Simon I'Anson's posts

Cath's recent post about Mappiness , and my response, prompted me to think about habits. How we form them, how we break them and how, as designers of utilities and services, we can build our apps to encourage habits to form in users.

After all, don't we want the things we build to be adopted and used regularly by thousands (millions!) of people?

But we all know that is difficult. Apps that look great on first glance, are downloaded with a sense of eager anticipation but are abandoned in the fetid wasteland that is three screens into your iPhone a few weeks later are all too common.

Why is this?

About a week ago (August 5th) a new Twitter account appeared. Nothing strange in that. But this one belonged to John Hegarty, Worldwide Creative Director of BBH. The BBH whose offices we share.

His account accumulated over a thousand followers in a matter of hours as word spread that one of the most well known ad agency creatives in the world had joined Twitter.

However, within a day or so people began to suspect that this wasn’t the real deal. The language was poor and the tweeted quotes hackneyed. “Not the language of Hegarty” people cried via Twitter.

On Monday night I tweeted that I was unfollowing the account. The 1990s management speak and trite ‘creative’ blatherings were too much. This was obviously an imposter. And I think I know who it is…On Monday night I tweeted that I was unfollowing the account. The 1990s management speak and trite ‘creative’ blatherings were too much. This was obviously an imposter. And I think I know who it is…

We’re working on a side project, the details of which can wait for another post, and the very nature of it has prompted us to devise new methods for team collaboration.

Without giving too much away (I’m a bit over-excited and secretive about it) the service we’re designing consists of two parts: a website and an iPhone app strung together with an API. There are dependencies between each part of the service. Things that happen on the iPhone app need to be reflected on the site and vice versa. There are other nuances but at that’s the core of it, a simultaneous broadcast / receive from app to site and back.

Transport for London (TfL) have put out a call for apps to promote London’s new cycle hire scheme which launches at the end of July.

This immediately caught my eye as it mixes two things that I love. Technology and cycling.

TfL opened up their cycle hire API earlier this month to allow access to information around bike hire locations and pricing.

I think this, mashed up with a few of TfL’s other APIs and a bit of smart phone magic would create an amazing mobile app service. It could help promote the scheme, encourage adoption and, vitally, aid TfL in defining future hire station locations and in adjusting and augmenting their current cycle path network.

Forget reading manifestos, analysing policy impact on your monthly take-home pay or weighing up the pros and cons of entry into the Euro. Who are our political leaders and, more importantly, what do we really think of them?

What started as a conversation at SXSW launched in double-quick time just over a week ago after a flurry of code production and pixel shuffling.

Tagminster, like it’s cousin brand tags (from Noah Briar), aims to capture the true sentiment of the public; in Tagminster’s case, on the subject of politicians.

Whilst wandering around an unfamiliar supermarket at the weekend (looking for Cous Cous) an idea for a mobile app suddenly hit me.

How about a store-based product finder?

It would work like this:

• Fire it up;
• the app knows what supermarket I’m in via GPS;
• I start to type in a product name, the predictive search autocompletes my request; and
• the app tells me which aisle the product is in.

On the recommendation of fellow cyclist Brian Sheridan who I met at SXSW (the conference that keeps on giving) I downloaded the iMapMyRide iPhone app last weekend to track my latest jaunt out on the bike.

I’ve been a cyclist for about 20 years and have used many different handlebar mounted computers over that time. These show all the predictable stuff like trip distance, average speed, current speed, overall distance, pedal cadence and a few other things. All measured by magnets on the wheels and sensors attached to the frame. I’ve even used heart rate monitors when I was really serious (and fit).

But this iMapMyRide app takes geekyness + sport to a new level.

In amongst all the digital talk at SXSW there was one panel that felt very analogue. In fact, it was about physical things. Titled “Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design” or “Get excited and make things”.

The panel took turns to present some of their projects which by and large involved creating physical, printed objects. Yeah, print. That dirty, high-friction mechanism for disseminating information.

Chris Heathcote kicked things off with a core argument that ‘puter screens are inherently boring and mundane and that ‘digital’ is natural and not special anymore. He used Russell Davies‘s term ‘post-digital’ which is about moving screen experiences into the real world.

I wrote a week or so ago about what I wanted to get from South by South West.

Now it’s all over, the hangover has faded but the jetlag is lingering longer than would be ideal, there are a few observations from my first sxsw that I would like to share.

The standout moment for me was Clay Shirky’s talk “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data.” He captivated the audience for an hour, weaving together seemingly unrelated topics and themes (underwear, weather balloons, spherical trigonometry, Napster and the printing press, amongst others). He created a beautifully articulate argument for how abundance breaks more things than scarcity and raised the question around how much value we can get out of civic sharing.

I’ve been to loads of conferences over the years. Most of them have left me feeling ‘whelmed’ at best and at most other times frustrated.

I blogged last year about one conference I attended in London last May. There was a general feeling that the speakers offered nothing new, virtually no excitement or insight and most of the talks boiled down to a personal retrospective. That’s fair enough you may say, but the conference was billed as being about the future of the industry.

It felt as if the speakers had just been asked to turn up and speak about anything they wanted. No vetting by the organiser and seemingly very little brief to the speakers.