Raise your head

It is quite possible that you are reading this text from a smartphone, If so, do me a favour, raise your head and look around for half a minute.

What have you noticed? What has caught your attention? Have you noticed how the other people on the bus or underground are behaving? Have you observed how they use their other mobile phones? If they have smartphoneIf they are watching the shrews? If they are asleep?

It is very likely that in this short space of time you have noticed: the 10 or 12 people who, like you, do not look up from their mobile phones. The lady who sits next to you and plays solitaire or snake with his old, worn and functional Nokia. The man who holds and spartanly reads the 1 kg bestseller lined with newsprint. The sudoku girl from the free newspaper. The young man reading sheet music while his hand plays an invisible piano in the air...

Apart from the rewarding experience of reconnecting with the real world, it is quite possible that, by observing your surroundings, you have come up with a solution for the location of that darned button that gave you so many errors in the user test. Maybe it inspired an idea for a new app, or you simply wasted time doing nothing for 30 seconds.

What a waste, isn't it? Half a minute without taking advantage of the time between journeys.

I don't know about you, but I've missed many a bus because I didn't realise it was coming and raised my hand to warn the driver. I've gone past the metro stop. I've almost been run over several times because I kept looking at the screen while walking... But what's worse, by not raising my head, perhaps I've missed many opportunities to observe the environment, to discover and to leave my mind blank to simply settle the ideas of the day.

As User Experience professionals we have to try to moderate the cognitive impulse of the screen and re-encounter with the habit of ethnographic observation, of the time-line real life, which is the final destination of our work.

 

More entries from We