Movable type: writing for the iPhone or iPod touch user

This is the third post in my series on life as an iUser. Following on from last week's post on site design and the iPhone (or iPod touch) today I'm thinking, briefly, about content.

We hear it often: readers don’t read on the web, they scan. But some people at desktops do have time to concentrate hard on what they are doing. My iPhone and I unfortunately don’t.

A major component of getting an iUser to touch base with you is therefore to make sure you truly follow the principles of good writing for the web when developing content relevant to people on the move.

The following points relate as much to documents I might open as attachments from my inbox, to emails I might receive, blog posts in my feed reader, and web page content.

Write to be read on the move

When it comes to content development remember I am in an experience, I don’t want an experience. (Though I had to laugh when one of the speakers at the recent Webstock conference pointed out this t-shirt: “I went outside once; the graphics are not that good”.)

What this means is I’m not so interested in your vision for me, your welcome to me, nor pretty images you think I will like. I just want your information up front.

If I could ask you to do five easy things to any content you provide that is relevant to me on the move, they would be:

• Don’t gush first then give me a summary of the gush. Give me the potted version first (especially in emails - it will help me decide whether I need to open your email now or later) - a good summary will take you a very long way

• Simplify. Think poetry not prose, and say more with less.

• White space. Use it. I’m never going to print.

• Active not passive language. Front load everything, from link text to sentences. That way if the end is cut off because I’ve had to zoom in to read and you aren’t using a mobile device style sheet, I’ve got the gist from the first half of your link or sentence.

• Put context in your micro-content. Not ‘on Sunday’ but ‘on Sunday 21st March 2008’ (unless it’s every Sunday forever and ever). Not the library but the National Library. Not ‘open today’ but ‘open today, the 4th of December 2008’, not click here but Opening hours for the National Library.

If you think about the content an iPhone user might want to access not as a page but as little patches of re-usable micro-content, you are likely to be on the right track.

Next time, more serious technical thoughts on optimising for the iGeneration. In the meantime, it’s awful quiet out there. Get in touch via the comments, eh?

The Source: news about digital libraries and library innovations from around the web

Introducing The Source

Alternative File Formats for Storing Master Images of Digitisation Projects (Note: PDF)

From the Koninklijke Bibliotheek website

This document is the end result of a study regarding alternative formats for storing master files of digitisation projects of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) in The Hague, the Netherlands. The study took place in the context of reviewing the KB's storage strategy. The objective of the study was to describe alternative file formats in order to reduce the necessary storage space. The desired image quality, long-term sustainability and functionality had to be taken into account during the study.


Many More than a Million: building the digital environment for the age of abundance (Note: PDF)

Find the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) website

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) hosted a workshop in Washington, D.C., on November 28, 2007, to talk about the general problem of what can be done with the very large digital collections now taking shape as a result of mass digitization projects, the so-called “million books” problem. This was the third of what will ultimately be five workshops held on this topic, organized by Tufts University with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This sequence of workshops on the million books problem converges with CLIR’s programs in digital scholarship, cyberinfrastructure and preservation and is part of an extended, distributed conversation on these related topics that CLIR is supporting in several venues in 2007 and 2008. While the November CLIR meeting focused on text collections, we also considered four major questions that are largely format independent but illuminate the implications of scale:
• What is the problem? How does access to large corpora of digital materials change that problem?
• What services do scholars need?
• How do we manage digital collections when the digital material is abundant rather than selective?
• What systems or infrastructure is necessary to provide services and materials to scholars?


