Problem
It’s like when a hanging picture is tilted. It’s just so agonizingly close to being right, and it would just take one little push to fix it. It kills me to not be able to straighten out the picture and it’s the same way with microinteractions. This project is to help me cope with the little things that are so close but not.
Solutions
Citymapper’s “favorites”
Citymapper has two locations on the home screen that are only one tap away. “Get Me Home” and “Get Me to Work”. Obviously you set those locations, but any other destinations you add are hidden under “Saved Places,” regardless of how frequently they are used.
They let you reorder the destinations within the “Saved Places” drop-down, but don’t let you change the ones on your home screen. The user should be able to reorder which destinations show up on their home screen. Citymapper got the “Get Me Home” right, but I only ever go to work from one place, my apartment, and the directions never change, it would be nice if I could put a location I would use more there.
Another small edit: The “Favorites” tiles should also be changeable by the user. I’ve never taken the Ferry in D.C. and I’m pretty sure they don’t even have a Light Rail, but these still show up every time I open the home screen. Getting rid of those surplus tiles opened up some valuable real estate where another “favorites” could go, but I decided to pull up the Schedule for the stops near my current location above the fold.
Casting Spotify to Google Home Mini
This is my lock screen when casting Spotify to my Google Home. The first is unopened and the second expanded, but still not open. My frustration is with the expanded lock screen notification.
With the controls it has, the phone is already acting like a remote. I think the extra space on the right side could be better utilized by adding more of the controls a remote would have. The addition of volume controls would still be consistent with their current design.
If you tap through the notification, it opens to the third screen, which you can see they have dedicated most of the real estate to volume control and I wish that was reflected in the expanded notification.
There is the space for it, they wouldn’t have to give anything up.
Exclusively connecting the volume buttons on the side of my phone is not a great solution, because the user has to option to also watch videos on the phone (with sound) while casting a specific app to the google speaker.
And here’s a link to the song SG Lewis - Sunsets Pt. 2
“Conversational design”
We talk about how design is becoming more “conversational,” and with voice controls, this is most often referring to the structure of our sentences in speech and the way we jump around or refer to things already mentioned. This makes sense, but I’m surprised at how often “Please” and “Thank You” are left out of conversational design discussion, especially since we’ve seen how hostile people can be when they interact with robots. I was inspired by this study and their solution to think about ways of encouraging polite interactions with personal assistants.
Users aren’t usually outright abusive to their personal assistant devices, but the language, tone of voice, and amount of patience is much harsher than what would be acceptable to another person. Robots are emerging in service roles and I worry that if we aren’t careful how we design interactions, this current “acceptable” behavior with robots will become acceptable with people.
Adults teach young kids to say “Please” and “Thank you” until it becomes a habit. For the Google Home, I was trying to come up with reminders that wouldn’t be too annoying so that they wouldn’t be immediately disabled, but still encouraged positive and more friendly behavior.
