Simple App Ideas: How to Find the Next Big Thing

Simple App Ideas: How to Find the Next Big Thing

Hardik Gandhi   January 23, 2018

Originally published on http://www.appsterhq.com/

When it comes to building mobile apps, app makers tend to overcomplicate their ideas and strategies.

The app winds up becoming a clunky Swiss Army knife — one that offers too many features, is difficult to learn and use, and costly to maintain.

But when we think about successful apps, it’s often the simplest ones that come to mind — apps like Dropbox and Evernote that address a pressing pain point, yet are effortlessly easy to use.

As Steve Jobs famously said:

“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Below, I’ll share about tried-and-tested strategies that I’ve used to help startups and entrepreneurs at Appster come up with simple app ideas effectively.

1. Train yourself to become an idea machine:

How do you get better at coming up with app ideas?

The answer, according to entrepreneur, best-selling author and podcaster James Altucher is to become an idea machine.

In Altucher’s words, it’s akin to being a superhero, where you’re never at a loss for ideas — regardless of whichever situation you’re in or whatever questions you’re thrown at.

If this sounds unrealistic, it isn’t — but it does require plenty of practice. Here’s a quick roundup of Altucher’s tips for becoming an idea machine:

How many ideas should you come up with each time?

10.

Why 10 ideas?

Most of us wouldn’t have much difficulty with conceiving a handful of ideas, even if it’s centered around topics that we don’t usually ponder about.

But after the fifth idea is just about when it gets challenging — where we find ourselves at a loss for ideas.

The point of the exercise is to break through this stage in order to build up your idea muscle.

How can you assess your ideas?

You can’t, and evaluating your app ideas isn’t the priority at this point in time. Says Altucher:

“You have to try multiple ideas and see which ones gets the excitement of customers, employees, and you can see that people are legitimately using it and excited by it.”

What are topics you can start brainstorming on?

The key here is to have fun with the ideation process, so don’t limit yourself to business-related ideas.

It helps to think out of the box, and conceptualize ideas around topics like “10 ridiculous mobile apps I would want”, “10 ways an app can solve a problem that I’m facing”, “10 mobile apps that I can reinvent” or “10 mobile apps I would improve”.

How long does it take to become an “idea machine”?

Altucher suggests doing this daily for at least six months.

2. Hone your problem-solving skills

How can app makers go about finding the right idea for their startup?

Daniel Kempe, founder of hand-curated content suggestion platform Quuu elaborates in a Forbes article:

“It’s not about the search for ideas, it’s identifying problems or gaps with existing products or services. Ideas are tough to come by, at least good ones are. But problems, they’re everywhere! Almost every product or service you use on a daily basis was created to solve a problem.”

Here four strategies you can use to hone your problem-solving abilities:

2.1. Review problems you face on a day-to-day basis

The first place to start is by identifying problems that you encounter on a day-to-day basis.

It can be difficult to come up with ideas in a brainstorming session, so start by observing any moments of frustration you have throughout the day — whether it’s an interruption or delay that occurred at work or a problem that crops up in your personal life.

At first glance, these issues may appear to be minute or mundane — but resolving a personal problem has been the launching point for apps like Dropbox and Summly.

The idea for Dropbox arose out of co-founder Drew Houston’s frustration with the absence of a seamless storage solution for his files, while Summly was conceived when founder Nick D’Aloisio found it inefficient to click through Google search results while preparing for his exams.

2.2. Pay attention to everyday conversations

Everyday conversations and seemingly banal complains can become a source of inspiration.

Try carving out a block of time — say five days to a week — where you pay close attention to and note down problems that crop up in conversations all around you. “I wish this could be better”, “I hate this…”, “Why does this keep happening…” are some phrases you’d want to prick your ears up for.

2.3. Tap on social media

Social media platforms are a great way to find out about larger scale problems encountered by individuals and communities all around the world.

There are different ways of conducting a search via social media: you may create hashtags around the problems you’ve picked up on through the above methods, or come up with a list of hashtags around topics or problems that you’re concerned about.

2.4. Go to where your potential users are at

Blog articles, blog comments, forums, discussion boards, Quora — apart from being a useful source of information, these sites are also a great way to interact with potential users or target audience.

