Category: Ideas
UX Live 22′ – Connecting to others
Goodbye Stereo, hello 360º Sound
In the past five years, there has been a paradigm shift in the speakers market. We’ve started seeing a different form factor of audio capable devices, 360-degree audio speakers, emerging. I want to have a look at the reasons behind the appearance of this form factor and the benefits it brings us.
First, it is important to look at the market segmentation reasoning:
1. Since the inclusion of Bluetooth in phones there has been a variety of (mainly cheap, initially) speakers that sought to abolish the need for cables. Docs and Bluetooth speakers were the answer. But at the time there was no premium solution for Bluetooth speakers and besides sound quality, there was room for more innovation (or gimmicks, like a floating speaker). To luxuriate the Bluetooth speaker one of the solutions that were created was a 360° speaker.
The original Bluetooth speakers were directional speakers and since it is unknown where they will be placed, how many people need to listen to them and where they are sitting; having a directional speaker is a disadvantage in comparison to a 360° one.
2. From another perspective, 360° speakers function as a cheaper alternative to hi-fi audio systems. Many customers are just interested in listening to music in their home in comfort and do not require a whole setup with wires and receivers. They also mainly play music using their mobile phones.
So it fits right in the middle. Now let’s look at some use cases:
Parties — It can be connected to other speakers and have increased sound. It’s also relatively easy for other people to connect to it.
Multi-room — It can allow you to play music whilst controlling it with your phone in all sections of your house. It can also be controlled remotely.
Conference calls — or actually any call. It’s also possible to put it on speaker on your phone but that’s sometimes hard to hear.
Smart — Today we have assistant speakers with arrays of microphones that sometimes come in the form of 360. It’s a bit different but a 360° microphone array is as useful as a speaker array.
I want to focus on the 360° form factor and discuss why it is so important and a real differentiator. To be able to understand more about 360° audio, its advantages and the future of 360° audio consumption, it is important to have a look at the history of sound systems.
The person as sound — Before there were speakers there were instruments. People used their own resonance to make a sound and then found resonance in drums, and string-based instruments. That led to a very close and personal interaction which could be mobile as well. People gathered around a singer or musician to hear them.
Phonograph and Gramophone — This was the first time music became reproducible mechanically. However, it was still mono (one channel). From an interaction perspective, it was a centerpiece with the sound coming out of the horn.
Stereo systems — Stereo was an ‘easy sell’, after all we all have two ears. Therefore speakers that can pleasure them both are fabulous. Some televisions were equipped with mono speakers but more advanced televisions had stereo speakers too.
Surround — 3/5/7.1 systems were introduced mainly for the use case of watching movies in an immersive way. These systems included front, back, center, and sub speakers (sometimes even top and bottom). It is still quite rare to find music recordings that are made for surround. Algorithms were also created for headphones, to mimic surround.
But there is a limitation with these systems. Let’s compare it to the first two reproducible sound systems: the human voice and the Phonograph. They both had more mobility. You could place them wherever you wanted to and people would gather around and listen to music. I can’t say it’s exactly the same experience, but it doesn’t hurt the premise of the instrument. However, with stereo systems and surround systems, you need to sit in a specific contained environment in a specific way to really enjoy their benefits. Sitting in a place where you cannot really sense that spatial experience makes these systems redundant.
Audio speakers in the present
Considering current technologies and their usage, our main music source is our mobile phones. It’s a music source that doesn’t have to be physically connected via cables. Our listening experience is more like a restaurant experience where it’s not important where the audio is coming from as long as it’s immersive. 360° speakers then were able to provide exactly that with fewer speakers. But we lost something along the way, we lost stereo and surround. In other words, we lost the immersive elements of spatial sound.
Audio speakers in the near future
There are huge investments in VR, AR and AI and all of these fields are affecting sound and speakers. In VR and AR we are immersed visually and auditory, currently using a headset and headphones. At home we’ve started controlling it via our voices, turning lights on and off, changing music and so on.
Apple’s HomePod has a huge premise in this respect. Its spatial algorithm could be the basis for incredible audio developments. Apple might have been late to the 360° market but they have tremendous experience in audio and computing and this is why I think this is the next big audio trend: “The spatially aware 360° speaker”.
Although they sell it as one speaker it can obviously be bought in pairs or more. The way these understand each other will be the key to this technology.
