Tom Hume

Joh and I ran a dry run for our Agile2009 workshop tonight, held at the mighty Skiff in the North Laine, Brighton... and after a frantic day of last-minute prep, I was quietly pleased with how it went.

The session opened with a few slides setting the scene about mobile. These definitely need some work - whilst I know the material quite well, I hadn't prepped them and it showed. I waffled somewhat, but fortunately at such a speed that it was over quickly for the audience, and we could get on with the meat of the workshop: exploring how an iterative design process can help address the kind of constraints that mobile inevitably entails handling.

We split into two groups - with 9 attendees this gave us teams of 4 and 5 respectively. Persona in hand and product concept in mind, one team headed upstairs and the other stayed downstairs, each spending 15 minutes designing a product with the aid of copious amounts of card, post-it notes, the ubiquitous Sharpies and some rather natty 1.5x sized replica mobile phones my dad and his girlfriend had put together for the session. After 15 minutes we halted the groups and swapped one member between them, to act as a test subject for a 5-minute usability test... after which the groups convened to show off their work, and the results of the test, in a short demo session.

Constraints were introduced, with each team having to transpose their product to a new device and form factor. Then rinse, repeat: another 15-minute design session followed by 10 minutes of demos, and a 10-minute run through to discuss learnings.

After the shaky start of my slides, I was pleasantly surprised by how things went: both teams managed to produce a useful design and test it within 25 minutes. One team definitely received worthwhile feedback from their test subject, the other got some but were less sure of its value. In any case, the notion that a group of people could go from zero to a coherent and in some way tested prototype in such a short space of time was both heart-warming and genuinely impressive... and I couldn't point at domain knowledge or mobile experience as being the cause of this success, with both Ribot and Mary (the participants with a background in mobile) located within one team, and no mobile experience in the other.

Learnings from the session displayed a comforting level of consistency between the two groups, too: both felt that moving to a smaller screen lent their design more focus, and that working within tighter constraints contributed to their creativity, rather than detracting from it. Time limits were clearly a problem (how could they not be?), and whilst one group found cross-platform consistency to be a tough trick to pull off, the other observed that their design changed less than they'd have anticipated in the move from iPhone to clamshell.

Both groups then consented to exchange beer for a pile of incredibly useful feedback, which we'll be using to further hone the session before running it in Chicago. And one comment which really chuffed me up was overhearing participants moot that firstly, this format might be an interesting way to open up a Hack Day type of event; and secondly, that he'd really like to see the product he'd worked on *actually get built*.

As always, thanks to Jon Markwell of Inuda and the Skiff for hosting, to Joh for gently stamping on some of my more ridiculous ideas and her rock-steady facilitation, and to everyone who came and participated :) There's a photo-set, yellow-hued thanks to my grotty HTC lens, here.

Update: slides from the warmup are here.

So, it's been a week since I got back from Mobile 2.0 - and therefore highly remiss that I've not written about it yet.

I really enjoyed both the Developer Day and the main event. The former seemed to be focused around mobile web - with widgets in particular getting a lot of prominence. Whilst I'm not convinced that widgets are the future of all mobile apps, it's an area where - until recently - I've let myself lag behind a little, so I got a lot out of the sessions. And one quote from the very beginning has stuck with me - Dan Appelquist remarking that applications are nowadays being consumed more like songs than software.

The main event was pretty decent. On both days some panel discussions had a tendency to get a bit angels-on-pinheads - the one where 4 people debated publicly about who was most "open", each using a slightly different definition of the much overused word, didn't really hold my attention. But the off-track talks really shone for me - Tom Raftery berating the industry for its at best token gestures towards environmentalism, and Regine Beatty and Atau Tanaka one-upping each other with wonderful examples of mobile frivolity. And outside of these, Ted Morgan of Skyhook talking about their business (200m location searches a day, vs 300m or so Google searches per day!) and Priya Prakash's talk on Beyond Free (an evolution of the last few sessions I've seen her do) were particularly memorable.

The venues (Barcelona Activa and ESADE) were both excellent (modulo the temperature of rooms in the former, which got quite stuffy). Now I've experienced the double-whammy of rock-solid wi-fi and power at every seat, I suspect I'm going to be a little spoilt.

