I am reminded of D&D, where everyone starts at Level 1 and you need to go adventuring to gain experience. Overlaid on that, each character has their class and sets of skills. And as they gain experience, they achieve new levels which open up new capabilities.
The Maker Class I feel that I’ve been living the Maker character class. Part of that are a string of skills that I slowly work at and gain experience. And (ok, a bit off the D&D formula) as I level up on each of those skills, things become easier and a whole new set of things open up.
Some skills I’ve been working on these past 9 months since I really started on this journey:
Arduino (and similar dev boards)
Sensors
Soldering (through hole)
AVR programming
Circuit building (including paper circuits)
PCB design
Badgelife (combination circuit building and PCB design)
3D printing
Thems a lot of things to learn.
Stepwise Where this whole ‘level’ thinking came from is the realization that the quickest way for me to learn things is to set stepwise goals that teach me one new aspect of a skill.
For example, I’m totally fascinated by badgelife – the mixing of art, hacking, and PCB design. At first, I had a ton of ideas of what I’d make. Then I realized that there were foundational skills I needed to work on before I could make anything complex.
So I started with just lighting an LED. I printed out my company’s logo, put it on cardboard, poked some LEDs through the cardboard, and laid down some copper traces to connect the LEDs to a 3V battery.
I ended up learning a bit about scale, shapes, fitting things in. The exercise also got me thinking of other ways to do the same thing.
Learning with your hands For the second iteration, I printed a larger logo, made a more robust circuit (copper tape and solder), and programmed an ATtiny45 to fade the LEDs (the one in the GIF).
That got me thinking of the challenge of programming a board once built, and perhaps other circuits that could do the same thing, and counting components.
From that, I read up on astable multivibrator circuits, as a way to blink LEDs without a circuit. And rather than be theoretical, I printed out a circuit, pasted it on cardboard, and connected it all up (the other GIF). A major driver to do this was to see the scale and what it felt like in the hands. From there I could iterate, make smaller. Perhaps I could add to the circuit to fade the LEDs.
More hands on building to learn things, I suppose.
Level up and up My very first D&D character (yes, I played it) was Harg from the City Afar, a thief (I always preferred such character classes). An, obviously, unforgettable name. And a fun time while he lasted.
But this Maker class guy is me, and I’m not role playing.
I wonder where the adventure will take me. All I know is that I’ll be doing it step by step and learning amazing things along the way (with a lot of kobolds getting in the way).
In the past 8 months or so I’ve been on a journey to learn everything I can about microcontrollers, circuits, electronics, components, sensors, and embedded software.
It all started with a second attempt (albeit 10 years after the first) at making something with Arduino. Since then, I’ve built more similar demos for work, but also fun stuff for me.
New to me, at least As I became sated with using assembled boards and sensors, I started looking into the microcontroller itself. I found numerous examples of folks programming just the chip that’s in the Arduino, part of the AVR family of microcontrollers.
I had a few chips belonging to an Arduino board I had lying around (the original one I had bought in ’09) and started playing with them, learning how to program them at the bare-chip level. And I followed examples on how to build a programmer, too.
There were also smaller AVR chips, the ATtiny45 and ATtiny85, which were versatile, simple, cheap. Yes, up in the image to the right is an ATtiny programmer shield for the Arduino I designed (still being prototyped at this stage, though).
I was leveling up here, real chip-fu!
A familiar path of discovery Then I saw how many ATtiny or AVR programming boards were out there. And I heard from folks that they too took that path. Indeed, I think this step of bare-chip programming is the next step most folks take after messing with Arduinos and that catapults them even further.
At the same time, I was asked to do more hardware constructs for work and I realized that I was no longer dabbling. I’d already spent some hundreds of dollars for work and for me. I really hadn’t taken good notes or managed my code well. Time to wisen up.
Not stopping yet After playing the AVR programming, I’ve felt more confident learning about circuits, and building them – low drop out voltage regulators, astable multivibrators, paper-based circuits.
In this last wave of leveling up, I’ve been taking good notes and managing my code better, like the scientist I am at heart insists I do. And the rate I am amassing experience points is accelerating. It’s exhilarating.
Some of the things next up for me include more elaborate and polished demos at work, getting deeper into 3D printing (I did), and continuing up the learning curve of badge life.