Take note of common problems and issues that are being discussed, and don’t hesitate to post comments or start a new thread around any questions you might have — this could spark off conversations that will shed light on problems that you weren’t previously aware of.

3. Keep a close watch on your competitors

A competitive analysis should be carried out at several stages over the lifetime of a mobile app: during the ideation process, before significant changes are made to your app or business strategy, and at regular intervals to keep up with changes in the competitive landscape.

Below, I’ll be focusing on competitive analysis conducted at the ideation stage.

Pay attention to user feedback and comments

User feedback and comments are a treasure trove of information. Start poring through reviews and ratings left by users of your competitors’ apps — from app store reviews to social media comments and forum posts — to obtain a clearer idea of features and strategies that resonate with your potential users.

If you’re in the midst of sounding out your ideas with friends and family or testing your MVP, keep an eye out for remarks like “I’ve tried out the ABC app, but didn’t like a particular feature they had” or “This feature reminds me of XYZ app” — you’ll know that these are competitors to keep track of.

Dig deep into your competitors’ strategies

By delving deep into the strategies implemented by your competitors, you can then break these down into simpler elements, and reverse engineer the processes to replicate their success.

The objective here isn’t to imitate what your competitors are doing, but to combine their strategies with your existing ideas to create concepts and features that work for your app.

Here’s a checklist of questions to help you get started on your research process:

• Which strategies have produced the best results for your competitors?
• What were unsuccessful strategies implemented?
• How can you improve on strategies your competitors implemented?
• How can you adapt these strategies to make it work for your mobile app?
• Don’t forget about indirect competitors

While your indirect competitors may not have launched a mobile app, they are still targeting a similar set of users — so it helps to pay attention to how they’re attracting your potential users with their products or services.

Here are key questions to guide you in your analysis of indirect competitors:

• In what areas are their products or services similar to yours?
• What are successful strategies and ideas that have helped them target and retain their users?
• How can these strategies be improved on?
• Can you adapt these ideas or concepts to make it work for your mobile app?

4. Stay on top of the latest trends

The ever-changing mobile landscape is a challenging space to navigate.

App makers are up against the intense competition — a 2017 Statista study indicated that Android users were able to choose between 2.8 million apps, while the number of apps on the App Store totaled at 2.2 million.

In addition, the emergence of trends like augmented reality, virtual reality and chatbots are revolutionizing the way users engage with mobile apps.

Strategies and features that are effective now may easily be rendered irrelevant in a matter of months. Generating ideas that resonate with today’s users requires a constant pursuit of keeping up with the trends.

Here are a few tools and websites you can use to stay on top of the latest developments:

• Google Trends
• Google Alerts
• App Annie: App market data and insights company producing consumer and competitive information on downloads, revenue, ratings, usage, search terms and more. App Annie’s Insights Blog and webinars are also great resources for app makers.
• Priori Data: App Store intelligence company providing market data and competitive benchmarking information on the global app economy.
• Forrester Research: Market research firm providing advice on existing and potential impacts of technology.
• Trendwatching: Independent trend firm scanning the global market for promising consumer trends and insights.
• Springwise: Provides information on innovation intelligence. Springwise sources for the latest innovation, startup, and business ideas from around the world.
• Trends and mobile apps outside of your industry

Too often, startups and businesses fall into the trap of living within the industry bubble. In adopting a myopic focus on industry trends, benchmarking and best practices, companies eventually wind up providing run-of-the-mill experiences that fail to stand out.

This can be prevented by studying and introducing ideas and concepts from industries, businesses or mobile apps that differ from your own.

Here are key takeaways you can gain from studying mobile apps across different industries:

• Zappos: Zappos is known for delivering stellar customer experiences, and its mobile app is no different. App makers can learn about providing top-notch experiences through studying features like Ask Zappos, a feature that helps users find any product with just a tap of their camera, and Handover, which enables users to shop seamlessly between their Apple devices.
• JetBlue: Pesky push notifications are a bane for smartphone users. Learn from JetBlue’s timely and thoughtful communication, which includes providing flight check-in reminders 24 hours before a flight is scheduled to take off, as well as notifications to let passengers review flight entertainment options in advance.
• Venmo: App makers can learn from the convenience and efficiency that mobile payment apps like Venmo provides — from the way user information is saved for easy access, to how a complex process like sending out money or making purchases can be completed in a few quick taps.

