Trialability is key to adopting the right innovations

Trialability is the possibility that a client or a user, in general, is given to test a particular product for a finite amount of time in order to test its characteristics and, ultimately, its suitability for a set purpose. Trialability has long been recognised as one of the 5 factors influencing the adoption rate of innovation.

'Mannequin in Venice Shop Window'
by Michael Summers under a CC license

Indeed, trialability is normally available for a wide range of products and services and is not restricted solely to the innovative ones. Depending on the country, common goods, such as clothes, video games, household equipment, electronics, etc. can be tried for a short time and then returned for a refund if they are unsatisfactory. Rules do apply for this process, e.g., goods need to be returned in good condition. I've also heard of gallery owners that give their potential customers the possibility to "try" paintings or other art objects in their premises for a while before finalising their purchase. Such practice is also becoming increasingly common in high-tech, high-price equipment, such as digital cameras, camera lenses, etc.

Manufacturers of industrial equipment typically offer trial leases of their equipment to potential clients, possibly offering a pilot scale piece of equipment or provide access to actual scale equipment within their premises.

Software products also follow that trend with developers offering feature-limited trial versions, full-featured but limited time trial versions or online trial versions.

The benefits of trialability come at a cost, which corresponds to the cost of making and providing a trial version of the real thing together with a reasonable level of support.

But what happens with products that normally require considerable customisation before becoming fit for the client? And since trialability is a sought feature for innovative (and regular) products that, however, comes at a cost, does it actually hinder new small players entering the innovation game?

Open source software: a helping hand for growth

Open source software is one of the things that occasionally gets entangled in the webs of ideology, politics and corporate marketing talk. However, open source software is a rather simple idea: Develop something, using an open, collaborative approach if possible, make it available to the public as a product, together with its source code and let them use it as they please. That simple.

Does this development model even make sense? Why would anybody do this? How can open source development pay their bills and, more importantly, who provides support to open source software users?

When pictograms use icons of the past...

'YVR Pictograms' by
Tom Magliery under  a CC license

A pictogram is an image, often depicting a physical object. that conveys a specific message. Pictograms are meant to facilitate the perception of a message, regardless of the language skills of the people exposed to them. Well, the latter in some cases is rather optimistic. Of course, in the case of widely used pictograms, such as road signs, very high positive recognition rates can be expected. But is that the case for all pictograms?

Pictograms have been increasingly used everywhere. The chances are that the ones we come across daily go much beyond the Public information symbols (of ISO 7001:2007), the laundry symbols or the chemical hazard symbols (GHS 2013 revision). Indeed, remote controls, televisions, software programs, smartphones, etc., rely a lot on the use of pictograms, rather than descriptive text, in order to be operated by the user as intented.

Some symbols are abstract so we get to learn their meaning. For instance, the volume level symbol on a remote normally looks like that:

Although the displayed symbol on a laptop might be like that:

 

Other pictograms are more interesting. For instance, the symbol for saving a file:

That is a 3.5'' diskette and while I have used plenty of those, the new generations may have never held one in their lives. The same goes for opening a file. The filing system depicted is still in use in many places but is becoming increasingly uncommon sight:

The paste function is associated with a clipboard icon. Clipboards are still in use but, again, they are not that common amongst young people. Palettes are not a common sight, too, although they are in use by professionals. Still, they are used in several pieces of drawing software.

Voice messages are often behind a pictogram that depicts a magnetic tape:

E-mail clients and webmail services typically use the old, common snail-mail envelope:

Some older e-mail clients used the US-style mailbox with the flag:

Many sound-processing-capable programs use the old-style microphone symbol to indicate record:

There are numerous other cases. For instance the old-school phone handset pictogram (that means "make a call"), the bookmark symbols, the calliper symbols (for measuring distances in photo-editing software), the gear or wrench symbols in software (usually leading to the settings sections), the film reel symbol (indicating video), the album symbol (indicating, well, a digital album), the binoculars and the magnifying glass symbols (search function - OK - both of these are in regular use), etc. But I think I'll end this section with the rabbit-eared TV symbol:

Similar problems exist in other fields, as well. Language expressions may refer to objects or practices of the past that are no longer used. That includes jargon, too (e.g., "radio buttons" in questionnaires that allow the respondent to select only one option). There are also sounds we don't hear often any more (such as the typewriter clicks in the typewriter song).