I first heard of the distinction between bits and atoms to describe the digital and physical worlds back in the mid-90s. Back then, atoms ruled – books, factories, records, physical things. But there was a distinct acceleration of the digital world of software, bulletin boards, the nascent Web, digital things.
I was truly an atom-level thinker Back then, I was just out of grad school and entering my post-doc. I was a researcher that thought on the molecular level, trying to understand how the influence of specific atoms, on specific spots, on specific structures interacted with each other. Often the difference between the molecules I worked with (protein, DNA, RNA) was a single atom.
That’s the programming I knew – using biological systems to create tools and objects for research, to uncover natural principals and build upon reality.
And I did well, writing a bunch of papers and creating a foundation that helped the lab grow in a new direction.
Then I became a bit-level thinker As the web took off in the late 90s, I got more involved in software, the internet, and mobile. This interest (always present – my father ran management information system departments) was enough to catapult me out of the atom world and into the bit world.
True, I worked for consumer electronics companies, but my role was not in the hardware, but in the software that was going to add so much value to that hardware.
And I did well, helping large brands engage with customers through digital sales and marketing.
Back to the atom thinking As I mentioned before, I’ve been spending a lot of my time making things based on microcontrollers, sensors, and lots of LEDs. Yes, I find myself back in the world of atoms, thinking of how an experience can manifest itself through tangible goods.
This is a different atom world than my first go at atoms, but I see a long red thread of my interest in things from now all the way back to then. And the perspective I gained of the interplay of bit and atoms, especially at Nokia, during my bits years, has become valuable.
Indeed, I currently work for a company with a strong hardware culture. And working for them sort of led me to solving problems with hardware.
Furthermore, talking hardware all day, and tinkering with hardware all night, has filled my mind with exciting potential futures. For example, I find myself thinking and talking a lot about how we can make the digital world, digital concepts, more tangible, more physical.
I hope that ten years from now I can say I did well, making a difference once more with atoms, but with a twist of bits.
I was checking out some DIY electronics at a local Microcenter, dying to buy something (hardware hacking has started to consume my attention, lately). I saw some NeoPixel rings that reminded me of a Celebration Spectacles guide I had read on Adafruit. Then I saw on the store shelf an Adafruit kit for making steampunk-ish Kaleidescope Goggles, making me to want to build some form of LED glasses, which made sense, as New Year’s Eve was only a week or so away.
Putting all together Interesting hardware and useful guides with code and wiring diagrams make it really easy to do your own hardware projects. I’m not surprised that my first wearable project was inspired by Adafruit. I had first heard of Adafruit many years ago specifically because they were making hardware to be sewn into clothing – true wearables.
I used the two Adafruit guides as my inspiration. Like in my kitchen, recipes are suggestions. I modified the Celebration Spectacles build and combined and tweaked the code from both guides to have the animations, sequencing, and timing I wished to have.
In the end, I used the two Neopixel rings (the most expensive parts!), a positively adorable Trinket M0 (more on that in future, for sure), a pair of specs from the dollar store, and a battery. I then soldered it all together, hotgluing the setup to the frames.
Pretty cool.
What I learned This is so far the most physically complicated hardware project I have done due to the wire routing, hotglueing, and careful soldering needed. I had no problem prototyping the set up, or writing the code. Though I had to pay special attention to the assembly – soldering and glueing are sort of one-way activities in that they are a pain to reverse. To facilitate connecting the pieces and assembling the glasses, I made a paper template to mark out position of things and to measure and route wires. Being patient and checking things twice made the assembly go smoothly and efficiently – much faster than I expected.
With respect to the software, I had partially wanted to do the spectacles as an excuse to use the Trinket to do something with CircuitPython. Alas, the animations in CircuitPython were so much slower than the same animations in Arduino, so I kept with the Ardiuno IDE. I guess I’ll keep playing with CircuitPython on my Circuit Playground Bluefruit. But this was a good lesson in the difference in the capabilities between Arduino and CircuitPython.
Funny thing, though, just before I put the Trinket on the frame it seemed dead. It had some touchpad code that I had last played with and I could not get the board to connect to the Arduino IDE. I panicked, pressed the board’s reset button uselessly, until I read that if you pressed the reset button ‘twice’ the board would go into USB mode. Just like other CircuitPython boards. D’oh. How’d I not catch that before?