How to Design Social Systems (Without Causing Depression and War)

How to Design Social Systems (Without Causing Depression and War)

Hardik Gandhi   January 20, 2018

How to Design Social Systems (Without Causing Depression and War)

Here I’ll present a way to think about social systems, meaningful interactions, and human values that brings these often-hazy concepts into focus. It’s also, in a sense, an essay on human nature. It’s organized in three sections:

• Reflection and Experimentation. How do people decide which values to bring to a situation?
• Practice Spaces. Can we look at social systems and see which values they support and which they undermine?
• Sharing Wisdom. What are the meaningful conversations that we, as a culture, are starved for?

I’ll introduce these concepts and their implications for design. I will show how, applied to social media, they address issues like election manipulation, fake news, internet addiction, teen depression & suicide, and various threats to children. At the end of the post, I’ll discuss the challenges of doing this type of design at Facebook and in other technology teams.

Reflection and Experimentation

As I tried to make clear in my letter, meaningful interactions and time well spent are a matter of values. For each person, certain kinds of acts are meaningful, and certain ways of relating. Unless the software supports those acts and ways of relating, there will be a loss of meaning.

In the section below about practice spaces, I’ll cover how to design software that’s supportive in this way. But first, let’s talk about how people pick their values in the first place.

We often don’t know how we want to act, or relate, in a particular situation. Not immediately, at least.

When we approach an event (a conversation, a meeting, a morning, a task), there’s a process — mostly unconscious — by which we decide how we want to be.

Interrupting this can lead to doing things we regret. As we’ll see, it can lead to internet addiction, to bullying and trolling, and to the problems teens are having online.

So, we need to sort out the values with which we want to approach a situation. This is a process. I believe it’s the same process, whether you’re deciding something small — like how openly you will approach a particular conversation — or something big.

Let’s start with something big: many teenagers are engaged in sorting out their identities: they take ideas about how they ought to act (manly, feminine, polite, etc) and make up their own minds about whether to approach situations with these values in mind.

Worksheets from “On My Own Terms”. Join our community to play these games!

For these teens, settling on the right values takes a mix of experimentation and reflection. They need to try out different ways of being manly, feminine, intelligent, or kind in different situations and see how they work. They also need to reflect on who they want to be and how they want to live.

These two ingredients — experimentation and reflection — are required to sort out our values. Even the small decisions (for example, deciding how to balance honesty and tact in a conversation) require experimenting in real situations, and reflecting on what matters most.

This process can be intuitive, nonverbal, and unconscious, but it is vital.¹ If we don’t find the right values, it’s hard to feel good about what we do. The following circumstances interfere with experimentation and reflection:

• High stakes. When deviation from norms becomes disastrous in some way — for instance, with very high reputational stakes — people are afraid to experiment. People need space to make mistakes and systems and social scenes with high consequences interfere with this.
• Low agency. To put values to the test, a person needs discretion over the manner of their work: they need to experiment with moral values, aesthetic values, and other guiding ideas. Some environments — many of them corporate — make no room for being guided by one’s own moral or aesthetic ideas.
• Disconnection. One way we judge the values we’re experimenting with is via exposure to their consequences. We all need to know how others feel when we treat them one way or another, to help us decide how we want to treat them. Similarly, an architect needs to know what it’s like to live in the buildings she designs. When the consequences of our actions are hidden, we can’t sort out what’s important.²
• Distraction and overwork. We also lose the capacity to sort out our values when reflection becomes impossible. This is the major cost of noisy environments, infinite entertainment, push notifications, and some types of poverty.
• Lack of faith in reflection. Finally, people can come to consider reflection to be useless — or to be avoided — even though it is so natural. The emotions which trigger reflection, including doubt and confusion, can be brushed away as distractions. One way this happens, is if people view their choices through a behaviorist lens: as determined by habits, reinforcement learning, or permanent drives.³ This makes it seem like people don’t have values at all, only habits, tastes, and goals. Experimentation and reflection seem useless.

