Mobile devices are the primary experience of personal computing for most people in emerging markets. Accessing content at prices these users can afford is all but impossible. But using sideloading and sneakernet, content can spread for free.

I was lucky enough to watch a great talk by Gary Marsden at the recent SA UX meeting in Cape Town. He talked about many interesting things, but this one captured my imagination the most.

In developing markets, mobile devices have much greater market penetration the personal computers. In South Africa, for example, around 77% of the population have mobiles but only 12% get online with PCs. So for hundreds of millions worldwide, the main, everyday experience of digital technology is probably a phone. When a phone is one of the few pieces of technology you've got, it's amazing what you will use it for. In emerging markets, mobile phones are becoming a primary mechanism for reading text, storing photo albums, watching video and listening to music.

Nokia has recently announced their $50 2323 phone, along with a suite of carefully targetted custom content to address this developing market demand.

But nearer the "bottom of the pyramid" the the cost of mobile data services is too much for most people to afford more than a trickle of bytes. Typical data consumption for a young South African might cost them around R7 per week, which is around 50 pence. Downloading MP3s or ebooks isn't realistic. So instead, some content is percolating across the community using bluetooth sideloading and sneakernet.

Sideloading sneakernet

Sideloading is a newish term, still ill-defined. But one meaning is that people can share content from one mobile device to the next, rather than downloading it from network servers.

Sneakernets are a venerable concept, still used by even the largest companies when the cost of electronic data transfer is too high. It just means that you carry data from A to B on a storage medium, instead of sending it over a wire. Google, for example, used blocks of disks to transfer 120 terabyte files.

If you put the two together you can transfer data to mobile devices for free, across any distance. Basically, one person sends a piece of content to another using bluetooth. The recepient can share their copy with more friends, and from them it can go on to more. The potential rate of distribution grows exponentially.

Riding the sneakernet

With only 6.6 degrees of separation between everyone on the planet, it's not hard to see that this could let content percolate quite fast. But our daily face to face contact is with far fewer people than our total network, so content will percolate more slowly, really.

Targetting connectors will help. The Tipping Point tells us that a few people in the world are connectors - they know a lot of people. To get a message out over a sneakernet, it would make sense to ensure it gets to the connectors.

In reality, it may be that most content won't hop quickly or reliably enough from user to user for many applications. So providing physical severs in public spaces to allow bluetooth content downloads looks like a more controlled option.

To do just that, Gary Marsden's team at the University of Cape Town, along with Microsoft Research have invented Big Board. It's a digital message board that allows people with ordinary, bluetooth-enabled phones to download text, images, audio and video for free. Most important, it requires no extra software on the handset at all - most phones can already receive mutimedia messages via bluetooth.

What content is worth distributing? For big board, community and local content make sense. Big board can also allow content to be uploaded to it, making it true, digital message board. Education and entertainment also fit well, and are good sneakernet fuel too. I've heard plans for using soap opera mobisodes to provide health education and AIDS awareness messages...

Further reading

• One Laptop per child: A formal sneakernet proposal for the OLPC initiative
• Wired: The real action in music sharing isn't online. It's on foot.

We've done a lot of travel site design, for companies including EasyJet, Hotels.com, National Express East Coast. In honour of World Usability Day's transport theme this year, we've pulled together eight design and usability tips from our travel-related ethnographic research and usability testing.

1. Support multi-variable trade-offs

Some people prioritise the cost of the ticket whilst others prioritise the time of travel. The type of trip will cause a person to prioritise one of those variables over the other, but most booking journeys involve trading off these two factors. Successful travel booking interfaces help people understand how time and cost influence each other.

For a holiday maker, the choice of location, duration and hotel make the activity even more complex. "I can go to Rhodes from Manchester on the 16th for 300 pounds, and stay in the four star excelsior for 7 nights, or Cyprus from Gatwick on the 19th for 312 pounds and stay in the 5 star Grand for 6 nights." These are really complex decisions, made in conjunction with family or friends, so you'll need to pull out all the stops to design an interface that really helps.

2. Present a well-defined proposition

Trying to be all things to all people is very expensive. Players with a tightly-defined target market will always do better at serving their market than generalised players spread thin over lots of markets.

Know your market and offer a proposition that appeals to that market - whether it's group travel, business travel, family holidays, design hotels, skiing etc. Then build a site that profoundly and accurately addresses those people's behaviours and needs.

3. Fight "search fatigue"� - catch people early in the decision process

People are overwhelmed with choice in the travel market. On average, people in our research visited 22 sites before deciding to go with a provider which they visited 2.5 times. By making site that supports people early in the decision making process and helps them fast track the exploration and decision process, you create awareness in people's mind and they are more likely to go with you.

