Now I have to stick with Firefox

This is creepy, but the person using firefox on the getfirefox.com site looks exactly like me. Other than that he's using Windows.

Mobile iTunes store for iPhone

No doubt it will come one day. Only Apple knows when. But, for the kicks I've been hypothesizing how the user experience might work.

In the spirit of Apple, usability, and doing things their way, the best starting point is at the beginning. Here is the music (and DVD etc) buying experience we're all used to:



Lots of bins full of albums, organized by genre and then by alphabetical order. Somewhat time consuming to look through perhaps, but familiar, simple and supports both searching and browsing.

Could this be mapped to a mobile version of the iTunes store? Consider CoverFlow:


Very similar... Lots of albums arranged by (default) alphabetical order. Flick through them with your hands. Clearly Apple are big fans of this, given how they've just applied it to the Finder for OS X 10.5. It's not quite right for a store, but it's close.

Could the two be merged? Yes. Something like this...


Arrange the genres / content types in 'labelled bins' very much like a physical store. Allow the user to thumb through them and drag (or click) a genre (or other subject) to look into it. Above, 'classical' has been selected.


Same with the albums. Once you're in a genre, arrange them alphabetically and allow the user to scroll though. Given the long tail this would be A LOT of albums. You might want to break them up by letter (introducing an extra click). Otherwise, the albums would have to be sensitive to fast finger drags: above a certain speed the albums would have to really fly by. To help this, the same technique used in the list view of the iPhone could be used: a floating letter (or letters) showing where you are alphabetically.


The letter 'P' shows the user that they are scrolling through artists beginning with 'P'.

Once they have selected an album, an upwards drag (or double tap) on the album would 'pull the album out' and they could inspect individual tracks, read cover notes, buy, or replace it.

You could argue that by slavishly emulating the real-life user experience you are making the process unnecessary laborious. However, this approach has one major advantage: even your grandmother could buy something from this store! It's so similar to the real-world experience that we all intuitively know what we need to do right away. Also, there is something about the tactile nature of CoverFlow that reminds us of the physical CD / Album and makes the whole purchase seem a little bit less 'virtual' (and hence better value). Irrational yes, but satisfying none-the-less.

There are some technical issues. Primarily the enormous amount of cover art that needs to be downloaded. It would take some clever streaming to make it work. Several months ago I'd have said it was impossible, but after the Microsoft Seadragon / Photosynth demo on TED, who knows? It would push down a huge amount of data, one for WiFi networks initially, at least until flat-rate data billing for mobile finally arrives.

Evolutionary psychology as a basis for ethical design

The June / July Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has just been published. In it is an article I wrote entitled Evolutionary Psychology as a Basis for Ethical Design: Virtual Status and Ubiquitous Altruism. It picks up on the themes of my IA Summit talk, but proceeds (I hope) with a greater emphasis on the logical arguments behind the ideas, rather than the more emotive approach a stand-up presentation naturally assumes. Less Banksy references in other words ;)

Anyway, you can download my article here, and you can get a pdf of the whole bulletin here.