Software-based social spaces can be disastrous for experimentation and reflection.

One reason that private group messaging (like WhatsApp and Messenger) is replacing virality-based forums (like Twitter, News Feed, and increasingly, Stories) is that the latter are horrible for experimenting with who we are. The stakes are too high. They seem especially bad for women, for teens, and for celebrities—which may partly explain the rise in teen suicide—but they're bad for all of us.

A related problem is online bullying, trolling, and political outrage. Many bullies and trolls would embrace other values if they had a chance to reflect and were better exposed to consequences. In-person spaces are much better for this.

Reflection can be encouraged or discouraged by design — this much is clear from the variety of internet-use helpers, like Moment and Intent. All of us (not just bullies and trolls) would use the Internet differently if we had more room for reflection.

Two lockscreens: one design encourages reflection, and one doesn’t. [from “Empowering Design”]

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Exercise: On My Own Terms

In order to learn to support users in experimentation and reflection, designers must experiment and reflect on their own values. On My Own Terms is an exercise for this. Players fill out a worksheet, then socialize in an experimental way.

“On My Own Terms”. Join our community to play these games!

In the experimentation part, players defy norms they’ve previously obeyed, and see how it works out. Often they find that people like them better when they are less conventional — even when they are rude!

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Here’s one thing this game makes clear: we discover what’s important to us in the context of real choices and their consequences. People often think they have certain values (eating kale, recycling, supporting the troops) but when they experiment and reflect on real choices, these values are discarded. They thought they believed in them, but only out of context.

This is how it was for me with consistency, rationality, masculinity, and being understated. When I played On My Own Terms, I decided to value these less.⁴ My true values are only clear through experimentation and reflection.

For users to have meaningful interactions and feel their time was well spent, they need to approach situations in a way they believe in. They need space to experiment and reflect.

But this is not enough.

Practice Spaces

Every social system makes some values easier to practice, and other values harder. Even with our values in order, a social environment can undermine our plans.

Most social platforms are designed in a way that encourages us to act against our values: less humbly, less honestly, less thoughtfully, and so on. Using these platforms while sticking to our values would mean constantly fighting their design. Unless we’re prepared for a fight, we’ll likely regret our choices.

There’s a way to address this, but it requires a radical change in how we design: we must reimagine social systems as practice spaces for the users’ values — as virtual places custom built to make it easier for the user to relate and to act in accord with their values.

Designers must get curious about two things:

1. When users want to relate according to a particular value, what is hard about doing that?
2. What is it about some social spaces that can make relating in this way easier?

For example, if an Instagram⁵ user valued being creative, being honest, or connecting adventurously, then designers would need to ask: what kinds of social environments make it easier to be creative, to be honest, or to connect adventurously? They could make a list of places where people find these things easier: camping trips, open-mics, writing groups, and so on.

Next, the designers would ask: which features of these environments make them good at this? For instance, when someone is trying to be creative, do mechanisms for showing relative status (like follower counts) help or hurt? How about when someone wants to connect adventurously? Or, with being creative, is this easier in a small group of close connections, or a large group of distant ones? And so on.

To take another example, if a News Feed user believes in being open-minded, designers would ask which social environments make this easier. Having made such a list, they would look for common features. Perhaps it’s easier to be open-minded when you remember something you respect about a person’s previous views. Or, perhaps it’s easier when you can tell if the person is in a thoughtful mood by reading their body language. Is open-mindedness more natural when those speaking have to explicitly yield time for others to respond? Designers would have to find out.⁶

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Exercise: Space Jam

To start thinking this way, it’s best if designers focus first on values which they themselves have trouble practicing. In this game, Space Jam, each player shares something they’d like to practice, some way of interacting. Then everyone brainstorms, imagining practice spaces (both online and offline) which could make this easier.

“Space Jam”. Join our community to play these games!

Here’s an example of the game, played over Skype with three designers from Facebook:

Eva says she wants to practice “changing the subject when a conversation seems like a dead end.”

Someone comments that Facebook threads are especially bad at this. We set a timer for three minutes and brainstorm on our own. Then everyone presents one real-world way to practice, and one mediated way.

