jawbone

#53 James & Per quantify themselves

James and Per are both fans of quantified self. In this show we take a look at what quantified self and life logging are. We chat about some of the potential benefits plus some of the challenges that surface from a UX and user perspective. Is quantified self ready for mainstream, or is it still a play thing of early adopters and gadget geeks?

(Listening time 37 mins)

References:

Per wearing a Jawbone UP and a Fitbit Flex:
flex-and-up

Transcript:

James: Hello and welcome to episode 53 of UX Podcast with me James Royal-Lawson.

Per: And me Per Axbom.

James: It’s a little bit odd when we do that the other way around. Not as often we do it that way.

Per: No, that’s true. I usually start off. It feels kind of weird.

James: It’s like wearing someone else’s underwear.

Per: Yeah. It’s August 6th of 2013. It’s a Tuesday today, I think. I have been working a bit that I’m off again and I’m actually at the summer house now.

James: I’m at Beantin HQ.

Per: Yeah. I’m sitting in a really hot car because this is the only place I could find that would be silent.

James: You’re in your car!

Per: I’m in my car in the passenger seat because I have five kids I’m taking care of. Well, two of them are mine at the summer house here. So it’s really loud.

James: Beantin HQ is 29 degrees at the moment. I’ve got two, maybe three kids. I don’t really know, to look after. I’m clearly not doing it very well.

Per: Instead we are recording.

James: Exactly. Well, OK, let’s jump into it. First of all, welcome back to all of you in Sweden who have bothered to start working again and is starting to listen to the show.

Per: Right. A lot of people are returning this week and next week …

James: of our Swedish audience..

Per: Yeah.

James: …We can see that they roll back into work now and start listening again. So, hello there. Welcome back. Today though, we’re going to be talking about quantified self and life logging. What’s all that about?

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Per: Well, interesting that you should ask James because I think we’ve talked about a bit before, you and I, about life logging and what’s the difference between life logging and self quantification. The gist of it is that you gather as much data about something as you possibly can to like make out trends and behaviour of yourself or in trips you’re making, your weight, whatever.

So usually when you talk about quantified self, you’re talking about data that you’re collecting about yourself and your body and your behaviour but life logging goes even beyond that. I think one of the hugely massive great examples that’s making the rounds and it should have been out by now is the Swedish innovative Kickstarter project Memoto where you actually have a wearable camera. You could even argue that that’s quantifying yourself but it’s also quantifying your life and what you’re seeing around you.

So that’s a camera that you attach to your clothes and it’s taking a snapshot. I don’t know what it is actually. It’s maybe every 30 seconds something. Yeah, something like that. So once you start doing all this life logging, you’re starting to see trends and behaviour because then you can see maybe from the photos. You see what you’re eating or how much you’re exercising and the gadgets that you and I will be talking a lot about today, the wrist bands that we wear to monitor our sleep and see how much we moved during the night. You can connect that and how badly you sleep, to exercise, and how much you’re moving around where you’re checking in.

Sometimes you see trends which could be quite interesting and that’s the incentive or the appeal for people to actually realize stuff that they haven’t realized before about themselves, but also to be able to look back I guess to previous behaviour and previous data about yourself that has changed over time.

James: Yeah. I’m just going to have to go and shut the window.

Per: Oh, absolutely.

James: I can hear the kids that I’m meant to be looking after far too much. I don’t want to hear them at all. So just hold on a second.

Per: OK.

[Pause]

James: So sounds are gone. Yeah, well for me, the quantified self aspect is when you gain  insights from the data you gathered by various means whether it’s weighing yourself or taking pictures every 30 seconds or counting how many steps you’ve done and so on.

Per: You could argue even then that it’s a variant of behavioural therapy that to be able to change your own behaviour you need to become aware of your own behaviour and that’s the basis of behavioural therapy. So what you’re doing here is automating that using a device of some sort. Well, it can actually be that you’re entering data yourself but as long as you’re doing it consistently over time.

James: Well yes, exactly. I think it’s just – like all statistics, you’ve got to be careful to make sure that you understand what you’re reading and what it is that you’re looking at. So for self-improvement or the behavioural therapy side of things, I mean if you look at a chart that tells you you’ve had this much sleep, and you believe it’s correct, you’re going to be changing your behaviour best on that information.

Per: Right.

James: And whether it’s correct or not is something that’s questionable.