4. Surface the right information to help people make a decision

Choosing hotels is hard. People find it difficult and stressful to make decisions when their criteria are flexible and the field is large.

Good pictures, features, location with map, star rating, Trip Advisor rating, price per room/night (not per person), hotel name and short description are what matters most when sifting through lists of hotels. Enabling people to get this information without having to 'pogostick' is vital.

5. Focus on selling the experience not the product

Beyond the basic factors above, there's a whole list of things that users want to know before they make a decision. Focussing on the experience of staying in a hotel, rather than the generic factors, makes it easier for people to make that final choice.

For example, a hotel in Paris is not just a "3 star hotel in the city centre". It's a fantastic base in the vibrant Place de la Sorbonne, it's ideal for food lovers with 6 gourmet bistros, it captures the image of Paris with its view of the Eiffel Tower, it's ideal for families or ideal for romantic getaways. Understanding what a stay there will be like is what will help people to decide and to buy.

6. Be transparent and honest

Trust is a major sticking point for travel sites. In our research, users rarely trusted the price shown and were always prepared for some last minute surcharges.

Travel sites want to show low prices (excluding as many elements as possible), because they believe it help buyers get started. The flip side: a slippery and arduous booking process repels buyers (one where surcharges slowly build up, and cross-sells appear in your basket uninvited).

Would giving the real prices transparently build reputation and trust that exceed the pulling power of a low offer? No one knows for sure. We do know that removing some of the automatic cross-sells does produce a short term loss of revenue. But whether it offers a long term boost in loyalty, no one has yet had the guts to find out.

7. The seducible moment comes after the sale.

When people go into low-cost flight booking mode, they are very task-focussed and don't really care about anything else. We think that's a learned behaviour coming from the situation that a) the good flight deals go fast b) they need to concentrate to make sure they get rid of insurance etc.

Low cost flight booking is like bargain hunting, and trying to up-sell users during the booking process is like taking the bargain away from them. The seducible moment for up-sell is not really during the flight booking process, but after. Most travel sites are stuck in the business model of trying to up-sell during the booking process.

8. Ensure localisation is an actual part of the design phase.

The most planned and least actualised design stage is LOCALISATION. Lack of effective internationalisation and localisation is costing travel sites money.

There's a myth that Europe offers a unified culture with different languages, but it's not true. Language, rating systems, research, booking and payment behaviour vary significantly from country to country.

A simple example: some cultures will tend to assume that a rating of 1 is the best rating, others that a rating of 5 is the best. (The solution is to use a visual rating scale which is less ambiguous).

To maximise adoption, conversion and revenue, travel sites need to research, and test internationally. Using design skills from a range or different countries helps too.

A market opportunity: Design the next generation of travel sites.

People have very quickly learned how to dodge the failings of one website by jumping to another. In our research we have seen that people have no loyalty, there is no trust and that means that online travel companies will always have a major element of uncertainty in their future.

But the development of the web shows that people are open to new ideas and new ways of doing things. So we urge travel companies to innovate based on these design tips. Come up with the iPhone of the online travel industry. The opportunity is there for the taking.

Thanks to Louise, Peter, Karl, Lola, SimonJ, Ofer, Claire and Alejandra for the research and insights.

It's World Usability Day on 13th November, and the theme is transport. User- and customer- experience design for public transport is a huge, multi-facetted topic, and one which we're fascinated by at Flow. In fact, Flow is sponsoring the UPA's London meeting, so that people can talk about it over a beer.

For the blog, though, we'll just confine ourselves to a simple report about the customer experience of a Eurostar trip from one of our UX consultants, Simon Johnson. Happy World Usability day!

Cramped queues at eurostar check-in

Fellow travellers,

Has anyone noticed how poor crowd management is at Eurostar?

The instructions for which line you should stand in are positioned at the wrong end of the line. It's not until you join a queue and proceed to the front that you are informed that you are in the in/correct line. Of course this causes all sorts of tension as people realise they need to move over into another queue - committing a social faux pas by now being forced to get in front of others.

The whole experience is littered with insufficient staff, lack of clear guidance, ad-hoc A4 print-outs with make-do instructions, broken ticket machines, stressed people. At both ends there is no system for separating those booked for immediate departure and the hundreds of punters who have arrived early for the later train.

The coach numbers printed on the platform are so worn out so it's difficult to read them. It won't be long before they have disappeared altogether. The coaches are numbered in dark grey on a muddy LCD grey backgrounds in small text.