Last thought I was able to assemble it all in time for New Year’s Eve, wearing it all that night and then the next day as I drove around and walked the dogs. Haha.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with the NeoPixels and the Trinket, so expect more in future. Indeed, I’ve been sharing wearable examples with my mom and she’s keen on me helping her with a project around pixels and microcontrollers on something she might sew or embroider.
The way we use deep personal data needs to change. Indeed, I’ve been saying this for a few years now. As everyone knows, megacorps like Google and Facebook[1] have built their insanely profitable businesses around selling products based on personal data. And other folks want to be as successful, too, so they lazily try to build business built around the collection and selling of personal data (data monetization! drink!).
What’s with the ads? Advertising is one of the first ways folks think about selling data. Advertising built publishing and TV, and then built Facebook and Google to gargantuan sizes. Their success made everyone think of a data monetization strategy – how to sell personal data to someone who will pay for it.
Now everything is a data collection vehicle to sell ads, even cars and toothbrushes.
I can’t stand ad-based models. The farthest back I remember being against advertising-based business models was when I was advising an innovation team developing a phone app back in 2004.
Choosing an ad-based model for your product is lazy, especially if your whole business depends on it (what the f- you smokin’?). For some, it can work (ahem, Google, FB, Instagram, etc.). The challenge is that ad-based models require control of a channel (or at least a heavy presence), large numbers of dupes to hand over data (scale), and a reason to buy ads on the platform (frankkin’ eyeballs, dude!). As the list of failed ad-based companies show (including newspapers and magazines), it’s a hard model to succeed with.
Data first Ads are not the only way to monetize data. The second way is to sell insights from the data to someone else. Indeed, in digital health, this is big – collect health data and sell to insurers, hospitals, or pharma. Once again, those insights require a significant number of users to make it valuable to data buyers. And, just like selling data for ads has nothing to do with the user giving data, often digital health apps do not return value to the user giving data to the same level as the value they give to the data buyer.
Basically, data models seem to sell the data separate of returning any value to the user giving the data.
Value to the user Ok, one _could_ say that ads are valuable to the user. Timely coupons! Discounts! Personalized ads! I mean, they must work for Google and others to make so much money.
Dunno. I think these days, ads are just so much noise that most are adept at filtering them out.
Also, I admit that, while I was always against ad-based business models, until a few years back I was supportive of data brokering (selling data to someone else) business models when advising companies.
Though, when I used to suggest collecting user data and selling to others for insights, I always wanted to do it in a context where the value is returned to the user. For example, collect data for a pharma to either pay the user or help the user get well (though, in the end, I think that’s a bit of a fantasy).
Tighter value loop Value to the user needs to be the metric in all things regarding personal data. Hence, where I have evolved is to use data in a tighter value loop, where the data collected is used to improve the service that is collecting the data. For example, Apple and Netflix have a lot of data on us, but our data drives their business, not some product for a third group. John Hancock and Progressive track people to reward for good behavior.
I’ve been advising companies to think of a data strategy that benefits only them and their user, not some other group, not selling data to the highest bidder. I’m all for collecting as much intelligence on your customer as possible. But use it for the benefit of the user, not the abuse. Personally, I want the products I use to know me and help me. My data should be tightly coupled with my benefit, not someone else’s.
The data genie is out of the bottle Because of the race to collect data in the past decade, personal data is everywhere. And with the general trend for everything to be a data collection point to sell data to others, this is going to be hard to reign in back all the bad behavior that has gone too far, with risks too great.
The good news is that the government and other folks are waking up to all of these personal data privacy issues. I’m not so sure if the average Facebook user really gets it, though.
Still hopeful I know we can make this work. The digital world of Google and Facebook is not the first ad-driven, data-collecting, and data-selling world. There are other indistries (like healthcare and pharma) who need to protect data and use it only for clearly consented uses. So there are frameworks to build off of.[2] Why would it be any different in the digital world?
Parting thought I keep thinking of ‘peak oil’ and how Sudi Arabia is planning for a post-oil world. Are we at ‘peak data selling’ and will Google be planning for a post-data-selling world?
I think they better.
[1]Facebook rant: I’ve never liked Facebook. And seems like they are scum, anyway. They say they don’t sell data, but story after story shows they play fast and loose with personal data, from Cambridge Analytica, to secretschemes, to developer access, to silent tracking. And Facebook really doesn’t care, even in the face of public and government scrutiny. They are the poster child for f-ing up with personal data. Why the frak does anyone still use facebook?