The Fifth Blackbird: Some Thoughts on Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation / Brian F. Lavoie

From the D-Lib Magazine website

A few years ago my colleague Lorcan Dempsey and I wrote an article entitled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at ... Digital Preservation". Our purpose was to present a more nuanced view of digital preservation than one typically found in the literature, conferences, and community discussion springing up around the topic. We suggested thirteen different yet intertwined perspectives one can take on the digital preservation problem, with the implicit message that successful digital preservation activities will likely have to accommodate most if not all of them. We summarized our thirteen digital preservation "blackbirds" by noting: Preserving our digital heritage is more than just a technical process of perpetuating digital signals over long periods of time. It is also a social and cultural process, in the sense of selecting what materials should be preserved, and in what form; it is an economic process, in the sense of matching limited means with ambitious objectives; it is a legal process, in the sense of defining what rights and privileges are needed to support maintenance of a permanent scholarly and cultural record. It is a question of responsibilities and incentives, and of articulating and organizing new forms of curatorial practice. And perhaps most importantly, it is an ongoing, long-term commitment, often shared, and cooperatively met, by many stakeholders.
The present article focuses on the fifth "blackbird" in our original list of thirteen: digital preservation as an economically sustainable activity.


The Australian METS Profile – A Journey about Metadata

From the D-Lib Magazine website

In any journey, there's a destination but half the 'fun' is getting there. This article chronicles our journey towards a common way of packaging and exchanging digital content in a future Australian data commons – a national corpus of research resources that can be shared and re-used. Whatever packaging format is used, it has to handle complex content models and work across multiple submission and dissemination scenarios. It has to do this in a way that maintains a history of the chain of custody of objects over time. At the start of our journey we chose METS extended by PREMIS to do this. We learnt a lot during the first two stages that we want to share with those travelling to a similar destination.


Privacy and Mobile Technologies: What are the Risks?

From the Riley Information Services website

This report assesses the ways in which privacy and new technologies are creating tensions as to the degree to which individual privacy is being compromised. Privacy is now a recognized human rights instrument. Privacy and Data Protection commissioners around the world are aware of this issue. However, the biggest challenges facing these privacy advocates are the ways in which information technologies are being used. In this new environment personal information can be bandied about with ease. One technology that is now pervasive in society is mobile technologies. This essay assesses the issues regarding the emergence of mobile (cellular) phones. It is now estimated there are 1 billion plus mobile phones. What are the implications for privacy?

Muscle and Bone

My written visits to this page are usually marked by some form of agitation on the part of a heartfelt advocate. I promise this visit will be no different. A couple of months ago I backed off posting a wee flag-burner of a piece, after bashing my head against a piece of software you could charitably call "somewhat retarded", in the course of repackaging applications. This role involves making customisations to software in order for it to meet the needs of deployment within the library. The process of repackaging has the side-effect of revealing inherent characteristics - positive and negative - in applications that can be traced back to things like development models and environments, software licensing and anti-piracy measures, sometimes even commercial affiliations. What I have learnt from this is that there are certain software architectural decisions that give me involuntary nausea.

DCOM, hang your head in shame. No biscuit.

It would seem logical to me, that software in use in an institution like a library, have a requirement for a slightly greater degree of inherent robustness than in a private institution. I'm not just talking common-or-garden stability here. I'm also referring to the radius of downstream effects the application has on the environment in terms of dependencies, the accessibility (or otherwise) of support, the responsiveness of the developers to feedback, and the ability to maintain, update, or modify the software. This is to prevent applications from shoehorning us into architectural support obligations, to provide for the contingency of being able to rescue data off desert islands of misuse, or to maintain the theoretical ability to jump platform ship. We cannot insure against the loss of intellectual heritage, whereas a private company can insure against loss of earnings. Our responsibilities are somewhat different, and the way we carry them out must be different too. Common-or-garden commercial computing practices don't always apply to Galleries, Libraries, And Museums.

At this point in the compositional process, I feel the need to point out the obvious fork in narrative I could choose to follow. I could get out my paintbrush and can of vitriol, and do a Rolf Harris-style portrait of some of the characteristics of some really irritating software, without naming names, of course. Alternatively, I could outline a few examples of characteristics really desireable to those of us involved in supporting the software pickaxes in the GLAM goldmines.

/Scratches head.
//Chooses the latter...

We have to be pragmatic about the platform we run. I would say platforms, but....yeah....
One thing we can count on is the general ubiquity of Windows. Leaving aside the OS debates, an interesting fact about Windows is the huge richness of different applications available - and it's a natural corollary that they have a wide range of characteristics. A GLAM-friendly client application for windows, in my own practical experience, would contain as many of the below characteristics as possible, in order to be robust and benign in the Culture and heritage environment:

• a permissive license, ie, at least per-seat, or site licensed, if not freeware or open source.