More than this though, on a personal level I got a lot out of the event. It seemed to have a perfect mix of 50% familiar faces and 50% new (and friendly) ones - I'm not a natural networker, but felt very comfortable at the event. And in particular it was great to finally meet Dom and Francois of the W3C and Mike Rowehl - all of whom I've known for a while, but only in a virtual sense. It's nice to have that corrected :)

I did a couple of sessions; one on Mobile User Experience for Developer Day, which was well attended but missed the mark a little, I felt. I emphasised how we run UX alongside development at FP over and above the specifics of mobile UX, and whilst my audience seemed happy to engage on this, I think I could've either been clearer in the title for the session, or put more emphasis on tactics than on process.

The "play" panel I sat on at the very end of the event was a different matter: really good fun, and an utter privilege to talk about location-based gaming, ghost hunting, shitting and sex, generative music and digital rights issues with Professor Tanaka, Gustav Soderstrom of Spotify, Akhil Monappa of Atlas Venture, and Michael Breidenbruecker - the lovable nutter behind Last.fm and RJDJ - all ably held together by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch.

And again, on a personal note I had a very interesting chat with Ted Morgan at the post-event dinner, learning exactly what it's like to get into work one day and find a message from Steve Jobs on your voicemail :)

Thanks to Rudy, Dan, and all the organisers and behind-the-scenes folks who made it happen. I'm already looking forward to next year, though I think I might give myself an extra day in Barcelona to help recover from Sonar...

Mobile 2.0: Beyond Free, Panel

Moderator: Inma Martinez, Stradbroke

Harald Neidhardt, Smaato

Fee Beyer, Berlin

Ian Ginn, Amsterdam

Dr Lai Kok Fung, BuzzCity

Priya Prakash, Nokia

IM: It's hard to fund mobile-specific busines

IM: What digital goods are being sold for a decent price?

PP: It depends on context. What goods are being sold on ebay?

PP: There's a distinction between creating an application and a service. In the song analogy, it's like being a creative musician. Anyone know of any apps which are service-like?

IM: There's a company in Madrid who does betting on mobile goods. They auction cars, games consoles, by text message: you bid for the ident, lowest price.

IM: What are the services worth paying for?
FB: Infrastructure companies like Orbster ("infrastructure on the phone").

IM: Imagine your service complementing others, so the uptake of users is faster. What elements are worth paying for? PP stresses UI...
PP: It's not just about the UI, that's where we're going wrong. UI can be lipstick on a pig. It's the whole ecosystem, there's as much design in the business model as in the presentation layer.

FB: To push a service through the operator organisation is very different.

IM: So many people create nice applications, but not apps you'd want to pay for.

LKF: In some emerging markets, we saw mobile banking as strong.

Q (Andrew Scott, Rummble): You need to focus on product, not revenue.

Q: (Martin, Layar) How should we charge?

IG: It feels like a killer app. I'd make a 30m drama about it to get the story out.

LKF: Make it work on all phones.

PP: Think about the discovery - who's going to help me find it?

IG: Make it newsworthy. Save a life with it, get it on the news.

Q: I keep hearing talk about money. But I like the iPhone because people can make an app without having money, and release it to a community - for social capital. Why do we focus on financial game? Why can't we help make life better?

A: If you're talking about a venture funded business, VCs have a different model. Bootstrap, don't talk to a VC - unless you're making something beyond amazing or your team has already done it before, your valuation will be so low... VCs are banks. The app store today is a good model for small developers, or Salesforce etc (having a mobile implementation of a pre-existing platform online).

Mobile 2.0: Regine Debatty on Mobile & Culture & Arts

Wants to cover how artists, designers and hackers use technology today. Ex-Latin and Greek teacher.

She shows off a series of art projects. I sit in my chair grinning ear to ear:

• Limor Fried, Wave Bubble, a portable piece of kit to jam nearby mobile signals.
• the portable cell phone booth.
• the privacy scarf
• Bikes Against Bush
• SMS Guerilla Projector, received praise form the Street Promotions guy at Warner Bros.
• Parasite, "an independant projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads"

• Nice video interview with Mike Cohn, including some lovely advice on how to start getting your Scrum on. I'd thoroughly concur - try it and do it strictly for a reasonable period of time before you start to adapt it;
• I'm sure I'll have posted this before, but it's worth repeating - Jeff Patton's 12 best practices for UX in an agile environment;
• Google Bets On Big 5 - old news as this dates back to last month, but I'm reviewing it after watching the Google IO Keynote video. Very interesting indeed, but I'd take issue with their presenting this technology as "all there" - a few experiments on Firefox, Safari and Chrome on the mac seem to show that some bits are present and correct on each, others lacking. Still, very exciting stuff whatever...
• Wave. Wow, double-wow for the demo of live translation at the end.
• A study on the effectiveness of using personas in product design. Really nice to have some evidence for this stuff, though the study involved giving participants pre-prepared personas. My take would be that personas are a useful tool when based on research, but as a catalysed form of assumptions about a target audience, they can be dangerous.
• Another study, on how price affects perception.
• Interesting presentation on digital inclusion in the UK, and preconceptions we may have. "It's a case of social equity: 93% of people under 70 who have a degree are online".