Employing pictograms to convey messages is not an easy task. Sometimes, they are artistic (e.g., pictogram movie posters). Sometimes they are fun but sometimes not so much. In some cases, if the pictogram fails to be understood, it could even be dangerous. This is particularly important when posting pictograms that will stay in place for tens or hundreds (or more) of generations, such as the warning signs in nuclear waste land burial sites.

It is clear that our world will continue to rely - increasingly - on pictograms. I'm sure that, as time passes, designers will get better in conveying messages in a graphical way and we will become better in interpreting in-context symbols.

Note: Clipart symbols obtained from CLKER (and are thought to be in the public domain).

Revamping those to-do lists

'to do list' by Eamon Brett
under a CC license

To-do lists are nothing new. They are simple and humble yet, for some people, precious.

Personally, I'm not too much of a fan of such things. For that, I have paid the price at a number of occasions. However, having forgotten - a number of times - to get the all the things I need from the supermarket in a single go and having gotten things I didn't really need instead, I somehow convinced myself to ride the wave and install one of those 'to-do' list apps on my mobile.

I went for Wunderlist but I soon realised that there are numerous alternatives, such as Toodledo, Remember the milk (!), Asana and many. many others, including Google Tasks, which is tightly integrated with GMail and Google Calendar and the purpose-built Google Keep. Each of those has its pros and cons, some are simpler and more intuitive than others, etc., but all can, in some way, find home in your smartphone and replace that old-fashioned to-do list on a piece of paper.

(BTW, I won't be doing a review of those apps here. However, there are plenty of reviews over the internet, for example in LifeHacker, the Verge and PC World.)

I'm a bit surprised that some many people came up with an idea (or copied the idea) for an app to replace a simple piece of paper. I know, I shouldn't be. After all, this is a kind of useful app with quite some margin for extra features.

People have been creating to-do lists all the time and having them in a digital form does come with advantages, such as the possibility to re-use lists or list items, share them with others, collaborate around them, combine them with work planning, etc. It's just that such lists can easily exist on torn notebook pages and post-it notes and still reach their objective. In that sense, having such apps feels like an overkill but, at any rate, clearly, that will work, too. After all, smartphones are supposed to be much more besides a simple mobile phone and adding the to-do list functionality is another (small) step towards helping us in our daily lives.

The app update ritual

'My iPhone family pile'
by Blake Patterson
under a CC license

I've been using computers - for work and leisure - for at least 20 years now. In my early PC days, software updates was a rare thing but usually associated with major changes. Update deployment was, at those times, a fully manual procedure. One had to find a disk with the new software version and install it on the target PC.

With time, internet gained ground and developers started using it as an alternative update distribution vehicle. It has been a very welcome thing, indeed; it is normally an easy process and allows for much more frequent updates.

As the number of our digital devices grows, software updates have become an increasingly important part of our (digital) lives. Smartphones, tablets, routers, intelligent devices (thermostats, smart light bulbs, cameras, even camera lenses) allow for their software to be updated.

The frequency of the updates depends on the product and its developers but for "small" applications and apps it can be very frequent. I have come across Android apps that have had 2-3 updates per week. And there, exactly, I believe I can spot a problem. The update process is beginning to take a bit more time (as well as bandwidth and data volume) than perhaps it should. Taking one's smartphone offline for a day, most probably means being prompted for a few tens of app updates when it is taken online, again.

Has the ease of deploying updates made developers sloppier? Has it increased pressure on them to release software as soon as possible, even if not all features are there and even when the software has undergone only little testing? Or is it just adding value to users, offering them access to new functionality, design enhancements and innovative stuff as they are created? As a software user/ consumer, I 'd very much like to think of the latter, though I suspect that we are mostly victims of the former. To be fair, though, for software and apps I really value, hitting the "update" button is often accompanied with great expectations :-)

There is nothing wrong in improving users' experience through well planned software updates. Needless to say that providing updates to fix security holes or fix critical bugs is a must, too. However, offering updates on too frequent a basis can have a negative impact on users' perception of software quality and come at a cost (users' time and productivity, network's bandwidth, etc.). Is it perhaps time for software developers to re-discover quality practices? Or is the constant updating thing something that we, the software users, will need to get used to (and perhaps, even, taught to like)?

