Mobile Apps, Gadgets, and Things Not Said in 2013

2013

Tired of all those “news” stories looking back at the year gone by? Hope not, because here are some more.

Mobile app development is the biggest of several services at my generous and benevolent employer. We noticed a few things more and more customers were asking for, and put together the thoroughly unscientific “Four Important App Development Trends of 2013“:

In the year 2013, the mobile technology sector has grown immensely. More people than ever own smartphones, and just by September, tablet sales soared 83 percent. Most of the technology trends Gartner compiled involved mobile as well, including HTML 5 / hybrid app development, enterprise app stores, cloud computing, and big data.

In all fairness, though my name is on the piece, a number of people contributed their thoughts and compiled interviews with our developers.

I’ve also begun contributing to The Hippo again after a self-imposed sabbatical. After a Techie gift guide two weeks ago, they asked me for a Techie year in review. So I gave it to ’em, I tell you what:

This has not been a year of dramatic revolution in the tech world, despite what every product launch might want us to believe. Rather, it was a year of logical progressions and advancements, with a few hints of what’s to come.

Yes yes, fingerprint scanner, SnapChat $3 billion, whatever. Humbug. Thirteenth straight year of the twenty-first century with no commercially available flying car.

Terrafugia Transition

“Reserve Now” doesn’t count, you wacky mechanical seagull.

There were also plenty of stories I started to write about, but flaked out on for one reason or another. Usually it was just lack of time or other priorities, but for one in particular I hemmed and hawed over the right wording until the story had faded from the news cycle.

In October, a provocative series of ads was unveiled by UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. The ads depicted the faces of women with the Google search box superimposed over their mouths; under entered text  like “women should” and “women need to” were autocompleted phrases suggested by Google, such as “women should be slaves” and “women need to be put in their place“. The title of UN Women’s news release was, “UN Women ad series reveals widespread sexism“.

UN Women ads

I wasn’t convinced, and started composing an entry with the cheeky title, “Women Should Take the Google Autocomplete UN Ad With a (Small) Grain of Salt”. I noted that Google’s help page on Autocomplete isn’t very specific on how it works, saying that search queries and content on web pages influence the suggestions “algorithmically”.

I drafted up a spreadsheet showing the number of results for the Autocomplete suggestions as well as the rebuttal phrases on the UN posters, as of two days after the story broke:

Women should

The numbers of results were all over the map, from a few million pages to nearly a billion for one set of words. The “cannot” rebuttal phrase had more results than all four of Google’s suggestions combined; whether they existed before or only after the ad series was publicized, I don’t know. My point, as much as one existed, was that Autocomplete results are not great evidence of sexism. As the most cogent portion of my draft blog entry said:

It’s also important to note that the mere mention of a phrase (or its constituent words) does not imply agreement. A matching Google result might be a piece expressing outrage at or arguing against an opinion expressed in a search. Indeed, one prominent person saying something objectionable often spawns thousands of articles spotlighting the incident.

For example, the number one result for “women should stay at home” was an AmericaBlog story lambasting Fox News for expressing that opinion. The next was a similar critique of a Catholic cardinal saying the same thing. The third was a WebMD article asking, “Working Mom Vs. Stay-At-Home Mom: Which Works for You?”, a valid question for individuals to consider for themselves. It wasn’t until my sixth result that the concept of imposing the standard of women staying at home was phrased as even debatable.

Likewise, we have no idea what the intention was of Google users who entered that search phrase. It could have been misogynists looking for support or feminists looking for debunking resources.

All we can really conclude from this experiment – and perhaps this is no consolation – is that these combinations of words are prevalent on the Internet. The biases implied by these phrases, even if they’re not agreed with, are in the collective conversation online. An optimistic view might be that those biases are on record and being addressed rather than completely internalized, accepted, and ignored.

Worried that questioning the technical means used by the ad agency hired by UN Women would be taken as trying to deny that sexism exists, I never posted. Well, until now. Hate comments below, and happy new year.