Spatiality is important because in a 360° speaker a lot of sound goes to waste, and a lot of power is inefficient. Some of that sound is being pushed against a wall which causes too much reverb. Most of the high frequency that is not being projected at you is useless.
Here are the elements to take into account
- Location in the room — near a wall, in the corner, center?
- Where is the listener?
- How many listeners are there?
- Are there other speakers and where?
In Apple’s demonstration, it seems that some of these are being addressed. It’s clear to see that they thought about these use-cases and therefore embedded their chip into the speaker which might become better over time.
The new surround
360° speakers can already simulate 3D depending on the array of speakers that are inside the hardware shell. This will be reflected in the ability to hear stereo if you position yourself in the right place.
But things get much more interesting if the speaker/s are aware of your location. If you are wearing a VR headset and have two 360° speakers you can potentially walk around the room and have a complete surround experience. A game’s experience could be super immersive without the need for headphones. Projected into AR, a room could facilitate more than one person at a time.
Consider where music is being listened to. In most instances, a 360° speaker would be of greater benefit than a stereo system. In cars, which usually have four speakers, offices and clubs, 360° speakers would work better than a stereo system. Even headphones could be improved by using spatial awareness to block noises from the surrounding environment and featuring a compass to communicate your orientation. Even a TV experience can be upgraded with just HomePods and some software advancements.
What about products like Amazon Echo Show?
A screen is a classic one direction interaction. Until we have 360-degree screens which work like a crystal ball with 360° audio, I don’t see it becoming the next big thing; after all, we still have our phones and tablets.
The future of 360 in relation to creation and consumption tools
Here are a bunch of hopes and assumptions:
- Music production and software will adopt 360° workflows to support the film and gaming industry; similar to 3D programs like Unity, Cinema 4D, and Adobe.
2. New microphones will arise, ones that record an environment using three or more microphones. It will initially start with a way to reproduce 3D from two microphones, like field recorders, but quickly it’ll move into more advanced instruments driven by mobile phones which will adopt three to four microphones per phone to be able to record 360° videos with 360° sound. Obviously, it’ll be reflected in 360° cameras individually as well.
3. A new file type that can encode multiple audio channels will emerge and it will have a way of translating it to stereo and headphones.
I can’t wait to see this becoming reality and having a spatially aware auditory and visual future based on augmented reality, using instruments like speakers or headphones and smart glasses to consume it all.
Here are a couple of companies/articles that I think are related
Finished copying Snapchat? What’s next in messaging
In the past year we’ve seen more copying than innovation in the world of messaging. In 2016 everyone did stories, disappearing messages etc. Instead of simply trying to mimic Snapchat there are other useful avenues to explore that can simplify people’s lives and increase engagement. In this article I will analyze key areas in the world of digital conversation and suggest practical examples of how it could be done.
What should be enhanced in messaging:
As users we spend most of our screen time communicating. Therefore there is a need for it to be easy and comfortable; every tap counts.
Part 1
Comfort — The product needs to be easy to adopt, following familiar patterns from real life and aggrandize them.
Rich messaging — Introducing new experiences that help users articulate themselves in unique ways. Charge the conversation with their personality.
Part 2
Automation — Reducing clutter and simplifying paths for repeated actions.
Control — A way for users to feel comfortable; to share more without proliferating vulnerability.
Rich messaging
Being rich in a wider sense means you have a variety of options and most of them are cheap for you. In a messaging UX context, cheap means content that is easy to create; interaction that helps deliver and sharpen the communication. Rich messaging can be embodied in the input and output. It is catered to the user’s context thus facilitating ongoing communication and increasing engagement.
In the past, and currently in third world countries, the inability to send large files including voice messages resulted in many people simply texting. This led more people to learn to read and write. Unapologetically text is harder to communicate with and primitive in terms of technology, hence why users have come to expect more.
Take voice input/output for example. It’s the perfect candidate as there is increasing investment in this area. Speaking is easy, in fact using sounds is the easiest way for humans to assimilate and share information.
There are scenarios where voice can be the preferred communication method, such as when you’re driving, when you’re alone in the room, when you’re cooking, and when you’re doing anything that keeps you relatively busy.
Here are a few examples for rich messaging:
Voice to text — Messaging is asynchronous and to drive engagement the goal is to strive for synchronous. It doesn’t matter how the content was created. What matters is that it is delivered to the other person in a form they can consume now!