I've put the slides from my talk at Mobile Web Summit 2.0 online - they're here, if you're after them.

My talk was looking at case studies of three mobile apps, two of which we'd done (Puzzler and the Ghost Detector), and one being the mighty Smule (which I've written about before). The main point I was making is that - as I was chuffed to hear Dan mention in his opening talk on day two - "all interesting mobile apps have some sort of social element". That said, this needn't involve all the classic paraphernalia of "social media" - i.e. conversations, contact management, or identity - and assuming that to be doing something social, you have to be building a branded Facebook, or a blogging platform, seems a little... crude. Audiences can be connected in more subtle ways, and as the examples of the league tables we launched for Puzzler, and the opt-in rate for Ghosty both show, these can lead to measurable increases in both uptake and loyalty.

We had fun in the panel session afterwards too, where I got to trot out a theory I've been nurturing around mobile advertising: on the web, the aim of advertising has been to drive users to useful web services, where they can get something useful done. On mobile, applications are a more appropriate destination for advertising.

Why? Mobile web sites tend to be more limited. There are a few really "sticky" ones (itsMy and Flirtomatic, I'm looking at you), but most destinations for mobile advertising are ad-supporting microsites with little long-term value for a visitor. As such, applications are a more natural and worthwhile destination for mobile advertising: give your prospective customers something genuinely useful they can carry with themselves and see value from again and again, rather than expecting them to return to a microsite.

If you're sceptical, I'd encourage you to look at iPhone app store statistics - the average free app is being run 80 times. This might not mean it's a great place to run advertising, but I'll wager that's roughly 80 times more traffic than most mobile microsites get...

Expanding the horizons of Mobile Web 2.0 to boost the developer ecosystem: An overview of the latest work and progress to move on to the next stage of evolution

"The Mobile Web is a Disruptive Innovation": this is not business as usual, we need new practices for how we develop and engage with the community.

• New markets: e.g. social networks opening up customer segments not served by web players (e.g. ItsMy);
• New players (Google, Apple);
• New business models (e.g. app stores);
• New customer expectations (UX, working out-of-the-box, sharing with friends);

We have turned a corner in the industry: as of yesterday, Dans wife is using the mobile web :) We don't need to talk about how to get people using it any more.

Current industry trends:

• Location apps and the location-based web;
• Social apps going mobile;
• Web browsers become runtimes - web as platform, more application development moves to the web with HTML5, widgets, rich APIs; this decreases fragmentation. As an agency you don't have to think separately for mobile - the same skills are transferable for PC web and mobile;
• Open source;

Clash of civilisations between web and mobile:

• Web: fast, software driven, scripting, APIs, iterative;
• Mobile: market size, scale, control points, regulation, customer ownership;

Mobile web apps

• Web has moved from page-metaphor to application metaphor;
• Mobile web is going the same way;
• Widgets are at the epicentre of mobile/web convergence;

Presents the Twiggy Widget: they got Carsonified, a web shop, to build a widget that does Twitter search.

Location is one of the most important device APIs right now. Working within W3C to build geolocation APIs for the web,

Widgets are made for the mobile web.

Ends with a personal please to end version numbering of web sites.

Panel discussion

Tim Green

Dan Appelquist

Raphael Gourmot from Orange

Sten Minor, VP of software and platforms, Sony Ericsson

TG: Dan showed a vision of web applications and open standards. How much of a hindrance can the device be, with different form factors etc. - Stan?

SM: We need to improve on standards. We have middleware, web runtimes, application ecosystems. In an ideal world you can combine these layers in ways you want. In practice you have vertical clusters (Apple). It's a nightmare to develop apps in this environment, advanced applications have to be made specifically for different clusters or across J2ME.

