why big-name apps are stuck in the core

By | May 18, 2021
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photo by Walter Smith, 2004 (flickr, CC)
photo by Walter Smith, 2004 (flickr, CC)

There’s a graveyard somewhere with the word Core on it. Relying on a core function is a killer. Think Dropbox. Twitter. Whatsapp. Evernote. All apps heading for Core Graveyard.

Here’s the thing.

In the old days the way to get your app noticed was to offer something no one else did, or did as well/cheaply. This was what everyone told you to do, right back to the idea of the mousetrap. But these days, because business models mostly revolve around freemium and subscriptions, this doesn’t work anymore. And it’s killing a lot of good products because they can’t navigate beyond from their core function without damaging the very thing that people like them for.

Take Evernote. The name is a great name because it describes what people like it for. You can take a note and save it forever. Or you could think of it as a verb, be forever taking notes. But to get people to take notes forever, or keep them forever, you need to offer it for free because there are, at least now, so many other players offering the same thing. So the story of Evernote is one of a company desperately looking to add some additional value to the product to justify charging for it.

The result: they have destroyed what drew users to it in the first place (I’ve been a user since at least 2005.) Evernote has added pretty much everything it can to the core functionality, including physical notebooks you supposedly scan (offering very little you couldn’t do manually as well if not better), but nearly every new feature gnawed away at the core, making the app less efficient at doing what made it appealing in the first place. If your unique selling point is being able to take notes easily, quickly and retrievably, then logically it follows that everything you add to the process actually detracts from its value.

Evernote is now a shadow of its former self. (Check out this Reddit thread for some of the recent pains expressed by users.) But you could have chosen any such thread from the past eight years or so and seen the same problems.

The same story can be repeated with many other apps and services.

Dropbox was once literally that, a digital box you could drop things in to share with others. Now it’s a bloated mishmash of features including an editor, a password vault, eSignatures and a file browser, but doesn’t do the basic syncing thing half as well as other tools, or as it used to. (It’s frustration with Dropbox that is prompting me to write this note.) Dropbox was once the obvious choice for anyone wanted to share files or sync files between computers.

And indeed, here’s the rub. It’s obvious these companies have determined, probably with the help of consultants (yes, I know, I’m one) to try to map out greater territory by defining the function of the app within a broader space. So Dropbox has persuaded itself no longer to focus on the rather prosaic process of sharing files and folders, but on ‘collaboration’. Evernote, similarly, tries to emphasise its place within collaboration, by encouraging users to create and edit files with others inside its (wait for it) ecosystem.

Collaboration is fine, but you need to make sure you’re doing the basics first. Collaboration is not why people use, or used to use, these products. Users wanted to do something quite specific, and were drawn to the app to do that specific thing. They’re not (necessarily) interested in the broader scope, indeed it’s likely they’re already doing that via other apps, but want another product to do some aspect of it that isn’t working well, or at all. But by imposing these new features on the user, they degrade the (wait for it) experience, and make the user less likely to stick with the product if one with a better functionality comes along.

Indeed, the reasons why the likes of Telegram, Quip, Slack and Zoom have all made inroads is that they do one key thing better than what exists: chat, writing documents, team chat and video calls/conferencing. It’s not that these functions weren’t available before these players appeared, it was that no-one did them well. They were either part of a separate suite, or there were things wrong with them because the developer wasn’t laser-focused on how well the tools worked. Quip did a better job than Google Docs; Slack did a better job than the likes of Yammer; Zoom did a better job than Skype.

Let’s all play

You can play this game with more or less every app you come across that isn’t focused in its approach. Twitter is now offering Twitter Blue, a subscription based service which, among other things, allows you to (drum roll) undo a tweet! Yes, if you pay you can actually ‘undo’ a tweet (I understand that this likely means not deleting a tweet, but of delaying the posting of a tweet). Great, so now you basically have to pay to think twice about dashing off a tweet.

Twitter’s appeal was a way to communicate one to several (ok, eventually many) with as little friction as possible. Coupled with that was the ability to see easily, with as little friction as possible, what others were saying — to everyone. Indeed, Twitter is a great example of how an app/service/product is moulded, not by the developers, but by the users. Much of what we think of its core functionality — hashtags, direct messages etc — were added by users, which were eventually adopted by the developers. Twitter has ever since tried to tinker with that model to generate revenue: the default view of tweets now is actually not whom you’re following, or at least not just whom, but tweets that algorithms think you’d be interested in. You have to alter the default to get a chronological list of tweets from people you’re following. Choose that and you’ll notice, from time to time, that Twitter will switch back to the default. In other words, the core function of Twitter has already been undermined in the interests of the company.

Whatsapp is another case in point. Whatsapp enjoyed massive adoption because it provided a useful service — free or cheap SMSs, if you want to put it bluntly. Whatsapp denied that at the time — I interviewed the CEO in 2012, and they were quite upset that this was the thrust of the resulting piece — but I know, I was there, or rather my Indonesian friends were, one of the first countries to really adopt the service. At the time Whatsapp hoped to make money by charging for it, via a subscription at a very cheap price ($1), in the second year. The number of users would have easily given them enough to keep the service going. Of course it didn’t turn out like that, and we’ve seen Facebook crawl through a number of hoops to find ways to monetize the service (by mining the data within.)

It’s true that Whatsapp has evolved hugely since the early days, but in the exact same trajectory SMS did, indicating it is still really just an SMS killer: think groups, think multimedia messages, think desktop app for composing and reading messages, think company communications with users etc. The bottom line: Every effort to move Whatsapp out of its core functionality and more into a data lake or part of a (wait for it) ‘family’ of apps are steps that undermine its core value.