A great deal of the overcrowding is due to the fact that Eurostar allocated so much room for after-check-in shopping. However, the opportunity to buy anything is zero, as they only allow you to check-in when your train is ready to depart. As a result, the retail area is empty of customers, while the waiting area is crowded with unhappy customers. Mais alors!

In the 21st century with years of breakthroughs in ergonomics, logistics, psychology, usability, crowd management, human factors, etc. and €billions, couldn't Eurostar have foreseen these problems? Moreover, now this problems are horribly evident, why aren't they being addressed tout de suite? Wasn't the Eurostar team packed with 'experts' touting university degrees from esteemed colleges? Quite frankly my mother could have done a better job, no kidding.

Simon

......

Take a look: Flow has made a real difference to the experience of planning and booking travel for companies like EasyJet, Transport for London, and National Express East Coast, Lastminute.com and Hotels.com.

Humans are not very good at predicting what will make us happy in the future. Designers need user centred design techniques to help them to overcome that limitation.

We don't know what's good for us

In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, describes recent research on "prospection" - the act of considering the future. Our ability to simulate future experiences is one of the things that makes us human. But our experience simulator (the pre frontal cortex) makes lots of mistakes. A key mistake is to imagine the future will be like the present.

For example, past visions of the future included rocket cars and jet packs, but usually the people's behaviour didn't change a bit. Mom still hung out in the kitchen, even though the work was being done by machines. And people lived happily in high-rise, concrete complexes. Today, retro-futuristic visions are more a quaint commentary on the time when they were made than a relevant description of the present.

On an individual level, we're bad at predicting what experiences will make us happy in our own future. After finishing a delicious roast duck dinner at a favourite restaurant, I will be full and I will have "habituated" to the duck. So future duck dinners will not seem so appealing to me. If asked to pre-order for my next visit in a month's time, I'm more likely to choose something other than duck. But when I arrive at the restaurant a month later, I am more likely to actually choose the duck again. When I made the choice about my future, I assumed it would be like my present, where I'd had enough of the duck. But when the future came, I was actually hungry - a frame of mind that I did not predict.

Methods for predicting the future

On a straightforward level, designers need to make this prediction: "What will people want to do with this product?" For example...

• Will people want to shop on my website by brand, price or by specification?
• Will people want to devote full attention to this mobile device or just glance at it?
• Will people want to watch a 30-second animated intro to my website?
• Will people want to click a button to clear all the data from a web form ans start again?

In all these real-life situations, the designers had to imagine future usage of their product and make decisions accordingly. A lot of them got things wrong, because they imagined that when using the finished product in the future they would be in the same frame of mind as when they were designing it.

Since we're actually better at thinking about the present than the future, designers who want robust results need to bring the future into the present. In some respects, that's what user centred design is.

• Ethnographic studies: Since target users are (usually) human they can't predict accurately what will make them happy in the future. So it's best to watch what people do instead. Study what makes them happy, and what unhappy moments you can address with design.
• Iterative prototyping: The future product isn't finished yet. But make a mock-up of it and get target users to try it out. By simulating real usage, you're simulating the future more accurately than you can imagine it.
• Scenarios and cognitive walkthroughs: Be methodical and write down what people's future situations might be. Then you've got a better chance of predicting their future behaviour.
• Field trials: For particularly huge and life-changing ideas, your prototypes need to be a bit more solid. Leave them with a select few for a while and see what you get. For example, Microsoft's SenseCam and whereabouts clock. Or Bill Gaver's Flight tracker.

Making future happiness evident

Designers are often asked to design things that look desirable - that convince people to buy, rather than to deliver ongoing satisfaction. In a way, the user experience design movement has been about changing that: creating products that actually make people happy over time.

But since our customers can't predict what will make them happy, they might buy the wrong thing. Something with lots of impressive-looking buttons, for example. So not only does the product have to make people happy, it has to look like it will make them happy.

One trick is to emphasise simplicity (which is what seems to make most people happy) as a feature. Sometimes it works.

We just celebrated eleven years of growth and leadership in the field of user experience, with a party for our staff and clients.

Since we've recently redecorated our offices, we thought we'd host the party there. It gave us the space to create a mural about the history of Flow and put up photos of past projects. A game of PS3 Rock Band provided a great interactive experience too.

Clients and staff enjoy drinks in Flow's newly-decorated offices

A lot to celebrate

Flow was set up by Meriel Lenfestey in 1997. From humble beginnings in Meriel's house in Stoke Newington, Flow has grown to a team of over 40 people with an annual turnover of £4 million and offices in London and South Africa.

In her speech at the party Meriel stepped us through the early years.