Per: Yes.

James: Or how correct is it.

Per: Exactly, how correct is it and what type of conclusions should you be drawing from the data.

James: Yeah. One of the reasons I mentioned just that is because I have a Jawbone UP band.

Per: Yes.

James: Which I wear on my wrist. It says – looking down at the wrist, realizing it’s not there. Where is it? Then I’ve just remembered now, I put it in my pocket, which is a thing in itself actually that I have to put in the pocket around that, but I will get to that. Now I have a Jawbone UP band I wear and I keep it on during the night as well and it measures steps during the day and it measures how little I move during the night and from how little I’ve moved or how much I’ve moved, it judges whether I’ve been sleeping deeply, lightly or awake.

Per: Right.

James: Now this produces lovely little graphs. I think the Fitbit Flex that you have, you know collection, does a similar thing. It measures how little you move and produces nice little sleep graphs.

Per: Exactly, basically the same output from these different devices actually.

James: Yeah.

Per: To be clear, I have the Jawbone UP as well before and we both had it while we were travelling to UX Lx. So we were sort of comparing the data we were getting from that as well at that time, which was really interesting.

James: It was very interesting because we were sharing a hotel room as well so we had very similar sleep patterns because we were going out together and so we’re waking up together.

Per: Oh my god. We’re going there again.

James: Oh, really. Anyhow, what you could see was that you Per for example, you actually – my wife as well. You’re very still during the night.

Per: Yeah, exactly.

James: So even though you’re awake, it doesn’t register you’re awake because you’re not moving enough and my wife, when she was using hers at first, she ended up getting to the habit of when she woke up during the night, she would shake her arm so that the UP knew she was awake. So it would register an awake moment.

Per: So basically telling the – that’s how you talk to your arm band. You shake it …

James: Yeah, which is silly really. But no, but for her that was her pattern of sleep. So to try and improve the graph, she was doing this kind of – she was having to work a little bit extra to get better data but that’s a learning thing. when the app presents the graph to you, it doesn’t really – there isn’t really so much talk about it’s inaccuracy or potential inaccuracy. The marketing and the drive of a lot of these quantified self things is this is how much sleep you’ve got. This is how many steps you’ve taken.

Per: Yeah. When you open up the app, it actually tells you you’ve been awake seven times this night.

James: Yeah.

Per: And the funny thing about that is that a lot of people are going to take it literally because it is presented literally.

James: It is presented literally.

Per: Yeah, and that pisses a lot of people off and they realize, “Well, I haven’t been awake that many times.”

James: Exactly.

Per: And you have to start interpreting the data. Well, that means that you’ve moved around quite a lot perhaps seven times during the night and you may and may not have woken up specifically during those times.

James: You want to peel back a little of the UI effectively and say OK, when it says this, it really means this. My wife, she actually stopped using her Jawbone UP for two months, the last couple of months, because she just got so disappointed that it wasn’t really telling her how much sleep she was getting and I explained to her in my usual way. Well, of course it’s not going to know exactly how much sleep you’ve gained because you haven’t got electrodes attached to your head. The only way you can tell exactly how much of six different levels of sleep you’ve got and the four different types of REM sleep and so on is by the electrodes attached to your head. This is just a kind of gyroscope that’s attached to your wrist. Of course it doesn’t know.

Per: But I mean most people won’t know that and I mean they will trust the app, what it’s telling them, because this is a new thing. It’s a great new device. It’s being marketed that way. It doesn’t have a big disclaimer when you open a box that – don’t trust the data. It tells you that this will measure sleep patterns. It will measure the number of steps you’re taking – and that’s it.

James: You had both on your wrist for a while, the Jawbone UP and the Fitbit Flex.

Per: Yes, I did.

James: So there you got to see how each of them has different formulas you could say for judging what kind of movement is a step.

Per: Yes. When I walked more than 10,000 or 12,000 steps per day, usually the Jawbone UP was almost 1500, 2000 steps less than the other one. So I mean that’s how you can tell that they’re not really exact and usually you probably have to calibrate these to your own walking style, your own gait, which is really interesting as well. I mean you can’t take a device and be sure that it will fit with your body and the way that you move around and if you’re – and as we’ve both noticed I think is that if you’re riding in a car or riding a bicycle and stuff like that, it does register something and sometimes not as much as other times. So many different aspects of this that can affect the data that you’re seeing.