Beware Superappitis

So what does this mean for the future?

Well, to me it’s clear that anything that can be defined as a single, important function that is not already part of a broader app or service should be marketed that way, priced on the assumption that it brings immediate value to the user, and should not be allowed to have extra ‘value’ bolted on to it.

There is a corollary to this. If you think you can add extra substantial value then do it, but don’t ever let it compromise the core. So Dropbox can offer editing services so long as there’s no extra steps, no larger download, no nagging windows to your app’s core value.

And if you’re offering, say, a banking function (transfers) then it makes sense to offer other banking services atop that once you have that core function working well, and that you make sure it’s always easily done, with minimal steps. TransferWise, now Wise, is adding features while at the same time ensuring transferring money is still as easy and cheap as pie.

But don’t let those new functions get in the way. A good example of this failure is Grab, a Southeast Asian ‘superapp’ (be scared whenever you see that word) which started out as offering easier ways to order taxis (it was originally called GrabTaxi.) It now offers all sorts of bells and whistles, and ordering a car, its core business is now a slower, more cumbersome process than it was. Even the map showing where you or your car is is largely covered by an ad, offering insurance for greater peace of mind. The service itself is still good, but the experience of ordering it is not.

Economic imperatives underline these moves. But they needn’t. Such distractions arise from a failure to define the purpose of the app or service. What itch is it, exactly, that you wanted to scratch with this? Failure to frame the USP in this way will always lead to tears or (eventual) bankruptcy.

The world of software is full of small, modestly successful apps that deliver individual functions that make paying for them worthwhile. I’m writing this on Drafts, an excellent app that does one thing: lets you compose stuff and then send it to pretty much every place you want (email it, add it to a calendar, tweet it, save it to Dropbox etc.) Yes, other apps let you do this, but this what the app focuses on doing, and doing it easily and well. The name captures the purpose of the app, and that’s all you need to know.

Single-celled future

I am a big user of apps. My instinct, honed by decades in front of computers, is that there are some things that an app can do better. Screenshot? There’s an app for that which does a better job of the purpose I’ve defined. I want an app to remember everything I’ve browsed for the past month, quarter or whatever, whichever browser I use. The answer: HistoryHound. Does it all, for a few bucks. An app which lets me save everything simply and in a way that makes it easy for me to find. The answer to this used to be Evernote, but not anymore, it’s (at least for Mac users) DEVONthink. What changed? Well DEVONthink just kept going trying to figure out how to make the process as effective as possible. Evernote meanwhile added too many bells and whistles, complicated and inconsistent changes to the interface, many of which got in the way of users. DEVONthink isn’t particularly user friendly, but it is effective and efficient. I now have sent to DEVONthink in four years of use about 10 times the stuff I sent to Evernote in 10 years of using it.

But who wants all these itty bitty apps that only do one thing? True. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But the big underlying shift, and a reason why I think the future is in small, single-cell apps is because they can be connected to each other via APIs, application programming interfaces, that essentially allow the apps to talk to each other. Drafts allows you to export your writing to other apps, but it also connects you to WordPress, or Dropbox, and to tweak that connectivity. If two apps or services you like don’t directly connect to each other, you can use third party services like Zapier. The only limit is your willingness to tweak a little, and your imagination.

But I also think it’s telling that there are still a lot of artisanal developers still around, still producing these apps. And app stores like Apple’s make it much easier to find them. And then there are players like Setapp, a sort of app aggregator for iOS and the Mac, which consciously tries to gather together a suite of apps that fit most of the niches that you as a user might need, via a $10 monthly subscription, irrespective of how many you use. I asked them why some apps disappear from their list: they told me some go because they are sometimes abandoned or the vendor parts ways. But then Setapp tries to go find a similar one. It’s not for everyone but to me it’s a godsend. Often I’ll find one of their apps does exactly what I’m looking for (Prizmo, for example, lets me capture some text on screen and copies it as text, even if it’s in an image, Permute lets me convert any multimedia file to another format, World Clock Pro shows me times in other timezones whatever the time is at home, Dropshare lets me share individual files with other people much more intuitively and quickly than Dropbox.)

Apps for every occasion

You could argue these are all esoteric functions that not everyone wants. That’s true. But this is how every app and service starts. The usefulness of Twitter wasn’t all that evident to those of us who first saw it. Whatsapp made sense to people living in places where SMSs were a significant expense. Dropbox came into being because people had trouble sharing files. The point is not that the function is esoteric. It’s whether the app or service or product can be defined as fulfilling a purpose. If you can define that and define it clearly, then you’re halfway there. It could be backing up your files. Or being able to walk along looking at your phone and seeing ahead via a transparent background using your back-facing camera. Or an app that tells you when your friends have been vaccinated and so are safe to have dinner with. Or an app that can tell you what lightbulbs you’re using, whether they’re about to break, and what is the cheapest way to replace them. Or an app that identifies whether the snake on your balcony is poisonous or not. Or an app that can tell you when you’ve given too many examples in a piece and how many readers have likely stopped reading. You get the idea.

We took a wrong turn when startups were encouraged to ‘growth hack’ and focus only on number of users, not whether the functionality matched the needs of those users. Sure, we all want to build the next viral sensation, but there’s a lot of other things we use our devices for, and someone needs to build for them.

OK my focus and word-counting apps are telling me to finish this. So I will.

can i be the first to report that social media is dead?

