@tacoe

Taco Ekkel / Quantified Self Amsterdam meetup / May 21, 2012

2 related topics + discussion starter

2010

desire to do something meaningful with technology

sensors + data + ideas = possibilities!

The beginnings.to makers, ‘possibilities’ are like crack cocaine mixed with kittens and baconmeaningful as in ‘planet’, ‘not the 100000th solomo app’

hans pinckaers niels bartels taco ekkeliOS development energy expertise design, algorithms

Good Move team

use smartphones to track mobility-related carbon emissions

A high bar• No user input required at all • No noticable impact on battery life• No dependences on external web services• Approachable, friendly, fun• Create/influence actual behavioral change

No user input = ‘fully ambient’, to stay in QS lingoNo external services (to pre-empt privacy concerns)

Ambient = hard• Need lots of sensor data to make sense of complex reality• Measured and preprocessed in the background• Advanced continuous signal analysis on noisy, gapped data• Adaptive, continuous classification system

1 - Storage becomes a problem... Core Data + background processing = sad developers 2 - Not possible for accelerometer data before iOS 5: project on hold for over a year3 - energy calculation & periodicity detection in noisy, non-stationary, gapped data4 - Much harder when you only have tiny pieces of the puzzle to save battery. We refer to this as the ‘sherlock holmes problem’.

Note that all the tech stuff set us back over a year!

Early tests show the amount of sherlock holmes-ing that has to be done. One might call this “Occam’s Razor Optimal”

But: we got it working!

One Percent Design IdeationFeb 2010 / TE

you friends everyone950km

last month's mobility report

your mobility - day to daymon tue wed thu fri sat sun

340 calories burned190 kg CO2 saved

210 kg CO2 generated

1150km

633km

Recent

Challenges

410 green credits

370 dirty points

Niels B challenges you: Zero Tolerance Week

5 km on bike, to Amsterdam+20 green creds45 km by car, to Rotterdam+12 dirty points

todaytoday

810

622

40 more to level up

In progress: Bike Meister against Suzanne V

Trips Friends Challenges SettingsStats

Trips Friends Challenges SettingsStats

190 more to get trees planted in your name

Clean

Trips Friends Challenges SettingsStats

622+ 622 Accept!

Bike 20 km in the coming 7 days

622

0

Neutralize 622 kg CO2 for € 2,19

+ 500

Purchase!

New Personal Challenge

Level up: Bike Monster

Big Spender Badge

Niels Bartels is going to bike to compensate his pollution this week.

622

+ 6220Level up: Bike Monster

green credits

dirty points

Trips Friends Challenges SettingsStats

replay your history

this is the 'serious version' - limited in fun and game elements

Recent

Challenges

Niels B challenges you: Zero Tolerance Week

5 km on bike, to Amsterdam+20 green creds45 km by car, to Rotterdam+12 dirty points

today

today

53

1802

40 more to level up

In progress: Bike Meister against Suzanne V

Trips Friends Challenges SettingsStats

190 more to get trees planted in your name

convert to green points Clean

if you keep getting dirty points and no green credits, the screenbecomes smoggy...

early concepts for UIs: very “quantified self meets influencing”. Graphs, challenges, emotional influencing, etc.

get traction on essenceno traction, no dice

but we realized, having learned from Steven Blank (best expressed in Ries’s lean startup), we need to start with the essence (minimum viable product) and get traction on that first. So we pruned the app until we arrived at the essence.

MVP: approachable essence

Demo video

Demo video part deux

note we also introduced lightmark benchmarking elements to anchor the, otherwise meaningless, numbers

On to the App Store!

2.16: Multitasking apps may only use background services for their intended purposes: VoIP, audio playback, location, task completion, local notifications, etc.

Rejected

Must be an innocent misunderstanding!

Thanks for reviewing Good Move and for providing feedback. It seems that the purpose of the app is not fully clear to you, which would explain the feedback you've provided us. What follows is additional information and a question to you.

Good Move is a "smart meter for carbon". There are numerous apps out there that help you track your carbon emission, but Good Move is of a new class altogether: it measures carbon emission without any user input -- which is considered an innovative and important step within the nascent industry of self-tracking. Where previously, users had to tediously type in their trip details by hand, Good Move detects those details automatically. This is a key understanding to both technology and design choices.

First, it helps explain why the app needs location information and some background work (Re your "2.16"). The app has advanced algorithms that combine information from two sources. First, the accelerometer, whose information is analyzed for energy and periodicity. This helps the app recognize activities like bicycling and walking. This activity can only happen in the background, since forcing users to keep open the app during all their travel would make for a useless user experience. As such, it satisfies the 'intended use' clause of 2.16. Morgan Grainger of Apple's developer support has been assisting us and a number of others that needed background acceleration information to make this possible (one of the reasons that this rejection surprised us). The second source of information is Location Services. We only use actual GPS where strictly necessary - relying on significant location changes to tell us the device's owner is on the move, without having to poll for it. Even as the user travels, to save energy, only short bursts of GPS are used with long pauses inbetween, relying on our algorithms to 'connect the dots'. The location information is used to, every know and then, get a user's land speed, to overlay known positions on railway map data, and to calculate distances.Both of these information sources are absolutely necessary for the smart meter to function. In addition to that, as we hope this explanation has made clear, we've invested significant development effort to minimize impact on the device's limited resources.