[2] I keep thinking of a certificate or label of trust that would be a quick way to tell someone that their data is safe. For example, a few parameters, such as if data is collected and what Y/N, data for internal use Y/N, code and organization audited for privacy and cyber controls (also, consent and re-consent constraints) Y/N, data for external use (ads, sell, access) Y/N. Here’s one attempt at this data use label.
Last September I wanted to go to a conference in Sweden and my boss asked me what I would do different from my attendance at the US edition of the event the prior April.
I said, “I’m gonna make a bioreactor demo.”
I wrote about the demo here on our corporate blog. In short, to me a bioreactor is no big deal; it’s just a flask with bugs and media. But for others, there’s a real nerd factor, especially with sensors stuffed into the flask, cables streaming data, and the network connectivity I was demonstrating.
Yes, the pic up to the right is the demo I built.
And then something clicked Before I get to what clicked, I wanted to mention a bit about the demo, the times, and what it all means.
I had chosen to build the demo around an old Arduino Duemilanove I had lying around. I had bought it ten years ago for my son and I to work on and learn. He and I tried to make sense of it all back then, but I really couldn’t find the info and code to help us make the most of it.
Fast forward to 2019 and I was able to find sensors, libraries, example code, and hardware to whip up my demo in a few weeks of nights and weekends type effort. To me, it was a huge difference from ten years before.
And from the ten years before that.
Once upon a time… I always envied how some folks could build and program hardware. When I was working at MIT, I’d meet hardware folks (can you say Media Lab?) or walk through the halls seeing all the hardware being hacked (that’s where I fell in love with microcontrollers, wanting to build smart robots). In grad school, my advisor was always programming or getting interesting hardware built for the lab. At Nokia, I met hardware folks at Nokia and outside Nokia, who could not only program hardware, but were building really cool gizmos in clever ways. Indeed, it was because of those folks during my time at Nokia, that I learned about the intersection of hardware, software, and design; of Patchube (then Xively, then Google IoT); Arduino; Raspberry Pi; and hardware hacking (yes, I know some of that stuff is from after my time at Nokia, but the early threads were all there).
Alas, while I had deep experience in designing proteins and organisms (ho-hum to me but perhaps magic to you), I had no clue how to string up an LED with the right resistor and getting something to make it blink (ho-hum to you, but perhaps magic to me).
Sigh.
Back to today Building the demo took me back to those times. And the tools and information I now had access to gave me superpowers to build something I never thought I’d ever be able to.
But after I built the demo, I sort of stepped back and let things cool.
Sort of.
I had picked up a Raspberry Pi Zero at the Sweden event and started playing with that, learning Linux, Kali hacking, and Python.
And then I started digging into the hardware hacking world, wondering how far that rabbit hole went.
That’s when things just clicked.
A new vice By October, less than two months from when I first started working on the demo, I was hooked, daily reading hardware hacking sites like Hackaday and Hackster.io; perusing community hardware sites like Crowdsupply, Thingiverse, and Tindie; visiting hardware catalogs and building wish lists (yes, Adafruit, that’s me visiting your site every-frakkin-day); and learning about microcontrollers, resistors, capacitors, PCBs, Discord, Raspberry Pi, systems on a chip and single board computers, retro-gaming, Python, Micro Python, CircuitPython, GPIOs, FPGAs, IC2 and SPI, and so much more. And I’ve met and read stuff and watched videos galore of folks who make and break hardware (helpful to work for a hardware company, too, we have so many smarties).
Then I had a new project idea and bought a few items to make it real: a brand new microcontroller, some sensor boards, a soldering iron. I got it working in no time (thanks to readily available libraries and coding guides). I even made my first PCB for it (just holes and traces to connect things together, no components yet, so far). And, yes, I’ve already broken a few things, humorously so.
OMG, so fun. And woe to anyone who gets me taking about it all. Haha.
Watch that wallet Along with the amazing community resources of examples, libraries, tools, and guides, the hardware has become so cheap (giving you permission to break things*). You can get a wifi- and BT-capable microcontroller with a ton of memory (for a microcontroller) that can run on and charge a battery and is an inch long for $20. Complex, ready-to-use sensors can be $5 or $15. PCBs can be designed with free tools and ordered online for a few bucks. And just about everything is on Amazon (tho, I prefer to buy from the manufacturer directly, to support them).
