sinéad's lifestream

Psychology is all about understanding, explaining, and predicting human behavior. We are fascinated by our own behaviour and those of us around us. By understanding behaviour we hope to gain insights into how our minds work and perhaps how to change our undesirable behaviour. An understanding of human behaviour can also lead to the design of good software, hardware and even guide policy writing relating to technology.

These days technology like the iPhone helps us to track our own personal habits, Twitter gives us an insight into popular topics and analytics give us fascinating web usage statistics. Whilst technology has greatly enhanced our ability to collect interesting data about human behaviour, it’s important to realise that using such data to make conclusions about why we behave in such a way is unwise without investigating the differences between causality and correlation. Take for example the problematic question of whether the Internet is addictive or if addicts use the Internet.

The Relationship Between Psychology and Technology

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Possibly the coolest free iPhone app since, well, forever. Logitech seem to have taken a leaf out of Joby’s book (I discussed this a while back in the post called “Novelty vs. Practicality: iPhone Apps for Effective Brand Awareness“) and released a free app that will have some longevity in your app collection.

The Logitech Touch Mouse app links your iPhone or iPod Touch and your Mac or PC using your wireless network, allowing you to use the touchscreen as a mouse pointer and keyboard. All you need to do is download the app itself as well Logitech Touch Mouse Server (it sounds more complicated then it actually is) the associated piece of software for your computer. Then you simply link the two by inputting your computer’s IP address into the app on your iPhone or iPod Touch. You don’t even have to worry about figuring out your IP address as the Logitech Touch Mouse Server software will find it for you.

I’ll definitely get some use out of this. I always have my iPhone in my pocket, and being able to control my PC using it is a nice feature that I was never bothered to try out because I would have had to pay for it. Granted I already have a remote and wireless mouse/keyboard, but the iPhone, like I said, is already always in my pocket, giving it another function certainly appeals to me.

It works perfectly for me running 64bit Windows 7 Pro and an iPhone 3G.

I’m surprised the phrase “Couldn’t sleep last night.” has yet to trend on Twitter, it’s certainly a common tweet I see in the mornings during my commute to work. Not only that, flicking back through the wee hours of my stream it’s also pretty common to see “Still can’t get to sleep.” appearing at 3am.

I would argue that if you’re tweeting, you’re certainly not trying to sleep or doing what’s good for your body in preparation for shutting down for a few hours. I myself have suffered some restless nights and made a real effort to combat the problem, rather than accepting it and suffering through more zombie like days in the office.

Turn Off Your Computer 30 Minutes Before Sleep

If you’re suffering from occasional difficulty getting to sleep at night you should consider the effects of using a computer late at night. Studies have shown that the brain remains stimulated after using a computer (or watching television), which in turn makes your sleep restless. The simple act of shutting down the computer 30 minutes before you’re planning on going to sleep can help relax you.

Research has also shown that the bright light of your computer monitor (let’s also not forget that mobile phone screens also produce a bright light) suppresses the production of our sleep hormone melatonin. If you are suffering from an especially bad case of insomnia then try shutting down the computer at least two hours before planning on going to bed.

Though you may enjoy the calming effects of using the computer, your brain on the other hand is thinking “light = daytime”. Staring at your computer screen means keeping yourself alert and wide-awake and returning online to complain about your inability to sleep is simply aggravating the problem.

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Another request from a final year MSc Cyberpsychology student, it would be great if you could fill out his survey for his post graduate thesis and also forward this on to any Irish person between the ages of 18 and 40.

I’m Mark Siggins – final year Cyberpsychology student in IADT and I’m looking for some volunteers for my MSc. Project. Its a study of Irish mobile phone usage and what happens when people are separated from their mobile phones. I’ve set up an online survey to get suitable participants (You must own a mobile phone, be aged 18-40 and live in Ireland).

A link to the questionnaire can be found here.

The online part takes about ten minutes and of course all replies will be confidential. The second part of the study will involve analysing your phone use for a 12 hour period – it’s explained in more detail in the questionnaire, but if anyone has any questions or concerns them please contact me at this address – siggins.mark@gmail.com

Thank you for your assistance.

Mark is looking for people to fill out his questionnaire and also for anyone willing to participate in an experiment – to go 12 hours without their mobile phone. If you’re up for the challenge I think this would be an eye opening experience. Of course, you can still fill out the survey without taking part in the experiment, as frightening as the thought might be.

I’m very much looking forward to the results of this research and hope to be able to publish a summary here when Mark has submitted his thesis to the college.

