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Communicating in Wales: design and architecture for mobile applications over poor connectivity
The document discusses the challenges of mobile application design and user experience in areas with poor connectivity, using a personal experience of walking across Wales to highlight these issues. It emphasizes the need for better architecture, infrastructure, and policy to support connectivity, particularly for education and local communities. Key insights reveal that current technology often exacerbates connectivity problems rather than alleviating them.
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Communicating in Wales: design and architecture for mobile applications over poor connectivity
- 1. Communicating in Wales: designand architecture for mobile applications over poor connectivity Alan Dix http://alanwalks.wales/
- 2. Tiree Tiree Tech Wave 26-30Oct 2017 University of Birmingham
- 3. today I amnot talking about … • physicality and product design • long tail of small data • community technology • intelligent internet interfaces • digital humanities • creativity and Bad Ideas • visualisation and sampling • situated displays • virtual crackers and slow time • modelling dreams and regret • the emergence of self
- 4. not to mention… REF
- 5. I am talkingabout … connectivity … or the lack of it!
- 6. poor connectivity three aspects: •user experience • architecture and infrastructure • policy … but first a little about a walk
- 8. walking Wales 1058 miles(1700 km) around around the margins of Wales
- 9. Welsh Coast Path openedMay 2012 linking existing paths a single way marked route with Offa’s Dyke encircles Wales three full traversals in 2012 (one running)
- 10. vision personal encircling, encompassing, pilgrimage,homecoming, practical IT for the walker & IT for local communities philosophical reflections on walking and space, locality and identity research personal agenda and living lab
- 11. no hard boundaries research– practice personal – philosophical 19th century science or Mediaeval?
- 13. walking Wales technology me: “whattechnology do you use?” walker: “a map”
- 14. the best technology! voicerecorder real buttons!! use it while moving
- 15. while walking active camera, recorder passive GPS,ECG, EDA when stopped iPad, blog, flickr, social media, uploading data before/after web for planning new contacts on Twitter, email reporting, analysis while walking other walkers occasional friends/family meeting when stopped shop keepers, B&B proprietors, chance meetings talks, visits before/after family and friends, readers, researchers, future walkers social sphere technical sphere
- 16. data location GPX ... batteries... sporadic signals .... bio-sensing ECG (heart), EDA (skin) and accelerometers audio and images in the moment text after the event implicit explicit
- 18. user experience connectivity problems Iexpected it to be bad ... but it was worse
- 19. ... not arecent issue ...
- 20. not just jerkymovies ... Software Update 2.3Gb security patch
- 21. software makes itworse ... Twitter 140 chars ... but unusable with poor signal email slow but works – 1970s technology Flickr uploader freezes on poor connections ... even in Paris! ✔ ✗ ✗
- 23.
- 24. timescales ms secs minshours days local interaction + syncronisation store & forward hand-eye coordination split-feedback syntactic/semantic local feedback pre-compute request response session
- 25. vocabulary … justwords? bandwidth … how much delay … how long jitter … how variable
- 26. glitches frequency length of drop mssecs mins hours days ms secs mins hours days total failure jitter intermittent connectivity glitches
- 27. principles store and forward …in an age of instant restarting after problems connectivity-aware applications also cost, energy, etc. e.g. rich media
- 29.
- 30. recall … software makesit worse ... Twitter 140 chars ... but unusable with poor signal Flickr uploader freezes on poor connections ... even in Paris! N.B. both as in 2013
- 31.
- 32. Twitter – why? code(on start) – read news-stream – build UI – allow tweets
- 33.
- 34.
- 35. 5 pages later… $ wc one-tweet.json 163 304 4468 https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/statuses/home_timeline
- 36. Twitter – why? code(on start) – read news-stream – build UI – allow tweets could be – asynchronous load – lightweight version of API 140 chars = 5-10K in JSON/XML API 50 items (server performance) 50 x 5-10 K = 0.25–0.5 Mbyte … on 2 bars of GSM!
- 37. Flickr experience on desktop: –select required files – categorise and tag on send – starts to work – failure – some files uploaded, but untagged – no ability to restart
- 38. Flickr– why? code (onsend) – upload all images – tag all images could be – build to-do list – for each item in to-do list • upload and tag – on restart: pick up last to-do-list … on fail exit but save to-do list on fail exit
- 39. software architecture asynchronous interactions distributedsystem not thin client – synchronisation technology – inc. partial sync. think local connectivity – – e.g. Qraqrbox (cf. www paper) think failure / restart – e.g. to-do list based coding
- 40. protocols IP slow start –resilient to nuclear war … but not Tiree or Wales coast DNS failure caching why glitches??? router overload ?
- 42. policy the net privilege ofthe rich or service for all
- 43. always connected? mobile signal absentor weak broadband ... not so broad masts point to sea not land ... yachts = money https://explore.ee.co.uk/coverage-checker
- 44. infrastructure or privilege? whatis the greatest British invention?
- 45. infrastructure or privilege? 19thcentury – Penny Post the amazing invention revolutionised communication Today – Internet 2013 – 50% of Welsh schools said poor connectivity hampers education 2017 – 7 out of 20 worst connected areas in UK … … in Wales http://www.victorianweb.org/history/pennypos.html
- 46. nudge, nudge mobile mastcharging – similar to European roaming – change cost-benefit for companies – allow more community masts ISPs & local communities – Tiree local traffic goes to London and back!
- 47. glitches? no official wordfor it! => not in agreements not in contracts not noticed … … unless you have to live with it
- 49. in summary user experience –on-going issue – impact for individuals, business and education policy – root cause – privilege or public service? – vocabulary matters architecture – good design ameliorates poor infrastructure