By | February 25, 2021
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Social media, I can confidently assert, is dead. We’ve just got to wait for the 4.2 billion people or so using it to realise it and leave, preferably helping with the washing up as they do.

OK, so it’s not exactly dead, but at least it’s dead as a term. It’s only been around since 2009, but if we look closely it has long stopped meaning what we meant it to mean. Originally we talked about Web 2.0, which most of us old enough to remember it defined as anything that shed the old paradigm of static web pages, the dot.com world dominated by blow-out companies, and instead focused on user-generated content — meaning helpful blogs, videos, forums and chitchat.

Social media was initially a subset of Web 2.0, insofar as any of us ever thought about it; it meant those parts of the web where the focus was on individuals sharing updates with each other, of making the flatter but still somewhat static blog world more interactive, collaborative. (Twitter is still sometimes called a microblog, which gives you and idea of the connective tissue between blogging and what we now think of as social media. And in some ways the growing passion for threads is an indication of that relationship.)

But when Google, and later Facebook, needed to monetise themselves, Web 2.0 pivoted from being a largely profit-free environment to being a mercenary one, where users’ personal data became the fungible asset, converted by the platforms into money by leasing highly targeted space for ads.

We all know the story of that, and what happened next: social media platforms grew impressively. But what we perhaps don’t fully understand yet is that in so doing, they are no longer ‘social’ or ‘media’. Since the requirement from a monetary point of view is to hold the attention of the user for as long as possible — so they can see as many ads as possible — the goal is not to create ‘media’ that is ‘social’, but to create a highly personal experience, one that is hard to let go of. This used to mean just stuff that was interesting. Now that is seen as rather quaint.

It’s now about triggering whatever desires, impulses, fears we have and latching on to those. In the words of Charlie Brooker, it’s a place where emotions are heightened. But (and these are my words) where those emotions are never quite resolved. It’s no good creating a feeling where the user is happy enough, satisfied, because then they’ll put their phone down, walk away and do something else. The goal, as Adam Curtis explains in his latest series of films, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, is to foster anxiety, that something’s not right, unsettled, because that will keep the user hooked.

Facebook (and the others, though nearly half of interactions on mobile were on Facebook and Google properties five years ago (PDF).) also don’t want you clicking on links and going away from the site to read something because chances are you won’t come back. Endless, infinite scroll, is the goal. (Infinite scroll is now 15 years old, which gives you some idea of how long we’ve been on the hamster wheel. Its inventor, Aza Raskin, has since disowned the technology, describing it and similar approaches as ‘behavioural cocaine.’

There’s another element, also identified by Charlie Brooker: it’s the idea of social media as performance. Part of the strategy behind social sites is to make you feel somewhat inadequate, to create a sense of dissatisfaction, as part of that addictive anxiety — what we often hear called Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO. Sure, there are lots of smileys, hugs, kisses on there, but I don’t need to tell you these are not real. What is real, though, is the desire to get approval.

On social media there’s no point in telling people what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, or where you are if none of those are particularly interesting or exciting. Mundanity doesn’t cut it on social media. So you need to perform, to present the most entertaining or interesting side of yourself, however fleeting and inauthentic that is: most of the time this means finding that rare moment when your family’s not fighting or the kids are not ripping down the curtains to post a portrait of domestic bliss. Or add a filter or two to make you, or your background, look better.

This is not performance art, it’s performance anxiety. You need to project an exaggerated, or even opposite, version of yourself — happy usually, but it can be sad if the emotion is one to which others can respond — because this is what social media demands. And that’s the way to get likes. Which means being noticed. Social media has made us believe that only if we get likes and comments on our posts do we exist. ‘Social’ here means that we have to be social beings, because the alternative — not posting, or posting and not attracting likes — is anti-social, or social failure.

And that brings us to another aspect, that I am brazenly lifting from Charlie Brooker: because of this need to perform on Twitter (and Facebook for that matter), are games. He describes Twitter thus: a “multiplayer online game in which you choose an avatar and role-play a persona loosely based on your own, attempting to accrue followers by pressing lettered buttons to form interesting sentences”.

The same is true of Facebook, in slightly different ways. The platforms are designed in the same way: “There’s a clear gameplay loop where, the more you engage, the less you want to put it down. If Twitter didn’t already exist, you could launch it today on the Steam game store as an RPG.”

He’s absolutely right. Social media is no longer a way to share and interact with your friends or connection in a cozy, caring environment — if it ever was. It’s a game, a competition. Even if you don’t think it is, it is. Even if you’re not actually contributing, just reading it is. It is because if you don’t participate and just scroll, you quickly develop a sense of unease, a sort of dystopian trance, where you’re consciously or subconsciously comparing your own life, or your own intelligence, with those you’re reading or flicking through. The political upheavals of the past few years have only made this worse — what has become called ‘doom scrolling.’

The platforms encourage this, are, indeed, designed for this, because they need to trap you into a ‘state of emotional motion’, where you’re always restless, always uneasy, always thinking that perhaps one more post, one more status update by someone, will snap you out, lift you back up to a mental state to face the rest of the day. And if you’re posting stuff, or hoping to, then that existential unease is compounded, because you will now expect the platform — your friends, connections or whatever — to acknowledge your existence by adding likes. But how many is enough? And do you respond to the comments? The treadwheel is merciless.

Charlie Brooker is right. Social media has essentially been gamified. It has ended up meeting its arch enemy for attention — online games — in the middle. This is not surprising: games have always grabbed the most attention. (In 2019 69% of U.S. consumers said they would rather give up social media apps or TV than lose their favorite mobile games, according to a study by mobile ad firm Tapjoy.)