"In the 1990s, I could see companies jumping on the interactive bandwagon with websites that were often visually stunning, but virtually impossible to navigate - and therefore not commercially viable. I set up Flow to introduce User-Centred Design (UCD) to my clients. I'm proud to say that we're now one of the leading UCD consultancies in the world."

Lola and Ian. Mimi and Louise (on guitar). Flow's history in mural form.

User experience for a competitive edge

Next, Flow's Managing Director, John Thew, looked to the future.

"We've faced a challenging economy before and we emerged unscathed from the dotcom bust. In a risk-averse economy with tightening budgets, user experience becomes even more critical for organisations looking for a competitive edge. It reduces risk, increases loyalty and returns and reduced costs. Flow is well placed to ride through new challenges this and next year."

Thanks to everyone for coming. Thanks to all our clients for choosing Flow. And thanks to the talented folk who delivered great results and helped make Flow a success.

Designing an effective Microsoft Fluent/Ribbon toolbar is not for the faint of heart. You need to understand your users' activity in detail and plan a consistent overall experience.

I'm working on two WPF applications at the moment. For both, we have to decide whether to use traditional File/Edit/View menus or an MS-Office-style ribbon. It's not an easy decision...

A piece of the Ribbon, from MS Excel 2007

Pro: It appears to be built on a sound theoretical basis and Microsoft tell us they've researched it to death with hordes of real users. They also say they're planning to use it more widely.

Con: Key players on both the teams I'm working with are against the ribbon. They say "I use Office all the time and I really don't want one of those things on MY software."

Con: Jakob Nielsen raises an eyebrow that a number of the best new applications of the year use ribbons. He points out that Microsoft have not always come up with the best interface innovations in the past. Pro: But he grudgingly admits that maybe "the Ribbon has legs".

Con: Some surfing around yields plenty of blogs posts from frustrated ribbon users.

Pro: The techsmith team implemented a ribbon on snagit 9 and say their research showed it worked well.

Con: And a couple of bits of software that allow you to replace the ribbon in MS Office 2007 with a more traditional menu bar. That's a sign that there's a potential market of people desperate enough to pay to get rid of the ribbon.

So what's going on?

Good if used with UCD

My analysis: The ribbon is a decent piece of interface, but like most things in UX, it's hard to design it well. And to design it well you really have to understand your users' needs, behaviours and work practices.

That's because the ribbon tries to show commands grouped together based on what users are most likely to want to do. So in Word 2007, for example, there's a tab for mail-merge, and one for page layout and one for referencing, whereas in Word 2003 those features are pushed lower down in a more generic menu structure. If you get the groupings right, your users will always find the selection of controls they need right there in the ribbon. But if you misunderstand what they need to do, they'll get an irrelevant list and you'll get complaints.

Microsoft have got a lot of it right, but a bit of it wrong. And with Office's massive user base, an angry, vocal minority is still a million people or more.

Three ways to get Ribbon design wrong

1. Choose groupings that don't mirror real-world workflow. ... Read more » 2 comments

Drawing ideas in real time helps workshop teams imagine the future more effectively.

In concept design projects, we help our clients to envision how people will use technology in the future. But people who are experts in particular subjects (like their current customer experience or business process), are often less comfortable imagining or describing how things might become. Sometimes, Flow uses client workshops with graphical facilitation to help everyone get a solid grip on abstract ideas.

Augmented conversations

The idea of a graphical facilitation is simple to say, but harder to do: Draw everything that's being said in real time on gigantic sheets of paper. For maximum effect, paper the whole room, so that all ideas remain immediately available throughout the workshop.

An extract from a large mural created during a workshop

Here's some rationale...

• People have new ideas through conversation. Well managed conversations provide inspiration, as well as tests and checks that can help new ideas take shape.
• Conversations about complex things stop working well unless they are recorded as you go. A visible, running record of the ideas helps the team reach agreement and accept new ideas as building blocks for the next iteration of the discussion.
• Images are a very powerful record. Most of us can scan images quickly and find things again efficiently. They're also very information rich.
• Some concepts are more easily expressed in terms other than words. Mathematicians and physicists use mathematical notation. Architects use sketches, models and blueprints. Describing a building or a law of physics in words alone would be exhausting. Expressing complex, interrelated ideas behind a vision of the future will always be easier in pictures.

Visualising the presentation of a new system

The effects of thinking in pictures

I asked a couple of Flow's user experience consultants about using graphical facilitation.

"The future is unfamiliar territory, and that can be unnerving. Real time graphic output helps make everyone comfortable," Simon Hatch told me. "In a recent workshop, there was visible, engaging output even before we broke for lunch on day 1, and that really helped people feel they were making progress."

But as well as helping people see progress, the imagery on the walls helps people to think more effectively.