When I graduated from my degree I thought I’d change the world.

I was ready to be a part of the next big technological breakthrough and I would be on hand to make sure it was as user friendly as possible and universal in its design and truly beneficial in its functionality. The prototypes I had project managed and been a part of during my undergrad course in Psychology Applied to I.T had all been focused on being helpful in their own little way – gadgets, websites or instructional programs that certainly weren’t playthings. With my knowledge of psychology I was prepared to take on the technology world and make it less frustrating and remove the exclusivity barrier around it. I was excited to finally be a part of an iterative design process that would actually reach the end – a product! a website! an application! anything! I wanted to be a part of something good and wholesome. I wanted to be able to stand up and say “I worked on that!” when someone was showing off their amazing new smartphone or trying out a new feature on a social networking site. I wanted to be a part of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, to be a part of a user experience research team into the latest and greatest of what was yet to come.

I was young and naive.

In the last three years I’ve worked a steady full-time job in the civil service (that I’d give up in a heartbeat for a chance to work or intern in any usability related field) and been awarded a first in my masters in Cyberpsychology. Yet I still feel like I’m just getting older and going nowhere fast.

So for 2010 I’ve set myself a serious ultimatum.
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A quick request from a final year MSc Cyberpsychology student, it would be great if you could fill out his quick survey for his post graduate thesis and also forward this on to any Irish Facebook users over the age of 24.

My name is Graham and I am doing a thesis on Facebook usage. The following is a link to a secure survey that I have made, asking basic Facebook usage questions and also incorporating a short personality questionnaire.

Open The Survey In A New Window

The whole survey will take no more than five minutes to do and is completely confidential; I can assure you that it is also anonymous. You need only type your initials. I would really appreciate it if you could find the time to do it, as I am struggling to get the required numbers. The only stipulation is that you are Irish, over 24, and have a facebbok profile. Thanking you in advance.

Graham Gilbert
Final Year MSc Cyberpsychology student at IADT

I’m rather interested in the results of this study and hopefully will be able to share the results of Graham’s study with you next year.

Amazon Mobile UK for iPhone was launched recently, similar to Google Goggles on Android phones, there’s a visual search option within this application called Amazon Remembers. Esentially it allows you to take a snapshot of any item and then attempts to match it with a product listed on the Amazon website. Pretty cool, right? I tried it out extensively and it seem to work perfectly with book and DVD covers and is okay with common household items too.

Wanting to push the application to it’s limits (a.k.a break it) I started experimenting with taking photos of people, to see how much everyone was “worth” – thus turning the search into a game of Top Trumps for Faces using Amazon Remembers. Some of the search results were pretty interesting. For example, my lovely girlfriend in her dressing gown was listed as a “Dark Grey Wool Womens Winter Coat” retailing at £49.99, whereas I was listed as a “Wooden Nose shaped Spectacles holder” retailing at £9.99 which meant she was worth far more than me, so I totally lost the game! However, it was a win all round because that made us both LOL ourselves silly.

Hopefully one of these days I’ll find someone with a lower Amazon Remembers face value than myself, I tried it on my Dad and it found a “Russell Collection Long Sleeve Easycare Fitted Shirt” retailing at £17.99, doh!

Non-digital brands offering free iPhone apps isn’t something new. Back in November I posted a short “homage” to the Denny iFry (2.5 stars), and I’ve tried out quite a few of these, like the Magic Coke Bottle (2.5 stars) or Lightsaber Unleashed (2.5 stars). All of these free apps are novelty at best, as you can see by their user ratings. Personally I don’t like to clutter my iPhone with apps I don’t regularly use, so these novelty apps are usually downloaded and played with for a week, maybe less.

I would argue that the key to using free iPhone apps as an effective brand awareness exercise, or as a way to drive physical sales, is not novelty usage.

Take for example the new app from the photography accessories company Joby, who primarily sell Gorillapods – flexible tripods for cameras. They now offer these tripods for mobile devices and with the launch of their new range they’ve made a free app to accompany these accessories. The Gorillacam app has an array of features you’d expect to pay for. It’s certainly not a one trick pony. It has a shot timer, time lapse, rapid-shot mode and a bubble level. There’s this great “press anywhere” mode too, that lets you press the touchscreen anywhere in order to take a photo. This app makes self portraits and photos with your friends really easy, something that’s virtually impossible with the standard iPhone camera app.