Online games have become social networks (think Roblox and Fortnite) while social networks have become games. Essentially they’re all the same thing. Whatever it takes to keep you hooked. A rhythmic flow of user-generated content lures us in, and hopes we will participate. But even if we just scroll, we’ll never reach the bottom. It will keep on going because to do anything else would be to lose us — possibly forever.

That, I suspect, is already happening. A detailed look at Facebook daily active users shows numbers in North America have largely been flat for the past year. Europe is little better. The only real growth is coming from APAC and the Rest of the World. And even there, data released today by comscore shows that social media usage fell relatively across most of APAC in 2020 vs 2019. (Entertainment, games, government and health were the biggest gainers, naturally enough, given COVID.)

comscore: Asia-pacific online trends: the year 2020 in numbers

It’s being supplanted by newcomers like TikTok, which are much more creative — and honest — in their approach towards hooking you. Post something short to drive likes and keep attention. There’s no pretence at building a social, and sociable, environment. Instead it’s about response and reward. Social media, in something like TikTok, has already demonstrated that it’s has moved on, and is much closer to gaming than it is to old fashioned social networking.

Meanwhile those tools that are purely focused on social networking — like Clubhouse, for example — are thriving. Yes, they still have strong elements of performance built in, but the content itself is a mostly collaborative one, by talking in a room, and do not appear at least on the surface to be designed to exploit feelings of unease, dissatisfaction, need for validation or a sense of inferiority.

So it’s not as if social media has actually died. What we think of as social media, the second tranche of sites like Facebook (the first were things like MySpace and Friendster) have morphed into games to retain attention. The result is that the most ‘social’ aspects of such sites, like Groups, have become separate islands in themselves. Indeed, the original principles and potential of social media has shifted back to the world that predated Web 2.0: instant messaging. This has been around since ICQ, launched in 1995, though messaging itself dates back to the early 1960s. Include teleprinters in that and we go back to the 1840s. WhatsApp helped popularise the concept on mobile, effectively killing off SMS (which has been in decline since 2012) and blurring the boundaries between computer-based messaging and mobile messaging. By March 2020 WhatsApp was not that far behind Facebook in terms of monthly active users — 2 billion vs Facebook’s 2.6 billion (when you take into account that. It’s no surprise, then, that Facebook has been forced to connect its messaging apps because of this shift: Facebook messenger has a paltry 1.3 billion users, and Instagram 1 billion. )

cross-plugging

Bottom line? A lot of attention has been given to the sharing of information, and misinformation, on social media. I would suggest looking beyond that, to look at why people post, or feel the need to post, and argue that it’s the inbuilt addictive, gamification-driven, intent of social media companies that is the larger problem. Simply put, the more time people spend on social media, the more likely they’re going to be emotionally unsettled, more susceptible to anti-social — for example fake, but also inciting — content. I don’t blame the social media companies entirely for this, but it’s tempting to conclude that if they were building systems that had a definite end-point: ‘OK, you’re up to date! Go outside and play with your kids!’ there would be a lot fewer of us stuck down rabbit holes. And social media wouldn’t have an expiry date on it.

sensing our way out of interaction impoverishment

By | January 12, 2021
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Interaction impoverishment: My pompous term for the things that we can’t do, and don’t seem able to imagine our way out of, when it comes to making our devices do what we want them to do. The key to all this — and where we might end up going — are down to those millimeter-dimension things we never see: sensors.

Don’t touch anything, Iris — George experiments with interfaces in Midnight Sky (Netflix)

I was speed-watching George Clooney’s Netflix movie The Midnight Sky the other day, which is set 28 years in the future, and they’re all (well not all, because most of the planet is dead) interacting with their computers in the same way — touch screen and voice (George at least can turn off an alarm by voice, while those in the spaceship have to get someone to manually stop the alarm, the sound of which would be recognisable to someone living 100 years ago). I feel that we’ve learned enough from Alexa and co to know that voice is a poor form of interaction with our devices. Our dinner-time conversation at home is usually punctuated by someone yelling “Alexa… Stop!” in response to some alarm or other, and then, back in a dinner party voice, murmuring to our guest, “sorry, you were saying?”

And don’t get me started on trying to get Alexa to remember things, or disremember things. Most trails usually end up with her asking, politely, for us to use the app, to which we usually reply, less politely, that if we have to do that, what exactly is the point of, well, her? And I have NEVER, ever, seen anyone interact in public with their phone by voice, except when they’re talking to an actual human. I think we can safely agree that particular line of device interaction is gone. Siri is, to me, nothing. Convince me otherwise.

Another thing: using a mobile device in the rain, or with fingers that are even slightly moist, is an exercise in frustration. Fingerprint scanner doesn’t work, fingers on screen don’t work,. Whether I’m washing up or trying to take videos of rainfall, I yearn for the days of a keyboard (or a smarter voice interface, or anything.)

So why George et al haven’t come up with a better way to interact with their computers, I would guess is because we’ve done a poor job of it thus far. Shouldn’t we by that point have honed our brain-computer interface? (A study by RAND last year said BCIs, as they’re called, are close.)

Indeed, there are some gleams of light, though I’m hesitant to call them more than that. Google has something called Motion Sense, which is a sort of radar — emitting electromagnetic waves and learning from their reflections — that improves, in theory, the relationship between you and your phone. Firstly, it can detect whether you’re nearby, and if you’re not, it will turn off the display (or keep it on if you are.) If it senses you’re reaching for it, it will turn off alarms and activate the face unlock sensors. It will also recognise a couple of gestures: a wave to dismiss calls or alarms, a swipe to move music forwards or backwards.

