Reducing distractions using smartphone applications

Distracted driving has received a lot of press in the past couple of months. The Department of Transportation held a special distracted driving summit, the NY Times' Matt Richtel wrote a special series of articles called "Driven to Distraction", and a recent truck study completed by Virgina Tech showed that texting while driving increases crash risk 23 times greater compared to not texting. A lot of the recent press has given new life to the driver distraction issue. Law makers have introduced new bills to ban texting, companies have outlawed distracted driving in corporate vehicles, and even Obama issued an executive order aimed at reducing distracted driving by Federal Employees. But will these executive decisions and laws really change people's bad habits and distracting behaviors while driving? What can be done to have a more immediate and larger impact on reducing driver distraction? Lets all give a round of applause for phone apps.

I recently came across a relatively new Blackberry application called ZoomSafer. ZoomSafer is essentially an information/communication manager for your cell phone. The application will suppress incoming text and phone communications when it detects that you are moving faster than 10 mph. ZoomSafer is essentially a firewall for unwanted communication while driving. What is even cooler about ZoomSafer are the social components. ZoomSafer will then send an auto reply notifying a caller or texter that you are currently driving. ZoomSafer also hooks into social networks and updates the users status message to let others know that they are currently driving.

Of course ZoomSafer does not completely eliminate distraction. Incoming calls from close contacts are not suppressed and the user has the option to answer the call. Also, the user has the option to receive messages or texts or emails from close contacts. At this point ZoomSafer turns the phone into a hands-free communication device similar to Ford Sync. Users can respond to the priority contact by navigating through an auditory menu using speech commands. Users can choose to either receive the call or send a voice message reply by email. Hopefully, ZoomSafer made sure to create a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to respond to close contacts. A clumsy or confusing interface will keep users attention off of the road longer, increase workload, and may reduce future use of the product. Additionally, while auditory-voice interfaces do eliminate peripheral interference they can still produce attentional interference that could lead to inattention blindness and reduced visual gaze variability.

ZoomSafer is available for free (though, the free version does not include the voice command features) and is readily available to anyone with a blackberry phone. The availability of the product makes it an exciting intervention for helping to reduce distracted driving. What really appeals to me about ZoomSafer is the social networking feature. Will it create a culture of safe driving among friends on social networking sites? Will status messages reduce the number of incoming calls and messages? Does the status of being a safe ZoomSafer driver improve the likelihood of drivers using the product and hopefully reduce their rate of distracted driving? A number of interesting questions that deserve attention in the future.

Woman Fired Becuase of Captial Letters

Email has taken over the workplace. But should it be used to fired someone? Sure, maybe if they content in the email was questionable, but what about if someone used captial letters or color. A recent article in the New Zealand Herald describes a story where a woman was fired because she used captial letters in her email. More specifically, the employees thought that many of her emails were too "confrontational".

One reason why you might want to use color, or alter the text size of a letter, is to bring attention to a specific item. The saliency of that item, compared to others, is much greater and people are more likely to see it. However, captial letters also have the contention that people are yelling; and red color general means that people are angry.

So what should you do if you don't want to get fired, but do want people to notice a message. I would put it the message at the front of the email, and in the title as well. Also, you could use characters, such a '*' to demark important items. Or you could put blank spaces / paragraphs between important items. While it seems strange peform these items, perhaps it could save your job.

The Rapt Book

The New York Times had an article discussing the Rapt book. The article discusses typically ways to reduce the distractions of the day, such as starting on the most important items in the morning or wearing ear plugs while traveling around town. However, it also discusses future ways that we may improve our attention such as using direct manipulation via light. I was also told of a technique that use electrical currents to alter brain function, and thus performance.

I was aware of techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation to direct influence brain activity for the purposes of understanding cognition, but these others techniques to enhance performance were new to me. I am not sure, how I feel about them. An interesting question to ponder is: If you could improve your attention would it matter to you if you had to take a pill or use a device that emitted something into your brain. For myself, I will continue to think about this, but not worry until I see these devices on sale at Walmart.

You fingers can now do much more.

Our fingers have long played an important role in our lives: They are great tools for eating, for playing an instrument, and for those finger pokes—seen in the classic slap-stick comedy routines.

With the advent of the multi-touch technology, however, our fingers are doing much more. Technology is also using the finger "tap/touch", as a method to interact with a variety of devices. The touch screens of: laptops, restaurants, and smart phones are such examples. Or consider the iPod touch. Users can perform different actions using a finger tip combo. Pinch two fingers together, and the image scales out; spread two fingers apart and the image scales in.

A recent article in BBC news, described the future for our fingertips. The author (Darren Waters) argues that the day of the mouse, keyboard, and desktop graphical interface are numbered. However, Mr. Waters also notes that while current technology exists to read and interpret these finger gestures, a significant hurdle still exists: "part of the challenge is about developing a codified understanding of such actions [read and interpreting human gestures]. In other words, we lack standards-a common method by which we all individuals understand the system operates.

To understand the importance of standards and finger gestures, consider the annoyance you may experience ever time you purchase a new phone. The process of going through and learning the menu structure, and organization scheme of the phone can be a headache. Now, what happens if you have to unlearn previous gestures, and learn new gestures to perform common tasks. Most likely that will invoke a specific kind of gesture that these devices may not respond well to.

Those pesky passwords, and user names too! Oh my.

Another interesting aspect of the Jared Spool article is that they discovered:

"45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested psaswords, to find out it reached 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested."

This size, frequency, and effect of forgetting ones password are remarkable. I must admit, I ran into this problem myself with Amazon, when I had problem tracking a package. I contacted Amazon, and it soon become clear that I had a multiple accounts. It appears now, that I was not the only one. Not only do many people it have multiple accounts, but they also appear to forget their passwords associated with those accounts.

The factors that lead to people forgetting their user accounts and passwords is not clear. For example, is it because they have multiple online accounts with different names and passwords; or is it because they have not visited the site recently. Whatever the cause or casuses of the password issues, the result is clear, people decided it was not worth the hassle and even though the requested their password they decided to move on.

The 300 million button

People (outside the human factors field, of course) sometimes question why it is necessary to perform usability tests. Furthermore, they often ask what benefit qualitative feedback provides? Well, I ran across one article that talked about the benefits of a usability testing. Jared Spool, an author of one of the articles, wrote:

"The results [of removing a registering button]: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000?

While, such examination may not always yield such great return, it is an excellent example of the potential.

Sleep and Daylight Savings

There are two primary debates surrounding daylight saving time. First, and the most well know is the energy debate . The second, and less well known, is the sleep debate. A New York Times article highlights this debate, and argues that perhaps we should not be switching our time, but rather continue to sleep.