Does Only the iPad Matter?

My local NPR affiliate, New Hampshire Public Radio, is holding one of its frequent fund drives. As it often does, it’s offering entry into a number of drawings for those who pledge (or, as I think is legally required, for anyone who sends the requisite contact information via an alternative method such as email). There are no fewer than nine separate drawings, yet only one prize ever gets mentioned on air or the front page of their website.

NHPR iPad Air

Not a goat!

Of course Apple’s iPad Air is a trendy item, and at $499 retail value for the 16GB version they’re giving away, it’s no mean pull even if you hock it. But there are other prizes, some with higher concrete dollar values and some perhaps more desired by many listeners, that get short shrift. Fortunately they’re all detailed at the radio station’s 2013 December Fund Drive page, along with the progression of drawing end dates. (The iPad Air drawing ends Dec. 17 at 9am.)

King Arthur Flour gift card – $250
Dec. 17 at 2pm

No joke, this is on my Dad’s Amazon wish list. Not the $250 part, because he’s not a greedy jerk leaning on his family to feed his bread-making addiction, but yeah, the dude likes King Arthur Flour. An iPad is a one-time purchase, and most Apple fanatics have purchased this latest iteration of the tablet already. Flour, on the other hand, is a consumable. You can heat and knead it into delicious baked goods only once.

Settler’s Green Outlet Village gift card – $500
Dec. 17 at 7pm

Not only is this prize worth a whole dollar more than the iPad, it can be spent at “over 60 nationally known factory stores” in North Conway, NH. Clothing! Shoes! Jewelry! Home furnishings! Food, glorious food! There is no app for stepping out in sexy, bargain-priced pumps. None.

Four Loon Mountain ski passes – ???
Dec. 18 at 9 am

Let’s not descend into reckless stereotypes about iPad users and skiers and the narrow sliver of joined space in the Venn diagram that describes them. The fact is, plenty of athletic folk enjoy their Internet and their touchscreens and their sleek aluminum casing. They probably shouldn’t be tapping away while careening down the slopes, but heck, winning both prizes is pretty unlikely. There’s no exact value for these passes, as it’s not completely clear what exactly one wins, but if it’s four lift tickets for the regular winter season, that’s worth up to – cripes, $324? It’s really $81 a day to sit on a chair that’s going up the mountain anyhow?

Super Fan Pack – ???
Dec. 18 at 2pm

Comprising “an NHPR Bluetooth Nano [speaker], NHPR Fleece Blanket, NHPR Baseball T-Shirt, an autographed Carl Kasell Pillow, Car Talk Shopping Bag, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me Mug, a book by Diane Rehm, and many, many more items,” this package is even more impossible to precisely value. From the picture, this prize seems to include three bags as well as three cups or mugs and a small bottle of maple syrup. Delicious.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8″- $249.99
Dec. 18 at 7pm

Okay, never mentioning this prize is clearly favoring the iOS software ecosystem over Android. Enjoy your ghost check from Ghost Steve Jobs, NHPR.

Burque Jewelers Gift Card – $600
Dec. 19 at 10am

What’s this? A whole $101 more retail value than the iPad Air? For products that in the long run might just appreciate rather than plummet in value? Baubles with no practical utility, perhaps, but when humanity is inevitably reduced to roving hordes of barbarians, sparkly stones will be worth much more than metal and glass slates.

Four Attitash Mountain Resort ski passes – ???
Dec. 19 at 10am

Apparently Attitash is only 86.4% as awesome as Loon Mountain, because even weekend one-day lift tickets are only $70 each, or $280 for four. The market doesn’t lie.

Bose Wave Radio III with Bluetooth Music Adapter – $399.95
Dec. 19 at 7pm

As far as overpriced electronics go, Bose gives Apple a real run for its money (no pun intended). Both brands make good stuff, sure, but a load of money goes into large ads with lots of white space rather than product engineering. This Wave Radio probably does sound very nice. And it’s, you know, a radio, which you’d think a radio station would be psyched about.

