The “Kindle 3″

Time Inc. Tablet Demo for Sports illustrated

These videos can make us wonder whether reading, watching, listening will soon be all merged into one seamless experience around content consumption. Great sources of inspiration.

Related posts:

1. Reading Ahead: A Research by Portigal Consulting

Reading on the Kindle

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)

Good for any book?

As I was trying to justify my purchase to these two friends it appeared clearly to me that ebook readers are not for everyone, and are not for every book as well. It does not make any sense at this point to purchase a design book or say a book relying heavily on visuals on the Kindle. The technology with the black and white screen is just too limited for that. But I would argue that it only takes a try to realize that for more or less any other kinds of books, an e-version is a very good option.

Good for anyone?

Then, are ebook readers for everyone? Well, in Hong Kong especially where there is very little reading culture, an ebook reader is just not going to be appealing to the mass market. People read very short articles or reports. And for that a mobile phone and a computer are very good reading tools. The great contrast and clarity of eink may not represent a huge plus. The advantages of ebook readers appear more clearly for people who read a lot of books. In my case, I have no significant bookshelf space in my small Hong Kong flat, every book I buy lies around somewhere and ends up being a burden after I finished reading it. Only books that I really enjoy and would read again find their permanent place in my home (this may actually still make me buy real books after I enjoyed reading them on the Kindle).

Giving more choice?

Another major problem – also pretty specific to Hong Kong – is that the choice of books in bookstore is very limited. Many times, Amazon.com is the only channel available to get books here and the Kindle seemed a good solution to alleviate this problem. Unfortunately, a few searches for books in the Kindle store after my purchase revealed that the Kindle’s range of choice was actually pretty limited as well, thus not solving this problem in the end.

Real-time Connectivity

Finally, and for me one of the most important feature of ebook readers is their real-time connectivity, arguably not an ebook feature, but more the fact that they have wireless connection. Now watching a show on TV, reading an article and simply walking in the street, if I see a book mentioned, I can just go on the Kindle store and download a sample of that book to see if I am interested. This really has changed the way I purchase and consider books. I now have around 10 samples on my ebook reader and one of them will be my next read. No more aimless trips to the local bookstore not knowing what to buy anymore.

So, can ebook readers get better?

My feeling since I purchased a Kindle is that this is not a mature product yet. It has great features and changes the reading experience, but it could be much more than what it is right now. There are two main points I’d like to highlight here. The first one has to do with publishers and the other one with social media.

Wake up publishers!
Since BusinessWeek stopped the Asian edition of its printed magazine to refocus on the web, I canceled my subscription. A very high price and articles less relevant to me were the main reasons. I now have resubscribed to BusinessWeek on the Kindle. The price is much more affordable and I do not have to carry any magazine around to read the articles. Still, I wish I could get my Asian version of the magazine back. If printing cost is the main issue why printed magazine are refocusing their activities, aren’t devices like the Kindle opening up a brand new low-cost store front for them? Plus, the ease of purchasing content on the Kindle, the trial periods and the scary lack of realization users have when spending money (better have great self control if you buy a Kindle) really make the Kindle a very attractive platform to sell content. Somehow, I am very ready to pay to get a magazine delivered to my Kindle rather than pay a subscription on a website to get roughly the same thing. There is a huge difference having content “delivered” to you instead of having to “go and get” it yourself.

The new paradigm of sharing
The world is changing and reading has evolve with the times. One of the biggest paradigm shift to me in recent years is the fact that doing is not enough anymore. We don’t do things for the sake of doing them anymore. The end result of what we do needs to have a “resell” value, it has to be shareable and broadcastable, it has to help us build our personal brands. Blogs, like this one, are great example of course. But the change is more profound. Kids are now publishing videos on YouTube explaining others how to use the software or game they just purchased. If nobody knows what you are doing, it seems that the value of doing that thing drops tremendously.

The same shift applies to reading and I personally see great opportunities in this space. What if reading became something we shared with everyone else? What if highlighting content in a book meant it was posted to Twitter? What if we could easily create blog posts out of the notes we took? What if we could create discussions for example on Yahoo Answers around specific aspects or paragraph of a book? What if each book would automatically have its own Ning-like social network? ebook readers and their connectivity really have the power to integrate very well into the existing ecosystem of user-generated content. It looks like Amazon’s competitors and Amazon itself are gearing up to offer more of these. Amazon just released the Kindle for PC for example which could be a great enabler for this kind of additional features.

