Philip Trauring on tech, user experience, and design

Transportation technology and the unknown

Post published:June 12, 2018
Post author:philip

"When I was a kid" is the beginning of many a discussion on how things were better in past generations. Obviously, obviously, it was better to play outside than to watch television. The effects of technology on people, such as how using social media affects our brains is a common discussion point today. Are we living in a bubble or echo chamber? These are all interesting perspectives on the effect of new technology on our brains, but there's a more physically visible effect of technology on our lives, and perhaps it illustrates similar effects. One of the biggest categories of tech companies getting funded these days is transportation. Uber's $72 billion valuation may grab the headlines, but other companies like Lyft, Didi, Grab, Ola, Gett, and Go-Jek are all valued over a billion dollars and targeting the ride-hailing/taxi space. As an aside I wrote of the tendency of companies to compare themselves to Uber back when Uber was only an $18 billion company in Uber meets Pretty Woman. For anyone who lives in an area underserved by public transportation and/or taxi service, these ride hailing services have made many people's lives easier. One can argue if the lives of the…

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.

Margaret Mead, anthropologist

Senior monitoring – security flipped on its head

Post published:May 30, 2017
Post author:philip

Essence Care@Home

Let's say you want to set up a security system for your home. In days past that would mean hiring a security company that would install sensors around your house, connected to a keypad, and linked via a phone line (usually a dedicated line you would need to add) to a monitoring company. Those sensors would probably have required wired connections to a central hub installed in a closet somewhere, or in a drop ceiling, requiring lots of installation work, cutting holes in walls, and cleaning up the mess afterwards with spackle and paint. Once installed, this system would only work if you paid the company that installed it a monthly fee. DIY Security Systems In recent years a new category of security systems have emerged, so-called DIY security systems. These systems are designed to be installed by the homeowner, and in general do not require ripping up walls to install them. Some systems allow you to monitor your house yourself, and some include monitoring for a fee, similar to the older systems. One good example of this type of system is SimpliSafe, which sends you a kit including various sensors to install yourself, and then provides a traditional monitoring…

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides

Why product design is like writing a recipe

Post published:March 27, 2017
Post author:philip

While reading a cookbook recently I realized the goal of the cookbook author is not entirely different than a product designer. In both roles, the designer and author, there is a need to anticipate the needs and knowledge of the user, and design around those needs within the constraints of their knowledge. There is also a parallel here between the engineer and the professional chef. Both have much more knowledge than the end user, and rarely understand how their user will be using the product they are creating. If you've ever read a cookbook actually written by a professional chef (as opposed to a professional cookbook author), you've probably not understood many of the terms or known what many of the ingredients were. If you did understand everything, then either you're either an experienced chef, or the book was likely co-written with a writer who specializes in cookbooks. User-Focused Design It's not that different with engineers working on a product to be sold to consumers. If you're a computer programmer selling a product to a computer programmer, maybe you can get away with designing it. If you're a computer programmer selling to a consumer, you probably need someone to guide…

If architects weren't arrogant, they wouldn't be architects. I don't know a modest good architect.

Philip Johnson, architect

UX Note: High lights and design

Post published:March 26, 2017
Post author:philip

Recently while driving down the highway I noticed a crew changing lightbulbs on a street lamp. This particular street lamp was one of those extra-high poles with the circle of lights around the top that you see only on highways and some industrial or sports complexes. I had occasionally wondered why the transition was made to those poles that were double or triple the hight of standard street lamps. My assumption was that being higher they provided a larger spread of light, and they could be placed in the median so they could provide light to both sides of the highway. However, as I knew street lamps had their lights changed by crews with cherry-pickers, I wondered how these high poles whose heights were clearly beyond the reach of a normal cherry-picker had their lightbulbs changed. The answer to that question was now answered, but more on that in a moment. Seeing this crew change the lightbulbs reminded me of two homes with the same issue. Both homes had living rooms with high ceilings, which were very nice, but had the same practical issue – changing the light bulbs was difficult. In the first home, the lightbulbs were standard Edison-screw…

HBO is not an advertiser-based model, it's a subscription model. So what's significant to HBO is not necessarily the debut of an episode, it's the cumulative numbers.

