Want more info and get coupons for the restaurants in this building? Simply snap the QR-code (or manually enter the website address) and you’ll be brought to a webpage when all that. Use your cel-phone as a coupon book!

Navigating in Tokyo is very different from North America. In Japanese addressing system, an address is based on block (CHO,町) rather than street. For example, the address of the Sony Building at Ginza is 5-3-1 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061 Sony Building. Here the 5-3-1 means the District #5, Block #3, Building #1. Since the allocation of block number does not often follow any rules, it is essential to consult a map before getting out of a train station.

e-NAVITA (http://www.navita.co.jp) is a private company that provides map service and local business directory for mobile devices. Now with growing usage of サイフ携帯 (SAIFU KEITAI, mobile phone wallet), user can easily download a district map with just a touch to the sensor. A secondary access way is to use the QR-code if you do not own a compatible phone.

SAIFU KAITAI is using Sony’s FeliCa technology. You can see my other blog posts about the FeliCa technology here.

For more information about Japanese Addressing System please visit this Wikipedia page.

You are sitting alone in this confined space. Except occasional distant noise from late night trains, the house is simply dead silent. The bathroom door next to your elbow is loosely shut, you can hear your breath echoing inside this space. The dim light above your head can barely light up the room, as well as the paper you are holding. But it casts an annoying shadow of you head onto the paper, making it even hard to read the small print. You move the paper closer and closer to your nose, tracing every line of the horror novel, and your heart beat is mixed with your ever faster breathing.

Can you picture this experience in your head? I am trying to describe a Japanese product: a horror novel that is also a toilet paper roll. The name of the novel is called ドロップ (Drop) written by 鈴木光司 (Suzuki Koushi). Mr. Suzuki also wrote the famous horror novel リング (Ring).

From User Experience point of view, the combination of toilet paper and horror novel is a brilliant idea.

• Time condition: People are usually free for 3-5 minutes (or longer) in bathroom. They would find all sort of things to kill the time, such as handheld gaming device, magazine and book.
• Emotional condition: When a person is alone in a confined, quiet space (the bathroom), he/she is more emotionally vulnerable to horror stories.
• Convenience: toilet paper is always placed in a bathroom, there’s no doubt about it. It is right at the place of reach, doesn’t require battery, and you don’t need to bring a book in and out of the bathroom. Even better, after reading a page you can simply use it for it’s primary purpose: toilet paper.

I am seeing a lot of local map in train stations that has a “touch download” feature, which allows mobile phone users to download local business information simply by taping their FeliCa-powered mobile phone to the sensor.

FeliCa is a RFID technology offered by Sony that allows touchless money and data transaction. The technology is currently being widely used by Japanese public transit and electronic payment systems.

Unlike QR-code, this touchless RFID is supposed to be much quicker in response time. Theoretically the user can conveniently and instantly get the information on their phone without touching any button on the keypad.

On the other hand, using of this technology is only limited to Sony’s business partner and those who can afford to install a FeliCa transceiver. Also, such transceiver would consume electricity, so it might not work when there is a power outage. In that case, QR-code is still a better offline (zero electricity required) alternative. Also, since QR-code is a loyalty free technology, you can freely incorporate the code into posters and marketing materials.

Unfortunately I don’t own a FeliCa compatible mobile phone so I couldn’t record a video clip of it in use.

Wikipedia on Sony FeliCa technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa

McDonalds Japan uses a lot of QR-code technology as marketing tool. In a purchase of drink and snack, I could find 4 codes on the placemat and the potato bacon pie package.

I particularly like the code on the pie package, which leads you to McDonald’s nutrition site. The interaction flow is like this:

• A customer purchases a pie and happily sits down to enjoy it.
• Being a health conscious individual, the customer is quite concerned about how much nutrition and calories the pie has.
• The customer pulls out his/her mobile phone, snaps the code and immediately sees the nutrition information about the pie in great detail. After knowing that the calories in this pie doesn’t exceed the daily limit, he/she feels save and happy to enjoy it without hesitation. Yum!

My thoughts:

Nutrition Campaign — McDonald’s can run a campaign to promote health conscious living, by creating free mobile app that let you scan food and automatically calculate the daily total calories consumption. The app is just a very simple QR-code scanner, which would recognize the code of the food you are eating (and also allow manual editing), and then automatically pull from the database the calories and nutrition values such as sodium, iron, fat and so on, and present a table of individual items as well as the daily total. It can also remember the data of previous days to generate historical charts.

Since most people perceive McDonalds as an unhealthy fast food restaurant, I think it would be nice for them to run such campaign to improve their public image and help marketing.

Testing Japanese Mobile Websites — tips to test mobile sites for Japanese mobile phone from desktop browser:

• Change your browser’s user agent to one of the listed agent on Docomo‘s spec page:
  http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/spec/useragent/
• For this test, I just randomly picked this user agent with support of Browser 2.0:
  "DoCoMo/2.0 F04B(c500;TB;W30H25) (Communicating from the browser(vertical full screen))"
• Turn on Safari “Develop” option to enable custom user agent.
• Change the Text-encoding to “Japanese (Shift JIS)” if your browser is not already defaulted to Japanese encoding.

More photos:

How do you pass the time waiting for a connection flight? What if you are so tired from the previous flight? How do you secure your luggage while your eyes are closed?

What makes a good sleep?

• Being able to lie down
• Shoes off
• Dark, or at least covering the eyes
• Sense of security
• Quiet

The airport bench is designed to avoid people from laying down. But like many things in life, people will always be able to find ways to work around. Can you design the airport so that it is more passenger friendly, especially those who are tired?

What about the design of the luggage? How about making it easier to sleep on, maybe with an inflatable pillow?