Sensing motion – Google/Infineon’s new chip (Google)

The jewel here is ‘presence detection’: Can a device be smarter about understanding what or who is around it, and behave accordingly? We’re used to this with motion sensors — lights coming on when we walk in a room, or alarms sounding when an intruder enters the house. But this is detection on a much smaller scale, requiring millimeter-wave frequencies by utilising the unlicensed V-band (57-64 Ghz) which makes measurements more precise and less likely to be interfered with by other systems. In short, Project Soli was enabled by a 9×12.5 mm chip produced in collaboration with Infineon, with a sensing range of 10 m and a range resolution of 2 cm (which can be reduced to sub-millimeter precision, allowing recognition of overlapping fingers. A paper published in 2019 concludes that accuracy of a ‘few micrometers’ (1,000 micrometers make up a millimeter) can be achieved with such sensors. This in theory would take accuracy of gesture down to a subtle eyebrow raise, or something even more inscrutable.

How this technology is used might not go in a straight line. Google introduced Motion Sense in its Pixel 4 smartphone, but removed it in the Pixel 5, mainly because of cost. There is solid speculation that the upcoming Nest Hub device has it. Kim Lee’s piece cited above from 2017 suggests it could be possible to control via finger-sized commands — pinching or snapping — and do away with visible controls altogether.

Of course other manufacturers are thinking along similar, or not so similar, lines. A concept phone (i.e. one that doesn’t actually exist) announced by OnePlus last December — the OnePlus 8T — included hand gesture interaction which included changing the colour of the device itself. (If you’re interested, this uses a ‘colour-changing film containing metal oxide in glass, where the state of the metal ions varies according to voltage.) What’s potentially interesting here is that OnePlus envisages the colour changing indicating incoming calls (etc — perhaps different shades, or flash rate, could indicate different things.) OnePlus also talk about using a mmWave chip to register a user’s breathing, which could then be synced with the colour changing. They call it a biofeedback device, though I’m still searching for the purpose behind this.

All this is welcome, but I do feel we could have gone further, faster. LG were touting gesture recognition in their devices at least 6 years ago (the LG G4, for example, recognised gestures in 2015 allowing you to take remote selfies etc), and we get occasional glimpses of what is possible with apps like ‘Look to Speak’, a Google app for Android that allows handicapped users who suffer from speech and motor disabilities to use eye movements to select the words and sentences they want from the screen, which are then spoken aloud by a digital voice. This requires some training however, and exaggerated movements.

Then there’s gesture control using ultrasound and light, something I wrote about for Reuters back in 2015. The idea is not to do away with our preferred way of interacting, by touch, but to bring the touch to the person using air, sound and light. A driver would not have to take his eye off the road to fumble for the controls, for example, but a virtual version of the controls would come to him, giving him haptic feedback through vibrations in the air.

To me this is a key part of any interface. Alexa will acknowledge an instruction, and our computing device will (usually) acknowledge in some way when we’ve entered a command or clicked on a button. But the touch is sometimes a better way to receive a response — it’s more private, for one thing. (My favourite example of this was a belt designed by a Japanese researcher which vibrated. Where the pulse was felt on the body determined the nature of the message. (Le Bureau des Légendes, an excellent French series on the DGSE, takes this a stage further where a CIA officer intimates that he gets alerts that his phone is being tampered with via a pacemaker.)

Sensors, ultimately, are the magic ingredient in this, but it’s also down to the execution. And if we’ve learned nothing else from the past 10 years, we’ve reluctantly acknowledged it’s usually Apple that brings these technologies home to us, at their pace. Apple thus far has gone with the LiDAR option — replacing the radio waves of radar with light — which, at least in the pro version of its recent iPhone and iPad releases, allows users to map a room or object in 3D, and then use it for design, decoration, etc.1 But it’s not like Apple to throw a technology into a device without a clear roadmap of either enhancing existing functions or adding new ones, so the most likely explanation is that LiDAR helps improve the quality of video and photos by tracking depth of field etc. But it almost certainly won’t stop there; Apple is betting hard on augmented reality, for which LiDAR is well suited, and a study of Apple’s patents by MaxVal suggests possible new directions: using LiDAR to generate a more realistic 3D image on the screen, for example, by better judging the position of the user’s head, say, or better Face ID.

I’m open to all that, but I really feel some of the basics need tweaking first. Ultimately it’s about our devices understanding us better, an area in which I feel they have some ways to go.

  1. Some Android phones like Samsung’s use LiDAR, but this version uses a single pulse of light to scan a space, vs the multiple pulses of Apple’s LiDAR ↩

the road beyond covid

By | December 17, 2020
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Boundary stone, Eyam. Such stones marked the edge of the village. During the 1665 bubonic plague, coins were left in vinegar in exchange for food and goods from outside the village, which had instituted its own cordon sanitaire to contain the plague

I’ve tried to avoid predictions this year for obvious reasons, but I think we’re seeing signs of impending dawn on the new era. I won’t call it Post-Covid, because that’s supposing too much, but definitely there are the signs of a new infrastructure being built that will allow us to return to something like our previous existence. But I think there are still parts of it that we haven’t thought through.