To conclude

In terms of reading experience, I love my Kindle. I wish it would do more and I feel right now it doesn’t offer a complete experience like the iPhone does for example… but I am confident very soon it will do more and when it does I’m sure I will always keep this device close to me. And Amazon’s latest software release allowing us to read pdfs on the Kindle is a great move in the right direction.

Related posts:

1. Reading Ahead: A Research by Portigal Consulting
2. Two videos about the future of reading
3. The web auditory 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.

Device Integration: Loss of Important Emotional Stimuli

Steve and Dan go through a lot of impacts arising from going towards a digital reading experience. One impact they mention is the loss of a direct link between the object (the book) and a set of memories or emotions. A book is a physical object and it ages. When you see it on your shelves or take it in your hands, it will automatically trigger specific memories (when you bought it, where you read it), specific feelings or moods. Taking an ebook reader in hand, will stimulate an emotional response as well, but using a single device for reading will make this response much shallower and less rich, as the response will mostly be linked to the device instead of the individual book.

As I listened to the talk I thought about a similar revolution that happened in the past when emails appeared to replace normal mail. Letters are single objects in themselves and are directly attached to memories, moods and other people. In the past, we were free to store these letters in different places according to the emotions they would trigger. Now, with emails (and this is re-inforced by the huge quantity of emails we receive), this link has totally disappeared. Going back to our archive in our email client and digging an old email will not have by far the same effect as reopening a box where we stored all our love letters. And this leads to a different type of emotional attachment, where users are attached to the device (the email client or the eBook reader) rather than the actual content (mails or books).

A changing world: Speed Versus Reflection

Right after listening to the presentation, I read this article from the Los Angeles Times called “The Lost Art of Reading” by David L. Ulin. This article strongly reinforces the insights extracted from Steve and Dan’s research to show how deep the reading experience is. It also highlights a very important fact which is that books are not only fighting a war against technology. They are also fighting a war against our changing way of lives.

As the article discusses, we live in a world where speed is of the essence – where we need to react to information we gather in the next second in fear of losing our edge. Books are all about a different way of life. Books can take years to write and for the most part could not care less about current events happening on the day you read them. Books are about unplugging (term used in Steve and Dan’s study) yourself from the world. Books are about reflecting on things. And these are less and less tolerated in the world today… but I am wandering off topic here (as I usually do), as this concerns the future of reading books in general and not the tension between physical and digital books.

Design Opportunities: Giving Life to Notes

Steve and Dan at the end of their report go through some opportunities that digital books’ designs can integrate to make the digital reading experience a stronger contender against the traditional reading experience. One that they do not discuss (unless I missed it) is notes. I would split notes into two categories in the reading experience: notes from the author and notes from the reader. Both of these categories of notes could be revolutionized by the advent of digital reading.

What would added interactivity do to author’s notes for example? What if you could click on a referenced article the author mentions and read that article the next second? Or even get a review/summary and ulitmately purchase another book the author also happens to cite? This would add a new depth to books and provide an exceptional experience to the reader (not to mention a great marketing opportunity for publishers). As Steve and Dan discuss in their presentation, this can of features would have to rely on a great ecosystem to provide this integrated experience. That’s something not in place at all today (especially outside of the US).

The other category of notes is user notes and this is where to me there is an even greater opportunity. Right now, you can highlight things in a book or put sticky papers on pages you think are interesting. What about searching for a term you saw in the book after you finished reading or looking up all the pages where another author is referenced? What about building yourself a set of quotes and comments about the book that you typed as you where reading and that are organized and retrievable anywhere after you’re done reading? What about co-reading even? See what people felt or commented as they read the book you are reading. What if the digital book allowed you to share your experience with other readers thus giving the digital book a life of its own, turning each book into a vertical social network almost…

As usual, I am just following a spur of the moment to write this post and I ought to have put more reflection into it (sorry… I am a product of the new changing world where speed is everything), but I do hope that it can even so modestly contribute a tiny bit to the discussion surrounding books and the reading experience. I am personally a big fan of physical books, but if the digital reading experience and a good ecosystem were in place, I would definitely juggle between both physial and digital reading (similarly to the way I do with CDs and digital music).

Related posts:

1. Agile User Research
2. Kindle Lover? – The eReading Experience
3. Doing Research on the Web

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.

