Designing Your Future with the Connected Car

The company Frog Design are currently hosting a session on "Designing Your Future with the Connected Car".

It was good to meet the leads from Frog; Cobbie and Michael.

The introduction circled around the goals of the session; exploring User Centred Design, and the Connected Car.

What is the connected car?

It's predicted by Telefonica that by 2010, 90% of all new car sales will be for connected cars.

What are connected cars;

- Wirelessly connected
- GPS
- Sensors
- HCI / HMI changes
- Wearables
- BIG data
- Machine Learning
- AR

Apple's Car Play, Google's offering and lots of other tech companies are trying to get into the in vehicle space. And lot's of car companies are trying for the self driving car.

User Centred Design

The session then focussed around the human element of cars - that everyone has a car story and interactions with cars are an emotional experience.

What are the needs / issues we are trying to solve with technology?

A process they follow is;

1) User research
2) Synthesis and brain storming
3) Storyboarding the best concept(s)
4) Illustrating the idea with a photo prototype
5) Pitching the idea

Idea in and around the connected car

Makes lives safer
- Proximity sensing
- Object identification and response / avoidance
- V2V comms

Show us the way
- Nav-D project on the road
- Search a map
- AR overlay on road / ghost car

Save Time
- Sync device e.g. nest
- Self parking
- Self driving cars

Make life richer
- In car comms
- Ride sharing
- Spaces / places to connect e.g. CES Mercedes swivel chairs

Help us explore
- Podcasting
- Exploration tools / road trips
- Contextual interfaces

Knowing us
- Personality & name for the car
- Driver (and passenger) emotion monitoring
- Health monitoring / biometrics
- Awareness and AI e..g Google car that looks 'adorable'.

Some of the Tech involved

Why did interflora get kicked off Google search rankings?

Here is a good question and answer from SXSW 2013 regarding why Interflora got kicked off the Google search ranking in advance of mothers day;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm7nVHslGyw

Question from David de Niese: UK there was a case regarding Interflora http://www.interflora.co.uk, where Google kicked Interflora off the search index, Interflora were probably responsible for that in some way as well, no doubt. But ultimately Matt was responsible for every mother in the UK not getting flowers for mothers day this year. What it does proof is that the algorithms that you use have a large material impact on every company in the world. How long do you think the work that you guys do will remain unregulated? 

Answer from Matt Cutts from Google: How long do I think the work we do will remain unregulated? That's an interesting question; I'm just a web spam guy, I'm not a lawyer, so let me prefix it with that. I've actually had the enjoyment of talking to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, right, for FTC and EC. And so far that's gone relatively well. From our perspectives we try to make sure we run the search engine, we run google, just like you guys would run the search engine, like you would run Google if you were in charge. And so we have pretty clear guidelines like don't cloak, don't do sneaky javascript redirects, don't make doorways, don't buy links that pass page rank cos those violate FTC guidelines and the UK fair-trade guidelines and all that stuff. 

We force that on both small and large companies. But you don't always here about it because when we take action on large companies, we're not as more likely to talk about that as we don't always talk about it when we take action against a small company. So last week for example we and earlier this week we took action on 98,000 sites, that were all part of a link network. We don't feel the need to call those sites out, right. And we're probably not going to say this site did badly, this site didn't do badly.

But I'm actually kind of heartened that when people like the FTC come in, and look through 9 million documents then about how Google works, you know there was a great article by Tim Woo who was at the FTC and said the regulators were doing their job, they looked at what was going on, and apparently didn't find anything worth pursuing. For working at Google for 13 years I think we try to do a pretty principle job. So you know whether it's a big or small company, whether it's a site that sells flowers, or whether it's a mom or pop, we try an enforce our guidelines consistently. 

The Rules of Subtraction @ SXSW

"The world of business and commerce has never been more complex. We live in a constant state of stimulation and distraction. The choices and features we face daily are overwhelming. Living a “simple life” is no longer an option. The desire to tune out the noise is overpowering, driving users and consumers to seek experiences that address that desire.

Business success in this new age of excess everything demands the ability to design those experiences, through the mastery of a surprising new skill: Subtraction.