For our society to function we need people to be able to move around relatively freely. It doesn’t matter if it’s a businessman flying off to check out a subcontractor, food being trucked from Porto-Novo to Niamey, or me meeting one of my clients in the CBD. The modern world doesn’t function without movement. Covid has made that hard because it highlights the contradiction between our lifestyle and our biology, which appears to be geared to small, self-contained groups — villages, or tribes, if you will — which may move around but do not come into contact with other groups. The first recorded pestilence, for example, is believed to have been when the Philistines usurped the Arc of the Covenant and moved it from place to place in about 1190 BC. Disease broke out in each place — probably bacillary dysentery. Blaming the Arc, the Philistines returned it to the Israelites, possibly preventing the latters’ extinction. But as Jonathan Cossar writes: “It is an early example of the spread of infection from the interaction of ancient peoples in their pursuit of territorial expansion… Thus history can be regarded as an account of man’s traveling exploits and the ensuing consequences.”1 Where people remained relatively isolated, and did not travel, scourges sometimes spared them: The Black Death, for example, sometimes skipped sparsely populated rural areas entirely, while cities and towns might lose as much as 50-60% of their populations.2

While early plagues tended to follow armies, later ones followed explorers and colonizers — Columbus bringing smallpox to the Americas, yellow fever imported by (immune) African slaves decimating the Spanish colonists, British soldiers visiting cholera on East Asia, the Middle East and Russia. And thereafter it has been largely trade, with international travel merely accelerating the vector. As Cossar, writing in 1994, predicted: “The potential for the emergence of a ‘new’ antigenic subtype of type A influenza remains, and with China but a jet flight away via the staging stop of Hong Kong, a fresh epidemic strain can be imported to New York in 16 hours or to London in 14 hours. Thus the forgotten history of 70 years ago may come to life at any time, thanks to ‘jet age’ travel.” When he wrote that there were 435 million international tourist visits a year, according to the World Tourism Organisation. By 2018 that number had more than tripled.

So the vision of an emergence from Covid-19 is one within an international system where we are able to demonstrate we have taken a vaccine recognised by both departure and arrival authorities. Where we can show that we’ve been tested by an approved lab several days before departure, and probably shortly before boarding. Once again, the labs will need to have been recognised by both sets of authorities. That this won’t have a seriously chilling effect on travel seems hard to argue. I was never a huge fan of airports, but this will make the process increasingly burdensome. Yes, you might be able to flash an app at an official to demonstrate you’re good to go, but the chances of everyone on a flight being able to do that quickly and to the satisfaction of officials seems unlikely. For one thing, the procedure of confirmation is highly unlikely to be the same in each location. Even in the long term we’ve not adjusted well to the security theatre performance, not least because the requirements and procedures differ widely from place to place. I still shiver from the ticking off I got from a Heathrow security person for failing to do something or other that I’d never had to do elsewhere.

This is where initiatives like CommonPass, by The Commons Project, kick in. The project, which is already running in several travel corridors and will announce more later today (Thursday), gives travellers a “secure and verifiable way to document their health status as they travel and cross borders.” It takes the form of an app that includes unique IDs and a ‘trusted’ record of a valid PCR test or vaccination. Thomas Crampton, an old friend who heads marketing for the NGO, describes it as a “common trust network across international borders,” a digital way of sharing medical information safely, via a platform that anyone can plug into and build their own services on top of. He pointed to the hundreds of thousands of sea farers who have been stranded on their ships for months, unable to return home. (Thomas says they’re about to announce something specifically for these crews.)

This is good, make no mistake. There needs to be a trusted third party building this out, and with the heft to win over governments, airlines, medical institutions and labs. And there’s no talk of blockchain, which is probably a good thing.

But my gaze is on the longer term. What happens after what happens next?

The rise of a ‘health passport’ will have impacts on society that may outlive the pandemic. Thomas talked of there one day being no need for such medical documentation, but I’m not sure. At least, I’m not sure we’ll see them not required anywhere, meaning that we’ll probably need them (indeed the Yellow Card, nearly 100 years old, is still required in some places.) Just as we still have to play security theatre at airports, so we’ll still be required to show that we’re COVID-free, long after it has ceased to be a feature of our lives.

Yellow Fever Vaccination Certificate issued by the Government of Tanzania, photo from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

More broadly, we may have to consider more deeply travel itself. Do we need to travel as much as we do (or rather, did)? For one thing, it’s likely to be a lot more expensive, and for there to be fewer options. So the ‘necessity’ of travel may be something that managers, and civil servants will scrutinise closely. Applying for visas will become more cumbersome, and officials will be cautious in issuing them. A weekend in Saigon may just not be worth the hassle.

But there’s another aspect to this, beyond international travel. At what point does travel of any kind become something undesirable? When South Korean researchers dug into why one person in Jeonju, a city which hadn’t had a coronavirus case in 2 months, had become infected. Turned out it was from someone who was in the same floor of a restaurant for about 5 minutes — on opposite sides of the room. The flow of two overhead air-conditioning units carried the virus 20 feet through the air.

While the research and reconstruction behind this is impressive, to me the key factor was that the infected person was from another city — Daejon, an hour’s drive away (she had not informed contact tracers she’d made the trip.) Just as China took the radical step of sealing off Wuhan back in January, it seems the lesson to draw from the Korean research is not only that our idea of what constitutes ‘close contact’ wrong, but the key to ridding ourselves of the pandemic may be to isolate communities, not just by country or state border, but at smaller levels, both to keep infection out, and also to keep the spread within. The idea of a village requiring more proof of being virus-free than the next is not unthinkable.

Yes, this is being done in some places, of course, and lockdowns have already become localised. But beyond lockdown, when vaccines are widely adopted, the question will arise, not of ‘easing lockdown’, but of permitting travel. Right now that has been something that is left somewhat vague, because there’s nothing that anyone can do beyond taking a test to prove they’re virus-free and showing that they’re not subject to lockdown. But what happens when a vaccine is available? If you’re going to prevent someone from international travel if they haven’t taken a vaccine, why is that same rule not applicable to any kind of travel — across country, even across town, or even between buildings?

