We brainstormed lots of user scenarios, but the client was locked into thinking that the mobile was primarily a business tool. The video focused on scheduling, travelling to meetings and making presentations, but we managed to drop-in some mobile behaviours that we thought would be common place in the future.

So what did we get right?

The scenarios maybe humourless, but they’re not a million miles away from the Siri launch videos.

What did we get wrong?

• A Leviathan scroll wheel menu rather than multi-touch
• Applications extending functionality
• Video working well over 3G (… but sold as a key speed benefit during the spectrum auction!)

The Intelligence Assumption

Our basic assumption in the video prototype was that the phone would act like a concierge or human-like assistant.  After hearing Matt Jones talk at the “In Progress” event, (staged by ‘It’s Nice That‘ magazine) maybe that premise is a promise too far. Maybe it is wiser to aim for experiences that connect robots and autonomous services in a way that engineers simpler emotional empathy rather than human-like intelligence. Examples of these types of not-so intelligent connectors to the real world are Little Printer, the learning thermostat and Cryoscope haptic forecaster.

Siri is still in Beta

However, a voice interface does provide the seductive potential to expose and unify services. Outside of America Siri is breaks easily.

Siri is hopelessly crippled for most of the world because it cannot link to maps, directions or local search. The disappointment felt is really similar to the feeling at the first iphone launch.  Jobs said Apple would never allow third parties to develop for the iphone.  There were a few bundled apps, and many of these, particularly messaging, had many flaws. AS history played out, the iphone’s most powerful differentiator is the application ecosystem.

Siri is the ‘doing’ ecosystem

Perhaps ‘Siri’ is distined to become  a new type of ecosystem that lets you command your phone  to ‘do’. There will be an API, where  businesses and brands will have a way of directly interfacing and extending  into the underlying lexicon, actions and  language. Interflora may have an app, but it’s far more interesting to be able to act upon the verbal question “Send my Girlfriend some flowers tomorrow”. Siri could become a doorway to a mirade of actions and third party datasets. This is already appearing in a range of ‘cracked’ usefulness.

Google must see the same thing, and many observers think this is the reason for recent unification of Google privacy polices. Currently in development, Majel will make it possible to offer the whole spectrum of Google’s confusing array of services via voice on android.

Will Siri get good enough?

The real question is whether Siri will actually succeed. It’s bad enough to make you just give up. Sending the voice recording to the cloud for interpretation introduces a very annoying lag.  It has a very high error rate. Even the activation gesture of raising the phone to your ear doesn’t work reliably. On top of these usability issues, there is a human reality that, for some reason, it’s really embarrassing to dictate misunderstood commands to your phone. It took my whole walk from the British Film institute to the millennium foot bridge to successfully dictate one SMS message.

I believe these usability problems will be solved in time, and linking third party services to pet-like ‘intelligence’ in the cloud will transform the perceived usefulness beyond dictation. If I were to make another mobile ‘future’ video today, I’d focus on the ‘Internet of things‘ and how the mobile works with the cloud of semi-intelligent connected objects that will fill our future lives.

When Ubermore works uber-more, we create little characters playing around with our technology, exploring geo location, NFC and augmented reality in a car. Hopefully, very soon we can publish our first demo clips.

SoMoLo = Social + Mobile + Location

We’re looking at how characters triggered by environments can join fuse the digital and physical worlds to provide stories and play.

Ubermore teamed up again with Laura Bambach, ECD at Lbi, and her crew.  A creative pitch to develop a campaign & media strategy celebrating the track record of ‘continues change’ and innovation over the last 25 years for a major financial institution. Inspired by Troika, Microsoft Kinect and stop-frame animation we developed a cross-media campaign that sold their story in an engaging, interactive and compelling way.\

UPDATE! 04 August 2011

“Barclays appointed LBi, Profero and SapientNitro to a new global digital roster for its Wealth, Corporate and Capital divisions after a review process aimed at reducing the number of its agencies. The three digital agencies will handle projects for Barclays’ non-consumer divisions after a pitch process that saw ten shops compete for a place on the roster. Barclays previously used 26 agencies across the three businesses.”

See the Campaign article

The Mill asked us for our strategic and UX knowledge to crack the code on a tricky engagement concept for a lovely client centered around an amazing uber-prize. All is still in development, but looks good so far. The 3 month running competition is planed to go live in 2011 Q4. We will keep you posted. promise

We always love working with Imagination; this time we had been asked to come up with different ideas for a leading handset manufacturer to be used in their Shanghai flagship store. How to drive traffic into the shop, engage customers and make it culturally relevant and enriching the city?

Anything from interactive installation to crowed sourced exhibition contribution, geo-location online games, light projections and  - of course – mobile apps…Intense few days with lots of research and ideas will hopefully keep Imagination busy for a while…

Just finished another job at Pirata, when Stinkdigital grabbed us and threw us into the pool of happening. “Can you come up with some ideas for a telecom account pitch while we are off for a shooting in Columbia and NY?…Oops, and then there are these 12 scripts from Goodby that somehow need to become interactive, any chance you have that ready by tomorrow?…”

‘Love their unconventional approach and cheeky attitude. Boundaries are fictitious!!!

Hope to work with Stink more in the future.

During 2010 Ubermore led  the digital strategy for the Isobar global Nokia team focusing on smartphones and navigation.

Back In January 2010 Nokia introduced free voice guided SatNav on all it’s Smartphones. The best component of this multi-million pound navigation campaign was ‘Own Voice‘. This came from a simple client side idea to make an app that would let people record (and share) their own voice instructions.

Launched on the same day as Tomtom starwars voices, the app (made by Starcut) was an instant hit ,  warmly received by tech bloggers and getting coverage in the mainstream press. Thousands of voice packs being still being made and shared every week. The genuine surprise was the popularity of regional accents, particularly Italian!

To help drive further engagement, the Own Voice facebook app was developed by Glue Isobar in collaboration with Wieden Kennedy.  A Facebook first, that allows groups of people to collaborate remotely and record personalised direction prompts onto their Nokia SatNav. This work received a Eurobest bronze.

What a week!!! Ubermore was creatively leading a team at Imagination working on a big pitch for a client in the States.

Fun: Thinking up interactive, touch-screen based ideas with live-feed widgets.
Challenge: Printed format only (!), submitted by post, no presentation, for a non–digital client …hm … and in American English… color not colour, customize not customise!!….

With a mixture of storyboard, storytelling, UX and the right selection of key screen designs, the document ‘flows’ now like a book and already got great internal feedback.

‘Guys, this is going to be VERY good’ Paul Mackay, Director of Imagination, NY

‘…I had high expectations and even those were exceeded…’ Larson Banilower, New business Director, Imagination

The pitch asked to identify areas of improvement on the newly launched website of Star Alliance. Ubermore suggested to approach the pitch from a slightly different angle and rather then looking at the site itself, identifying areas that have not yet been explored outside the site, using existing content and service. We developed mobile phone service ideas, online widgets and social media loyalty programs, always considering the fact that Star Alliance is predominantly an aggregation platform on the net.

Tom Roope from rumpusroom invited ubermore to chip in some creative thinking, strategic knowledge and UE as part of an ARG for one of the leading household appliance manufacturer. The idea is now in production and will be part of a digital online campaign launching the new product to the public.