Enter The Laws of Subtraction.

Filled with examples drawn from industrial design, art, business, and science, this talk makes a compelling case for a new approach, one based on the paradoxical notion of gaining by taking away.

This talk outlines six simple rules for winning in the age of excess everything, and delivers a single yet powerful idea:

In business and in life, when you remove just the right things in just the right way, something very good happens."

My Notes

• The session was not a book reading... rather a story

• Working for a Japanese car company the author learnt a lot of these techniques

• Showed an example of a E with whitespace to indicate the letter. Once you know what it is you can’t unshift your knowledge of it

• Example of the Fedex arrow :-)

• Example of the Sopranos ending, not an ending ... put clues in the episode as to what had happened in the ending. People re-watched the show a number of times. Then 3 endings came on the internet...
• An example of a bicycle with a hole in the middle, being the leading most comfortable bicycle seat, rather than other manufacturers who have been adding more and more support, in contrast this company took away.
• Given an example of a car - toyota - they wanted personalisation - $15K car, stripped down all the facilities and added as options

• Added another $15k of options on it - all about what was added (what was left out)
• Traffic intersections - removed all the traffic signs and signals at high traffic intersections in towns. Video given for the intersection - looked crazy. Completely “unambiguous and uncertain” Therefore people slow down and look at human beings. Twice traffic flow, accidents almost zero or at least cut in half.
• Example of the Mona lisa - a lot of mystery about the smile... Somato - blurry, removed the distinct lines from around eyes and mouth ... and so each time you look at it the smile changes. 
• Comic books, comicon, what makes comics so magical is not what is drawn... it’s in the gutter (the space between the panels). Takes two images and mashes them together, and generates what has happened in the space between - you make up the animation in your own mind.
• iPhone 2007 magical ... implementation of this - big part misisng - the physical keyboard, most compelling part, big big hype. Usually meant lots of information and leaks. There was no advertising, or leaks or advertising. The radio silence, sparked the imagination of the world. By the time the iPhone went on sale, 20m had expressed desire to purchase - it has tipped. Limiting information fires the imagination.
• OutBurger - drive through, 1947 it started, simple menu ... only about 4 things, and it’s still the same way. What’s not there, not is there. Secret menu!!!! 2-3 other items on the secret menu. E.g. flying dutchman, animal style or grilled cheese, etc....... ! Limiting of information and constraint of not changing menu.
• Put in a policy that less work will make you more productive ... e.g. in a company stopped people working one evening. Breaks - not working, make you more progressive.
• “stand still when the hippos charge” - if you run you will die. Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something.
• The full slides can be found here: http://matthewemay.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/SXSW.pdf
• The author is called Matthew May
• Check out the book - Laws of Subtraction http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0071795618

The Making of Doom at SXSW 2013

The intro;

"Few games can match the ubiquity and legacy of Doom, the seminal first-person shooter that ushered in thousands of mods, clones, and successors. Nearly every significant FPS, from Resistance to Half-Life, Call of Duty to Halo, owes its success in part to the Id Software game. Programmer, Game Designer, Level Designer and Doom II final boss John Romero will deliver a postmortem on the game showing never-before-seen material, memorializing its immersive but nerve-wracking 3D environments, networked multiplayer deathmatches, Satanic imagery and themes, Barney WADs, exploding barrels, and BFG 9000. Romero was a co-founder of id Software, among other companies, and also worked on other significant shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Quake...."

Presented by John Romero

What a wonderful treat, the charismatic creator of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D gave an hour's presentation on the journey to produce the game. From the evolution of earlier games, such as building an earlier game for the difficult to programme EGA to Wolfenstein 3D through to the development of the amazing (for the time 3D engine) and realisation what they could do with it.

They were playing a lot of dungeons and dragons at the time, and really wanted to create something with demons in it - which was a big inspiration for Doom. The 3D engine they developed allowed more complex environments to be created with exterior and interior, and large rooms with variable height ceilings, and non-orthogonal walls. John tells of the guy that was producing level designs initially was developing levels that looked like Wolfenstein - and an early tech demo video showed how it was looking at that point, then he was instructed to build some military looking buildings / levels but these were really boring, so John experimented with creating something much more interesting. Another really cool aspect of the engine was the lighting, and ability to get shadows to fade out the environment in the distance.