I can see myself using the Gorillacam app over and over again. I’ve already placed it beside my other camera apps – apps which I willingly paid for. I would have paid for the GorillaCam app too. I didn’t have to pay for it and in exchange I’ll be seeing the brandname Joby over and over again. I’ll also be constantly reminded of how if I bought a Gorillapod for my iPhone, I could fully utilize the brilliant features of this free app.

I may have initially been triggered with a desire for a sausage sandwich or a can of Coke, but with no motivation to use either app over and over again, the trigger was never reinforced again. With Gorillacam, I’ll be reminded of my interest in their products every time I happily use that free app.

Now that is an effective free, branded, iPhone app.

I seem to be in a minority group that sees the potential that the new twitter re-tweet function brings. For someone that has worked on a method of highlighting Irish tweets for the benefit of non-twitter users and anyone offline for a long period of time, it’s possible that I’m able to see the potential a little more clearly.

The biggest benefit of the new retweet function is how it adds a method of highlighting localised trends. If 20 of your twitter friends retweet the same message you won’t see it 20 times, but you’ll see 20 “likes” beneath it instead, giving weight to the content of the message. It also stops your stream being diluted by the same message over and over again, which can be frustrating. And at the end of the day, if you’ve not had much time to use twitter you’ve got the “retweets” section to conveniently show you the highlights you’ve missed from your own personal stream that day.

The retweet feature also takes into consideration attribution; the original composer of the tweet appears in your stream and this is a wonderful way of discovering new twitter users. In essence it’s a solution to the fix @replies issue twitter had, everyone was so angry that they wouldn’t have an organic method of discovering new users to follow, now you do.

The other great thing about retweets is that it adds an extra dimension to keeping track of the tweets YOU find most interesting. If like me you use the favorite feature in twitter for something else entirely than the ability to view “retweets by you” will help keep track of the tweets you found important enough to share.

Overall I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the service and will continue to do so. I find it most interesting how, just like with Facebook users, change is scary and new but after awhile everyone gets used to it and moves on to being mad about something else entirely.

Over coffee yesterday Darragh pointed out that he didn’t “Do the Flickr thing.” and I tried to explain why I thought he should. For someone that takes at least one photo a day and posts it to Twitter via a mobile photo sharing site he could greatly benefit from having somewhere like Flickr to permanently store and share his photos.  If it’s interesting enough to tweet then it shouldn’t be allowed to get lost and unshared after the tweet has washed away in the stream.

I myself have been using Twitpic to post the occasional interesting photo from my iPhone, but only when I’m on the move and I usually post these same photos to Flickr at a later date. Recently I’ve had much more free time to take photos with my “real” camera, and many of these photos are now on Flickr. Sometimes I’ll post a favourite photo to my blog and then link to the rest (rather than posting all of them as a long blog post). The reason I do this is the ability to tag, edit, archive and view stats – but there is so much more to it than that.

Flickr allows me to have a space online independent from my blog, my twitter, and my social networking. I have control on how they are displayed and archived (and can be as meticulous about this as I need), I can tell stories that go with the images, I can make notes to focus your attention to something special hidden within, and when I’m feeling nostalgic I can go back and review my own photostream based on tags I’ve created (see my tagcloud here). I can upload the well taken photos, and the badly taken ones too – if they say something that should be retold, they belong on my photostream.

However, what I really want to do with Flickr is share my photos, and see yours too. Today for instance I checked up on David’s travels in Beijing, Rory’s travels in Japan, I also met John’s gorgeous family, laughed at the bizarre mannequin Steph spotted, day-dreamed about Killiney Bay and wondered about the mind of an artist. Flickr can be a wonderful sneak peek into the lives of people you know and even strangers you might one day meet.

At the moment I only have 56 contacts (compare this to the almost 300 people I follow on twitter). I want more.  I want to follow your interesting lives, I want to comment on the things you’ve done and places you’ve seen. Almost every day I login to Flickr and check my contact’s uploads, the same way I login to Google Reader to check my RSS feeds – the difference is, photos can tell a totally different story, and can share the stories we don’t have the time to tell. Many of us lead busy lives, leaving us with not enough time or patience to blog as regularly as we would like, photoblogging is a taken a bit too seriously, but Flickr is a great way of sharing your life online without too much of a time or energy strain.

Plenty of bloggers that I read regularly will occasionally post their photos, but I always wonder about the photos that weren’t “good enough” for a blog post. Also, some bloggers are far better photographers than they realise and it’s a travesty that their incredible photos can disappear, lost in their blog post archives.

If you’re reading this and use Flickr add me. If you’re reading this and you post photos somewhere else, open a Flickr account and let us follow your life, taking a peek with each new upload.