As I write this post, I am anticipating that I may write more on this topic in the future. I don't have in mind, say, a 6-post series. One of the problems of writing on the topic of Google is that I don't really have a window on planned changes and enhancements on Google products and services. I use so many (just to start, Google Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Keep, Blogger, Youtube, etc.), not to mention my first smartphone, which is an Android model.
It may sound unusual for an IT academic to admit being late to the game of smartphones. Part of that was based on budget constraints, and I saw cellphones as mostly functional devices. Familiar readers may know that I finally got my first cellphone after a major tire blowout in I-5 heading down to LA from Silicon Valley. I had had a couple of work-related cellphones before then. I don't really make a lot of calls, and minutes were expensive, so I might do tech interviews, etc., via a wired, later digital line at home. As time went on, there were restrictions on the use of client PC's and Internet services (especially with the government). I often might not have access to the cellphone at work for security reasons (e.g., recording functionality), but I might be able to take a break from work (e.g., lunch). There was some functionality I wanted beyond calls, say, for example, a stock or mutual fund transaction in my retirement account during market hours. (One prior employer vendor, for instance, Fidelity Investments, will process an exchange at the next end of the trading day. So if I was building a position in biotech stocks, I might look at a down day to build my position. If I waited until I got home and placed the order, biotech stocks might have a good day tomorrow, meaning more expensive shares.)
Substitutes also deferred my decision. For example, a while back, I wrote a piece on a Garmin device. This has some nice functionality that goes beyond GPS-guided directions; for example, I can get directions to the nearest post office, fast food places, gas stations, hotels, etc. Before that, I would go online and print out directions and plan stopping places.
A few things happened in the interim. While I lived in West Virginia, I realized one day I was never using my digital phone, which was probably $30-40 of my monthly triple play cable bill. Whereas the latest iPhone or Galaxy might set you back a few hundred dollars, you could buy a decent quality phone for about $100, and some mobile vendors started offering virtually unlimited talk, messaging, and data for $35-50/month. (Granted, only a certain threshold of data was guaranteed high speed, but then I really wasn't planning to use my smartphone for A/V feeds.)
So I've owned my SmartPhone for just over a year now. As a human factors researcher, I was absolutely thrilled with the idea of studying what types of usability problems I would encounter, false inferences or expectations, natural interface gaps/Procrustean technology, etc. I've found myself using the device in unexpected ways.
I'll give a few examples to illustrate salient concepts. I happen to have short, stubbier fingers, which don't always work well given limited size touchscreens. I don't do a lot of messaging, but I realized the other day, I could utilize Google's excellent voice-to-text technology to dictate my text message.
The voice interface is pervasive through the technology. For example, I could use the Google search screen to request "Show me Mom's phone number." I was pleasantly surprised to see Google correctly typed out our surname when I asked the same question for one of my brothers. (The English pronounciation is "Gill met"; in fact, Dad used to sign into restaurants with that spelling.) Depending on the question, I might get a spoken response, e.g., "How old is Donald Trump?". On the other hand, when I asked, "What was Elton John's last American #1 hit?", I didn't get a vocal response, but I did get the link of a Wikipedia page for Elton John's discography.
I recently started playing around with building shopping lists, which you can do if you download the Google Keep app. So I can activate my Google voice functionality ("OK, Google"), and say "Add 2 cartons of eggs to my shopping list", "Add a half-gallon of almond milk to my shopping list', etc. And then the next time I'm in WalMart, I can simply say, "Show me my shopping list" and check off items as I do my shopping.
One of the first times I used the browser voice functionality was on a visit home over the holidays. Most of the times I had visited in the past, I had used a barber shop at the nearby military base. Mom used to work at the base exchange (Dad used to bring me to the NCO Club); there was a large barbershop at the exchange with a DMV queue type system, with the exception that active military preempted people in the queue. Long story short, Mom finished shopping and I was still in the queue. She decided it wasn't worth the wait. The base is across from a town where the family used to live, but since my Dad and brothers never used the town's barbers, we didn't know where to go. I used my cellphone to find relevant barbers along the main drag of the town. The main issue is that I got street numbers which weren't legible from the road. It would have helped if we had better signposts on location (which may have been an artifact of my search). I quickly inferred it was in a smaller strip mall across from a larger strip mall we had entered to check street numbers. (In hindsight, I may have been able to use the Google Maps app already loaded on my phone to get turn-by-turn instructions like for my Garmin; I may test out the functionality for a local barber shop in my area.) But it certainly beat the old school way of checking the Yellow Pages at home.