Voice dictation has improved tremendously but somehow most of the focus has been on real-time. The nature of messaging dictates a non-real-time solution. It can be leveraged to give a better quality LPM (Language Processing Model) transcript result. For example, Baidu recently launched SwiftScribe which allows users to upload an audio file that the program transcribes.
Another recent example is Jot Engine, a paid service designed withinterviews in mind. I myself use Unmo and PitchPal to help me prepare for pitches.
They’re not perfect but they take away the guesswork of trying to understand someone in real-time. In a recording, the algorithm can search for context, see what the subject is and rework the language accordingly. I would argue that the result of someone sending you a voice message should be a transcript with an option to listen to the voice as well. As a user, you’d be able to listen to it or just read if you are in an environment that doesn’t allow you to use sound.
In another scenario when a user is in the car they should be able to listen and answer text messages that were sent to them.
Voice context attachment — A good example of this concept is the Livescribe pen. It allows users to write notes that are stored digitally while recording audio to add context. I admit, it’s a more novel idea that won’t be for everyone, but its potential is clear in a professional context.
Metadata — Other than location there are other metadata elements that can be kept with the messages. How fast you type, how strong you press the keyboard, where you are located, who is around you. The possibilities of enhancing the text and providing context are endless and have barely been explored.
It baffles me that no one has done this yet. The cloud actually has more capacity to interpret a message and learn from context. In photos apps like the ones by Google or Samsung, you can see more and more belief in context including location, details of the picture, live photo etc. All these elements should be collected and added when they are relevant.
Engagement and emotional reactions — With services like Bitmoji users can create their own personal stickers. An exaggerated instance of themselves. Seeing this in the world of video would be very interesting. Psychologically these stickers help users to enhance their emotions and share content in a way they wouldn’t if they were communicating in person.
In addition, Masks on Snow (live filters in Snapchat) also helps user express their feelings but at the moment it’s just some weird selection that has a fragment of a context to where they are or what they are doing. You can see how users just post themselves with a sticker not to tell a story but for the fun of it. If they could tell a story or reflect this on reality it would be emotionally usable which will elevate it as a mode of expression.
Comfort of Use
Comfort depends on the way users use the communication. Important relevant detail surfacing and accessible ways of communicating are the backbones of the UX.
Contextual pinning — Recently Slack added an incredible 90s feature “Threads”. If you’ve ever posted in a forum you know that this is a way to create a conversation on a specific topic. Twitter call it stories and Facebook are just using comments. But the story here was the conversion of this feature to the messaging world and that generated a lot of excitement among their users.
However, I see it as just a start. For example let’s say you and a few friends are trying to set up a meeting, and there is the usual trash talk going on while you’re trying to make a decision. Later another member of the group jumps into the thread but finds it really hard to understand. What has been discussed and what has been decided? If users could pin a topic to a thread, and accumulate the results of the discussion in some way it would be incredibly helpful. Then they could get rid of it when that event had passed.
Here is another good example
Accessibility
Image/video to message — instead of just telling a user “Jess sent you a picture or a video” you could actually try to tell the user something useful about that picture/video. Currently most notifications systems are limited to text so why not take advantage of the image processing mechanism that already exists? In other richer platforms you could convert the important pieces of the video to a Gif.
* In that context it’s quite shameful that Apple still doesn’t do bundling of notifications which really helps to tell the story the way it happened without spamming the user. I’m not sure I fancy Android O’s notification groups, but it’s definitely better than creating an endless list of notifications.
Voice type emojis — Keyboards are moving towards predictive emoji and text. They understand that having a different keyboard for emoji is a bit complex for the user, especially since they’re used a lot. A cool way to unify it is to create a language for emoji to make it easier to insert them into messages via voice.
In text translation — We’ve seen improvements from Skype immediate translation and Facebook / Instagram’s “Translate this”. Surely it makes more sense to have this in a chat rather than on the feed? I’m sure not too many people talk to other people in a different language, but if users had such a feature, they might do so. This could also be a great learning tool for companies and maybe it’ll help users to improve the translation algorithm.
