It is very difficult to say the phrase “Have you seen anyone in an orange hat” without sounding like you’re either drunk or undergoing elocution lessons. The orange hats idea was something I came up with in university, where between the two options above it was unlikely I was undertaking elocution lessons at the time.

It works like this: In our lifetime we must see millions of people’s faces but never consciously remember them. Their physiognomy registered on some deep and inaccessible part of our brains, but unless there was a good reason to remember them, they were stored in the cerebral equivalent of the draw we all have, filled with chalk, Ping-Pong balls and unidentifiable keys. Wouldn’t it be interesting if somehow it were possible to get everyone who we had ‘perceived’ to wear an orange boater when in our field of vision and, on that hat, have a label saying where and when it was we’d seen them? Just think how many orange hats we’d start to see springing up around the place – just for us.

I’d worked out that this could be done through magic – not parlour tricks or acts of illusion, but actual, proper physics ignoring real magic. Sadly, I’ve still yet to work out how to bend the rules of reality, so instead this has become my fantasy augmented reality app.

For those that don’t know, augmented reality is a way of viewing the real world with contextual information added and viewed through a screen or heads up display systems (HUD). These were characterised in films like Terminator where Arnie’s baddy cyborg could view the world around him with additional information added to his field of vision (gun types, potential threat levels from random bikers – that sort of thing), but these days it’s more mundanely applied to adding things like competitor price details and nearest other vendors, when viewing bar codes or recognisable objects on the screen of a smartphone.

Although it’s still relatively new, the value of augmented reality is to add contextual information quickly sucked from remote data sources and present it in easy to understand ways alongside the object itself rather than searching the web and doing a manual comparison or depending on our own knowledge to phrase an enquiry, where augmented reality can supply new information we couldn’t have known to ask about. My (then) four year old son was also kept amused by my friend’s iPhone as he used its camera to scan a room where only through the magic (there it is again) of the device he could see fairies floating around as if this really were a true-seeing device (you have to keep up with the fairies when they float out of view) and zapped them.

So … have you seen anyone in an orange hat? Sadly, there is still a certain amount of magic necessary for this application to work – either that or some very sophisticated face recognition software and keeping an iPhone strapped to my forehead to record all that I might perceive.

Still, any very clever and very bored software geniuses out there are welcome to have a crack at it – just remember your old Long Dog would love to see the results and know just how many people DO wear orange hats, around the world.

The Augmented and Orange Hatted Long Dog

Part 1: In which a snowy day and poor mobile website usability result in near truancy.
Following 6^th January ‘s closure of my five year old son’s school because of bad weather, the next morning, as instructed, I checked the website of WessexFM, our local radio station, to see if the school was open or closed.

Avoiding waking the household and balancing the possibility of extra sleep against the anticipation of a bored boy bouncing off the walls while I worked, I used my phone to check their site. On a page clearly titled “School closures” I found my son’s school listed. Not to mistake yesterday’s information as today’s I checked at 07.30, 07.45, 08.00, 08.30, even 08.45 and reckoned that was pretty good responsible parental checking.

Those familiar with ‘having a Daddy look’ will not be surprised that following a late morning call from the school I checked the main website on my computer where the ‘open/closed’ status was instantly visible on the right of the screen and my son was hurriedly dispatched to school.

As you can see from the image, there’s no clue there was a status off the mobile screen to the right, so I’d taken this to mean that the school was still closed. Damn, bugger and bumhandles.End of part 1.

Bestselling author and self-styled ‘usability guru’ Jakob Nielsen wrote that the mobile web of 2009 was like the desktop web of 1998. With web enabled mobile devices becoming more available to mainstream consumers, users expect the same service from websites on their phones as they do from their desktops. When they don’t get it they’re just as likely to lend credence to the adage that “your competitor is only a back button away”.

Generation Y’ers who’ve never known life without the internet don’t see why mobile sites can’t be as good as desktop sites – after all, it’s Mum and Dad who are in offices or staying in, worrying about their children all evening, who’ve got time to spend sitting at desktops. This is the generation whose fear-mongered parents have bought their little darlings phones. While they’ve done it to offer late night taxi services to preserve their own sanity as well as their offspring’s safety, the web generation are using these devices to access web on the move (or at least from street corners and secret park-based cider dens). The time has run out for organisations to ‘get round to sorting out their websites’ and now the race is on to make sure they’re mobile accessible as well.

Back to the story…

Part 2: Where feedback is acknowledged and everyone lives happily ever after.
In attempt to keep my son and heir’s school record unblemished I emailed his teacher with the details of my mistake and the promise to contact the wicked WessexFM and tell them of their hanus crime. Which I did, fully expecting the usual silence as my complaint fell spinning into a void of corporate complaisance. I was pleasantly alarmed when the Station Manager himself emailed me this:

“I have spoken to our web team and here is their reply…………

‘We’ve had a look at this and agree it could be interpreted incorrectly on a small device and have made a few changes…

• The “Closures” page now reads “School Status”
• We’ve added a line of text to the page highlighting that the page is offering both “Open” and “Closed” information
• On the main schools status we’ve added a filter so only open/closed schools can be viewed

These updates are in place now and will hopefully make it clear for anyone using a mobile to look at the pages.’

I sincerely hope that your son doesn’t incur a truancy mark as it is clear that this was an innocent mistake.”

How quick was that!??! Checking the emails I can tell you:  Four hours. Not only did they willingly accept user feedback, but made simple changes that improved the whole user experience. It’s these little tweaks that remind me of the article “How one button cost a website $300 million”. End of Part 2.

And the morals of this story?

• Explain it’s you that messed up and your son doesn’t get into trouble with his teacher
• Mobile website usability is still poor.
• Users: Don’t trust sites browsed on your mobiles unless you know you’re using the proper mobile version.
• Designers and developers: Make sure you use ‘liquid layouts’  so that they expand and contract to fill the size of the user’s browser; don’t depend on mobile device’s scroll bars to appear (they don’t always); detect if users are accessing the site through a mobile and present the information appropriately.
• User test and amend your work – Repeat until it works properly.
• And lastly … a round of applause for WessexFM, for listening to a concerned father / listener / user and being smart and agile enough to make changes to support your website’s users. Bravo!

The (mobile) Long Dog