One interviewee for a consulting project I recently led, an experienced professional in the human logistics field, told me that the biggest long-term trend to emerge from Covid will be “the influence of government, on business and individuals.” He sees a growing share of government in industry, the economy and as a customer. Subsidies, and a growing regulatory rule in health, will be with us for a long time, and the speed with which it has happened in his field was “mind-boggling”, he said.

It’s hard to argue with that. When I asked Thomas of The Commons Project why it was not the WHO or IATA that was developing a solution, he said that his organisation would be happy to work with anyone, and was keen to forge partnerships. That may be true, but inevitably however agnostic the platform, the process will inevitably be one dominated and run by bureaucrats. It is a necessary, even welcome, step by governments, but one which will not be abandoned easily. It will be extremely hard to declare an end to Covid, because pandemics don’t just end. They come in waves, as we’ve found to our cost, and the end will only come when the last country declares itself Covid-free.

In the meantime a layer of authentication, however efficient, will have been added to travel. It is hard not to imagine that this layer will not become an ID of sorts: why should I risk the citizens of this town/village/building by letting you in if you can’t produce this document? Right now it’s a QR code but in the future it could be digital signal (RFID, BLE etc) that turnstiles on public transport, or in office blocks, look for before allowing the holder through. In some ways the more efficient and less frictionless the technology, the more likely it will be adopted beyond the confines of its originally intended use.

I may well be wrong. It may well be that economic priorities and sheer exhaustion (and incompetence) lead to these measures gradually being dropped. But I do think that the concept of travel, and mobility, will change, possibly radically. We have largely been focusing on the changes wrought by ‘working from home’, or as some prefer it, ‘working from anywhere’. But that is part of a much larger question about ‘movement’. We may simply find that movement is too hard, too costly, too inconvenient, that those of us who move are discriminated against, so much so we alter our habits. This will have a profound effect because for so long we’ve taken travel and mobility for granted, failing to understand its profound impact. That notion of mobility goes back a long way. The introduction of the affordable bicycle in England in the late 19th century allowed young rural men and women to venture beyond the village boundary and marry elsewhere. Before 1887, 77% of marriages took place between people from the same parish. Between 1907 and 1916 this had dropped to 41%. (The safe and cheap Rover ‘safety bicycle’ was introduced in 1885 3.)

2-wheeled velocipede for ladies, model “Svea”, courtesy Picryl under a Creative Commons license

We may not exactly return to that world, but the depth of the bureaucratic response to Covid is probably the single greatest reverse that the march towards frictionless mobility has encountered. Even war tends to cause mobility — fleeing refugees, moving armies and their logistical trains — indeed the Spanish flu was closely entwined with the First World War.

The counterpoint to this is the extraordinary resilience of supply chains — we have faced little of the shortages that usually accompany such global shocks. But all that shows is two things: that the movement of goods doesn’t require that many people, and those that are involved are considered both vital and, I suspect, expendable (this WSJ piece from South Korea tells the story of the impact on delivery workers, attention prompted by the death of 15 of them since the pandemic began, mostly through overwork.) In essence, we’re outsourcing mobility to others so that we can stay home and live a life of sorts, and dream of escaping at some point to a beach somewhere.

I don’t really know what will happen, of course. Perhaps we’ll be lucky and the vaccines will be so well distributed and so widely administered that the regulatory landscape governing travel won’t have deep enough roots to survive beyond the pandemic. But at the very least we should probably start thinking about what it means to move around, and move around safely, and what constitutes our freedom to roam, and what constitutes responsibility. And what we allow our governments, in our name, to impose upon us. In short, what kind of life we want to live when the virus runs out of road.

  1. “Influence of Travel and Disease: An Historical Perspective”, Jonathan H. Cossar ↩
  2. “Brief History of Pandemics (Pandemics Throughout History)”, Damir Huremović ↩
  3. PJ Perry, 1969, a finding confirmed by geneticist Steve Jones. See also ‘Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales 1700-1950’ By K. D. M. Snell ↩

are the devices we use sexist?

By | December 9, 2020
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Are women physically suffering more than men when it comes to computing?

Does the tech industry not only favour men but also design itself around them?

And if that’s true, is the COVID-driven trend of working from home exacerbating the problem, leaving a legacy of back and neck pain for women around the world?

Heavy questions, so let me start at the beginning. I’ve long noticed how stock photos of women and devices tend towards (or perhaps I should say the websites and company brochures that use stock photos tend towards) those of women+laptop or tablet in poses away from a desk. I offer a selection throughout this piece and on the blog. My study is not scientific, but it’s been enough to annoy me: why are women and computers represented differently than men and computers? Why is a woman and her computing device more often than not shown in a less workstation-like pose than a man and his? And then I looked around, and saw that there might be some truth behind the sexist cliche. Women, my unscientific survey found, tend to not only sit at desks, but seem more likely than men to also sit on cushions, on the floor, on an easy chair, suspended from the ceiling (maybe not.) So could there be some truth in it?

And if so, what does that mean?

So I looked for some academic research on this. I couldn’t find a lot, but what I did worried me.