See you in Part 2…
Recruiters don’t work for startups — Why I’m cutting the middleman
We’ve all seen Google’s search results when you type recruiter. I’ve read multiple “open letters”, hate posts, attempts to explain how “companies” and “candidates” should be treated. I have recently experienced it from the “company” side, which surprisingly is even more annoying than the “candidate” side. But that’s not the purpose of this post. The purpose is to focus on recruiting for startups, how it is now and how it can possibly become better. Obviously I’ll start with a short rant, but after I’ll try to gracefully outline some new thoughts and ideas for making this work.
Once upon a time…
Well actually it was a couple of months ago, I started scouting for developers for my platform and posted a naive message on LinkedIn. I was hoping to get some replies from interesting developers. Within one minute of posting, I received a phone call. It was a recruiter. I’ve written before about the pyramid of communication. Obviously, it threw me off when a salesperson called me without my permission. As far as I’m concerned, people should call if they (1) Want intimacy (2) Have something urgent to say (3) Are close to me and want to tell me a long story that it’ll take too long to write. But because it caught me off guard I agreed to talk to the recruiter.
A few days had passed and as a result of that post I got loads of messages, all from recruiters. Actually, I also posted the request on Facebook. The overall result of my 3300 connections in LinkedIn and 1700 friends in Facebook amounted to 20 messages from recruiters and one friend that recommended a person. That’s a pretty crappy return on what’s supposed to be the core value of the platform — namely finding employees.
The following week was full of unexpected calls from recruiters, contacting me left, right and centre whenever they felt like it. Some calls were even at weird times. And of course everyone leaves voice messages instead of sending an email.
We had a couple of interviews and after the first batch, we realized that the definition of what we were looking for was wrong. The recruiters didn’t get it, it was the developers themselves who explained it to us. So much for expert recruiters who can translate your need into reality.
I must admit I’ve experienced two approaches from recruiting agencies. The first is ”I’m not working till I’m promised money because I don’t want to waste my time”, the other is “we give you value then up-sell”.
Working in a startup has many unknowns to tackle, therefore, I prefer to minimize unknowns especially when it comes to burning rate. So even with agencies that didn’t mention their terms, I defined in advance a day rate including the agency fee. The problem was that, even after taking that step, once the agency saw I was interested in a candidate they started renegotiating the rate. Time is the most valuable asset a startup has and since a big part of my time is prioritizing and planning I have zero tolerance for things that waste my time.
Let’s talk about money
The recruiting agency model is most definitely not matched for startups. Let’s assume a person is 100 per day, a recruiter will take between 15–25 percent on top of that. For every day a person works for me, I will pay 100 to them and 25 to the recruiter, and the best part is that’s how it works forever.
If you want to hire a person permanently it’ll be a bit different. You will have to pay 20–30% in one go. So if someone earns 100k you will have to pay 30k immediately, after their probation is over.
Big companies save so much money by having their own HR and processes but also reluctantly sometimes use recruiters if they need to grow fast. But for a startup who raised seed or A round money, the prospect of subscribing to recruiters forever, or giving an immediate payout for a perm role is foolish.
Professional startup consultants
Solicitors, closers, and advisors learned and developed ways to work with startups, by agreeing to risks, getting paid a bit now and then more later. Startup employees who also believe in the company do the same. To me it makes perfect sense, and recruiters should see an amazing prospect here too. The startup can continue hiring through them for a very long time, and maybe at some point even buy them as their HR department. You’d think that would work for everyone involved.
But throughout my experience, I haven’t seen any flexibility, no models that work well for startups. The business world has evolved, but it feels like the recruiting world has stood still. After all, what does a startup need when it comes to recruitment:
- The ability to understand they made a mistake and terminate a contract quickly if the person doesn’t fit.
- The support and connection of people who believe in it.
What does a startup have to give:
- The promise it’ll be new, agile, interesting and revolutionary.
- A return on investment of either time or money.
I think more recruiting agencies should start developing a model for this. The corporate world is brilliant but the startup world has much to offer too. Invest in startups and we will be grateful. I promise you it will translate into long-term working relationships.
The whole reason to choose a recruitment agency is to save you time, but I guess I’ve learned there are no shortcuts here. My advice to myself is to use personal recommendations (like we did so far) and go to meetups and find people myself. Maybe one day when there are good models I’ll test the recruiting world again, but at the moment it feels dated and rigid.