Not everyone’s idea of the ultimate prize is a new tablet, is all I’m saying. It’s too late for this fund drive, but shoot, think about your messaging, NHPR.

goat

Maybe offer a goat? Granite Staters would totally love winning a goat.

6 Lessons Learned from Going (Slightly) Viral

A recent entry of mine – an infographic from October 8 detailing certain, ahem, similarities between ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Torchwood from the BBC – suddenly started receiving a lot of hits two months later. (I say a lot. I mean a lot for me, a humble writer lazing away in the wilds of New Hampshire with blog technology from last century. So a lot, relatively.)

Site Stats

Scale omitted to preserve dignity.

Apparently it was shared by someone mildly influential on Facebook. My own site visits, however, were dwarfed by the amount of activity the graphic itself attracted on Tumblr. Over the course of two days, a single post was liked or reblogged nearly 4,000 times. Sometimes both by the same person, so we’ll say 3,000 people actively engaged with it. (Yes, that’s big for me. We’ll also say a billion jillion people saw it and guffawed without clicking anything for my ego’s sake.)

From the response, I’ve gleaned some valuable wisdom. As I share, feel free to re-share.

1. A little influence goes a long way.

I have no idea what Facebook post set off this mini world tour. Maybe someone saw the post when it was first published and remembered it in a later online conversation. Maybe someone stumbled upon it in completely unrelated search. I do know that one person with a strong network can create a ton more views than your average introverted blogger. Just like multi-level marketing schemes, a viral hit depends upon more people sharing at every subsequent fork.

2. It helps to be visual.

It’s unlikely an essay detailing the same parallels between two TV shows would have spread so far. Summing up an idea with easily digestible images gives viewers the chance to quickly get your message without talking them to death. As a writer by trade with what I often refer to as only rudimentary graphic design skills, this is yucky medicine, but it’s the whole concept behind sites like Visual.ly and GraphJam.

Cynically adorable cat

Not to mention random cat pictures.

3. You don’t have to be first.

There were plenty of people drawing parallels betwen Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Torchwood long before my little infographic. Long before Agents even aired, in fact. But a spin that readers haven’t quite encountered before can tickle their fancy enough to share it with the world.

4. Include attribution.

I really must thank the Tumblr user who included a link to my original blog entry when she posted the infographic on its own. Without a few people clicking on the source link, I might never have known that the content was making its way around. When I made a previous infographic for Star Trek‘s 47th anniversary, I had the presence of mind to include a shortened URL leading to the original entry in the image itself. It’s not perfectly trackable, or even impossible to edit out, but it’s much more likely to lead to an actual site visit than an image without any attribution at all.

5. Be very sure of your facts.

I could try to parlay it into a conversation about “what is race anyway?” or a justify it as shrewd commentary on “passing” or just admit that I didn’t really think to research Chloe Bennett’s ancestry. That kind of thing can make you look a little stupid.

Chloe Bennett is half Chinese

Excerpting all these responses took way longer than a visit to IMDb would have.

6. Don’t expect a sustained bump.

The Internets, they are fickle. Frankly, there’s so much good content out there, it’s amazing any non-aggregator sites still have followings at all. See the sharp decline after the spike in the traffic graph above? Yeah. Don’t worry, if you read this blog, you’re still totally underground.

Never Do Anything Because Someone Else Is Better

Two pieces of sage advice hit my browser on Friday. First up, from Gawker’s feminist site Jezebel:

Cancel Your Geek-Themed Wedding Because This Couple's Got You Beat

Apparently weddings are competitions now? This particular wedding was so geeky it had Batman and Iron Man (that’s two totally different comic universes, y’all), plus ninjas and medieval armor. No sign of the 6,979,231 other things deemed “geeky” these days, so really it shouldn’t be that hard to one-up this couple. Makes me want to go out and get married right now, just so I could combine retro video games, Star Trek, the TCP/IP stack, quantum physics, and designer board gaming into a single ceremony. Anyone with similar interests, a burning desire to win, and not necessarily any need for a lifelong loving relationship interested in collaborating? I think we could take the title.

sexy-red-plumber-costume

You would be Mario. Obviously.

