How does anticipating failure inform design?
Q: Why do people love the iPhone/iPod Touch?
…because it works. To be honest, I’m still a little surprised that it works as well as it does. Well two recent blog posts have reminded me that the iPhone just may be the mobile land of milk and honey. The rest of the world isn’t so pretty…
Nicolas over at Pasta & Vinegar points to Lars Erik Holmquist’s recent column at ACM interactions regarding two basic problems encountered by mobile social software: battery life and critical mass:
“The first may seem trivial, and more than one startup seems to simply shake it off-isn’t everything in electronics getting better all the time anyway, according to Moore’s law? No, this is actually a real killer. A device that pings its surroundings wirelessly with regular intervals, using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, will drain any sensibly sized battery in a few hours at most. Continuously pulling up and reporting a GPS location can be even worse. It is highly unlikely that users will stand for carrying half a dozen replacement batteries, and barring an unprecedented breakthrough in battery technology, the only fix on the horizon is some kind of push solution based on network cell location. Unfortunately, to be useful this requires a degree of cooperation between network service providers that is still a long way off.
The second issue stems less from a lack of user interest and has more to do with the extremely fragmented mobile device market. Whereas signing up for a Facebook account can be done in a matter of minutes, downloading and installing a mobile application has been lots of hard work and beyond the reach of most normal users. This might change very fast, however. With Apple’s iPhone 3G and the accompanying Appstore, there is now for the first time an attractive platform and sales channel for mobile software. In response the rest of the market is likely to finally consolidate around a small number of standard operating systems (including Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile). This means that quite soon, we will see people downloading and using social software on their phones-and those that hook into existing networks will have a head start. Already, iPhone versions of AIM and Facebook are among the Appstore’s top downloads, with others such as Twitteriffic and MySpace also gaining headway.”
Meanwhile over at Near Future Laboratory someone, probably Nicholas again, posted about the importance of anticipating failure:
What are the ways that our technology forces anticipated failure? Does anticipating failure lessen the consequences? Can anticipated failure become part of specifications so we get out of the land of fantasy-advertised-feature-richness and get back to the pragmatics of how things actually work out in the wilds of normal, human real social practices?
Reading these posts reminded me of a section from the ACM paper on Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now? …not to be mistaken for Blast Theory’s actual game Can You See Me Now? In particular, the section explores player state with regards to network connectivity and location tracking. The paper outlines 4 states that players can exist in:
[Players] can be connected and tracked, being within both network and positioning system coverage.
[Players] can be tracked but not connected. For example, their local device is receiving GPS updates and can update its local display accordingly, but is unable to communicate these updates to other players.
[Players] can be connected but not tracked in which case their device can exchange updates and communication with other players, but cannot inform them of its position or update the local display according to the participant’s movements.
[Players] can be neither connected nor tracked in which case their device does not know its location and cannot communicate with other players.
…so how does assuming the damn thing will probably break at some point inform its initial design?
