Adam Little @ CIID

Cards filled out by participant

Last night I met up with Sanne and Tommy, two Danish twenty-somethings that carried around my “Mobile Ideas” probe for a week. Amazingly, especially since Sanne lost her phone twice over the course of the week, the little envelopes filled with blank cards actually stayed attached to their phones the entire time.

They wrote 7 ideas each about ways to improve their phone based on complaints they had while using the devices in their daily routines. Some of the ideas were fairly obvious or were simple technical improvements, while others were quite unique and inspiring.

Some of my favorites:

• Creating automated, self-service lost-and-found  boxes for phones left on the train. Sanna lost her phone on the train twice during the past week, and recovering it each time meant connecting the dots between a lot of people and mild embarrasment when actually picking the phone up.
• More “pleasant” alarm functions for the morning. Since Tommy has the phone by the side of his bed anyway (in case someone calls, to recharge it, etc.), the phone has replaced his alarm clock. What if the phone could play a random song each morning? Or what if the phone could give you a reason to get up in the morning? I.E. Remind you of your goal to eat more healthy breakfasts, or remind you of that extra reading you still needed to do before class.
• Text messages as email threads or chat windows. Tommy and Sanne both made note of this. More and more, SMS is used for carrying on conversations. So why not do what Google did for email - turn correspondence into a dialogue by visually displaying all messages as a thread. Or even make SMS resemble a chat window like MSN or Skype.
• Services for Roskilde! Roskilde is the biggest music festival in Denmark and Sanne wanted a phone to fill her in when she discovered a new band or new song. For example, what if you can send a text to a stage and get a response with the name of the current song being played. Last year Sanne heard so many new songs, but didn’t know how to find them after the festival was over.

Sanne is a business student and Tommy works with a community/youth organization, so I was quite impressed with the ideas they came up just by carrying around some paper attached to their phones. But in the end, this wasn’t so much a tool for getting new concepts as it was a tool for getting stories. So having these ideas on the table helped us have a much more rich discussion and share our stories. Thanks Sanne and Tommy!