What IKEA has done is basically scanned in the entire UK IKEA catalog – all 384 pages of it – and made it accessible from the iPhone. It basically consists of 3 different features:

• Flicking through pages
• Fast-flicking through the same pages using a thumbnail view
• Pinch-zooming in the pages

That’s it!

All that I can say about it is; Wow, what a missed opportunity! IKEA, you could have done so many exciting, fun, explorative and sales-generating features and your choice was to just digitalize what you already publish in paper form?!

IKEA, you look like you are in need of some inspiration. So here, absolutely free of charge, I give you (and ILVA, Mio, EM, Lutz, Home Depot, Sears and the rest of you) 4 ideas for your future iPhone apps.

1. List what you show in a picture

Sure, you show prices on some of the things that you display in you inspiring and beautiful room settings (kudos to you there!) – but I want you to show me a list of everything from your company that’s in the picture. How do you know I’m not interested in the paintings in the far end of the room? If you’ve got it – show it! You already do this (at least to some extent) on you webpage today. Just let me flip the image that I’m looking at around and give me a list (with pictures) of all items that are visible in the picture.

2. A better serach function

You didn’t even include a serach function? Not even an interactive index so that I didn’t manually have to flip to page 270 to watch that SNILLE swivel chair? Add a search function to help the user find what they are looking for in an easy way. And while you’re at it, make it more attuned to their needs. Maybe I know the name of a product that I want, maybe the type of a product, maybe the color of a product, maybe the material of the product. Regardless – help me find what I’m looking for. Give me suggestive search, use synonyms to make the search more forgiving, suggest alternative search phrases if I get few or no results.

3. Show products in a real context

So you’ve helped me find a product, now show me all the fun and inspiring ways to use this in my home (you do this so well with your room setting pictures). So for every product that you have, let me access pictures, movies and information that you have in other places where that product also appears.

But why stop there? How would the EKTORP sofa look in my living room? What can I put on this wall, and how would that look? It’s a phone application that you’re building – make use of the phones unique properties. Use the phones camera to provide the live background image and put the product that I’m looking at on top of that. That way I can see just how well that HALLARYD painting would look on the shady wall at our office. And just wait a few months or years and with all the fancy new augmented reality opportunities out there you’ll be able to scale your product in real time so that it fits perfectly into the image from my living room.

4. Is the product available in my local Store?

The iPhone has a GPS, so you know where the closes IKEA store is from my current position. Then you can also tell me if the product that I’m looking at is in stock there. Also show me where in that particular IKEA store that I can find the product (both on display and for me to take home). Also, give me the possibility to add the product to “My shopping list” if I so desire, that way I can easily access it when I arrive at the store.

Shopping has never been this fun, or easy!

And IKEA (and the rest of you) I’ve got 20 more ideas for you if you’re interested. Just give me a call and we can talk about them

I personally use the facebook app on a daily basis, and to my surprise facebook carried out a makeover, upgrade of the facebook app last week without previously notifying me as a user.

The home screen, is now a page where customers must choose and I cannot understand what logic is behind the order of the functionality and icons:

Why is News Feed first? Isn't Profile (users own profile) the most important "Home page", and why is the page not customizable?

This page is empty and customers are suppose to add pages, friends but the interaction principles are unclear of selecting/deselecting shortcuts.

Why is "Wall" more important than "Info" and "Photos"?

Overall, I would like to know which principles facebook designers are applying and if they consider that customers most likely are utilizing the facebook app differently that the web-version of facebook?

What's clearly improved are images, photos (viewable on facebook app) which are shown in higher resolution and actually pleasent in comparison to previous image quality.

So, what do you think about the redesign of the iPhone facebook app.

/Zayera Khan

1. Maps – saving functionality, how come I cannot bookmark, save locations, maps, directions and access it at a later point. For example, I type in own address and want to use it to calculate distances to other location (via car, bicyle, walking, public transportation, etc)?

2. Calender – why doesn’t the calendar synchronise with other calender which I use, for example Google calender or Yahoo calender? If that is possible, how can users find this functionality on the Calender?

3. Address book – synchronisation issue, and import/export how can I use other address books, for example from other applications or online to track and keep my contacts uptodate?