Publicly mourning heroic figures, on the other hand, has been a competition ever since Matthew added an earthquake to the moment of Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, making Luke and Mark’s “darkness” sound pretty tame by comparison. So it’s fortunate that victory could be declared so soon after last week’s passing of South Africa’s greatest statesman and civil rights leader.

Save Your Nelson Mandela Status Messages, the Omni Dallas Just Won

The winning status message was plastered across all 20 stories of the Texas hotel’s facade in bright lights: a glowing reproduction of the South African flag. A fitting tribute, to be sure, and one that might not have reached beyond city limits without the amplifying power of the Internet. With the need for posting influential quotes and heartfelt remembrances of the man to TwitFace thus eliminated, social media users the world over were free to honorably retire from the contest and go back to taking selfies and sharing provocative headlines without reading the articles.

Write whatever you like to try and win the comment thread below. Winner will be declared by a self-appointed judge and will award no tangible prize.

 

HealthCare.gov Condition Upgraded to Guarded but Stable

The website for the Health Insurance Marketplace portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, HealthCare.gov, has been receiving much-needed improvements since it was launched on October 1. A better experience was promised after November 30 – and for the most part, it’s been achieved.

For the most part.

Queued

I experienced my own struggles with the site in October. By restricting the number of active users, the developers have prevented most of the crashing and molasses-like slowness that plagued the portal in its infancy. The worst problems seem to have been solved; I haven’t seen any disconnections or half-loaded pages this time around, and although filling out an entirely new application was necessary, I did finally get to view an eligibility report. Even better, the report was ready within seconds of submitting my new application.

Indeed, removing my “problem application” is one tool that is promoted in a Tuesday blog entry on the site. Other new features include “More robust window shopping,” allowing a quick glance at available plans, and online continuation of applications begun over the phone or with paper forms, using an application identification number. Even these tools aren’t perfect – the window shopping shows full retail pricing without any subsidies for which one might be eligible and the problem application removal tool confusingly gives “Cancel” and “Reset” options in a pop-up confirmation box – but these are usability issues rather than basic functionality.

Usability is important, though. Optimizing the user experience (UX) is common practice – though, admittedly, often neglected – in software development. Establishing “Remove” or “Reset” as the term for tossing a previous application in the trash and using that term consistently helps ease users through a complex process. Choosing health insurance has never been a piece of cake, so care really should be taken to avoid introducing anything that makes you go “Huh?” Take this little step in the application:

Tell us if you're getting help

Simple enough, right? The lack of punctuation is mildly upsetting, but most people probably aren’t bothered by that. When the very next step contradicts my selection, though, that’s a problem.

You've told us another person

What? No. That’s not what I told you at all. I … okay, reading the previous step again, I realize I was never given the option to say that NO ONE is helping me, just none of the specific people you mentioned. So it’s possible to interpret that statement in blue as being correct. Sort of. Technically.

from a certain point of view

From a certain point of view.

A more grievous issue came in the “Review & Submit” portion of the application. If I chose to edit one piece of information I’d entered, I had to click through every subsequent screen again. No quick adjustment of one little thing, no sir. At least all the information was still there and I didn’t have to fill it out another time.

All the niggling little quirks point to a project that just didn’t take UX details seriously enough. Performing triage on site performance was unquestionably more important than correcting grammar, and hardly any major software or web site is perfect in that regard, but I do hope clarity and consistency are refined as further improvements are made.

Have you used HealthCare.gov? What has been your experience?