We thank you for the helpful suggestion to add the sentence: "Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life." to our description. We've followed this suggestion, even though our app doesn't actually continuously use GPS.

The context of 'smart meter' also explains the limited options for user input in the user interface (Re your "10.6"). After a brief welcome screen, the main screen of the app just shows you your current status, much like Apple's own Weather app just shows the weather. The user can swipe right to learn more detail; this is indicated by the little dots at the bottom of the screen -- again, much like Apple's own Weather app. And like the Weather app, the sphere of influence lives outside the realm of buttons -- in this case, a user's mobility habits are what influence the UI. Put differently: the app doesn't have controls because it doesn't need them -- much like some of Apple's own apps (Compass, Weather, Stocks - their only controls are about settings, which our app doesn't yet need). If you're asking us to add UI elements nonetheless, we want to mention that in the interaction design community, adding un-needed controls is regarded as a way to make the user experience worse, not better. Certainly Apple itself follows the doctrine of not adding un-needed UI widgets.

Other than the above, rule 10.6 mentions the need for "simple, refined, creative, well thought through interfaces". Good Move's interface design, in our eyes and those of our test users, is actually a prime example of 'simple', 'refined', and 'creative' -- if anything, more a reason for featuring in the App Store, than for rejecting it. Can you please clarify specifically which parts of the interface constitute to "poor user experience", other than the absence of many buttons, which we've explained above?

We've invested over a year of three persons' development, design and testing efforts in this application. We thank you for your time and await any further feedback or questions - which we would be delighted to answer for you. If you feel a phone call might help clear some things up, do not hesitate to call me at +31630181165.

Kind regards,

Taco EkkelCo-founder, Good Mobility

2.16: Multitasking apps may only use background services for their intended purposes: VoIP, audio playback, location, task completion, local notifications, etc.

Rejected

we were not happy

app reviews are not intelligent work. It’s mostly semi-automated checking off of checkboxes without time investment to understand an app.

good thing this exists, since about year and a half.

succes! (everyone, start your downloads)

Where we are now✓No user input required at all (fully ambient)

✓No noticable impact on battery life

✓No dependance on web services, to pre-empt privacy

concerns

✓ Approachable, friendly, fun

x Create/influence behavioral change

How can we tell we didn’t reach #5 yet? Well before you enact change, you need interest first. And we didn’t get a lot of that outside those “in the carbon emission industry”

Most people’s thoughts on carbon emissions

- Steven Blank

Our problem: we think carbon emissions are a problem, but when push comes to shove, most people don’t feel this (enough) as their problem, or feel too little agency in being able to change it. This is an existential threat to what we’re doing!

How Apps Die, In Three Easy Steps

1. “Hey, that’s kinda cool”

2. Download, install, use once (maybe twice)

3. Totally forget all about it

* or, more precisely: never become a lasting business

*

So, this happens. This pattern applies to many QS apps - in fact, to most ‘cool gizmos’ apps.

This is not necessarily bad: Many pay-once iOS apps work this way. But it’s not a good way to build lasting change.

Your smartphone ambiently senses mobility information, without needing any help or interaction -- and without draining the battery.

you office company950km

this month's mobility report

your mobility - day to daymon tue wed thu fri sat sun

340 calories burned190 kg CO2 saved

210 kg CO2 generated

1150km

633km

410 green credits

370 pollution points

StatsLeaderboard History

replay your history

StatsLeaderboard History

ONE PERCENT

Advanced algorithms in a cloud-based data center process sensor information to determine trip distances, trip type (car, bike, etc) and CO2 generation.

2

1Everyone gets a dashboard with readings on how they're doing — and how well their office or department is stacking up. For the curious, there are beautiful visualizations of mobility over time.

3

Your management gets the full picture on consumption and savings per office and department. Compare with other organizations to get a benchmark.

4

everyone can make a difference

Get your one percent change (or more!) and carry the WWF One Percent seal on your public site and marketing!

5 1%

• B2B: provide corporations with insight in fleet carbon emissions• Offset carbon button (in-app purchase)• Micro carbon trading platform• Health: iPhone-based ‘fitbit’

Pivots & Models considered

And now for some unrelated Quantified Self early adopter geekery

Nest! The learning thermostat. Only sold and supported in the US right now

use solid, not stranded, wire - Nest’s clips won’t detect the presence of stranded wires

Success!

mention US zip + Arment’s pulsing boiler

this is now like the 20th device in my house to apply software updates to itself over its own network connection. Sounds like a nuisance (sometimes is) but it’s fantastic: new functionality without needing new hardware -- saves tons of waste.

Laws Of Quantified Self Success• Commercial effort at scale, aimed at making $$$

Submit to the rigor of the market. Start/search lean, but play for keeps.

• Solve a problem most people actually want solved...Like saving money or early detection of diseases.

• ...in an easy waye.g. Nest, Good Move.

• Target non-geeksDoesn’t mean Quantified Self geeks aren’t the early adopters.

• Tell a story that stays interestingMeaning the numbers keep changing, never completely settling into predictability.

To illustrate how hard it is to stay interesting: I know people that have stopped using Nike+ and Runkeeper because they usually run the same courses.

If you do not adher to all five of these, you will fail (if you haven’t already). Even if you do, no guarantee for success. Elucidate discussion.