George’s idea involves a timer. When it rings, everyone says “this conversation doesn’t meet my need for ____”. Jennifer suggests something else: putting a bowl in the middle of a conversation. Player can write out alternate topics and put them in the bowl in a conspicuous but non-interrupting way. (Jennifer also applies this idea to Facebook comments, where the bowl is replaced by a sidebar.)

We all wonder together: could it ever be “okay” for people to say things like “this conversation doesn’t meet my need for ____”? Under what circumstances is this safe to say?

This leads to new ideas.

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In the story above, Eva is an honest person. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to be honest. She struggles to be honest when she wants to change the conversation. By changing the social rules, we can make it easier for her to live according to her values.

Games like Space Jam show how much influence the rules of social spaces have over us, and how easy it is for thoughtful design to change those rules. Designers become more aware of the values around them and why they can be difficult to practice. They feel more responsible for the spaces they are creating. (Not just the spaces they make for users, but also in daily interactions with their colleagues). This gives them a fresh approach to design.

If designers learn this skill, they can support the broad diversity of users’ values. Then users will no longer have to fight the software to practice their values.

Sharing Wisdom

I hope the previous ideas—reflection, experimentation, and practice spaces—have given a sense for how to support meaningful actions. Let’s turn to the question of meaningful information and meaningful conversation.

We are having a problem in this area, too.

Amidst nonstop communication — a torrent of articles, videos, and posts — there is still a kind of conversation that people are starved for, because our platforms aren’t built for it.

When this type of conversation — which I’ll call sharing wisdom — is missing, people feel that no one understands or cares about what’s important to them. People feel their values are unheeded, unrecognized, and impossible to rally around.

As we’ll see, this situation is easy to exploit, and the media and fake news ecosystems have taken advantage. By looking at how this exploitation works, we can see how conversations become ideological and polarized, and how elections are manipulated.

But first, what do I mean by sharing wisdom?

Social conversation is often understood as telling stories, sharing feelings, or getting advice. But each of these can be seen as a way to discover values.

When we ask our friends for advice — if you look carefully — we aren’t often asking about what we should do. Instead, we’re asking them about what’s important in our situation. We’re asking for values which might be new to us. Humans constantly ask each other “what’s important?” — in a spouse, in a wine, in a programming language.

I’ll call this kind of conversation (both the questions and the answers) wisdom.

Wisdom, n. Information about another person’s hard-earned, personal values — what, through experimentation and reflection, they’ve come to believe is important for living.

Wisdom is what’s exchanged when best friends discuss their relationships or jobs, when we listen to stories told by grandmothers, church pastors, startup advisors, and so on.

It comes in many forms: mentorship, texts, rituals, games. We seek it naturally, and in normal conditions it is abundant.

For various reasons, the platforms are better for sharing other things (links, recommendations, family news) than for asking each other what’s important. So, on internet platforms, wisdom gets drowned out by other forms of discourse:

• By ideology. Our personal values are easily eclipsed by ideological values (for instance, by values designed to promote business, a certain elite, or one side in a political fight). This is happening when posts about partisan politics make us lose track of our shared (or sharable) concerns, or when articles about productivity outpace our deeper life questions.
• By scientism. Sometimes “hard data” or pseudo-scientific “models” are used to justify things that would be more appropriately understood as values. For instance, when neuroscience research is used to justify a style of leadership, our discourse about values suffers.
• By bullshit. Many other kinds of social information can drown out wisdom. This includes various kinds of self-promotion; it includes celebrities giving advice for which they have no special experience; it includes news. Information that looks like wisdom can make it harder to locate actual, hard-earned wisdom.

For all these reasons, talk about personal values tends to evaporate from the social platforms, which is why people feel isolated. They don’t sense that their personal values are being understood.

In this state, it’s easy for sites like Breitbart, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, or even Russia Today to capitalize on our feeling of disconnection. These networks leverage the difficulty of sharing wisdom, and the ease of sharing links. They make a person feel like they are sharing a personal value (like living in a rural town or supporting women), when actually they are sharing headlines that twist that value into a political and ideological tool.