• a responsive support community.

• a humble standalone .msi or .exe installer, non-obfuscated, straightforward.

• it would be cross-platform.

• it would be as free of platform-specific dependencies or runtimes like .NET as possible.

• it would be compatible with other, similar local client apps for data exchange purposes.

• if an application has a browser-based client interface option, it should not require Active X or any browser-specific third party commercial plugins.

• there should be no registry data anywhere outside of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE.

• there should be no hard-coding of paths, install-time variables, or configuration values.

• configurable client settings should be located on either the client, or on the server. Not spread across both.

Yes, I am a rampant idealist.

To flesh out my picture a little more, let me show an example of a piece of software I'd consider supremely GLAM-friendly - dotproject. It is a multiuser, web-based project management application, (web demo link here) A co-worker mentioned to me that a company she was collaborating with overseas had recommended that she look at it as an alternative to emailing back-and-forth excel spreadsheets and project files. The application is freely available (free as in beer and free as in speech) for all platforms, the client interface is a browser, with all data stored server-side. It is open source, and the user, support, training, and documentation resources are quite extensive. If I were told to make it available to end-users in my organisation I could simply provide them with a link. Everyone in the org could be working on it, pounding my server, in less than a minute. Nice huh? How friendly is that?

Now, giving in to my darker urgings, I'm gonna go on my Rolf Harris trip, with the paintbrush and the can of vitriol....I recently heard the following remark being made during a software deployment test:

"I'm sorry, there is no way it could be a fault of the application - this software costs $250,000."

- Such a brilliant one-liner couldn't help but sear itself into my memory. This was a defensive response to a particular piece of software being blatantly stupid, from the Vendor supporting it. I am not scientist; but I felt when I heard that comment a great sense of vindication - the application in question didn't contain a single characteristic from my list above. [And just as a follow-up to the vendor's statement above, it did turn out to be a fault of the application, despite the fact that it costs $250,000.]
Pricetag is sometimes a reflection of the size of the barrel a software provider have you bent over. For a record keeping institution like a library or an archive, being bent over a barrel is a consequence of not following best-practice software selection or use. Typically this occurs with the more niche nuts-and-bolts software, you know, the stuff we percieve as really indispensable that makes wheels rotate in a well-lubricated fashion. It occurs on a lower level when we value a familiar keyboard shortcut or a particular menu location of a tool, over a general function or software license. It occurs passively when all we try to do is follow a well-trodden path of least resistance. No piece of software used in the Culture and heritage sector should be making dependency requirements that lock-in the institution to particular purchasing decisions. If a piece of software does this, we have a responsibility to have in mind a contingency, a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel escape plan. If our environment becomes an ecosystem finely-tuned to supporting only a very particular type of animal, we'll be working in an innovation-hostile world.

If we're in a position where a piece of software has become indispensable, we're not following particularly robust software usage practices as an organisation, and this is an issue because a lot of our software decisions are informed (overruled?) by the usage habits of normal, everyday librarians. People working in the Culture and heritage sector need to look for software that is GLAM-friendly not just in function, but also in design philosophy; in muscle and bone, not just skin.

Reach out and touch your web space: site design and the iPhone

In my last post in this series on content development for new generation mobile devices (well, more specifically, the iPhone or iPod touch), I sketched out a profile of an iUser based on my own personal experience. In this post I’d like to start thinking through what this means for you and your current website design.

iDesign tips

While I personally am immensely proud to have been part of the team who built the National Library website, I am sorry to report that my iPhone (which could also be an iPod touch) does not like it.


This one on the other hand (;-)), from the team who brought you Papers Past, is not too bad:


Why is this? Partly it’s because my iPhone and I appreciate modular design – the kind of pages like iGoogle that could just as easily be built out of widgets. We like patchworks (or newspaper-type designs) with clear scrolling lines not brick walls. We don’t like flash, nor heavy graphics - but more of that in an upcoming post detailing what technologies the iPhone does and does not support.

