the Kindle is almost on topic…
I will also try to build some more resources around the blog, especially in relation to user experience in Asia, as well as resources I use on a regular basis in my work and personal projects. Yes. Personal projects will be another aspect of this blog. I have been advising people regarding web strategy and user experience, but in the end, I only rarely put myself out there and this is about to change. With two friends, we are working on a project called go2gethr and I will be blogging about how the project is going as it unfolds.
Let me know your comments about the new design and especially tell me if you see broken stuff!
Enjoy the reading…
Investigating the “reading experience” and “physical versus digital books” has to be one of the most interesting research topics available out there. Reading is one of the deepest experiences we have with “things” / “content” and it is presently facing (and resisting still) the new technologies available and other tensions that could entirely change that experience.
Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg from Portigal Consulting just released the findings from a really interesting research study they performed on the topic called Reading Ahead (study performed out of their own interest). I strongly recommend checking out their different blog posts about this and especially listening to their findings presentation.
Basically it is so good it got me to post again after such a long time away from my blog…
Note: I won’t summarize the study here as my post is already pretty long, so to fully put my reflections below into perspective, it’s better to look at their slides and listen to their presentation first (the presentation lasts 1 hour and 20 minutes).
There are several thoughts that came to me as I was listening to the presentation. Let me try to structure a few below.
It’s my first time blogging about something directly related to my current job as product manager at GoAnimate.com. I am not sure why I did not do it earlier… Working at GoAnimate allowed me to switch from being an uninvolved consultant advising people to being in the “pit” fighting to make the website a success not only in terms of user experience and interaction design, but also more generally as a company.
One major realization I had while working is the power of the community. I have been humbled by what and how users have been using the platform. We first designed it for people to create short funny stories, and we now realize that quite a number of users are now using the platform to create whole animated episodes that sometimes last more than 10 minutes. We also see amazing thing happening in terms of users sharing their creations and the content they upload to the platform. Overall it is amazing to see the dedication and passion of the users on the platform. Continue reading »
I got back to watching some TED talks and the talk from Tim Bernes-Lee felt like a good one to start with. In his talk he reveals his vision for the evolution of the Web, moving from sharing documents to sharing raw data. The presentation is very visionary and somewhat scary I would say.
Watch it below:
If I get the idea well, Linked Data means that when browsing the Web “tomorrow” instead of looking through documents (web pages), the search engine (or whatever is used to browse) will look through raw data. So, I guess one could type a question like “How many friends does Nicolas Lassus have?” and get results from many different places/databases that would answer that question.
I have just finished reading The Black Swan – The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book is a great read. I already found Fooled by Randomness by the same author very interesting and this one goes further by applying similar ideas to fields outside of finance. Black Swans are basically very improbable events that are impossible to predict and that have major consequences on their environment. There is no need to look very far to find a Black Swan, as we are in the middle of one with this financial crisis (although some could argue it is a “Gray” Swan as it might have been predictable).
For me, the main lesson I get from the book is that we need to face uncertainty as it is (unpredictable) and should not let unsound theories or stories (especially success stories) fool ourselves in making wrong or too risky decisions. Most articles out there try to rationalize things with checklists, qualities of the successful entrepreneurs… stories that transform successful entrepreneurs into semi-gods who somehow possess a magical potion to make any idea successful. One of the last such article I read had: “The product does not matter” in its checklist for a successful social network. After a short state of intense anger reading this few words, I came to wonder. Is that true? Does the product really matter? Or maybe not… Continue reading »
A week ago, I received a request from a user on SlideShare to download my presentation on “Hong Kong NowTV Shop“. I am not sure why I did not allow everyone to download the presentation in the first place, but now it allowed me to take a look at this specific process on SlideShare, a very useful type of interaction for social networks.
There are two actors in this interaction: The reader and theauthor.
The reader, browsing SlideShare (or more probably searching on Google) for content related to his study or presentation, finally finds something on SlideShare inside a presentation. Too bad though, the author of the presentation decided he would not allow readers to download the presentation.
SlideShare has well addressed this need in their design. In case a presentation can be downloaded, the interface displays a clear “Download” button just on top of their slideshow, and if the presentation is not downloadable then the button is changed into a “Request Download” one.