Michael Mann, film director

The world of Mac software development

Post published:January 24, 2017
Post author:philip

The Mac App Store today

I was recently sent an offer to beta test a new service. The service is interesting - it is a subscription service for applications on the Mac operating system. Let me digress for a moment. Selling applications on the Mac, or any desktop operating system, has become more difficult in recent years. In the case of the Mac, this is partly Apple's fault. The App Store Apple introduced the App Store for the iPhone back in 2008, and it completely turned the traditional software business on its head. Many companies made a lot of money from the App Store, and others went out of business. It messed with existing business models, and the reverberations in the software industry are still being felt. My own company, Command Speech, was founded shortly before the launch of the App Store, and it had severe effects on our business. The App Store today One of the big effects of the App Store was the race to the bottom. Traditionally, software companies had to spend money to market their applications – through magazines, newspapers, and online. There were also distribution costs. In the old days you had to pay for the media it was distributed…

Delay is preferable to error.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to George Washington

Three delayed keyboards (or four future keyboards)

Post published:March 2, 2016
Post author:philip

Anyone who has been involved with crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, and particularly those who have backed hardware products, know all about product delays. I've written before about how crowdfunding sites are invigorating the hardware startup market, allowing hardware products to reach the market that would never have done so in the past. The flip side is of course that not all the hardware products that receive crowdfunding do in fact reach the market. Many crowdfunded products have famously failed, such as the Eyez by ZionEyez HD video recording glasses whose principles seemed to simply disappear off the face of the planet without delivering any products (and it's unclear if they ever worked on their product at all). That case was covered by Forbes and Network World, although it only raises about $350,000. More recently Kickstarter has made it harder for pie-in-the-sky hardware ideas to make it onto the site. One interesting case was the Skarp Laser Razor, which raised over $4 Million on Kickstarter before the site suspended their campaign. The company quickly switched to IndieGoGo and raised over $450,000. Whether Kickstarter was right and the project ultimately fails remains to be seen. A product doesn't need to be crowdfunded to be…

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchmen?)

Juvenal, Roman author and poet

Who watches the watchmen? Apple vs. The FBI

Post published:February 23, 2016
Post author:philip

The confrontation between the FBI and Apple over decrypting an Apple iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino terrorists, who murdered fourteen and injured twenty two more on December 2, 2015, is a very interesting story. At first blush the story seems quite simple. The FBI clearly wants to know what is on Farook's phone, as it could potentially tell them if the terrorists had accomplices, as well as if they were in touch with other potential terrorists before the attack. Everyone involved (other than perhaps their accomplices if they exist) wants the FBI to get the information on the phone. In fact, Apple assisted the FBI in getting all the information backed up to iCloud, and offered advice on how to retrieve the data from the locked iPhone. That advice was simply to plug in the phone in the presence of a known WiFi network, which might have triggered an automatic backup to iCloud of the more recent data. This would not have been affective if Farook had disabled backups, but otherwise would have sent a backup to iCloud that Apple would have been able to provide the FBI. The reason this method didn't…

All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause. The strength of a belief, when it is destitute of any rational foundation, seems, of itself, to furnish a new ground for credulity. We first admit a powerful persuasion, and then, from reflecting on the insufficiency of the ground on which it is built, instead of being prompted to dismiss it, we become more forcibly attached to it.

Charles Brockden Brown, early American novelist

An infographic for the keyboard-obsessed

Post published:February 10, 2016
Post author:philip

The web site Go Mechanical Keyboard just released the results of their semi-annual keyboard survey in the form of a very nice infographic, which I've displayed below. You can view the raw data online if you want. 950 people responded from 49 different countries. You need to be a bit obsessed with keyboards to understand everything in the infographic, although if you've been following my other posts on keyboards you should get most of it. Form factor? See my post "How many keys are there on a keyboard?". Switch types? See my recent post "A keyboard with swappable switches" where I change the switches that came with the keyboard. What do you think about the infographic?

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