I got my pebble a day before SXSW Interactive. Good timing. It was a snap to setup, and with a single charge I was on my way.

There has been a lot about the “iWatch” recently – from Samsung confirming they’re launching a watch to recent posts around what we’d want out of a “iWatch” to current “smart” watch providers like Sony adding features as fast as they can.

I came across an article from earlier in the year “The UX Community Needs to Start Paying Attention to Android” – and that got me thinking. WIth both Android and Windows Phone, I don’t dislike them on principle – I’m just happy with my iPhone. But neither really have an iPod Touch like version that’s cheap enough for me to play around with, while keeping my iPhone as my primary device.

Even with Google’s Android operating system running on 75% of the smartphones shipped in the third quarter of 2012 – Android has a usage problem. People are buying them as basic phones because the carriers are giving them away, but even with current low usage, I do agree that as Designers we should be aware of all platforms, and be able to design for them equally. And as passionate, curious individuals, we might learn something new.

Over the holidays I came across this:

A HTC One V, running Android ICS (which is currently the #2 Android OS by usage). It’s locked to Virgin Mobile for cell service, but unlocked as a wi-fi device. And there is no mandatory connection to cell service needed. Just switch it over to Airplane Mode, turn on the wi-fi and GPS, and you’re good to go!

So for $69 (Amazon deal-of-the-day at the time), I got a Android based iPod Touch, that I can play with online and off (as long as there is wi-fi around) – and I’ve been playing with it. I’m trying to replace my iPhone while at home, and I have to say it does a good job. Most of the apps I regularly use are available (I think I’m only missing Byline for RSS, and of course FaceTime), the OS is fast enough, and there are some interesting design details that I would like to see on my iPhone.

• This is a great way to get-to-know a device, and learn its advantages and quirks.
• And as a father of mobile device loving kids, this could also be a great replacement for an iPod Touch, at a fraction of the cost, and if it lasts – it could one day be a pay-as-you-go phone for your kiddo.
• It also makes a great kiddo-camera – with easy ways to upload your photos straight from the camera.

So as pay-as-you go devices get down to second device level prices, now’s the time to take the plunge, and try to see if you can replace your device for part of your day. Do it for the love of Design.

Here are some current pay-as-you go deals to get you into a different Mobile OS:

$100 HTC One V (4.0 ICS)

$199 Nokia Lumia 710 (Windows Phone)

$70 LG Optimus Slider (2.3 Gingerbread)

$100 LG Optimus Elite (2.3 Gingerbread)

$169 Samsung Exhibit II (2.3 Gingerbread)

$99 Samsung Illusion (2.3 Gingerbread)

How can you determine if something is worth building? Recently at the Warm Gun Conference Instagram founder Mike Krieger talked about what they called “The Wizard Of Oz Techniques For Social Prototyping” – what I’ve heard called “404 Testing” – where he said:

Krieger says him and Systrom tested an early version of a feature which would notify you when friends joined the service. Instead of building it out, they manually sent people notifications “like a human bot” saying ‘your friend has joined.’ It turned out not to be useful. “We wrote zero lines of Python, so we had zero lines to throw away.”

What could be a better way to find out if something was truly valuable to your customers – then to fake it. There are a couple stories, one dating back to early computing days when a company wanted to see if they could get admins to use voice dictation software. At the time, this was a very expensive project, with huge technology hurdles. Before starting to invest in this project, they decided to run a test. They installed a “working” prototype into an office, only it wasn’t real. While the admins talked, someone was listening and typing back what they said.

After some testing they found that the admins didn’t like the product, that it was taking away from their tasks, and they preferred other methods for input. This would have been a multi-million dollar project, that most likely would have flopped. They spent almost nothing to find out this product had very little value to their target market.

I’ve thought about how this could work for smaller feature sets – and then came across this:

It’s from a new travel site called: http://www.mrarlo.com/

While at first you could be thinking “lame, why not just add a under construction gif to the page?” – but if they’re tracking the clicks for this – they’ll quickly determine what % of visitors would be interested in the feature, and is it worth the investment to build out.

When asking customers if they would like feature A or B, they’ll usually say “how about both?” – to them features are free. They don’t know the development that goes into something as seemly simple as “neighborhood” for instance.

404 testing is a great method for finding value, from a single feature to an entire product. Remember, development is expensive and will keep you from delivering features your customers really want.

Tomorrow I will be speaking at the Dallas Digital Summit in the User Experience & Design track @ 4:10.

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I’ll be speaking about Lean UX (and related topics) – dubbed: Fail Fast, Learn Fast, Move Fast: My UX journey to move faster. I’ll post my slides right after the talk (because you know I’ll be editing them until I’m on stage

The tickets are currently sold out, but if you’re there be sure to say hello! And if you’re not, you can follow along #DDSum12.

This year at Big Design I spoke about Designing for Sensors 
& the Future of Experiences. This is something that’s near and dear to my heart as we move forward into an exciting time as Designers.

As Android gains ground, iOS may not be enough for some brands. And with limited budgets and development constraints, sometimes you can’t give your app the full “Android Treatment” it should deserve. I’ve put together a mini guide to go over some common ways to get your iOS app over to Android, while keeping it consistent (mostly) with today’s Android patterns.

This past week I was able to speak to a large room of developers at the Gravity Center, who were all there to learn more about developing for Kinect. Which is really developing for sensors – of course Kinect development is much more exciting than sensor development You could also say it’s designing for NUI – Natural User Interfaces, ways you’d expect to interact with interfaces if we didn’t have things like mice in the way. I was asked to speak, as a Designer (and the only one in the room) on the trends of Kinect interfaces, and give my perspective.

I’m Gowalla user #91. They’re at about 2 million now. But, alas… they are no more. I’ve been easing into the idea for months now – my slow decline in usage started with a series of events: taking away my (yes my) icons, demoting check-ins, and my social graph moving on to other apps/sites. Gowalla is one of my first true “must have services” that have disappeared. Why am I sad, because Gowalla was meaningful to me.

With Steve passing, my RSS reader and twitter stream filled up with stories of how Steve (or a product created under Steve) had made life better. Or that he inspired, and challenged people in their lives to do something big. To do something more interesting, to strive for great – or insanely great. I’ve been an Apple owner for some time, and owe most of my career to Apple’s products. Not that I couldn’t do great things on a PC, but something about the Mac – creating great things just comes naturally on something that is itself great.

The first thing I’ve really been excited about in facebook for some time – the timeline. I’ve always been interested in showing my data in more interesting ways, and as the owner of much of my data, facebook is ripe to take advantage of it. While others have been trying to visualize parts your life, you really won’t need to look much further any longer. Let’s take a look at what my data looks like in the new timeline.