But beware: I work hard to keep myself to buying multiple items at a time (to save on shipping). And I work hard to keep from buying everything in sight. It all adds up. And fast. Haha.
What’s next? I’m surprised by where I have come in three months – the confidence, the knowledge, the skills. And I’ve only scratched the surface. Though it’s clear to me that _at this moment_ this has become a daily obsession that is occupying so much of my spare time, and there’s no sign of it slowing down.
In my innovation work, I tend to do a chocolate and peanut butter ideation exercise. So I wonder if the hardware hacking were the chocolate, what would be the peanut butter I can mix it with? Though, I don’t mean something like hardware and brewing, which is what I am working on with one of my projects. I mean something bigger, something I might mix with hardware to do something completely different, that might catapult me to a new phase in my life.
What might that be?
Dunno.
For now, I’m quite excited running up this hardware hacking learning curve.
Where might it lead me?
*My wife says, in skiing, “If you’re not falling down, you’re not trying hard enough.” Sort of works for life, in general, too.
Yup. Another year and a half has gone by since my last station identification. So much has happened and so little has changed since then.
Me Who am I? I’m Charlie Schick. I’m passionate about the intersection of design, mobile, and data. Also, I’m a recovering PhD, and proudly ex-IBM, -Boston Children’s, -Nokia.
In the past year, I’ve been getting deep into cyber security (again) and hardware hacking. In the last ten years, I’ve been focused on healthcare and the life sciences (again). In the last twenty years, I’ve guided category-leading companies, from global titans to small startups, with digital product design, market insights, and go-to-market strategy.
One more thing, I enjoy sharing my experience, insights, and exploits, especially through writing for and speaking to large audiences and engaging with others in stimulating conversations, including the office of CxOs. Let me know how I can help in this capacity.
Right now My current 100% is with Owl Cyber Defense, a cybersecurity hardware and service firm. I lead their business development and corporate innovation in healthcare and the life sciences, growing a new segment for Owl products by uncovering and establishing new and innovative business, partnering, and product opportunities.
I see myself occupied by Owl for the foreseeable future, though outside of Owl, there have been some other fun developments (more later).
And of course, my standard disclaimer (my usual riff off of an ancient Cringely disclaimer) Everything I write here on this site is an expression of my own opinions, NOT of any of my clients or anyone I work for, especially Owl. If these were the opinions of my clients or Owl, the site would be under their name and, for sure, the writing and design would be much more professional. Likewise, I am an intensely trained professional writer :-P, so don’t expect to find any confidential secret corporate mumbo-jumbo being revealed here.
If you have ideas or projects that you think I might be interested in please contact me, Charlie Schick, at firstname.lastname@molecularist.com or via my profile on LinkedIn.
I’ve been hankering to write here for the last few months, and finally, in the lull between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I’ve run off to one of my usual outposts to take time to write something. Then I noticed that in 2017 I only made 13 posts, and in 2018, 2.
Long history (with gaps) My writing here goes back to January 2004: a photo of my laptop screen, using my phone and posting over the web to the blog. I remember feeling late to the game. I was introduced to blogs (as they were in 2003-2005) the year before by some wonderful smarties at Nokia, knew a few ardent bloggers, and then joined a team where blogging was part of the product. Back then, I had been writing online for a few years, starting with a proto-blog, so it was natural for me to blog. Indeed, by 2008, I got so deep I was leading the Nokia corporate blog and beyond.
While 2017 and 2018 have been quiet here, I’ve been writing for others – corporate writing, alas, offline and on (latest) – but still in my own style, fortunately. But, online, for myself, I’ve been quite quiet.
And in fine company There are a few people, who will remain nameless for now, who were smarter and more productive with their writing back in the day (2003-2013). Some of them were the ones inventing the future, and I count myself very fortunate to have interacted with and learned from them. All of us were on the cutting edge of mobile, design, digital interactive, the web. Many things we talked about back then are only now becoming main stream.
We lost touch long ago, and we’ve all moved on to other things. But one thing I noticed we all have in common is that, at some level, we’ve all stopped posting to our blogs, social media streams, and many other public channels (I checked recently, actually).