Overall my impression is that iPhone has changed the physical way we communicate with each other as well; since instead of putting the phone to the ear, due to its size (too big, heavy and uncomfortable to hold in a small hand), I am making the bold assumption NOW that more people will be using the phone looking at it, talking with a headset, and interacting with it via the screen due to the touchpad and touchscreen interaction rather that using it as a standard mobile phone (where most users still put it to their ears, head. An exception being Blackberry or business users who already are accustomed to headsets). Culturally speaking, some mobile phone users prefer neat and slim phones – instead you have a clunky square to carry around in your pockets. However I do understand the dilemma as well, for surfing, emailing, online activities and screen-interaction users will require a bigger screen, in order to see and read adequately – yet in the perspective of phoning, and communicating users really just want a dial pad, addressbook, and the average phone functionality, such as SMS (txt), camera phone, bluetooth/infrared etc (although  phone feature usag/popularity really depends on country, user segments and age).

As a paradigm shift, iPhone is great for challenging and pushing other mobile phone manufacturers and operators to think differently but as a tool for communication I am not so convinced about its usefulness.

Reported by Zayera Khan.

I just got myself an iPhone (I do think the phone is cool and all, but my critical ME is irritated on a few
things), and since 3 days I am trying to figure out how to best use it.
Compared to other phones, I miss the following functionalities (perhaps they exist and I just haven’t figured out yet how to access these:

1. Transfer and manage contacts from other sim-cards, so far I tried to copy sim-contacts via inserting an existing sim-card and import these = did not work. Then I tried to send over via bluetooth, but that failed too. Editing and adding contacts I find pretty tedious, so I asked a friend to send me a SMS (txt) with adress, phone details. How do you think I can copy paste these? In other phones the copy functionality is used, so that a user can copy & paste "text", however here I did not figure it out. Oddly enough, the street number, postcode, email were identified but the phone numbers in the SMS were not recognized as phone numbers -> perhaps iPhone is not accustomed to regional phone number standards (in sweden it is typical to write all numbers together or but a – after the city/prefix).

2. Phone profiles! I really miss my personal phone profiles, on my other mobile phones I am an avid user of phone profiles, and change to work, meeting, outdoor, home, etc.

However on the iPhone, I cannot make any setting or profiles at all – how am I suppose to make sure my work colleagues are not disturbed when the phone rings, besides turning it on "Mute"?
Or how are I suppose to make the ringtones louder if I am outdoors with more noise around me?
Noise management is an important factor not only socio-culturally but also for our well-being and mutual respect of privacy, and shared spaces.

3. Writing and typing on iPhone, I find a bit frustrating, here is why: Why do I need to shift between screens for selecting numbers and symbols? The standard keytype when you press a digit to get numbers, symbols is something that users are accustomed to, so why not keep or enable these settings? For example a long click or 2 taps to get the number?

How do I disable the "correction" mode, so that I do not get "dom" whenever I type in "com" (.com).
How can I select multiple languages, especially for users who are accustomed to writing with letters such as "å,ä,ö" or in german "ü", or other special letters for various global languages.

4. Why doesn’t iPhone have infrared, or why can’t I record videos and movies on it?
More to follow…

Reported by Zayera Khan.

1. User does not make any choice and is automatically logged in/logged out depending on pc. Why not offer the possibility to be logged in on multiple devices, platforms? (btw, similiar issues occur when logging in on more than 1 pc as well). User experience and usability are effected and users will be irritated due to login/logout on various devices due to usage, and hence decrease efficiency, seamless interaction.

2. Presence awareness, is defaulted and set automatically on FRING, which is odd as users (especially advanced users are those who are into voip, sip-tools) should be able to choose how (where, to whom) present they are, and how their information is displayed to others. In this case, FRING needs to be improved and work on "settings" and presence topics to improve connectivity.

//Zayera Khan

If you have time to read only one book for the remainder of this year, read this one!

In short, the book describes new means for making business and challenges "the old way". The principles of wikinomics are:

• Being open: Transparency is a powerful new force for business success. Transparency is critical to business partnerships and for lowering transaction costs between firms. Employees of open firms have higher trust among each other and with the firm, resulting in lower cost, better innovation and increased loyalty. And when companies are open with customers, they gain trust.
• Peering: People increasingly self-organize to design goods or services, create knowledge, or simply produce dynamic, shared experiences.
• Sharing: Firms in electronics, biotechnology, and other fields finds maintaining and defending a proprietary system of intellectual property often cripples their ability to create value. Smart firms are creating intellectual property like a mutual found – they manage a balanced portfolio of IP assets, some protected and some shared.
• Acting globally: On the economic front, the ongoing integration of economies into a borderless world and the surprisingly fast and furious rise of new titans such as China, India and South Korea will continue to broaden and flatten the playing field.