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Exercise: Value Sharing Circle

For designers to get clear about what wisdom sounds like, it can be helpful to have a value sharing circle. Each person shares one value which they have lived up to on the day they are playing, and one which they haven’t. Here’s a transcript from one of these circles:

There are twelve of us, seated for dinner. We eat in silence for what feels like a long time. Then, someone begins to speak. It’s Otto. He says he works at a cemetery. At 6am this morning, they called him. They needed him to carry a coffin during a funeral service. No one else could do it. So, he went. Otto says he lived up to his values of showing up and being reliable. But — he says — he was distracted during the service. He’s not sure he did a good job. He worries about the people who were mourning, whether they noticed his missteps, whether his lack of presence made the ritual less perfect for them. So, he didn’t live up his values of supporting the sense of ritual and honoring the dead.

In the course of such an evening, participants are exposed to values they’ve never thought about. That night, other people spoke of their attempts to be ready for adventure, be a vulnerable leader, and make parenthood an adventure.⁷

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Playing this makes the difference between true personal values and ideologies very clear. Notice how different these values are from the values of business. No one in the circle was particularly concerned with productivity, efficiency, or socio-economic status. No one was even concerned with happiness!

Social platforms could make it much easier to share our personal values (like small town living) directly, and to acknowledge one another and rally around them, without turning them into ideologies or articles.

This would do more to heal politics and media than any “fake news” initiative. To do it, designers will need to know what this kind of conversation sounds like, how to encourage it, and how to avoid drowning it out.

The Hardest Challenge

I’ve pointed out many challenges, but left out the big one. 😕

Only people with a particular mindset can do this type of design. It takes a new kind of empathy.

Empathy can mean understanding someone’s goals, or understanding someone’s feelings.⁸ And these are important.

But to build on these concepts — experimentation, reflection, wisdom, and practice spaces— a designer needs to see the experimental part of a person, the reflective part, the person’s desire for (and capacity for) wisdom, and what the person is practicing.⁹

As with other types of empathy, learning this means growing as a person.

Why? Well, just as it’s hard to see others’ feelings when we repress our own, or hard to listen to another person’s grand ambitions unless we are comfortable with ours... it’s hard to get familiar with another person’s values unless we are first cozy with our own, and with all the conflicts we have about them.

This is why the exercises I’ve listed (and others, which I didn’t have space to include) are so important. Spreading this new kind of empathy is a huge cultural challenge.

But it’s the only way forward for tech.

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Thanks for reading. (Here are the credits and footnotes.)

Please clap for this and the previous post!

And…

• There is a community you can join to practice this stuff.
• Learn about a complimentary approach in metrics.
• Read more about human values, the connection between values and emotions, or the history of time well spent.

How to catch a criminal using only milliseconds of audio

How to catch a criminal using only milliseconds of audio

Hardik Gandhi   January 16, 2018

Scientists can tell far more from your recorded voice than you might think. Image: Pixabay

Simon Brandon, Freelance journalist

This article is part of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

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A prankster who made repeated hoax distress calls to the US Coast Guard over the course of 2014 probably thought they were untouchable. They left no fingerprints or DNA evidence behind, and made sure their calls were too brief to allow investigators to triangulate their location.

Unfortunately for this hoaxer, however, voice analysis powered by AI is now so advanced that it can reveal far more about you than a mere fingerprint. By using powerful technology to analyse recorded speech, scientists today can make confident predictions about everything from the speaker’s physical characteristics — their height, weight, facial structure and age, for example — to their socioeconomic background, level of income and even the state of their physical and mental health.

One of the leading scientists in this field is Rita Singh of Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. When the US Coast Guard sent her recordings of the 2014 hoax calls, Singh had already been working in voice recognition for 20 years. “They said, ‘Tell us what you can’,” she told the Women in Tech Show podcast earlier this year. “That’s when I started looking beyond the signal. How much could I tell the Coast Guard about this person?”

Rita Singh is an expert in speech recognition

What your voice says about you

The techniques developed by Singh and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon analyse and compare tiny differences, imperceptible to the human ear, in how individuals articulate speech. They then break recorded speech down into tiny snippets of audio, milliseconds in duration, and use AI techniques to comb through these snippets looking for unique identifiers.