How to make recruitment work for startups
Flexibility
In a startup things are unexpected mainly due to inexperience. Lack of experience could be reflected in: legal, recruiting, management etc. In addition, the startup might pivot or get hit with a lawsuit or a partner crisis. The startup world is hard and unstable, so warmth and flexibility help oil the joints.
Flexibility can also be reflected in the lack of pressure recruiters put on businesses. Work with the startup on their terms. Have a weekly meeting with the CEO about new candidates. Be a part of the mission, anticipate the needs of the company and suggest what roles could help it develop. Instead of bombarding us with emails and phone calls that just distract and create antagonism, let the startup cope. The CEO will talk to you when they have time and if they don’t it’s not your place to push. It probably just means that priorities have changed.
Money
Fire quickly — In reality this flexibility could be in the financial model a recruiter offers a startup. The ability to fire fast is key, especially during the probation period. Big companies can afford to keep the contractor for another two weeks, but in startup life two weeks are like two months.
Vesting — Percentages and big chunks of money don’t work for startups. It’s just not sustainable. Top candidates come and work for a pay cut and blue sky options. They come because they believe in a mission and are willing to work together to make it happen. A recruiter should also believe and invest in the same way. If you are vested the startup will continue working with you. With startups it’s not all about now, it’s about the future. There’s a chance it’ll turn into a Unicorn company and that you’ll have 50% of their recruiting cycle. That’s a lot of business that is good for everyone.
Permanent roles — Let’s face it, in a startup having a perm position doesn’t promise the stability it does in a corporate. The wheels are moving fast, the pressure is high and statistically employees stay less time…mainly because most startups fail. So instead of taking a huge chunk at the beginning, stretch it over a couple of years to make sure it’s the same amount of value a corporate client gets. Yes, there’s a risk involved, but that’s unavoidable when it comes to dealing with startups.
Long-term value
Find a way to give value that stays with the company. Recruiters search for and know many candidates and they can use this to the startup’s advantage. Having a database of options that are a match to the startup could be great for the future. It might not work out today, but it’s definitely valuable for tomorrow. To facilitate that a new account management system should be in place. Imagine an SaaS model for a startup or a yearly subscription that helps the startup keep track of potential employees, ready for the day when they can hire them.
Invest
Startup recruiters should be like VCs and investors. The market is big and many people are looking for jobs or employees. Allow yourself to be selective about the people you work with. Make sure the company you are recruiting for will survive the next six months and if you believe them then invest and create a long-term relationship. Build a pricing range that says, for example, in seed money I will get x% per employee I put to work there, in series A the percentage will grow and in series B as well. Start thinking outside the box when it comes to charging, rather than relying on the current structures that are so ill-suited to startup businesses.
Linked interests
Help the company and advise them as an HR expert. Help them to retain candidates as then your percentage will grow the longer they stay. Link the success of the employee to your success. If they get promoted or stay longer it might help you as well.
Summary
As a recruiter you don’t need to prove that you can find one person who can survive 90 days in the company. You need to be able to continuously bring value when needed and grow the current value based on experience and your success. Recruiting should be less like pimps and more like a long-term relationship. It requires trust, understanding and hard work, as well as support in the bad times as well as the good.
In today’s fast-paced world people move more. I don’t know if it’s because of interest, ambition, boredom, recruiters or bad management. But what I do know is that if someone did a good job for me I’d want to see them again and offer them another job. We’ve all got people that we like working with and that we love to hire, I’d like to see recruiters join that group as well.
Reimagining storage
Storage is everywhere
Look at your house, half of the things there are for storage. Sometimes there is storage for storage like a drawer for small pots that are placed inside pots. In the computer science world they took this metaphor and used it in order to help people understand where things are. Throughout time, new metaphors came like search and ephemeral links. When I was 21 I taught a course called “Intro for computers” to the elderly community, in it I remember explaining how files are structured in folders. I could see how the physical metaphor helped people understand how digital things work.
Unlike the organisation of physical objects in a house, it’s harder to anticipate where things will be in a computer if you weren’t the one who placed them there. Then search came, but still nowadays search is somehow so much better for things online in comparison to our own computers. A lot of research has been done about content indexing for the web. Obviously it was driven by search engine optimisation and the business benefits you get if you reach the top three in the search results page. However, people are not familiar with these methods and don’t apply them to the way they work with files on their devices.