Earlier demos show how the environments and level design was developing, and they showed some of the levels with the enemy characters without AI. The UI around the game window went through many iterations, a lot of the detail was dropped. The bobbing of the gun came in which looks cool. One of the creators modelled the shot gun reload on themselves. The chainsaw was a broken chainsaw borrowed off one of their girl friends, the shotgun was a toy bought from Toys r Us! The characters were designed by a wonderful artist, initially in clay - but these were found to melt under the light, so they moved to latex and plastic. They used a Lazy-susan to rotate the characters and record them into the computer.

They talked some what about the Apple pre-cursor computer the Next - and on one of these they spent $11K! I didn't quite follow how this was used in the development... initially they were just using the hints information, but I understand they developed a lot of the graphics on this. They developed the Doom bible which was lost, but they managed to recover a copy and re-digitise it.

Doom Bible: http://planetdoom.gamespy.com/classicdoom/doombible.pdf

The day before launch there was a big press gathering around congress with complaints that video games are too violent and the next day they released Doom!

During the launch they uploaded to a university's servers which made them crash several times due to user load, and before launch they were heavily spammed on usenet from angry gamers awaiting it's launch, as the makers held back the launch due to a critical bug which they had to resolve. Basically the game over-clocked the computer somehow - I didn't quite follow this, but the tick should have been 8 times a second, and they increased this to 100 times a second, to enable them to do all the music and the animation and creating of a high frame rate. Anyway they were setting a value to FFF, and it was trying to increment, but there is not higher value - so the system would just wait and cause the whole computer to freeze. By setting the value back to 0 it would ensure the computer wouldn't hang. They resolved this and released the software. Interesting they provided it to shops for free and told them to offer it for $10 and they could keep the money.

The screenshots, graphics and video demos were wonderful, and it was nostalgic and wonderful, and what a treat to be able to attend this lecture.

SXSW Google and Bing how to improve your search rankings

Good Q&A with Google and Bing regarding how to improve your search rankings. All about SEO/Search Engine Optimisation. Interesting points that came up;

• Facebook has a robots.txt file which blocks all web-crawling of their site. And Google mentioned that they have been blocked by Google. Whereas Bing has a partnership with Facebook. Could that be a big concern for Google. Especially in light of;
• Facebook Graph search - does that worry Google or Bing, they didn't really answer that one very directly, they just made some comments about them waiting and seeing and it could be interesting. Whereas I think it could spell quite a problem for Google...
• They re-iterated before contacting them in order to understand a problem on your site in terms of site ranking then you should make sure you are fully utilising the web master tools as they will reveal a lot of the problems / issues and how to fix them.
• Interesting discussion around when a site has gained a poor reputation, or you've taken over a domain with a poor reputation, you can request a "re-inclusion" request (after you've rebuilt the site and distanced yourself from the site before) - this will effectively wipe the slate clean and get you re-listed on Google.
• Interesting discussion about content behind a login - what's in front and behind the login or paywall should be the same, outside should be a subset. If you offer a completely different experience internally then this is known as "cloaking" and is frowned upon. The guy from Bing also explained you should do a spreadsheet of all the links/content on your site and place a value on all those links, and you need to flip it round and see how you can get a subset of your most valuable content outside the login, in order to help attract users in to the site.
• Note you can setup local listings options for your site, to reflect for a business, where the local region(s) for that business is.
• If you are having problems with content not getting crawled or appearing in search, use the "fetch as googlebot" and "fetch as bingbot" tools to see what the crawlers are seeing.
• Utilising schema.org to mark up your website is a good idea, as it helps the search engines understand your sites content and index it appropriately (and display it appropriately) it doesn't get you higher on the search rankings though.
• They repeatedly talked about how you can perform better on search when you are in a domain dominated by larger players - and that is to pick a niche keyword(s) and build a reputation around that, and then expand from there. Also the suggested phrases at the bottom of search can help you decide what keyword phrases to focus on.