Personally, I see quite a number of huge hurdles to overcome before something like that could work. The first thing is something faces by Wikipedia everyday. How do you ensure that the data is accurate and legitimate? Even if people are not trying to manipulate others, there are so many ways to calculate something that just providing raw data can be totally unusable. For this to work, everything around the world would have to be entirely standardize. For example, the way unemployment rate is calculated in different countries is different because of each country’s specificities (or political agenda). Theoritically speaking standardization would be great, but is it realistic?

Another problem is that data is actually a huge business. The open source concept is great, but gathering good data is actually a very time-consuming and tough job. How do we “reward” the people who bring the data to the masses? Personally, I am not a big supporter of the free economy and I believe things that are free today, may not be free tomorrow anymore. Somebody at some point in the supply chain has to pay for things.

The last problem is privacy. If people are able to post data about other people on the web. How do we control that? Facebook and other social networks are testing the limit of this on their side and it will be interesting to see where things go… (I’m reading some articles on the topic and will try to write a post soon about that).

This said, Linked Data can definitely have great applications in some fields. All the fields where data standardization has been happening really fast in the past like financial reporting, corporate social responsibility, etc. Linked data in that field would be a great advance. As I worked on CSR a bit, I really feel that all these reports corporation work so hard on producing should be replaced by Linked data. Something that allows people to easily compare and analyze what companies are doing to make better informed decisions about their purchases or which brands they supports. This standardization has already started and there is just a very small step to make to actually make Linked Data a reality… whether something like that could spread to the whole Web will be interesting to witness.

Related posts:

1. Open your mind… and dream: Nokia Morph
2. Follow-up on user-generated content…

Despite its title, I think the most important issue raised in this latest article is the one about business models. With the “everything is free” idea going on (thank you Wired) everybody is running around trying to come up with an “hybrid business model”. Indeed, current free models offered by formerly paid publications are not sustainable as they don’t generate enough to cover for the loss of subscription money. So, is there an hybrid free business model? … I tend to think there is none. If you want quality, reviewed, edited content, … well it makes sense you have to pay for it somehow. And there is only so much advertising money can cover.

The big problem is that the line between Expert and Amateur content is very blurry as the article states, so it makes matters worse. What makes it even worse is that as human beings we are really bad at reacting to a situation until there is a big crisis. So, as long as old-fashioned professional publications survive, we won’t realize that we actually want to pay for quality content. Personally, I do a lot of consulting work, and I am happy people are actually willing to pay money for my work, instead of having to watch a 5 minute advertising video before every meeting they have with me. I can imagine it is the same for a reporter or an editor. My feeling is that paid publications will come back in the end… I can’t help but think that the whole “free” thing will quite quickly disappear… not that I am an expert on the issue in any way, just a thought.   )

Related posts:

1. The end of User-Generated Content?
2. Agile User Research

The debate is not really about whether user-generated content will disappear or not. People will continue to generate content. And with the increasing power of applications and tools we have within our grasp, we will continue to generate more and more content. But it is the role of this content that we generate that will be changing. With all the excitement brought by “Web 2.0″ (for lack of a better word) about common user doing the job of experts and companies using them to build a business model, we forgot that experts did not appear out of nowhere. Experts are here because, well, they are experts! They are much better at doing something than other people, and they should be rewarded for that. The tools that we now have available helped closing the gap between real expertise and perceived one, but the difference remains nevertheless.

The fact that blogs exist for example does not mean we can all be good reporters or journalists. It only means that we can all publish stuff. The fact that we can now comment on articles on most of the major magazines and newspapers, does not make us more expert than the person writing that article. And actually if we go beyond the facade of user-generated content, we discover that most content, as highlight in the article, is generated by a very small group of people. In the end, to create quality content to all can refer to, you need experts. Wikipedia just showed that an amazing tool could be created by offering a place where experts from a wide range of fields could aggregate all their knowledge, but it omitted to include a clear accountability review on the quality of each contributor.

In every such discussions I have these days everything boils down back to the word “good”. In the recent discussion on the use of personas, the conclusion basically is that if the person is “good” then personas are great. In this case it is the same. If a person is good, or an expert, then we can trust his or her judgment. This means that we need expertise, and we need ways to identify who has that expertise. After all the excitement, we could very well see more old fashioned business model that we thought were dead make a come back.