Primarily my iPhone and I appreciate sites that follow the principles of good web design, but with an additional edge. They can be touched, moved, chunked, panned and zoomed, not just pointed at, clicked, and scrolled.

So what else makes a website iPhone (or iPod touch) friendly?

Clear lines of site

• Alignment of page elements: I can easily move vertically and horizontally along the edges of patches or modules – hard to do when information is structured like a brick wall or, worse, is all over the place with centred headings and what not.

• Clear-cut elements. Behind the scenes, when I double tap, Safari on iPhone looks for the closest block to the element I have tapped (such as the DIV), zooms it to fit my magnifying glass and centres it. The little snippets of newspapers from the Papers Past site expand perfectly – though so far I haven’t had much need to find out what time the movies are on in 1914. (note, there is no scroll bar on a real iPhone as in this demo graphic).
  

• Related information and links are clearly grouped – a basic principle of information design, but here the grouping relies more on sound architecture than graphics.

• Next buttons and other navigational elements are not aligned to the right if the dominant scroll direction is vertical and content is left aligned (this is where Papers Past falls down) – and they are consistent. In fact most of the content is left aligned within the patch.

Bi-directional viewing

Works in portrait and landscape view (when I tilt my iPhone 45 degrees, it automatically reorientates your page to the way I am holding it).

Short URIs

Short URI for an entry point, such as http://i.eb.com/. What could be simpler to touch type in (if I have to)?

Essential graphics only

Graphics are optimised as communication devices for a small screen, if there at all. Typically this means they will err on the side of less detail rather than more.

Good to touch

• Touchable content (which means it is probably crawlable by Google bots too) and clear indication of what I’m getting when I do touch (no ‘Click here’s’ - I ain’t clicking. Hopefully we can avoid a ‘tap here’ movement too).

• Good margins around each ‘patch’ of information and the overall page: I can get my thumbs and fingers in there without accidentally clicking off somewhere unexpected.

• Links have good amounts of white space around them so my clunky fingers don’t hit two at once. Again, the search results for Papers Past are a great example of how to use white space. The results for Te Ao Hou, on the other hand, are not.

• Tabs are just made for my fingers. Yes, my fingers! Similarly, rectangular chunks of content are perfect for side viewing. Buttons are also big and clearly invitations to touch (or click, if that is your device of choice).

Interestingly, and I have to say rightly, the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 identify navigational and other elements at the top or side of the page as extraneous material (e.g. Menu Bars, Breadcrumb Trails).

When I am out and about with my iPhone, I’m definitely not browsing – not your site, anyway. If I land on your site and the first thing I get is a giant graphic, I’m lost until I scroll down to what I am really looking for: your information.

That aside, most of these points will not be new to you if you practice good web design. There are ways of expressing these things far more technical than mine – and I’ll point to a few of these in upcoming posts.

For now, I’m concentrating on what the iPhone user experiences when they are using your current website, not one that has been optimised specifically for this device. Next time: writing for the iUser (who is really just your average information consumer).

So, out of interest, how do you think your website stacks up?

The Source: news about digital libraries and library innovations from around the web

Introducing The Source

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe. An updated forecast of worldwide information growth through 2011 (Note: PDF)