DA: The widget and runtime environment works well. It's easy to build an app that only makes sense in one screen size/form factor. There's skill in doing device-independent UI. There are tool chains underway to help developers here.

RG: We're helping developers with porting to devices and operating systems. Things have improved a bit, in 10 years. We still face fragmentation. W3C with device APIs runs the risk of following J2ME, with manufacturers implementing standards differently. We're working with middleware to do multi-publishing (e.g. Celsius). But who is the audience.

DA: Regarding the comparison between JSRs and web apis: there's a rabid web developer community intent of ensuring browsers support standards correctly. We need to engage early adopters and developers first, to try and bring this culture to mobile.

SM: We should differentiate on top of standards, not by supporting them.

TG: How?

SG: In services on top - not by locking in users.

DA: Users want a consistent experience when they pick up their phone too.

RG: People are buying devices for form factors, looks. Some of us might buy for features, but we're geeks. For services, differentiation is difficult: how do you do it? You update your browser on the desktop every year, but you don't tend to do this with your mobile. I'm seeing lots of single-platform developers at Orange, who want to reach beyond where they are now. To be more positive, the real benefit from the web.

Panel discussion: impact of form factors. Role of the mobile browser. Ideas on how a more open web might enable more social applications. Where does the handset company sit in a mobile-web dominated future?

Group 1: lots of industries will be trying to apply their industries to the mobile web. Look at broadcasting, say - the mass market want content from broadcasters, aren't fussed about technology. We need to be talking more to the content industry.

SM: Within Sony, there's a lot of collaboration - Sony Pictures, Music, Playstation

DA: It's always good to get the content industry involved earlier on in the standards process. It's hard to engage broadcasters in sometimes-speculative standards work, because it's not really part of their business model. The BBC is definitely on the leading edge.

RG: Content providers were very involved with standards, but it was all push-based. Now they're waiting for standards to be ready. What about DRM? The content industry want their content protected.

Group 6: We collectively wailed when standards were mentioned. The consensus was that they don't work.

DA: I completely disagree. The whole value of the web - the most succcessful interactive media ever - is interoperable standards.

Group 6: Yes, but the web is a case of an individual driving standardisation. But in a business environment the dynamic is different. Telecomms industry has thousands of useless standards.

RG: Standards covers a wide number of layers. The web industry creates upper-layer standards, transport-level layer standards are lower layers. The web industry is moving down the stack whilst the mobile industry moves up.

Q: When we talk about mobile web, we're often thinking about firing up a browser: Safari is one app on the iPhone. Need the mobile web be about the browser? Is the browser the only way to go or will individual mobile applications be it?

DA: The UX of the web runtime environment is that you invoke an application; this is the widget experience. The stock and weather widgets on the iPhone are built in this environment, but Apple don't open them to developers.

Funding the Future of Mobile Web 2.0: The Investors viewpoint in 2009 – is Mobile Web 2.0 the next growth opportunity?

Tony Fish, AMF Ventures, Angel investor

Roberto Bonzaninga, Balderton Capital

Mark Gracey, Scottish Equity

Daniel Waterhouse, Welington Partners

Hugh Fey, OpenVantage

Hugh Campbell, GP Bullhound

Moderator: Tim Green

TG: Why are you an awkard git, Tony?

TF: I'm independent so I can challenge assumptions.

TG: Give me an example of counterintuitive thinking.

TF: The last panel. Standards for applications at the edge are bollocks, driven by people who own the infrastructure.

RB: We as an industry would be better if we thought about consumers. Forget about technology, standards, consume.

TG: Why are there fewer fast-growing mobile companies in your recent list Hugh.

HC: There were 5-6 out of 50. Our table was based on revenue growth; startups in mobile are struggling to deliver this here. Mobile advertising is shot for the next 18 months.

TG: Is it getting harder to generate investment interest?

HC: It's hard for mobile, software and content businesses to raise money right now. VCs have made bets which didn't work out and it's a tough ecosystem for a young company - very busy value chain, problems getting a big enough revenue cut to support yourself.

MG: We've invested in Surfkitchen for longer than we would've liked and they've been through ups and downs. In the last few years we've seen interest in this company grow, operators have long-running projects that have wasted money - they want valuable companies to help them transition to what the iPhone has done. It's tough for startups in mobile infrastructure as well as apps.

DW: The investment community has been scarred by history - mobile gaming, music, LBS have all unravelled in a bad way with few success stories. The ecosystem is improving but there's hesitancy.