Unsaid reasons I’m not going to go into the various possible reasons, but I do think part of it is the noise,* the changes from personal to impersonal, and the general changes in the je ne sais quoi of the digital world and everything connected to it (non, je pense que je sais quoi).
I know that my withdrawal here is reflected in the other digital places I’ve withdrawn from. Though this really doesn’t reflect any reduction in what’s happening between my two ears.
Don’t mind if I do That said, I’m no longer writing for you and others (you’ll never find this without me explicitly sending you the link), but for me (at some level, all my writing has been for me, but back in the day, you were on my mind, and you were able to find me amongst the much more reduced noise*). Despite all the amazing things blogs have provided for me and others for the last decade and a half, I’ve reduced my blog to a repository for notes I might want to share with others at some point.
So, while I have no expectation that anyone will read anything on this blog unless I point it out, I’ve a backlog of some things I want to write. And if you do find this, thank you, and enjoy. If not, then I do hope we have a great conversation and I get to send you some links from here to expand your mind.
Cheers.
*The noise, as in, finding a signal in everything that overwhelms us from the digiverse. I see this affecting so much of what I’m trying to do, forcing me to find alternate ways to engage with others (albeit, more physical, face to face, so not all bad, for the most part).
“I will find a way or make one” – on my Harvard University chair kindly given by Gary Silverman on my departure from his lab
A year and half has gone by since my last station identification. So I thought it might be a good time for me to update things.
Me Hello. My name is Charlie Schick. I’m passionate about the intersection of healthcare, mobile, and data; particularly how we can improve the way healthcare organizations engage with customers, patients, and families. I also advise companies on digital transformation, solutions design, and content marketing.
I enjoy solving difficult and complex problems through insights, action, and innovative digital solutions. And I have over 25 years experience crafting and applying digital strategies to drive success in marketing, sales, solution design and development, and research. In this time, I have been influential leading major brands, such as IBM, Nokia, and Boston Children’s Hospital, with innovative ways of engaging with customers through digital solutions.
777labs
I make this experience available to clients through 777labs, an innovation and strategy consultancy helping clients identify, craft, and deliver digital solutions that grow their business and engage with their customers. We combine our experience in digital transformation and solution design with our analytical research and consumer insight to guide and help clients think strategically about their digital business. Through product, market, and customer research; innovation strategy design and execution; and commercialization, product adoption, and customer engagement strategy and execution we help clients solve key business issues and be more innovative, agile, and customer centric. [Yes, that’s the pitch.]
Innovations in Addiction and Mental Illness I also lead a multi-disciplinary community of Boston-area innovators evaluating and addressing opioid use from a fresh and broad perspective. My intent is to connect stakeholders; reframe the problem; and identify, craft, and deploy innovative solutions addressing opioid use.
Our goal is to build a resilient addiction and mental illness system. A viable ecosystem to not only address opioid use, but also addiction in general, psychoergonomics, neurodiversity, suicide, and mental illness.
Thinking and speaking and helping Beyond the consultancy and ISAMI, I continue giving talks and running panels. I regularly speak in front of large audiences, sharing my experience and interests through various forms of media and design, and in the office of CxOs. Send me a note if you want to know more.
And of course, my standard disclaimer (riffing off of an ancient Cringely disclaimer)
Everything I write here on this site is an expression of my own opinions, NOT of any of my clients. If these were the opinions of my clients, the site would be called ‘777labs’ client’s something or other’ and, for sure, the writing and design would be much more professional. Likewise, I am an intensely trained professional writer :-P, so don’t expect to find any confidential secret corporate mumbo-jumbo being revealed here.
If you have ideas or projects that you think I might be interested in please contact me, Charlie Schick, at firstname.lastname@molecularist.com; via my profile on LinkedIn; or via @molecularist on Twitter. And if you’re interested in working with 777labs, you can contact me at firstname.lastname@777labs.co.
One of the chief reasons I bought an Apple Watch was for Nike Run Club (what used to be called Nike+).[1] But the Nike software’s bugginess and some missed design elements has made Nike Run Club one of the most frustrating pieces of my watch. If Apple Watch is to be the forefront of smartwatches, then they need to whip companies like Nike to make full use of the interaction potential of wrist-based interactive surfaces.
Read on for more.