Your voice can give away plenty of environmental information, too. For example, the technology can guess the size of the room in which someone is speaking, whether it has windows and even what its walls are made of. Even more impressively, perhaps, the AI can detect signatures left in the recording by fluctuations in the local electrical grid, and can then match these to specific databases to give a very good idea of the caller’s physical location and the exact time of day they picked up the phone.

This all applies to a lot more than hoax calls, of course. Federal criminal cases from harassment to child abuse have been helped by this relatively recent technology. “Perpetrators in voice-based cases have been found, have confessed, and their confessions have largely corroborated our analyses,” says Singh.

Portraits in 3D

And they’re just getting started: Singh and her fellow researchers are developing new technologies that can provide the police with a 3D visual portrait of a suspect, based only on a voice recording. “Audio can us give a facial sketch of a speaker, as well as their height, weight, race, age and level of intoxication,” she says.

But there’s some way to go before voice-based profiling technology of this kind becomes viable in a court. Singh explains: “In terms of admissibility, there will be questions. We’re kind of where we were with DNA in 1987, when the first DNA-based conviction took place in the United States.”

This has all proved to be bad news for the Coast Guard’s unsuspecting hoaxer. Making prank calls to emergency services in the US is regarded as a federal crime, punishable by hefty fines and several years of jail time; and usually the calls themselves are the only evidence available. Singh was able to produce a profile that helped the Coast Guard to eliminate false leads and identify a suspect, who they hope to bring a prosecution soon.

Given the current exponential rate of technological advancement, it’s safe to say this technology will become much more widely used by law enforcement in the future. And for any potential hoax callers reading this: it’s probably best to stick to the old cut-out newsprint and glue method for now. Just don’t leave any fingerprints.

Have you read?

• Could the next frontier of biometric security be your ears?
• Can voice recognition really unmask a terrorist?
• Will voice recognition kill the keyboard?

The Video Game Experience

The Video Game Experience

Hardik Gandhi   January 09, 2018

 

Table of Contents:

1. Top Three & Honourable Mentions
2. First Person & Third Person
3. Roleplaying & Strategy and Tactics
4. Independent & Virtual Reality

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Independent

Best: Rumu

Rumu is a very unique game, and of all the games on this list, I think it’s the one that has the most unique UI. This is most likely due to the fact that Rumu has pioneered the ‘Sentient Vaccuum Cleaner’ genre, and there’s simply no game similar enough to pull inspiration from. Because of this, I’ll briefly summarise the elements I liked the most, so you have an idea of what I’m talking about.

It’s fitting, then, that Rumu’s UI pulls from a number of different genres and also remains quite unique. Rumu (The titular vacuum cleaner himself) has a radial menu to manage it’s quest log and inventory. That’s about where the traditional UI ends, and you start to see some bespoke elements.

Tutorial tips for controls appear outside the environments. This is a nice detail, as it serves not only to communicate the key bind but also as a hint of what you’re supposed to do in any given space.

A similar method is used for doorways or vent spaces — each is earmarked with text or iconography to indicate whether the player can pass through. The difference is actually really important, because it serves to split how the player treats information throughout the game — if the information is inside the room, it’s something to be learned. If it exists outside of the game space, it’s something that little Rumu already knows.

There’s a ‘Datavision’ function that allows Rumu to see how the various smart devices and intractable objects connect. It’s a great way to declutter the environments when the player is being task oriented, and it also often hides hidden easter eggs or gadgets.

One of the smartest UX features of Rumu is how it uses it’s palette and art style to generate emotion. A clean, white kitchen feels calm and simple, while crawling through vents on a sinister dark background gives the game a sense of urgency and danger.

Rumu is beautiful, functional, unique, and incredibly evocative. It’s UX blends perfectly with the narrative of the game, and aids in the storytelling.

Conclusion:
Independent developers are constantly coming up with new, interesting ways to interact with their games. There’s even a few on this list: Hand of Fate 2 and Tooth of Tail both innovate in a well-trodden genre.

Rumu’s a little different, because the robot vacuum cleaner genre isn’t quite as mature as, say, first person shooters. Despite this, the interactions in Rumu feel natural; the spacial and diagetic elements are what I’d expect a robo-vacuum to see in the world, and the meta UI tips help move the player along without breaking the (sometimes literal) fourth wall.