There’s a paper last year from Iran’s Qom University by Hamidreza Heidari, Ahmad Soltanzadeh, Elham Asemabadi1, Hoda Rahimifard and Abolfazl Mohammadbeigi that sampled 150 people, male and female, and categorised their computing postures using a laptop into 16, from squatting on the floor to sitting up in bed. It found some key differences between how men and women sat. Women were more likely to use a cushion when sitting on the floor (cushion under laptop or chest.) The paper doesn’t reach any conclusions on this (and I’ve yet to hear back from the authors) but my reading of the data is — while the sample size is a little too small to make any big pronouncements — that there are many different ways that people sit with their laptop, both by men and women, and that the differences between gender are pronounced enough to be worthy of note.

Another tentative conclusion one might draw from the data is that women tend to spend less time in certain positions than men. Sitting crosslegged on the floor with your back to the wall, for example, was extremely popular for both genders (maybe they don’t have desks at Qom), but females spent much less time in that position: less than an hour. The same was true for sitting with a pillow behind your back and laptop resting on slightly bent knees. This was frequently adopted by women, but only for less than an hour a day. It’s a stretch to assert this from the Qom study, but it does seem plausible that many women prefer to use their devices in different poses, and shift those positions, and locations, more frequently.

But here’s the worrying part. The final, tentative, conclusion that might be drawn from the study is this: The two out of three postures which the paper deemed least suitable, health-wise, were much more likely to be adopted by females. Women, it seems, are using their laptops in poses that are likely to result in musculoskeletal disorders.

And we don’t need to rely on the Iranian study for that. According to Szu-Ping Lee, Associate Professor of the Department of Physical Therapy at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who with colleagues published a paper on gender and posture when it comes to tablet use in 2018, “in general, women are more likely to develop neck pain” from tablet use. She pointed me to a study in Sweden published in 2012 which concluded that short-duration bothersome neck pain, or BNP, was much more prevalent among women than men across all age-groups, and slightly more prevalent for long-term BNP. The paper concluded, clearly enough: “Women are more likely than men to have and to develop BNP, and less likely to recover from such pain.” (See the chart below.)

Now that study was done in the mid- to late 2000s (i.e. before tablets), and doesn’t mention the source of such pain. Why are women more likely to experience neck problems? This is explored by Szu-Ping’s paper, which says that when it comes to tablet usage “gender differences in anthropometry and biomechanics may explain the disparity in neck and shoulder musculoskeletal symptoms.” (Anthropometry is the study of measurements and proportions of the human body; biomechanics is the study of how our body parts — muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments — work together to produce movement.) Szu-Ping and her colleagues write that in the workplace, “women assume neck flexion more often”. Their source for that is a 2010 study of Swedes which found that there was a clear link between women under “iso-strain” — high strain and low work-related social support — and neck and shoulder symptoms. Meanwhile “no associations were found between iso-strain model and symptoms among males.” In other words, men and women under similar work and social strain had quite different experiences when it came to muscle problems. If you’re a woman, “working with neck and/or body bent forward, arms above shoulders, and precision work tasks were predictors of musculoskeletal symptoms.”

Now that study wasn’t focused on computers and other devices. But another one did, examining computer mouse tasks and reported that “female computer operators who are shorter and narrow-shouldered exhibited more extreme postures.” Another study found that when typing, women have “significantly higher normalized keyboard forces than men and they tend to have higher muscle activities, and less neutral shoulder postures.” If you’re shorter things are even worse for typing and posture. And the study looks at tablets as well, and says things don’t get better: it found that more than 40% of subjects used one more for more than three hours a day and concluded: “The female gender’s generally lower muscle strength and smaller body size may predispose them to neck and shoulder symptoms during such use.” Szu-Ping’s study concluded that being a woman was an important risk when using a tablet: “Female gender, existing neck and shoulder symptoms, and sitting without back support during tablet use were shown as the most important risk factors.”

This is pretty damning stuff. It seems clear that our devices are not well designed for the female body, and they are causing all sorts of physical ailments that may well not be properly understood outside the realm of a few academic studies. I’m frankly gobsmacked that not more is made of this. As Szu-Ping and co point out in their paper students are especially badly hit by this. Students were much more likely to experience neck and shoulder symptoms (73.4%) using a tablet than university faculty and staff (52–64.9%). Unsurprising, given that “students in the U.S. typically do not have a permanent workstation and are constantly moving between classes. It may be more common for the students to use their tablet computers in compromised postures such as placing them in the lap while sitting without back support.”

In short, we’re busy handing out these devices to workers and students and thinking that ‘work from anywhere’ is a great idea, without regard to the consequences.

But how does this fit with the idea that women and men might use these devices differently, in terms of posture, location and lengths of time? Szu-Ping found this an interesting question, but pointed out that this might be a chicken and egg situation: “Is it that women ‘need’ to move about more to get comfortable due to their relatively weaker muscles and other anatomical disadvantages, or is it that they tend to use more compromised postures which lead to their neck pain?” she wrote in an email. “The answer to your question is currently unknown.”

That’s probably as far as we can take it, though I’m sure I’ll get some thoughts from readers about their own experiences, and whether more varied work postures are really a gender thing or not, and if so whether it’s down to discomfort or not. I spoke to one manager of a co-working space who said that females do tend to move around the various desks, bean bags and nooks in the office during the day, which he had put down to the vagaries of the air-conditioning.

Whatever the truth is, it’s clear that women are getting a raw deal when it comes to the way we design our workstations, our workspaces and our devices. I can only imagine that this is being further aggravated by COVID, where millions are being forced to work from a bed, a chair, a kitchen table or the floor. But perhaps the reality is different: that those of us frustrated by limited ergonomic options at work are building workplaces that suit us better at home, and won’t consider going back. I would like to think that, but I’m not holding my breath.