One of my summer interns, Ivaylo Lafchiev, is working on an interesting project over the summer, looking at the effect delays might have on mobile phone use. He has developed an Android app that introduces a delay when the phone is unlocked. The effect is that the user will have to wait for a short while (seconds) before the phone becomes available to them. The idea is to vary the duration of the delay to see if we can notice any effects on the overall usage of the device (for instance is the amount of time spent on the phone altered).

The app is now ready to be used in an experiment. The app is available on the app store, and the hope is that the app will attract a few users who will keep it installed for at least a few weeks. This is extremely risky. Why would anyone keep an app that makes it harder to use the phone? The hope here is that people do want to become more conscious about their phone use, and therefore are willing to participate in this experiment. The question however then is in what way the data will be biased by participants already wanting to change their phone use? We are trying to mitigate this bias (and investigating it) by first setting the delay to a short time, and after some time, we'll change the duration of the delay remotely to see if we can stop a difference in phone behaviour. By comparing the use before and after the delay change, and by changing the delay differently for different users, we hope to gather evidence as to whether this will have an effect or not.

I've made two personal observations from having the app installed myself. First, each time I unlock the phone, it serves as a reminder that I'm now about to use my phone. This might seem like a weird thing as the fact that I'm using the phone should be a reminder itself. However, I tend to use the phone when ever I have nothing else todo: waiting for the subway or waiting in line at Starbucks for instance. With the delay, I'm reminded, and then given a short time to contemplate whether I actually want to use the phone or if I should just take a few seconds to do nothing. The longer the duration, the more annoying the app is, but it also makes me more aware of my phone use. When the duration is long enough (more than 3 seconds or so) I start to think before using my phone, even before I take it out of the pocket. All of a sudden I'm reminded that I will have to wait a few seconds before the phone becomes available, and I choose often not to subject myself to it because the thing I was supposed to do with the phone was pointless anyway.

I'm looking forward to see what happens with this experiment. Is anyone going to download the app and install it? Is anyone going to keep it installed for long enough for us to collect data on their behaviour? Only time will tell. But until then, I will be more conscious and mindful of my phone use – until Ivaylo makes the duration so long that I will uninstall the app and go back to mindlessly fill every void of my life with mobile phone use.

You can find more information about the project, and download the app, here.

Last week I was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award from the college. The award was given for my teaching activities within the school , including: the development of a set of tutorials given to students and staff across levels, supervising undergraduate and postgraduate students, and contributions to undergraduate courses.

This morning I presented a paper at CHI entitled Pass The Ball: Enforced Turn-Taking in Activity Tracking. See the abstract below

We have developed a mobile application called Pass The Ball that enables users to track, reflect on, and discuss physical activity with others. We followed an iterative design process, trialling a first version of the app with 20 people and a second version with 31. The trials were conducted in the wild, on users’ own devices. The second version of the app enforced a turn-taking system that meant only one member of a group of users could track their activity at any one time. This constrained tracking at the individual level, but more successfully led users to communicate and interact with each other. We discuss the second trial with reference to two concepts: socialrelatedness and individual-competence. We discuss six key lessons from the trial, and identify two high-level design implications: attend to “practices” of tracking; and look within and beyond “collaboration” and “competition” in the design of activity trackers.  

I've been struggling recently with transcoding media files and streaming to Chromecast. Starting with the excellent project castnow over on github I wanted to be able to 1) stream media files directly from rar archives, and 2) create a web interface to start media files. It is not meant to be overly ambitious but just something useful to use at home.

Among several problems I've encountered so far, one has been especially annoying and turned out to have a very simple fix. The transcoding is done using ffmpeg. What I've been doing is to let ffmpeg reencode any media file I give it, into an mp4 with h264 and aac. This works most of the time, however for some mkv-s there's been no image when transcoded. Casting the mkv directly to the chromecast gives you moving pictures, but it has no sound (since Chromecast does not support 5.1 audio as of yet as far as I understand).

The first attempt at a solution was to then not reencode the video but to simply copy the original. That is simple using ffmpeg flag: -vcodec copy. Unfortunately this still doesn't work. However encoding the video to a file and then casting the file to the chromecast works. Thus there was something going on when the output from ffmpeg is streamed directly. I've still not worked out what is going on, but I've found a solution. Instead of creating a mp4 container, encoding everything into a mkv (or matroska) suddenly makes everything work just fine. The final line is

[code]

cat some-media-file | ffmpeg -i - -f matroska -vcodec h264 -acodec aac -ac2 pipe:1 | stream-to-chromecast

[/code]

So far this seems to work all the time, however it is somewhat unnecessary to encode h264 if the video is already h264. In my project I therefor check codecs and set the flags for ffmpeg accordingly.

The project is written in Node.JS and is available on the following github repository.

Today I was invited to give a talk at the Mobile Apps Group Meetup in Glasgow. I decided to talk briefly about my own app development in my research, why it involves quickly building apps, and how I tend to do that.

I first gave the premise of my work: To understand an app (or the ideas manifested in the app), it needs to be built, so that it can be studied in use. In my view, we can only know what an artefact is once it is in use. We cannot know what it is prior to that.

I then explained how I suggest people to do that. None of the points are anything new, but it is hopefully something that people will start doing once they hear it often enough so I figured it is worth talking about. Concisely I'm trying to convey that you should make decisions when they are easy to make and refrain from it when it is time consuming.

Thus the process is:

• Sketch a lot of ideas. Sketch on paper or in any other material that is easy to produce and easy to discard.
• Make a mockup using Sketch, Photoshop, or anything else that allow you to create what you want different screens of your app should look like. This is where decisions are made. From the sketches made previously, pick one, make it into images that will say exactly what the app will look like on screen. The purpose of this mockup is to describe what is to implemented in the next phase.
• Now you build. But make no decisions what so ever. Just transfer the decisions manifested in the mockups, down to the font sizes, margins, and colours. As soon as you start playing around with margins, font sizes, and colours, you start loosing a lot of time. The reason is because it is not as easy and efficient as it would have been if you would have done this already when creating the mockups, so you should not do it now! If it makes it easier, pretend that the mockups come from a paying customer who pays you to implement an app that looks exactly like he has decided and you have no room for creative suggestions.

In my experience, following this simple rule of making all decisions while creating the mockups, and making no decisions when implementing, makes implementing it a breeze. I think one of the reasons for this is because when you try to make decisions in the implementation phase you not only need to think about how you would like it to look, but you also need to think about how to make it so. Having the decision made means you only need to think about how to make it.