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Location-Based Mobile Apps: Served Up Fast and Hot

Picture this in the not-too-distant future.

You’re on your way to pick up some fast food because you’re so amazingly hungry for a new quadruple-decker bacon angus cheeseburger. Your mind is just telling you to go out and get this new meat wad delight, which sits precariously between two deep-fried grilled cheese sandwiches. Hard to imagine, I know, since you’ve been using a mobile app to count your calories, but you’ve got a serious hankering (and no one needs to know about your caloric careen off course now anyway, right?).

However, instead of ordering at the counter or over the loud speaker at the local drive-thru window, you decide to check the “My Locations” folder on your mobile phone–or better yet, the iPad mounted to your dashboard. Once you come to a stop at the restaurant, an icon with the unmistakable red pigtails of a certain girl appears. You click on it. She starts talking to you by name and tells you what’s new on the menu. With a few swipes of your finger, you glance over the succulent selections and tap on the value meal that’s going to soon spark a conversation between you and your family physician (we’ll save the details of that encounter for another daydream).

At the end of your order, you’re asked to repeat their fast food slogan, or some other perfunctory gibberish thought up by the marketing hacks. This allows you to pass the voice recognition process, which instantly purchases the order using your pre-saved payment information. You feel so good about the experience that you somehow forget that a factually correct account of the caloric intake you’re about to consume was just instantly uploaded to a data-cloud. Guess you’ll come to terms with the slowly declining line graph that represents your ever-diminishing dietary goals the next time you’re faced with your personal apps at home.

For not only does the future mean that mobile applications will be served to you at the moment you need them without downloading apps or typing in web addresses (this was served to you when you came in proximity of the restaurant), it also means that your information will be sent to other applications and services uninterrupted by device or network specific barriers. Think of the possibilities of using the same premise at retail stores, hospitals, airports, or classrooms.

So, while you once downloaded applications to your mobile devices anticipating to use them with the world at large, the experiences of the future will most likely be finding you instead–and with that, changing the way you interact with the world.

In fact, this is all quite possible now and could certainly be used for more worthwhile things than ordering cheeseburgers.

Or maybe I’ve just got my head in the clouds.

The Shape of Design

I alluded to a design theory about two years ago. Rather than allowing it to collect more cerebral dust as my take on what’s important to design becomes aged with each passing day, I thought I’d share parts of it now.

In truth, it’s more of a construct than a theory, and it’s not at all original at that–all the parts are derived from the well-established principles of design management. I just applied different components of that application into a visual model that made sense with the way I’ve been seeing and working with design every day for the past couple of years.

The shape, like a lot of theoretical models, is composed of three equal circles that converge at the center. What’s important to know about this model, though, is that it starts broadly at the top and funnels its way down to a more narrowly focused endpoint. This purposely suggests that design problems in need of a solution, regardless of individual design practices and organizational structures, optimally start with a large overall strategic objective, which eventually or simultaneously merges with operational practicalities, and becomes something real through iterative tactical execution.

All of the relevant parts are equal and overlap at multiple points, suggesting that each are far from estranged from one another, but rather remain integral to a higher working order which requires constant communication and coordination throughout a design life cycle. At its core, I believe, lies the heart of real design thinking, which independently can be used to develop the mythical “shared brain” among design practitioners and business thinkers alike.

While this model certainly needs a lot more substantial examination, if not explanation, I’ve found that it’s been adequate enough to allow me to organize where disciplines, people, and ideas fit into a given design context. I think it also sets my expectations for what design is, and where I think it needs to go–for the time being anyways.

I’ll be interested to see how it holds up, myself, in the future.

Merry Christmas 2009

Mike & Cole Schindler
Christmas Camel 2009
Mixed Media

Visual Affect in 50 milliseconds

Over at A List Apart, Patrick Lynch nicely summarizes the essence of one of my favorite books by Don Norman, Emotional Design and applies it to neuro-activity within our brain.

In psychology, emotional reactions to stimuli are called affective responses. Affective responses happen very fast, and are governed in an automatic, unconscious way by the lower centers of the brain that also govern basic instincts (food, fear, sex, breathing, blinking, etc.). Think of affective responses as the brain’s bottom-up reaction to what you see and feel. Cognitive responses are your brain’s slower, top-down, more considered responses. They’re governed by your personal cultural views, learning, experiences, and personal preferences that you are aware of and can easily articulate. Affective reactions assign value to your experiences; cognitive reactions assign meaning to what you see and use.

He even offers a measurable application of this viewpoint:

Research confirms that users make aesthetic decisions about the overall visual impression of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second). These instant visceral reactions to web pages happen in virtually all users, are consistent over visit length, and strongly influence the user’s sense of trust in the information. In short, users have made fundamental, consistent, and lasting aesthetic decisions about the credibility and authority of sites before major eyetracking events begin.

While I think any designer worth his salt instinctually knows this, there’s an important truth to consider — any site with an objective to establish trust in users and confidence in doing business should execute on multiple levels — and at the visceral level it happens nearly instantaneously with users.

Serving Brain Food Since 1998

As the new tagline says, this site has been serving content since 1998. I don’t know the exact birthday because much of it existed as static content served by the ISP I was with at the time. You could say I was one of the original bloggers. This was long before tools like WordPress or Facebook existed. Much of the content I wrote back then focused on keeping in touch with folks back home while my wife and I explored life down South. We found work, got a little tanner, adopted a black cat named Max, and even stayed long enough to develop a peculiar sounding drawl.

Much of that early content was lost (I don’t remember how, but let’s just say it was during a hurricane evacuation, because that really did happen). Anyway, I really can’t say the loss of those writings was such a terrible blow to culture as we know it today. But in my heart, I’ll always remember how it started. I spent a lot of time working on a portfolio site, which I still can’t find the courage to take down, despite its tarnished age. Back then I taught myself HTML through endless tinkering, trial and error, and more than a little time at my day job reading the paper print outs I’d made of Jeffrey Zeldman’s site (back then, he was calling himself Dr. Web, but if you called him that now, he’d probably think you were throwing down for a fight).

Nothing but love, Jeffrey.

So that’s where it all began. And I’ve re-designed the site today to celebrate the longevity of this experience. It has been something to watch–even for myself. And I look forward to sharing more content with you as I continually evolve and hopefully mature into the next phase of my existence.