From the EMC Corporation website

This white paper calibrates the size (bigger) and growth (faster) of the digital universe. It also seeks to understand the implications for business, government, and society.
Some key findings are as follows:
• The digital universe in 2007 — at 2.25 x 1021 bits (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes) — was 10% bigger than we thought. The resizing comes as a result of faster growth in cameras, digital TV shipments, and better understanding of information replication
• By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006
• As forecast, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home
• Fast-growing corners of the digital universe include those related to digital TV, surveillance cameras, Internet access in emerging countries, sensor-based applications, data-centers supporting “cloud computing,” and social networks
• The diversity of the digital universe can be seen in the variability of file sizes, from 6 gigabyte movies on DVD to 128-bit signals from RFID tags. Because of the growth of VoIP, sensors, and RFID, the number of electronic information “containers” — files, images, packets, tag contents — is growing 50% faster than the number of gigabytes. The information created in 2011 will be contained in more than 20 quadrillion — 20 million billion — of such containers, a tremendous management challenge for both businesses and consumers
• Of that portion of the digital universe created by individuals, less than half can be accounted for by user activities — pictures taken, phone calls made, emails sent — while the rest constitutes a digital “shadow” — surveillance photos, Web search histories, financial transaction journals, mailing lists, and so on
• The enterprise share of the digital universe is widely skewed by industry, having little relationship to GDP or IT spending. The finance industry, for instance, accounts for almost 20% of worldwide IT spending but only 6% of the digital universe. Meanwhile, media, entertainment, and communications industries will account for 10 times their share of the digital universe in 2011 as their share of worldwide gross economic output
• The picture related to the source and governance of digital information remains intact: Approximately 70% of the digital universe is created by individuals, but enterprises are responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of 85%


Building a creative innovation economy: opportunities for the Australian and New Zealand creative sectors in the digital environment (Note: PDF)

From the Cultural Ministers Council website

This report provides a high-level discussion of the issues, opportunities, potential future directions and key shared priorities for the Australian and New Zealand creative sectors in the online, mobile and broadcast digital environment. It documents achievements to date and aims to raise awareness about potential future directions for the creative sector in the digital environment.


InterConnections: A National Study of Users and Potential Users of Online Information

From the Institute of Museum and Library Services website

Museums and libraries have long been sources of learning, recreation and information for personal, family, educational and workplace purposes. However, the Internet, Web and other technologies have become an increasingly used source of information that some believe will largely replace their physical counterparts. On the other hand, some have speculated that the Internet and related technologies and services will actually enhance and increase museum and library use.
Until now, there has been no solid evidence to support either assertion particularly considering the wide range in types of museums and libraries. The “IMLS National Study on the Use of Libraries, Museums and the Internet,” delves into the use of libraries, museums and the Internet and concludes that “the amount of use of the Internet is positively correlated with the number of in-person visits to museums and has a positive effect on in-person visits to public libraries.”


How digitisation can bring a nation's heritage to the desktops of all (Note: Podcast)

From the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) website

One of the projects in JISC's digitisation programme, the Welsh Journals project is set to add to a growing body of materials dedicated to Welsh, culture, history and language. In this podcast, director of the project, Arwel Jones talks about how digitisation can promote wider efforts to make a nation's culture and heritage available to all.

A Beguiling Demo of Silverlight and Seadragon

The good people over at Fresh+New today cover the Microsoft Silverlight-driven memorabilia collection of the Hard Rock Cafe, which showcases some of that smooth-and-practically-infinite zooming we all saw in last year's TED demonstration of Seadragon. Nice.

If you haven't seen it, please head on over to http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/, install Silverlight, and allow yourself to be momentarily beguiled by the production. Enjoy that feeling while it lasts, because as soon as you come back here I'm going to go on and on about why approaches like that are confined to promotional boutique collections that don't play well with others, and how there is nothing there that ought to be emulated by cultural and heritage institutions.

To begin to take the sheen off what you've just seen, consider that when I went looking on the internet for a letter that Paul McCartney wrote on note paper from the Hotel St George right here in Wellington in 1964, do you think I headed on over to http://memorabilia.hardrock.com? No I googled it, of course, which is my point, but ironically I wouldn't have found it, because for all the effort they've put into the interface, they haven't exposed their memorabilia metadata in a way that google can index.

Consider the increasingly accepted notion that the web is not about websites any more, it's about data. If anyone with a smart idea and a free evening can repurpose and "mash up" (ugh) data into new forms, you're going to get an incredibly interesting cutting edge, like you see at Everyblock Chicago and countless others. When you hear "incredibly interesting cutting edge" you should also hear "incredibly uninteresting remainder", which is where we're going to have to file http://memorabilia.hardrock.com, since it doesn't do anything its creators didn't expect, and it won't do anything tomorrow that it doesn't do today, at least nothing that wasn't planned and paid for. Essentially, in my colleague Emerson's words, it isn't a resource that will have any ongoing life in the hands of the wider digital community, and while the marketing department at the Hard Rock Cafe might not be too concerned about that, those of us in cultural and heritage institutions ought to care a lot.

