Came across this when preparing for a presentation at IMRG. Still hits the spot!

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If you are in London and in need of a wireless point you could do much worse that visit Foyles Cafe on Charing Cross Rd. The wireless is free there, which is great, and the coffee is also very good. When I said to Steve Potts about this in slightly awed and excited tones, he brought me down with “the bay area in San Francisco has been like that for years”. Well, ta, Steve … and in the meantime, try Foyles, 113-119 Charing Cross Rd, London, WC2H 0EB… and they also have one or two books …

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I’ve always, when asked, considered eyetracking to be pretty futile when it comes to improving the customer experience through good design. I guess my point is that design is generally so poor in producing ‘flow‘ within a web experience that the user is always spending time deliberating what they are doing rather than just doing. When design gets better, then eyetracking might be more use, but now when all user activity is so self-conscious, lets not bother, do a usability lab instead.

But maybe I’m just a wrong-headed miserabilist. Some interesting stuff from the US is providing some real looking and interesting results. They look at media sites, which in many ways have become subject to a standard(ish) layout in the way that newspapers have. So perhaps with this domain we do get flow and people are doing and not deliberating about doing.

Maybe this just reflects the new movement towards more consideration of the user and whats in their head rather than whats on the screen. As this site reflects, that is my view, so perhaps alongside measurement of affect (emotion) we now need to roll in other indirect measurements of cognitive behaviour like eyetracking, facial movements, eegs even…

As an aside, in usability labs you do see eyes move. Its hard to record, and all anecdotal, but I believe I have seen a tendancy or movement towards an initial focus at the centre of the screen rather than top left. In the report the eyetrackers say that you would ‘expect’ an initial focus top left.

But maybe this depends on how you think of the web. If the web is percieved as ‘document’ then you would go top left, as you would a newspaper or book. But if the web is percieved as ‘moving media’ like TV or film, then you’d look in the middle… in which case, yes this IS interesting and perhaps with eyetracking we can really start to get inside peoples heads.

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I wrote a little bit ago about VOIP (in the vernacular, telephone calls by internet), and characterised it as a ‘disruptive technology’ as it breaks many of the communication models we now think of as set in stone.

At the time I was bullish about Skype as a provider, but the main problem with Skype then (and this is only a few months ago) was that calls between Skype users were free BUT you couldn’t get out of the internet. So you could call your techie mate with Skype, but not your Gran with BT. And, practically, you could only do this sat with your headset on at your PC, not on your sofa with a glass of wine.

Well lets face it, I thought, this technology must have a long way to go. Because what you need is a phone, something that you can handle and take with you, not an IM clone rooting you to the PC spot however ‘unwired’ you are. And you need to be able to phone your Gran. And what happens when the PC gets turned off? Whatever the technology underpinning the service, the disruptiveness I talked about is to infrastructure not culture, and, at least initially, what we know and use easily now has to be retained to be able to evolve.

So, along comes Gossiptel. You get a 0870 number that people can call and you can use your broadband connection to phone ‘out’ of the internet for prices cheaper then BT. Wow, so we have escaped the internet then! And you can get a ‘SIP’ adapter for less than ?100 that you plug into your broadband connection directly. So its always on. And you buy a DECT phone and plug it into that. So its portable, and wireless. And theres lots of other voicemail caller ID stuff etc.

I’m testing this now, still with a PC softphone, but first impressions have been very good. All being well I shall get the adaptor in a couple of weeks. But, lets face it, you early adopters, it’s a phone, it’s connected, it’s pay as you go, it’s better quality, it has more features and it’s VOIP, so it does appear that the future is upon us… so get signed up and we can talk for free!

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I got my freeview box about four or five months ago. Its a Humax and as well as the freeview thing it also has a hard disk that it records onto. I was very interested to see how the whole PVR thing (personal video recorder … hard disk recorder) would change how I watched tele. (My kids were interested in cbeebies but thats another matter…).

Well, it didn’t change how I watched tele at all. It just made the process of recording easier. You don’t have to remember to put a tape in, rewinding is easier, weekly scheduling is nice … but no real quantum here.
Then the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) came along. That has changed things. You go through the guide … press OK … it gets recorded. No entering times and dates for me anymore, just browse through and click. I love my EPG. It signals the end for broadcast, you just get programs when you want to watch them.

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