I think I am in favor of pro-active laws against wearing/using something like Google Glass while driving. It is a form of distracted driving and aligns with the current laws regarding texting and driving.
Yes, it is that time of year, when people go shopping, because, well, they are supposed to shop. New York magazine has a great article that explores just how crazy this is Why Black Friday Is A Behavioral Economist’s Nightmare:
The big problem with Black Friday, from a behavioral economist’s perspective, is that every incentive a consumer could possibly have to participate — the promise of “doorbuster” deals on big-ticket items like TVs and computers, the opportunity to get all your holiday shopping done at once — is either largely illusory or outweighed by a disincentive on the other side. It’s a nationwide experiment in consumer irrationality, dressed up as a cheerful holiday add-on.
It then goes on to explore the retailing ‘tricks’ that are employed:
The doorbuster: The doorbuster is a big-ticket item (typically, a TV or other consumer electronics item) that retailers advertise at an extremely low cost. (At Best Buy this year, it’s this $179.99 Toshiba TV.) We call these things “loss-leaders,” but rarely are the items actually sold at a loss. More often, they’re sold at or slightly above cost in order to get you in the store, where you’ll buy more stuff that is priced at normal, high-margin levels.
That’s the retailer’s Black Friday secret: You never just buy the TV. You buy the gold-plated HDMI cables, the fancy wall-mount kit (with the installation fee), the expensive power strip, and the Xbox game that catches your eye across the aisle. And by the time you’re checking out, any gains you might have made on the TV itself have vanished.Implied scarcity: This is when a store attempts to drum up interest in an item by claiming “limited quantity” or “maximum two per customer,” which makes us think we’re getting something valuable when we may not be. It’s a staple of deceptive marketing, and at no time in the calendar year is it in wider use than on Black Friday. (There is also actual scarcity on Black Friday — when stores carry only a 50 or 100 of an advertised doorbuster item — which also introduces a risk that you’ll be 51st or 101th in line and waste your time entirety. Both are bad.)
I spent Black Friday at home, with my family, working through my to-do list. Aside from lunch, we didn’t venture out to buy a thing.
What if we reviewed movies that same way that we review tablets? That is, don’t rate them based on their own merits but always relative to some other popular movie, allow lots of subjective, unsupported assertions and conclude that popularity equals quality. So if we assume that Spiderman was the benchmark du jour, it might go something like this:
Avengers had quite a few popular characters in it, but the fatal flaw was that there was no Spiderman. However, everyone noted that many of the characters closely copied Spiderman in having an alternate identity, special powers and a snazzy costume, it was clear that these were to make the characters more like Spiderman, who is the leader in the super hero space. While the movie was entertaining, it just didn’t have the same flow and ‘ease of watching’ that Spiderman did. And while we paid less to see the Avengers at a matinee, the quality of Spiderman clearly made it worth the extra ticket expense because everyone knows that Spiderman is just a higher quality product. We are sure that the Avengers might appeal to some people; we still believe that Spiderman is the best movie there is.
The amount of attempted privacy over-reach in mobile apps is approaching appalling. The number of mobile applications either out of the box or via subsequent updates that require the privilege to access (and in some cases upload) your contacts from your device is growing. In most cases it seems the same reason is given for this invasive action: it is for *your* convenience. Meh. It is unnecessary, plain and simple. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, Linkedin, Path, Gowalla and others all do this – with or without your permission or knowledge. I mean, why would an application that is supposed to serve as a remote control for you TV need access to you contacts?
Second to the contacts grab is the gratuitous need to have fine grained location information for no apparent reason. For example, why would an application that identifies music need your fine location to work? What does that have to do with music recognition? It seems to be just collecting data for the sake of collecting it.
It is beginning to get even more obnoxious. Some web-based services are not allowing users to create their own username and passwords. Rather they try to force you to log in using your Twitter or Facebook accounts. And with few exceptions they require access to your contacts and other inappropriate information. Some applications (typically browser) are taking this approach. This is even more heinous as now not only do they have your contact information they have a record of every site you visit and every keystroke that you type into every site that you visit. Think about that before you run something like RockMelt.
Be aware of what permissions sites and applications ‘require’ and don’t be afraid to say no. After all, it is your data that is being given away. And once it is gone, chances are you’ll never get it back or get it deleted.
I am a bit amazed at the manufactured frenzy that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It seems that each year the press does their very best to hype something that really doesn’t have a need to exist any longer (and probably doesn’t for the majority of people).
There really is no reason for people to be pitching tents in front of retailers the day before Thanksgiving so they can be first in line for the big ‘deals’. Is this really more of a social thing than a necessary thing? Do this people not value their own time? Or do they (the sheeple) do it because the press tells them that is what they should do? Are the press trying to justify their repeated (if not specious) claim that the day after Thanksgiving is ‘the busiest shopping day of the year’ when actual facts (something that journalism in this country seems to have only a nodding acquaintance with of late) show that the weekend before Christmas is typically the busiest shopping day. The only thing that I bought on ‘Black Friday’ was a couple of pints at the pub – well away from the shopping mayhem.
The ‘Cyber Monday’ hype is another head scratcher. I could see how this might have been significant a decade ago when most people didn’t have high speed internet connectivity at home and availed themselves of their employer’s internet pipe after returning from Thanksgiving holiday. But now most people *do* have high speed connectivity at home. And not only that, they have high speed connectivity at home the other 364 days of the year as well; so there is no practical need to wait for a specific day to do their online ordering. In fact, quite a few folks I know begin shopping online as early at October to insure that they get the selection they want and have plenty of time to deal with backorders and special orders.
Figure it out folks. Don’t believe the hype.
This is a great story about a guy in Copenhagen who had his bike stolen and through the power of social media and the interwebs he got it back. And what a great reward for the guy who found it for him!
This post titled Don’t Mimic Real-World Interfaces really resonated with me and reminded me of a post that I had done a while ago titled Evolution Of The Mobile Experience.
There have always been those few apps that insist on looking like their physical, real world, equivalent. Calculator apps, date books, calendars, note taking apps, “stickies” — you know what I am talking about. Despite there being better options out there, better ways of displaying the data, designers stick with the known representation of the tool.
Now, though, Apple is taking it too far.
If you have seen any of the screenshots linked across the web about the new iCal interface you know what I am talking about. If you haven’t seen those, iCal is looking a lot like it does on the iPad right now in Lion’s developer preview. It’s ugly, and we should be way past this style by now.
Ugly and harder to use than it should be. Designers need to focus on how to allow the user to fluidly access and manipulate their data not slavishly stick to the limitations of physical items.
Another dimension of this is how poorly developers/designers have approached the touch interface. The industry seems to be mired in button-driven-pull-a-menu-to-do-anything paradigm. Interfaces really need to take better advantage of long-tap context options and gestures to make the interactions more fluid. This is one of the things that drives me bonkers about the iPad – it is so modal; I have to close one app to do something in another. I guess I have gotten used to how easy it is in Android to just share data between apps without having to change apps.
Speaking of Android apps, I think that Feedly is the first really usable news reader that I have encountered on Android. I subscribe to a lot of feeds and that seems to be the death of most readers on mobile devices because the developers thought it would be a good idea to download all your feed updates at once. This typically results in the app going away for a long time. Feedly does it more on demand. And they are clever about using gestures in the app – swipe down and to the left and I have marked that page of articles read and moved on to the next. Brilliant. Much better than ‘pull menu, select mark read, select next page, close menu’ annoyance of other apps.