In iOS, Apple chose to eliminate the finder and files in general. Apps replaced icons on a desktop, the App Store replaced thousands of websites and the only folders we actively access on the phone are gallery, videos, and music. Even Android concealed the folders and through Share menus users can probably avoid the transitions that were a norm on computers.
How do we deal with files nowadays?
- We sometimes look them up via search
- We put them in folders, in folders, in folders
- Files sometimes come as attachments to emails or messaging apps.
- We (if advanced users) tag them using words or colors
So here are the problems:
- Search — It exists but indexing needs to happen automatically.
- Self organisation — lacking and not automated in any way.
A new horizon for our contents
Companies see value in holding on to user data, it’s of course stored on the cloud. There, companies can compare, analyze it, do machine learning, and segment it for advertising. Their ability to centralize things helps them to give us a smoother experience by creating an ecosystem.
But storage isn’t just a file or a folder. It has its physical presence, as a file but it could also be an object in real life, a part of a story, a timeline with interactions, challenges and emotions. How can we rate the importance of things and interlink them into past events? How can people relive their day a while ago, black mirror style.
The average person has x amount of files. That is probably x photos, x videos, etc. For many of these there are dedicated software. For music you have players, for photos you have galleries with new search features and event creating features, for video you have your library or Netflix. But what about the rest of the files? What about you Excel sheets, your writings, your projects?
Think of the revolution that happened in the past couple of years around photos. We started having albums, then stories and events. In addition to that we have the elements of sharing, identifying who is there, conquering the world with our pins. In addition to that we have another layer of filters, animations, texts, drawing, emoji. All that is even without speaking about video which needs to adapt these kind of paradigms to create meaningful movies…it’s nicer to share.
If we are looking at the work area there are products that try to eliminate the file by opening different streams of information like Slack or hipChat.
The one thing that these products still lack is the ability to convert them all to a meaningful project, which is attempted by project management software. Project management software tries to display things into different ways which helps covering use cases and needs. However, still most of its innovation is around aggregation, displaying calendars, tasks and reports. Things get complicated when tasks start having files attached to them.
What kind of meaningful file systems can we create?
Imagine the revolution that happened for photos happening for files. Photos already have so much information linked to them like Geolocation, faces, events, text, and the content in it. We finally have pieces of software that has the ability to analyse our files. A good example is Microsoft LipNet project that extracts subtitles from moving lips in video. Imagine the power of AI working on your files. All these revisions, all these old stuff, memories, movies, books, magazines, pdfs, photoshop files, sheets and notes.
How many times have you tried to be organised with revisions, your savings of docs? How many times you’ve created a file management system that you thought would work? Or tried a new piece of software to run multiple things but soon after realised it doesn’t work for everything? It is a challenge that hasn’t been solved in the work environment or the consumer environment.
Some products that are focused on the cloud started implementing seeds of this concept. It usually comes in the form of version control and shared files. It is amazing that people can now work collaboratively in real time. However I think it will spiral to the same problem. There are no good ways to manage files and bring them together into meaningful contextual structure that could once and for all help us get rid of nesting and divided content.
In terms of users navigation there are currently five ways to gain content on the web:
- Search — have a specific thing you’re look for
- Discovery — get a general search or navigation and explore
- Feed — Follow people
- Message — get pushed from outsiders
- URL dwelling and navigation — repeated go in and out
But on the computer with your own creation there are only two
- Search — for specific file and then maybe it is associated by folder
- Folder dwelling — No discovery, just looking around clumsily for your stuff and trying to create a connection or trying to remember.
It’s an early age for this type of service offers
There are some initial sparks of innovation around systems that simplify files. For example looking at version control in Google Drive or Dropbox. The idea that a user can work on the same file with the same filename without even thinking they will lose important information gives comfort. No more file revisions can be a good step in helping us find things in a better way.
Code bases like Github also help control projects with versions control that allows collaborative work, and merging of branches. That is also a good step since it proves that companies are thinking on file projects as a whole. However it still can’t help creating contextual connections or meaningful testing environments.
Final note
AI systems are finally here and the same thing they do on the cloud they can do in our files. We can maybe finally get rid of files the way we think of them and finally be organised, contextual and god forbid, the structure doesn’t have to be permanent, it can be dynamic according to the user needs and the content that is being accumulated every day.