Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

Jott is a phone service which will do all types of internet-y things such as update your calendar, send emails and texts, create to-dos and notes, and more.

Jott connects to and explands lots of different existing web services, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Remember the Milk.  They will also read RSS feeds to you.

(Thanks Chris!)

During the last week, I’ve had a variety of people try out the sign-up and contact making aspects of Pigeon.  Beyond testing technical implemenation, I did of research into how to talk about the system.

People generally thought that the sign-up time was appropriate.  Most didn’t want to spend more time than they did completing sign up.  I’m still considering if and how profile information should be collected to make searching for contacts easier.

There were some issues in understanding the voice prompts, especially the phrase “member number”.  I may change that to “Pigeon number.”  The chat excerpt below was discussing this issue.

Some users were given the system as is, but I gave later ones some context, telling them that “Pigeon gives you 2 minutes to tell your world what you’re up to.”  I want a really catchy phrase that can sum things up quickly, and I want to be able to talk about the system in more detail clearly. One of the harder things for users to understand without that prompting was that their messages are available to all of their contacts.

I think a set of instructions should be played as soon as sign up in complete with the option to skip the instructions if desired.  These instructions could also be avaliable as the last choice on the main menu.

I also lengthed the amount of avaliable wait time for entering a desired member number, because as a tester said “what if they don’t know you need a number?”

ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré announced in New York that worldwide mobile subscribers are likely to reach the 4 billion mark before the end of this year.