]]> http://www.calvin-c.com/blog/watch-your-luggage-while-sleeping/feed/ 0 http://www.calvin-c.com/blog/gesture-controlled-seal/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gesture-controlled-seal http://www.calvin-c.com/blog/gesture-controlled-seal/#comments Sat, 08 May 2010 23:45:49 +0000 Calvin C http://www.calvin-c.com/?p=688 Curious seal responses to human gesture. Beautiful human to nature interaction that no amount of technology and interaction design can beat. Shot at Ocean Park, Hong Kong.

Curious seal responses to human gesture. Beautiful human to nature interaction that no amount of technology and interaction design can beat. Shot at Ocean Park, Hong Kong.

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Advertisement displayed in the right context would increase it’s effectiveness. The picture above shows a set of typical recycle bins on the street in Hong Kong. Notice that there’s a sticker on the blue one, which is an ad of fridge and air-conditioner repairing service.

When people are throwing away recyclables after house cleaning, what’s their state of mind? Do they also have some appliances at home that need to be repaired? Figuring out the correct state of mind while doing one task, and conveniently provide some related services, is really valuable in identifying business opportunities.

Now lets look at web advertisements on Gmail, Yahoo and Mixi respectively.

Although some people claim that intrusive, Gmail’s algorithmic ad is quite good at guessing what might interests me at the moment while reading the UX newsletter email.

Yahoo Mail basically just attach some random catchy news and trendy topics on the page. This strategy is pretty typical in many Chinese websites.

Mixi, one of the largest Japanese social networking site, gives me ads about cosmetic surgery, hair removal, aquarium mini game, makeup, all regardless of my gender and interest settings in my member profile. It is no better than throwing darts in the dark.

1. to organize our computer usage into experience-based, rather than application-based. Users can focus on the actual content and function of interest, freeing them from remembering the application that is actually working under the hood. Barton suggests six group of experiences and their specific actions:
   • Media: music, movices, tv, podcasts, radio, images, texts, marketplace
   • Memories: capture, record, view, share
   • Connections: phone, sms, browser, mail, maps, calendar, contacts, web apps
   • Documents: create, explore, marketplace
   • Creations: create, explore, marketplace
   • Games: console games, portable games, community, marketplace
2. At #1:00, the video shows that user can organize the relevant resources base on context (project, time, name, location), seeing a bunch of papers and folders that you can physically grab and interact with them, instead of seeing the computer files as uni-size icons.
3. Desktop is location aware, and the device can automatically switch to different desktop profile base on the location or context: kitchen, study, driving, public transport…etc

3D desktop with physic engine

3D interactive desktop with physic engine is not a new concept. BumpTop is an application that is already available with a free version and a pro version for $29. However, it is still using the desktop/icon analogy, just making it more visually appealing.

image source: BumpTop. See video at the end of this post.

Hardware

On top of the Locus OS, Barton Smith has an industrial design concept called Stream way back at 2008, which is a mobile device designed for such context based usage. Some of the visions in this design seem to be realized by Apple’s iPad.

Speaking of iPad, it is indeed an interesting device that is technically capable of creating this kind of location-awared, task oriented workflow experience. Unfortunately, Apple only ports the existing iPhone OS to it, which is still very application-based. Furthermore, the tens of thousands of apps available in App Store, which Apple considered the strength of iPhone/touch OS, can be seen exactly as a weakness too. The current SpringBoard app launcher only limits user to have 9 pages of apps in it. User must also remember the page number in order to correctly locate the app that he/she has manually placed, if not randomly dropped to an empty spot by the App Store. Yes, there’s a Spotlight search feature built-in to the OS, but user must remember the correct app name to be able to find it. Thanks to some creative app writers, some of the application names are just impossible to remember. (Shazam, Chomp, Echofon…these are not English!)

Also, Apple locks down the hardware so that no one can develop such a third-party OS. The only possible ways would be to either make it for jail-broken iPad, or an big app that sits on top of the native iPhone OS.

More about OS

Further thoughts on the task oriented OS and file organization method:

PersonalBrain – a file/resources/knowledge organizer that uses non-linear, mind mapping technique. The same file can be linked from different parent node, as well as having multiple child nodes.

iPhone SpringBoard 2.0 Concept by AskTOG, Nielsen Norman Group – an improvement on iPhone SpringBoard app launcher that allows user to group apps based on context: home, work…etc. This is resonant with Locus OS’s multiple desktop profile.

Locus OS concept video:

BumpTop video tour:

Inspired by a blog post in Makezine about DIY iPhone Stylus, I decided to make one with my Staedtler mechanical sketch pencil.

Few technical notes:

• the stylus mimics a human finger tip, which must have enough conductivity, capacitance, and contact surface area to trigger the touch sensor in the iPhone capacitative sensor screen. After a few experiments, I found that the 9mm snap button works the best.
• I chose Staedtler Mars technico because it has the right weight, balance, and conveniently with a metal grip that would increase the capacitance of the stylus.
• as mentioned in the Makezine post, attaching the snap button with dental floss instead of super glue allows it to flex in different angles, thus always maintain the biggest contact area. Also, the snap button and Staedtler Mars tip makes a good ball-socket joint.

Materials:

• Staedtler “Mars technico” mechanical sketch pencil
• Dental Floss
• 9mm snap button

Voila, iPhone Stylus it is:

I am really interested an further testing my DIY stylus on a Macbook and Inklet, an application that turns the Macbook trackpad into a drawing tablet. If the system works, it would be much easier for people to draw sketches without buying a separate Wacom tablet. One example is that, designers can meet with the client in a coffee shop and sketch their ideas on the laptop without any extra drawing tablet.