Another thing I wanted to check was the handling of sounds, ringtones, etc. Now what I brought into the configuration was experiences like the use and installation of fonts. For example, I use an email signature software called Qliner Quotes (described in an earlier post). I wanted to use some Old English calligraphy for my Quote of the Day section heading. My Windows TrueFonts did not come bundled with a relevant font so I had to search for a freeware font and installation.
Now, of course my Android device came with relevant configuration defaults, and I could tell some notifications were available via a flashing green light at the top of the phone. I was rather annoyed at my limited selection of available ringtones, etc., and I might get silent notifications. I might hear or feel my cellphone vibrate, say, if I got a message someone had retweeted one of my Twitter tweets, but what if I got a notification while taking a shower: I might have to check if my phone had a blinking light; an audible sound was harder to ignore,
Similarly, just like I could add items to my shopping list, I might want to set an alarm. Now here's a situation where I ran into an expectations problem. If I say "set the timer for 1 minute" on my notebook PC Chrome browser (toggling on the microphone icon), I will hear an audible alarm of beeps, but if I do this through the Google search window, it results in a vibrate alarm. (I will point out that if I launch Chrome on the smartphone and use the voice input, I will get a similar audible beep.)
I had figured out how to load one of my music tracks, e.g., "Love is Blue" onto my SD card I had installed on the phone (which was a "fun", unintuitive experience) and set it as the ringtone. But I just wanted to configure something classic, like desk phone rings, maybe a classic email tone for notifications or some buzz, beep, or bell for alarms. I experimented with a couple of ringtone apps like Zedge and picked up on how to select, download and configure the relevant sound. What was confusing was that when I configured an alarm manually through the alarm apps, it used the configured app default, but when I created an alarm through the Google search box, it created an alarm in the alarm app--and showed the configured default sound, but when the alarm was triggered, it was on vibrate and did not use the configured sound. (Perhaps the phone needs to be restarted?) It's not a big deal because I have a couple of ways of setting a usable audible alarm, but it comes across to me as confusing.
Finally, I've sometimes experienced a concept often fleshed out in Japanese quality control, e.g., the Kano model: the attractive quality, e.g., something unexpectedly pleasing that you never realized you always wanted in making a transaction. (Hotels often do this in various ways: maybe it's a complimentary newspaper, chocolates, fruit or warm chocolate chip cookies.)
Google products often have this. Let me give a simple. Google Calendar, in addition to configuring your own personal calendar of events, allows you to subscribe to any of a number of special-purpose calendars, including sports calendars. In my case, I add calendars for the UH Cougars, UT Longhorns, San Antonio Spurs, and the Minnesota Twins and Vikings. (Long story on the latter two; the first three deal with my college experience.) Now I did see the upcoming games and times on my calendar. I later began noticing that updated game scores showed up on my calendar (not to mention the next round of NBA playoff games for the Spurs).
The Google search engine in Chrome can be used not just to query for content but to extract for various information items, e.g., "what is the temperature in Atlanta, Georgia?' If I find a difficult word or wonder how to pronounce it properly I can query "define xxxx"; there is a speaker phone icon click on to hear the word and its definition. If I want today's GOP primary results or delegate count for my political blog, I query those descriptions; similarly I can query for the MLB Scoreboard or NBA Playoff Reaults. If I query Elton John songs, I get links to over a dozen Elton John videos, a short biography, even upcoming concert dates. When I recently baked a ham, I told my browser, "set timer to 200 minutes" If I land on a webpage from Germany, Russia or China, Google allows for quick, easy translations. I recently got a Word document questionnaire over a professional gig and easily loaded it into Google Docs. It was integrated with voice input, so all I had to do was point after each descriptive entry and dictate my response (with remarkably good translation). I read a recent post which suggested you could translate text from scanned business cards.
There are some minor things which I felt would improve the usability of products for my purposes. For example, I was trying the other day to save a Google Maps search, e.g., for directions to nearby Dan's Barber Shop into Google Keep (see above discussion of shopping lists). It would have been nice if I could have extracted information into a Keep note, e.g., right-click, Save to Google Keep. I could copy and paste the directions into a new note, and Keep has image-import functionality, but I couldn't transfer the image directly. I could save the map image to my download folder and then import the map image into the note. It seems to me that there should be a way of piping the image directly than resorting to a workaround. There may be a Google tool for this or related purposes.
I have come to a natural breaking point for the conclusion of this first post. For many Google power users, much of what I've described here is well-known but may not be obvious for new or occasional users of relevant tools. I stumbled into a lot of this not through tutorials but by playing around with the search engine and other tools. If other people find these tips interesting or useful, this post has served its purpose.