TG: Do investors hunt in packs?

TF: No. Mobile has to interface with lots of other things. To talk about it in itself is naive. The industry is scarred because operators promised lots of data consumption and failed to deliver: people create more than they consume. This is where mobile is relevant.

DW: I'm not seeing mobile being an adjunct to the web service. We invest in Qype who have a simple iPhone app contributing a significant percentage of content to the service, though still a small number of users.

RB: VCs are guilty of a bit of homogenous thinking. We need to look at things with fresh eyes: the world changes, ecosystems change.

HC: If you'd have taken the Crazy Frog to an investment committee, it wouldn't have gotten funded.

MG: Jamba wouldn't have made it past our investment committee.

TG: What's the current situation like, in terms of quantity of available funding, and approaches from mobile startups.

RB: We've started a new $100m fund. I spend a lot of time on mobile startups. We don't see much truly new stuff. I'm a bit disappointed that Twitter was created in San Francisco - we had SMS here for years. But today it's exciting that When we look at something, it's not about what I, or operators, think... it's about what consumers think. You can see consumer traction - we can be wrong, but the consumer is normally right. We see lots of small startups, 1 or 2 guys with 1m downloads.

TF: There are fewer startups now, I'm happy about this. We've stopped seeing the same startups come back again and again. Folks are leaving corporates with good ideas.

RB: From an investment POV, App Stores have given us data to work with as to what users are downloading. There's money in the big funds in Europe, but we need great ideas!

TG: Are companies coming with next-generation ideas, or ideas for folks with feature-phones or with wide distribution across the world?

MG: On-device portal is a dirty word these days, it's v operator-centric terminology. We're seeing a lot of companies, but the plans are more plausible. Applications have been proven. It's easy to test, tweak and improve businesses; to invest less and see how it goes.

Q: What areas of the value chain, and what subsectors, do you think are most interesting for investment?

TF: Don't care. Is the market big enough, can it work, is there an exit?

HC: Mobile communities is an area seeing tremendous growth, there's so many interesting things here. Micropayments, smart ad tracking,

RB: As a fund, we don't think like that. OpenVantage are using an old technology; it's the consumer proposition that's working. I think less about the space they're in, and more about the proposal. But it's time to do disruptive consumer propositions now.

HF: Yes, VCs hunt in packs. City events last year made things tighter, valuations are lower. The technology doesn't matter; we're supporting the accessibility and support of spontaneity. We bring this to sports betting.

Q: How many mobile investments do you expect to make this year, when did you last do a new investment?

DW: Last time was 6m ago, first question don't know: we don't have an allocation.

MG: Twice this year. Again, we have no allocation.

RB: Same for us; last one is *now*, we're closing a round. No quotas for us.

TF: 60 days ago.

Q: What's the one thing you'd like to see change in the industry to help you invest more:

RB: Consumers.

TG: What's the most common mistake.

RF: Operator deal: that one deal will change the world. I'd like operators broken back down to providing capacity.

Beyond SMS voting - mapping the future of Mobile Media 2.0

Barry Houlihan, CEO, MIG

SMS voting isn't happening in the UK right now, but the future is optimistic.

MIG: 120 staff, £65m revenue, organic growth, no funding. Freemantle Media, Comic Relief, etc.

Jigsaw: mobile interactivity agency, doing mass-participation in the UK. NewToy, a live experience technology agency.

Kilrush: mobile internet publishing platform, making it easy to integrate mobile with web. Drag and drop, feeds, etc., to help team build services easily.

Walkers crisps activity geneated 60/40 activity in favour of mobile, all by SMS.

47% of all written communication between 15-24yo is by text.
UK consumers send 28 textx messages a week, only make 20 calls.
24-44 year olds are 70% of UK mobile browsing.
67% of the UK mobile browsing internet in the UK is male.

Freemantle aren't seeing a return on their mobile content investments, and are publicly saying they're going to cut back. Endemol have said their biggest challenge is working with application providers: ensuring that apps deliver engagement.

Are You Ahead of Time? A Crowdsourced Vision of Mobile Media, Monty C M Metzget

An interactive session....

I forgot to post about BOGFest - Brighton Outdoor Gaming Festival, the inaugural event of which was held last weekend in Brunswick Square - curated by Richard Vahrman of Locomatrix fame.