The book describes new ways of making business, and a new type of enterprise, “Enterprise 2.0”, is described. Some highlights:

• In february 2007 the Swiss drug maker Novartis released all its raw data on the Internet, for free. “These discoveries are but a first step. To translate this study’s provocative identification of diabetes related genes into the invention of new medicines will require a global effort”
• P&G use ideagoras, but they also employ a network of tehnology scouts that literally scour the globe for new consumer products and technologies.
• Lego has become a flagship for how to get your customers deeply involved in co-creating and co-innovating products.
• Always strive to be the best at what your customer value most and partner for everything else.
• Outsourcing is increasingly a way to gain speed, innovation and knowledge.
• The Net Generation norms: speed, freedom, openness, innovation, mobility, authenticity and playfulness.
• Peer production is a way of producing goods and services that relies entirely on self-organizing, communities of individuals who come together voluntarily to produce a shared outcome. Companies that will benefit from peer production needs to invest in infrastructures for collaboration while carefully considering issues such as Intellectual property diligence and indemnity.

The book is full of interesting examples of movements towards wikinomics. Some of those that were new to me are:

• Marketocracy is a company started in 2000 by Bruce Horn and Ken Kam, with the view of isolating top stock market investors around the world in head to head competition so they can run real mutual funds around these soon to be discovered investment super-stars.
• TakingITGlobal.org or (TIG) is a global non-governmental organization (NGO) that runs a large online community and social network for young people interested in social, political and global issues. TakingITGlobal also runs a number of offline engagement projects and partnerships that are strongly linked to or supported by its online initiatives.
• InnoCentive is an "open innovation" company that takes research and development problems in a broad range of domains (such as Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Chemistry, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Business), frames them as "challenge problems", and opens them up for anyone to solve them. It gives cash awards for the best solutions to solvers who meet the challenge criteria.
• The Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) is a small scale workshop with the tools to make almost anything. This includes technology-enabled products generally perceived as limited to mass production. It has everything you need to make just about anything, including nifty gadgetry such as laser cutters to etch out 2D and 3D structures, digital carving tools for making circuit boards and other precision parts, and a suite of electronic components and programming tools for constructing cheap microcontrollers.

Some figures and thoughts that I found interesting:

• During the worst natural disaster, the hurricane Katrina, people organized a project for finding information on their beloved, (the People Finder project) that would have the cost loads of money and years to execute. Three thousand people, lightly coordinated, made a huge data collection effort during four days with absolutely no cost to the taxpayer.
  Mass collaboration at it’s finest.
• Each Wikipedia article has been edited an average of twenty times.
• Globalization doesn’t just lead to rationalized supply chains. It also affects the geography of innovation. An estimated 20 to 30 percent of worldwide clinical research already takes place in Asia.
• 40 percent of the goods on eBay are now uploaded automatically from the inventory system of third-party stores that use eBay as an alternative sales channel.
• Deepening supplier involvement has significantly boosted the efficiency of the design process. When Boeing sent the specs to the electronic supplier for the 777, the document was twenty-five hundreds page long. The equivalent spec for Boeing 787 is a mere 20 pages.
• The blogsphere is “the World`s biggest coffeehouse”.
• The new private spaces are increasingly found online.
• The modus operandi of R&D dept is to invent, not to aquire outside ideas.
• What happens when the modifications and extensions that customer develop conflict with a company´s business imperatives?

For those who like to listen instead of reading I recommend an interview on YouTube. The wikinomics blog is also o good place to find information.

Happy reading!

/Ingrid Domingues

Still awaiting the iPhone release in Sweden, we are now publishing the report from the comparative usability test we performed last autumn, which we first presented on World Usability Day.

The iPhone sure looks fantastic, and it’s been hyped by media and critics around the globe. But, is it really that good? And, if so, how come? 

Download "So… does the iPhone live up to it’s hype?"  (PDF, 1 MB).

/Johan Berndtsson

Note. This post is also available in Swedish.