Surfaces
I got my first smartwatch in 2005. At that time, smartphones were establishing themselves as the convergence point for web, information, media, and social interaction. As I used that smartwatch (also purchased for running), I saw the way a second surface could enhance my phone, provide me with glanceable and immediate information, and allow me to extend my interaction with my phone, which might be in my pocket or in my armband.
Apple Watch as a slave
Most of the apps on the Apple Watch only use the phone for connectivity. For the most part, they don’t share information back with the phone. They are not an extension of the phone, but a replication. There are apps that do have an awareness of what I have on my phone, though it’s more of a phone to watch sharing rather than a two-way collaboration – the watch is slave to the phone.
For example, if I set an alarm on my watch, it doesn’t show up in the alarm list on my phone. Oddly, if I set an alarm on my phone, it does ring and can be silenced from the watch. And I can control my phone-based music and podcasts from my phone, but I need to start them on my phone.
By the way, I don’t count things like email, texts, reminders, and calendars as being shared between phone and watch. Those things have established synchronizations across all related devices, so I don’t count the use of those on the watch as having anything to do with the phone (though, more on this below).
Nike minus
Based on my previous experience with running watches and my long time use of Nike+, I had high expectation for Apple’s Nike+ Apple Watch. When it works, it mostly delivers what I want – a glanceable read-out of my run on my wrist, and the ability to pause or end a run without pulling my phone out of the armband.
But the app misses a few key usability features. For starters, the app is flaky, half the time it won’t start on the watch or doesn’t know I started a run on the phone. This is the app itself – in my 10+ years using Nike+, the app always seemed to be designed by marketers, not true product developers. No other app on the phone seems to miss a trick when controlling my phone (albeit, I’ve only seen Apple apps do the remote control).
The app on the watch does know (when it works) that I’ve started a run on my phone and provides running data and the ability to pause and stop the run. But what irks me is that if you start the run on your watch, it does NOT turn on the app on the phone. The phone app does know if you’ve started a run on the watch, because a few times when there were issues, the phone app told me that the watch was also recording a run.[2]
What?
Apple Watch as surface
What I have always expected from a wrist-based surface is that it be an extension of my phone. I should be able to initiate things on the watch that are reflected on the phone. And vice versa.
For example, if I start a run on my watch, then Nike Run Club on the phone should start and I should have the same experience as if I had initiated the run on my phone.
Also, if I have an app on the phone and on the watch, there should be some way to effect a handoff so I can start one place and continue elsewhere. For example, if I check a calendar entry on the watch, I can then go straight to the entry on my phone for more detail or interaction.
Why does this matter? Divergence.
Gartner, on the eve of the Mobile World Congress, reported the first ever decline in global smartphone shipments. They attribute this, though, to lack of low-cost options, folks holding on to their existing phones longer, and longer upgrade cycles.
But let me suggest this: might it be due to the increasing number of surfaces we now interact with?
The growth of smartphones was characterized by the increasing convergence of computation, data, media, social connections, and attention in smartphones. But in the past years, we’ve slowly diverged, especially with home hubs for music and information, smart devices being spread across the home, smart cars, and, of course, the proliferation of wearables, particularly smartwatches.
We are finally entering into a real ubiquitous computing era, and this is wearing down the smartphone’s central role. As we accumulate a cluster of devices we interact with or own, we need to update our current model of interaction, where everything is a slave to the phone. We need a model where all the devices are aware of each other and share the load; where what we do is handed off between devices as we move to the more appropriate surface or interaction interface. So long as all our devices are slaves to the smartphone, our user experience will be tethered to the phone.
Tellingly, the onboarding process for the Apple Watch basically can be summarized as “Do as I do on my phone.” Can we go beyond that?
Glimpse of how it can be
In many ways, Apple has made us less focused on the primacy of the smartphones. Apple implemented Handoff between iPhone and Mac, so you can start actions one place and complete elsewhere. iCloud keeps our media, messages, and content synchronized for every device we use, so getting a new device just means signing into your account. (OK, so I’m a bit of an Apple-head)
This divergence beyond the smartphone will force developers to be cleverer as to how we make use of the seams between devices, be more cognizant of the benefits of different surfaces of interaction, and strive for a higher bar of usability across multiple usability challenges and environments.
Exciting, no?
What do you think?
[1] The other chief reason was that I needed a more secure and private notification method.
[2] I can’t stand error messages that know what’s wrong but make me do the corrective action, rather than fixing it themselves.