There was a programme of events running all afternoon; after a diary clash with a 5th birthday party, I managed to make it along at 4, missing Tai Chi Twister and Clock the Doc but arriving just in time to kick off some games of Fruit Farmer, one of the Locomatrix formats.

It was really interesting seeing Real People playing Fruit Farmer. We cheated completely, of course, and presented each player with a phone and GPS unit that had been preconfigured with the application installed - in real life they'd have to do this themselves, which we know to be a bit of a barrier (though the geocaching crowd seem to use applications on occasion, so it's not completely out of the question).

We had 6 pairs of players run off for a game. All bar one of the pairs managed to locate themselves quickly and orient themselves against the on-screen map - working out what direction they had to run in to do anything useful. A few players noted that their position was a little laggy, and we were slightly embarrassed to find out that the game layout we'd chosen for the day was slightly too large for the playing area - meaning that players would've had to climb onto the roofs of local buildings to collect a few of the larger pieces of fruit. Memo to self: next time, check map first.

But that said, players seemed to enjoy the game - particularly some of our younger participants:

Also throughout the day we had some treasure hunts running, a scavenger hunt at the end of the day, and Tristan brought along his Hunt the Wumpus QR-code game - he's written a great post on how it went for him, which you can find here.

Time constraints meant that I never got to show off ArchaeoloGPS, the game I've been doodling with recently. Perhaps next year... :)

• Moblin, a project the esteemed Mr Richards has been beavering away on, is launched - looking extremely tasty, particularly for a 1.0 ...
• The Big Lunch, a nationwide social eating project. None near us... yet. Any takers?
• Groundhog day for NFC: "it could all work really well if we viewed mobile phone apps a bit more like ring tones and made them as easy to obtain and dispose of"
• Mobile literacy, an Adaptive Path research project in rural India;
• Software development advice for startups: "Software development is complicated, expensive, error-prone, regularly boring and complicated. As a programmer, here’s what I think you should know before we meet for coffee"
• The clean sheet of paper: "two ways to work with talent"
• Frank Lloyd Lego sets, beautiful.
• Equally beautiful in another way, SickCity - realtime disease collection.
• The design with intent toolkit, "features 12 design patterns which recur across design fields (interaction, products, architecture), and there are also 35 more detailed here on the website. Some of the names will be unfamiliar, but we hope the patterns and examples will be understandable, and inspire your own concepts."

MEX: Achieving great tactile experience is a subtle art, Christophe Ramstein, CTO Immersion

Gets us to take one anothers' pulse.

As person taking the pulse, you were able to perceive something invisible and engage on another level. Haptics is an invisible experience we're trying to bring to the computer.

What is it?

Cutaneous sensors - skin is 2 square metres! Kinesethesia (positioning of body parts). Proprioception (integration of sensing with self-awareness?).

You can't feel if you don't touch - it requires proximity and contact. Haptics is intimately related to motor control. Touch reinforces sight and sound and needs to be consistent with them. "Touching is believing".

Hardware vs digital?

We have new types of UI enabled by haptics, and enhanced UX. And it might be realistic (simulation-based) or interactive.

How does it enhance UX?

Pros: direct/natural manipulation, maximise ergonomics by combining output and input, reconfigurable UI.

Cons: typing, visual occlusion, lag, sensing thresholds. Mechanical keyboards are still better.

Samsung and LG have quickly replaced their UI with touchscreens, and are now moving to haptics.

How can we leverage it?

Touchscreen navigation/typing is a big problem. Tangible messaging and communication is an opportunity. Things become emotional when we touch them. What if we could hug remotely (ahem - you can - CuteCircuit). Non-verbal communication.

Haptics improves typical WPM and accuracy, "except when you're sitting on a Jackhammer".

You can type on a mechanical keyboard without looking at it. There's a rumour that some car UI will be forced (by regulation) to have haptic feedback to make it safer.

What are the design guidelines?

Design tools for haptics: synchronise with sounds, shape parameters (amplitude, frequency, etc.), design effects and experience in real-time. Today we're talking about "button confirmation".

Q: We know haptics is important, but there are so few tools to experiment with it... how can designers begin to prototype?

A: Look at the ones on our web site.

Q: How do you see gestures combined with haptics?

A: It's about enaction. There's lots of room for gestures, for creating or manipulating content. How do you get the perception that what you did was accepted. (Knocks on table). This is a gesture, the sound, vision and feel gives feedback.

Marek: when you engage with people on an emotion level, you connect with them more deeply. Does this make them more likely to spend?