Consider also whether it is reasonable to expect people to learn to use another special interface like this just so they can browse your material. There are simply too many collections, and I don't have time to learn a million ways of interacting with digital material. What's more, the odds that your interface suits me are vanishingly small; I expect to be able to use my tools of choice to interact with your collections. On my 2560-pixel wide display, the tiny 800-pixel wide viewing window is no good. On my Octocore 3.2GHz Xeon with 8800 GT video, it hurts my eyes that these images don't fold themselves into a flock of perfect origami cranes, fly gracefully towards me and land on the lake in the foreground (with a splash!) before wringing themselves dry and smartly unfolding into the original image. At the same time, despite all the effort that has gone into developing this custom Silverlight interface, it actually breaks a number of standard user interface norms: I can't open a new tab with control-T, and I can't copy and paste the descriptive text.

While I'm not interested in the battle between Silverlight and Flash, since I can't see a place for either in the Web of Tomorrow, I think it's important that any website that uses them in this era also provides an alternative interface for users that don't or can't use these plugins.

So. The new "Web of Data" model of the future encourages us to think of our digital material as discrete, self-described objects that are surfaced to the internet and delivered to the user in standards-based ways. Think server-side instead of client-side development. Imagine if the Hard Rock Cafe had chosen to expose their material in this way: that letter from the Beatles would be discoverable through google (alongside similar material), or it might appear on a google map of Beatles ephemera, or on your iPhone when you walked by the Hotel St George. But perhaps most importantly, I could use my own interface-of-choice (currently PicLens) for viewing the material, along with other material that matches my avenue of enquiry from a wide range of sources. What's more, if you think PicLens is nice now, consider that it is being improved all the time at no cost to you, and that there are doubtless other interfaces being developed too. In a year or two, sites like http://memorabilia.hardrock.com will look primitive compared to the browser plugins that we are using to view digital material that meets our criteria, drawn from millions of sites on the internet in an instant. That's the power of the internet; who would bet against it?

In cultural and heritage institutions, instead of spending our limited resources on developing boutique interface silos, we ought to concentrate on digitisation, persistent identifiers, rich fine-grained metadata, and open standards to share it with the world: that's our role in this ecosystem, the stuff we can do that no one else can.

The Source: news about digital libraries and library innovations from around the web

Introducing The Source

Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0

From the First Monday website

Web 2.0 represents a blurring of the boundaries between Web users and producers, consumption and participation, authority and amateurism, play and work, data and the network, reality and virtuality. The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 infrastructures suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks. But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of one’s identity across fractured spaces, the emergence of powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor for commercial gain, and the fear of increased corporatization of online social and collaborative spaces and outputs.
Articles include:
* Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
* Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
* Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
* Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
* The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
* Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance
* History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward


The effect of structural cues on user comprehension, navigational behavior, and perceptions (Note: PDF)

From the University of Washington website

Web authors need writing strategies based on empirical studies of real Web users, strategies that will produce comprehensible Web documents that facilitate readers on the Web. The study reported here investigated the effect of structural cues (text previews and navigational tab menus) on user comprehension, navigational behavior, and perceptions. Our findings underscore that good Web design must be context specific - structural cues that promote understanding are not necessarily those that promote exploration or enjoyment.


Mobile Access to Data and Information (Note: PDF)

From the Pew / Internet website

Anyone who doubts how important mobile phones are and will become as a platform and marketing medium needs only to look at the latest Pew Internet & American Life report. Cellphones are now more important to US adults than the internet, television, landline phones and email. In addition, an increasing number of consumers are using their mobile phones for things other than voice communications, including accessing mobile internet content.
62% of all Americans are part of a wireless, mobile population that participates in digital activities away from home or work. Not only are young people attuned to this kind of access, African Americans and English-speaking Latinos are more likely than white Americans to use non-voice data applications on their cell phones.


Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World (Note: PDF)

From the OCLC website

The practice of using a social network to establish and enhance relationships based on some common ground - shared interests, related skills, or a common geographic location - is as old as human societies, but social networking has flourished due to the ease of connecting on the Web. This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including:
* The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web
* How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues
* Opinions on privacy online
* Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking

Beauty is in the i of the beholder?

I am interested to know how many organisations out there are running the “am I optimised for an iPhone or iPod touch” test as well as the various usability, accessibility, browser compatibility, search engine optimisation, and other tests we usually run when developing new online products or services?

I’m willing to bet not many. In fact I know you are not. Because I have an iPhone, and a lot of your web content is not doing it for me. Nor are your documents. Nor your emails. So in this series of posts I want to start thinking about some things we can do to make our online offerings - or at least those relevant to mobile device users - iFriendly.

To me, this starts with acknowledging the iUser – just one of a number of mobile users out there who might seek access to the services we provide.

Getting to know the iUser

One of the reasons I got an iPhone is because I like to travel. I like to travel and I like to stay in touch with people but I don’t always like to lug around a laptop, guidebook, and camera; nor to sit in dirty internet cafes trying to work out how to reset Google from German to English.

I am also of the generation that does not retain certain types of information because I know how to find it if I need to. Why duplicate the effort of millions of servers?

Here are some other things you might like to know if you want me to keep in touch with your website now that I am no longer shackled to a desktop. I'll look more deeply at the significance of these points in further posts:

1. Generally, I am the same as the iPod touch user (a more likely visitor to your site if you are in New Zealand) except I have phone apps too.
2. For better or worse, I am using Safari, and it’s Safari for iPhone not for the computer desktop.
3. I am using my fingers, not a mouse. Now, my fingers are not exactly sausages, but they’re not a precision input device like a stylus either.... I wonder if there’d be a market for a thimble-type thing with a small cube on the top for precision touching? Call it nimble touch or something. Apologies, I digress....
4. My middle finger can’t cut, copy or paste (though come to think of it this would actually be kind of useful in everyday life). What I am mainly doing is tapping and pinching, pressing and panning. Yes, I realise this sounds a little odd.
5. I can’t resize my browser window but I can and will zoom – a lot – and I will move your content around all over the place under my squiddly sized (but zoomifying) viewing window, which can be either portrait or landscape. Imagine someone interacting with a newspaper page using a rectangular magnifying glass. That’s me, my iPhone, and your current web page. Sort of.
6. I am in the real world. Maybe I am in a bookshop wanting to know whether I should pay $35 for a new title or get it from your library. Maybe I can’t remember what time you close. The real world has a lot of other sensory stuff going on. Don’t add to my confusion.
7. I’m probably in one of these places. For the most part, I am in an experience – I don’t want an experience. I just want information relevant to my context, or the context I am shortly going to be in, and I want it now.
8. I am in transit. I may be on the train (OK, so it’s not a New Zealand train). I could be in the airport waiting for my plane, or out on the street. I am going places! My primary destination is not your website. Sorry. Usually it’s your information relevant to my site, where I am with my iPhone that counts.
9. I am Googling to find stuff because, whether rightly or wrongly, my device comes with Google built in. If you are not optimised for one of these search engines, I’ll find you but it will be hard. I may bookmark you though – and I seem to be using my RSS feed reader more than usual. What I’m not doing so much is browsing.
10. Because I am that kind of person, I think cellphone and keitai fiction is cool and I’d like to see libraries offering me nano-works like this for when I am sitting in an airport or on a train. A bit like the Wellington poetry on buses initiative. But I may be alone in this.

Google, which has a mobile user experience strategy, categorises mobile users into three behaviour groups: Repetitive now, Bored now, Urgent now. You can read about them in this article by Stephen Wellman on informationweek.com.

So far I have been oscillating between bored (waiting for stuff to happen, nobody around to talk to, didn’t bring a book) and urgent (need some information fast to help make something happen). You can take a look here if you want to see how I am physically (learning about) interacting with my iPhone.

The question is how can you let me reach out and touch your website? I’ll put forward some personal thoughts and beginner's research to that end in the next post.