Related posts:

1. Follow-up on user-generated content…
2. Agile User Research
3. Social Networking: The growth dilemma…

Concepts have been used a lot in the car industry to spur design ideas and creativity. I think this video does an amazing job at setting a vision for the future of mobile. It is crazy and … and a very long term vision. But it is also based on actual technology and actual constraints we have today with mobile devices (like features integration, screen size). Just like in the car industry where we don’t see concept cars in the street, there is very little chance we will see this concept out at all. Still, just like in the car industry, some of the features in these concepts can make it to the main stream products. I can’t wait personally how screen size limitations are addressed with new technologies… See Philips work… or Modu Mobile.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/IX-gTobCJHs]

Related posts:

1. Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data
2. Agile User Research
3. TED Talks: Twists of the Mind

There are two main points that made me think about how Agile methodology could have an impact on my work: user experience / user research.

1. How can we make research more agile?

The Agile concept is to break down every project in small fully functional modules that can be delivered in a very short period of time (could be 2 weeks for a development project). This helps focusing on the core features of the project, while leaving the rest for later. This also helps starting the design even without knowing all the business requirements and actually supports better defining business requirements along the way as the client sees the system build itself from scratch.

In this post, I will just focus on the research part of user experience. Indeed, the interaction design part can be incorporated quite easily in an Agile methodology, but the preliminary research appears more tricky to me. Indeed, when we start a project we first want to know what the customers or users want. We have an array of tools to address this from quantitative ones like surveys to qualitative ones like usability testing or ethnographic research. Studies like this can actually last for quite a long time and from the client’s point of view it is hard to visualize what they will get out of it. What if we could break down any research into small items that would last maybe under a week and deliver clear conclusions at the end of each week. Being new to Agile stuff, I still need to think about that some more… the first problem I see is how to perform a relevant study (in terms of sample size for example) in such a short time… But with this in mind, making research more iterative helps design a better research in the end by fine-tuning the study objectives bit-by-bit.

2. Should I work towards not having a job?

From Martin’s point of view and following Agile concepts, the developer and the client should be in direct contact. This makes the role of the Business Analyst on such projects redundant. Of course he mentioned that on most projects Business Analyst are actually key in creating a bond between the different parties, but that made me think… Are researchers like business analysts?… In an ideal case, if my client (I mean, the operational teams) could talk directly to his or her customers, everything should be better. What if instead of designing punctual studies, researchers should all strive to design systems that allow their clients to stay in touch with their customers on a continuous basis, making our role as researchers redundant.

That’s pretty much the concept of customer experience. Stay in touch with your customers on a continuous basis so that you can better design your products and services depending on their changing needs. Still maybe more could be done to integrate advanced qualitative methods into the operations of a company. We see more and more ethnographic research within companies… but my feeling is that more is possible.

Just some unfinished thoughts…

Related posts:

1. Reading Ahead: A Research by Portigal Consulting
2. TED Talk: Clifford Stoll – An Agile Mind
3. Your brand spans multiple touchpoints

It looks that the first focus of this evolution is to tackle one of the most critical problem with the Web, the fact that people don’t read. I was reading (… so people really don’t read?) an article today and next to the title was a button saying: “Click-2-Listen”.

Out of curiosity, I clicked on it and listened to the article being read to me. In the end, I missed most of it as my colleagues were talking to me and I could not be bothered to press Pause/Play all the time. The quality of the speech although impressive is nothing like a real human talking. In the end, I think I prefer by far reading.

I guess the nice thing with this text to speech service is that you can download the media file and play it later maybe on your mp3 player when you are on the way home. It seems to me that if we are in front of our screen, we’d rather read through an article which is a much more flexible task rather than listen to the article. The service could then be much more targeted towards people who download the file for later.

Two companies offering the service are:

• News Worthy Audio
• Odiogo (I really like the tagline: “Gives your text content voice … and legs!”, which plays much more on the listen later feature of the service)

Related posts:

1. Speech-to-speech Translation
2. Kindle Lover? – The eReading Experience
3. Changing the advertising experience?

A really good article on Personas… It is well written, entertaining and to the point; i.e. Personas are misused in most cases and a tool meant to “help companies actually get closer to their REAL customers” has been transformed into a tool used to “be perceived as close to real customers”.

Should personas be dumped altogether or should researchers educate marketing and design people about how to use them to actually make a difference in the product lifecycle (instead of just being as a marketing tool). I am for education… but how long will that process be?

Related posts:

1. The end of User-Generated Content?
2. IxDA F2F: Inputs, process and outputs in interaction design