"It enables us to uncover and unpack things in a different way," explained Stuart Penny. "Seeing everyone's words represented on the wall helps each team member to absorb everyone else's ideas. And thinking in pictures reduces the effort of working an idea through and visualising its impact and consequences."

Smaller scale

Images are a great way of summarising and communicating the contents of a meeting too. We've been experimenting with writing up some of our meetings using images. You could see it as putting doodling to constructive use!

For fabulous drawing talent, we like to work with Cognitive Media.

Not all of Seedcamp's cutting edge entrepreneurs understood how to design for customers.

After last year's success, Flow was asked to come back to Seedcamp to mentor on the product and marketing day. I got the opportunity to go and talk with a range of people about how they conceptualise and design new services.

The keynote panel for the day focussed heavily on usability and user-centeredness - in that order. It seems that for most people, the route to user-centered thinking still sparks the notion of usability testing your service/product after build, squeezing it in at the end. Since the cost of changes to software can tend to increase exponentially as you get closer to launch, making changes at the end is not a great way for young businesses to conserve their limited cash.

Soup.io: One of Seedcamp's winners

But from usability, the discussion branched out into the notion that a user-centred approach to strategy early on in the process is much more valuable. This was really valuable for the competing teams. The feedback made it clear that most young entrepreneurs weren't thinking or developing around customer needs. In conversation most said the one thing they didn't have was a differentiated picture about who their users are or how a usable interface might look.

I worked with five of the finalist teams to see if I could help!

Social, efficient, usable

This year's winners seemed to follow a consistent theme: publishing better content, with less effort, and tying it into your social networks. That certainly seems like the mood of the moment on the web.

My favourite

A company called Uniki didn't make it into the final seven. But they were a personal favourite of mine, as an interaction designer. They've created a system to allow gestural interfaces for projected screen. So you can stand near a data projector, wave your hand and turn an on-screen page.

A uniki user gestures at the projected image of an old book to turn the page

The BBC used ethnographic research to inspire and inform their Audio & Music team, as they design new services for young people aged 13-18.

How do young people find new music? What do they do with it? What technology gets used and why? Rather than statistics or abstract trend statements, the BBC Future Media and Technology department wanted vivid examples and concrete insights about the user base they were designing for. They asked Flow to help them.

Learning about people's lives

We worked with four different target groups, which we named The Gamers, The Streetwise Teens, The Social DJs and the Indie Teens. Each group had three members – all close friends with each other.

We worked through 4 activities with them over the course of a few weeks:

• Group sessions
• Diaries
• Shadowing
• Follow-up interviews

Shadowing means spending time participating in each person’s day-to-day life. Our ethnographers enjoyed a night out in Camden with two 18 year-olds, some live gaming on the Xbox with a 14 year-old boy in his bedroom, gossiping with two 16 year-old girls at their home and a lesson about hip-hop dance from a 17 year-old dancer. The insights from experiences like this go much deeper than surveys and focus groups ever can.

Sharing what we learned

We had workshops with the BBC team all the way through the project. This let the team hear discoveries "as they happened" and be inspired to ask new questions. The research team were about to direct their enquiry towards the areas which our clients thought looked the most fruitful.

The final results were written up in a highly-visual, 80-page book. The goal was for people all over the BBC to engage with the study so we made sure that the results were presented in an interesting and visual way. The report was publicised in Ariel, the BBC’s internal newspaper.

Observations

I asked Jude Rattle, the lead consultant on the project, what she had learned from the study. “All sorts of things that you can’t mention in a blog post,” she told me. “But a few that you can.”

“Sharing music with friends is an important social activity. In the 70s and 80s young people made mix tapes. Now MP3s get swapped from phone to phone whenever people feel like it. But there’s a twist. The DRM mechanisms designed to stop digital piracy also stop people from engaging in that key social behaviour. So a lot of our participants had an added incentive to seek out pirate MP3s on Limewire: the file they got would be readily shareable.”

“People often think that young people are universally brilliant with technology, but they are not. In our study we found that teens will go to great lengths to use technology that does things that are important for them. But there are other things that older users might take for granted, which teens don’t know how to do. For example, some of our participants did not know how to burn a CD, even though they did know how to copy an MP3 onto a mobile phone’s memory card or Bluetooth it to a friend.”

Giving innovators an edge

Imagining the future is hard. Designing future products and services that will be discovered and adopted is harder still. In large organisations, design teams can easily become far removed from the people they are designing for. To stand a chance, they must have rich detail about what their target users actually do, what they like and what they need.

Ethnography helped the BBC to connect with teenagers as they consume music – and gave them practical insights that they can use as a basis for innovation.