Do we make the most out of (computing) technology?

'Typewriter' by Reavenshoe Group
under a CC license

Sadly, the brief answer is no. Most of us have in our hands, at home or at work, computing or other electronic hardware that would have been considered pure fiction 20-30 years ago. Although we have changed the way we live and work due to technology, the steps forward we have made don't necessarily go hand in hand with the leaps in technology we have witnessed.

Of course there are exceptions to the observation above but let me mention a couple of examples and tell me whether they sound familiar or not.

At the place that I work, all employees have PCs. Their (the PCs') primary tasks are e-mail, word-processing and printing and web browsing (not necessarily in that order). Yes, sure, so people do some statistical analysis, some DTP and some database design and some feed input to a number of databases but, still, the majority of PC time is devoted to the three things I mentioned before.  You may think that the volume of work or the quality of the output has increased. Indeed, it may. But there is still a small number of regular PC users that treats word processing software closer to a typewriter than a modern PC. OK, I'm exaggerating here but I believe you can see my point.

The other major change has been in the field of mobile devices. Each smart phone is practically a small computer, powerful enough to handle not only calls and messages but also browsing, voip and video chat and practically most of the stuff that would run on a desktop computer. Do people use those features? Yes, some people use some of those. But some others seem to have problems with that new technology. The following infographic shows an approximate breakdown of the various uses of smart phones.

by jaclynsalem.

According to the infographic above, new stuff (web, search, social media, news. other) account to a moderate to low 24% of the time of smart phone use. An interesting question would be if the total time interacting with smart phones is higher than before, when we had plain mobile phones. I suspect it is.

So why can't we make more and different things now that we have such computing power in our hands?

I don't really know (I'll be doing some guessing here) but here are some possible reasons:

• Bad design on the user interface. Yes, all manufacturers and software designer call their interfaces intuitive but that is not always the case. To make things worse, I don't believe that there is the perfect user-friendly, intuitive interface. It will always need persistence, imagination and luck to get to use an interface successfully. But there are design basics that can help. Below there is an early (very) critical review of Windows 8 (which btw I rather like as OS)
  
  
  
  
• Crappy or buggy software; Software incompatibilities; Software complexity; Inconsistency across platforms and devices; Lack of decent manuals or efficient tutorials. Lack of user training (it sounds old fashioned but in some cases it could help).
• Software cost and/ or poor use of open source software. This particular point always bugs me. It 's fine to pay for software that enhances productivity. But why do businesses avoid to invest in open source software in a coherent way? Especially in cases where the open source alternative proves better in usability, compatibility and, well, cost.
• Hardware restrictions. Yes, you read correctly. We have plenty of processing power but we may be having other limitations that hinder full use of that power. For instance, smart phones can do a lot but they need to be reliably connected to a fast network. That comes at a cost that in many cases is undesirable or, even, excessive. Another example is modern PCs that are powerful but often they come with the minimum possible display estate. Just adding a second monitor would boost productivity (and save on printer paper) but the majority of workplaces I know of stick to small single monitors (often badly positioned in front of the user). Another all-too-common thing is policy restrictions in the use of PCs, some of which severely impact usability, especially when that is paired with an IT department that refuses to listen to the users' needs.
• IT departments that are overloaded with the typical tasks and don't have the resources to add new capabilities to their systems (an extra programmer could do miracles under many circumstances).
• No reliable communication between (casual) users and developers to assist new product development or product improvement (yes, there are beta testers and developers can gather telemetry data but this is not even close in magnitude to what I refer to).

The disappointing thing is that most of the problems above are not-so-hard to address. Maybe the entire product-market-user model needs some rethinking. Maybe developers and, possibly, manufacturers, need to put more effort on durable platforms and commit to their support for longer periods. And, finally, maybe we, the users, need to be more conscious of our options/ choices and voice our thoughts/ wishes/ concerns when needed. Just saying....