I look forward to seeing the robot vacuum cleaner genre evolve.

Worst: Stationeers

Picking this game sparked an internal debate in my mind over having a ‘Worst’ section at all, but in the end I decided it’s always better to get your feelings out than internalise them.

I really enjoyed Stationeers; I played almost six hours straight in my first run through. It’s an incredibly complex space space station construction game. Most of it’s UI is inoffensive: a simple HUD with your vitals and atmosphere stats, and a slot-based inventory system.

It all falls apart for me in the item management. Rather than go into specifics, I’ll give you an example: I need to take the empty battery out of my welding torch, and replace it with a full one.

I have to press 5 to open my tool belt, use the scroll wheel to highlight the torch, press F to put it in my hand, press R to open the torch’s inventory, press E to change hands, press F to move the batter into my free hand.

Now I press 2 to open my suit inventory, scroll wheel to an empty slot, press F to place the flat batter in there. Scroll wheel to the full battery, press F to place it in my off hand. Press E to change hands. Press R to open the torch inventory. Press E to change hands. Press F to place the battery in.

That’s…15 key presses. I can see what they were going for with this system, but there’s got to be a better way.

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Virtual Reality

Best: Lone Echo

If UX as a practice is still in it’s infancy, UX for VR is a single-celled organism attempting mitosis for the first time. Nobody really has any idea what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, and so many games have great executions with a poor UX.

Lone Echo feels like someone looking at what VR will be doing five years from now, and dragged it screaming back into 2017. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Lone Echo’s UX will help define the future of virtual and augmented reality interfaces.

There’s no HUD in Lone Echo, instead opting to have your UI displayed from various arm-mounted gadgetry. Jack, the player character, has a number of controls and panels along his suit, each of which the player can interact with to reveal various elements interfaces.

This actually annoyed me at first — I wasn’t sure why a robot need any sort of interface at all. However, the interactions available are just so neat and genuinely enjoyable, it becomes a very small nitpick. You will also witness other characters in the game use the same interface, which gives some internal consistency to the game.

Talking to someone, for example, is a matter of simply looking at them and tapping a button the controller. This spawns a list of dialogue options that you select with your finger. It’s a simple thing, but being able to quickly interact with the object your looking at feels great.

Any panels you summon are intractable with your hand. You can scroll and tap like you would on an iPad. It feels completely natural to work with, and there were very few times after the opening minutes where I had trouble with this interaction style.

Similarly, Jack’s wrist holds a number of functions and features that are activated using your opposite hand. Slide across your forearm to open your objectives. Tap the top of your wrist for your scanner, or the side of your wrist for your welder. The interactions are so second-nature after having used them a few times that I found myself not even looking at my hands as I did these simple tasks.

Most of what you see in Lone Echo comes from somewhere. The locomotion, the dialogues, the tool interactions, are all borrowed from games that have come before it. Lone Echo proves that these interactions are unequivocally the right way to do them, and if done right, can be so immersive and intuitive that the player doesn’t have to remember them, they just become the way things are done.

Just like the brilliant writing and slick graphics, Lone Echo’s UX is the reason it’s such a successful game. It keeps the player completely immersed in everything they’re doing, no matter how complex the task. At it’s best, the interactions in Lone Echo are actually fun to use. Menus that are fun! If that’s not a revolution, I don’t know what is.

Conclusion:
The most immersive experience I’ve ever had in a video game. Lone Echo bends over backwards to put you in the moment with objects that behave like the user expects they should, and an environment that is consistently interactive.

Lone Echo isn’t held back by trying to fit it’s UI into it’s narrative — it’s built it’s entire user experience around the narrative, instead. Lone Echo sets the standard for VR UX to come.

Worst: None

It’s a cop out, I know. Truth be told, I haven’t played a VR game that released in 2017 that had any truly awful UX. There’s plenty of games that make some missteps, or the occasional obvious error, but this is going to happen with a still-growing genre like virtual reality. For now, VR gets a pass.

If you got this far, thanks for reading! Hopefully you found something interesting in my choices. Please feel free to comment with your opinions, especially if there’s something great that I missed.

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