Since coming back home on the 3rd of March I have been working at the Deutsche Telekom Design Research Laboratories here in Berlin, leaving little time left for blogging.

However, the Design Research Lab is a very interesting and environment for an internship and I am very lucky to be working with a bunch of really bright people.

Project I am working on at the moment is coined Next Neighbourhood, and if you are interested you can have a look on our team blog to find out more about what we are up to. Topics covered range from Design Methodology, Community Informatics to Participatory Design. All in all, very exciting times!

If you have ever used an iPhone you’ll notice that there are some really cool gestures that you can do.  Amongst them is this cool little On/Off gesture. It works really well on the iPhone, the gesture is natural and very clear when you have tried it once or twice. Great.

Lately I have started to encounter this little interaction in different places that are certainly not gesture based. Prime example of this was Spotify. The latest Spotify builds allow you to sync some playlists to you hard drive giving you access to it offline (which is great). Instead of using a good old checkbox to do the trick, they have resorted to copying the iPhone’s way of of doing it, with a slider. The massive difference is though that sliding with your mouse is a lot harder to do than swiping with your finger on a screen.

The kicker however is the fact that this little slider is not even a slider, although you’ll forgive anyone for thinking it is one. It actually behaves rather differently from the iPhone slider, namely that you have to click it to change its state.

My guess is that when they developed the iPhone client of Spotify they thought that simply using the controls that are being used in on the iPhone would also work on the desktop. Well, guess again.

All three of us went on to blog a little on our own, with Joel currently running being involved in creating inspiration and Rogier blogging about his experiences in Shanghai.

Back then, we blogged about things that were supposedly not usable, as the title of the blog might suggest. When I started writing here three years ago, the theme was also the same. Over the years though, the direction of writing here as changed a little. Having had some success with two ebooks (Wireframing using Indesign and Introduction to Good Usability), I felt the pressure of writing longer, more researched posts. However, I now think that perhaps the original format, of short posts about real life usability experiences, good and bad, might be a better suited on a blog, especially since your IQ drops about 10 points when multitasking online.

Because of this, I hope to change the direction of my blog slightly, upping the frequency of posting and focusing more on interesting usability examples found in the real world and online. I can’t promise anything, but I will give it a shot.

No discussion about location awareness would be complete without having mentioned privacy: the nature of the work demands it. However, when it comes to privacy things are not always what they seem. By interviewing almost 400 respondents Ackerman, Cranor, & L. F. Reagle, (1999) identified 3 groups of people, based on privacy concerns: Fundamentalists, consisting out of 17%, a Pragmatic Majority totaling 56% and lastly the Marginally Concerned with 27%. These last two groups are of little concern, the marginally concerned give away information under most circumstances, expressing merely mild concern about privacy. Pragmatists are generally concerned about data but these concerns seem to fade when privacy measures are visibly in place. This, by itself is fairly positive sign: a system designed to take care of the concerns of the pragmatic majority and to a certain extend the marginally concerned would be sufficient to satisfy a large percentage of users.
Of special interest are this first group of people, who seems to be the most problematic with regards to privacy. To better illustrate how fundamental this group of people is, a quote:

The privacy fundamentalists were extremely concerned about any use of their data and generally unwilling to provide their data to Web sites, even when privacy protection measures were in place. They were twice as likely as the other groups to report having been a victim of an invasion of privacy on the Internet. About a third of the fundamentalists refused to answer our survey question about their household income (as compared with 14% of the pragmatists and 3% of the marginally concerned).(Ackerman, Cranor, & L. F. Reagle, 1999)

This paints a pretty negative picture about this 17%. However, as mentioned, things are not what they seem. A follow up study by Spiekermann, Großklags and Berendt, (2001) took this study a step further by not only asking questions about privacy but also testing how much respondents were willing to disclose. The study was conducted by asking questions about personal information, some of which were only slightly related to the task. The results were surprising: large percentages of respondents answered all of the questions asked and out the group indentified as fundamentalists, 86% of the questions were answered. To truly see how remarkable this finding is, refer back to the quote describing this group.

Recent studies about this subject seems to further strengthen the evidence that people are willing, and in fact do, disclose much more than they say they do. Garde-Perik, Markopoulos, Ruyter, Eggen, and Ijsselsteijn (2008) researched the subject by presenting respondents with music recommendation system, one of which functions by disclosing favorite artists and the other by disclosing personal information. Respondents seemed to have very little concerns about disclosing information for the perceived benefits of such a music recommendation system and the authors conclude by saying that considering the ease with which users disclose information that they consider personal, safeguards may be needed to prevent disclosure in contexts in which this is not safe. (Garde-Perik, Markopoulos, Ruyter, Eggen, & Ijsselsteijn, 2008)

This just illustrates that when it comes to privacy, what people do and what they say don’t always correspond. It also shows that if the right design decisions are made and proper control and assurance given about personal data, that in fact, very few people would not be willing to disclose such information.

Works Cited
Ackerman, M. S., Cranor, & L. F. Reagle, J. (1999). Privacy in e-commerce: Examining user scenarios and privacy preferences. Proceedings of the ACMConference on Electronic Commerce , 1-8.
Garde-Perik, E. v., Markopoulos, P., Ruyter, B. d., Eggen, B., & Ijsselsteijn, W. (2008, February Unknown). Investigating Pricacy Attitudes and Behaviour in Relation to Personalization. Social Science Computer Review , 26 (1), pp. 20-46.
Spiekermann, S., Großklags, J., & Berendt, B. (2001). E-privacy in 2nd generation e-commerce: Privacy preferences versus actual behavior. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce , 38-47.