James: Shopping trolleys Per.

Per: Shopping trolleys, oh that’s interesting.

James: I realized that when I do shopping which sometimes can take an hour and a half, I just get almost a flat line on my graph of how many steps I’ve taken even though I’ve been walking for an hour and a half.

Per: It doesn’t register.

James: And that’s because my arms are holing the trolley.

Per: So you will have to start walking with only one arm pushing the trolley.

James: So you put your Jawbone UP in your pocket which is why mine was in my pocket now because we went shopping this morning and I put it in my pocket while we were shopping. So again, you have to learn an interaction in order to fix the limitations of this particular device. I mean OK, if we’re talking about the – what is it? Withing scale, the Wi-Fi scale that can measure your weights and it transfers up to the app it’s on. That’s a little bit different thing because with the scale, I expect it to be 100 percent accurate when it comes to weighing me. Although as we know, if you weigh yourself in the evening or morning and so on, you get different weights because of different liquids and different food in you and so on and waste in you.

Per: You’re even actually – well how do you say it? Less tall in the evening than you are in the morning.

James: That’s right. Your spine compresses and it can be a couple of centimetres.

Per: Yeah.

James: Or a half an inch. But yeah, so even there, there’s a certain pattern you got to follow because – to get the accuracy. Then there’s some other guessing aspects to it that he tries to do but the weird thing is a pretty definite thing because you’re still in the platform and it tells you how much …

Per: So if we connect this to a UX perspective, then I think it’s really interesting how you communicate to the user will set the expectations of that experience and if that experience is not aligned with what you’re telling them, then they’re not going to like it.

James: But if you told someone, “Ah, this is all a bit of fun. It’s not really accurate,” would they sell any? Would people be interested in changing their behaviour? Doesn’t it have to lie a little bit given the limitation, the intrinsic limitation?

Per: Excellent point. Could it perhaps be saying something in the lines of that this is accurate to the point of X and we can’t really promise anything but it gives you something to work with. I’m not sure what I’m saying here but …

James: No, I know what you mean but there is going to be a lot of people – there are going to be a lot of people that – like my wife that think, “Oh god, if you can’t do it properly, I’m not interested.”

Per: Yeah, so that’s interesting. So people would buy it. Well, they use it. So does that really mean that people are not ready? Is the device not ready for the mass market yet? Is it just ready for the geeks like us?

James: I would say so. I think generally a lot of this quantify self stuff demands you to be quite – well, highly engaged. You’ve really got to be driven to want to keep it on you, to keep syncing or checking the app or learning these little tweaks to make it good. Most people aren’t going to bother doing that.

Per: Yeah.

James: OK. Maybe we go beyond geeks here. We’re going to get into the fitness geeks as well.

Per: Yeah, exactly. Like my wife currently who is running a lot and she has been using a Fitbit One which is not the arm band but the one that you attach to your clothes. She has been using that for over a year now. She has been using it like everyday and she’s really fond of it and it has changed her behaviour a lot because I mean – and mine sort of. I mean I had a Fitbit One and didn’t have anything for half a year or something but we started taking walks in the evening to get up to 10,000 steps as per recommendation of what someone our age probably would need to walk everyday to keep healthy. That’s really interesting how that behaviour changes and we can bring people together as well, not only in the virtual world but in the physical world.

We’re actually starting to take walks together and which is an interesting effect. Whether or not the accuracy of the device is an issue here, I’m not sure, because I have – I think I have the same discussion with her that it’s not that accurate but it’s a trend and that’s sort of fine with her.

James: I think that’s the key. Just when it comes to these bands, being aware of the days when you’ve not moved so much is quite useful. It’s a reminder to say, “Oh, you actually do need to move more than this.” It can make a couple of hundred calorie difference in your burn rate by walking a few thousand steps less. I noticed that during the summer. When you’re in holiday and you sat around, you’re drinking beers and relaxing, I’m not walking about. You understand why people go gain weight during the summer, during the holidays. Have you tried the FuelBand, Nike FuelBand?

Per: No, I have not.

James: This is for people that run. This is another wristband that you put on and the FuelBand in my impression – and I’ve got no real idea about this – is that there’s more normal people who have the FuelBand than the UP and the Fitbit.

Per: Oh, interesting.

James: It’s pushed by Nike with trainers and everything. I’ve got a couple of running friends in England that have the FuelBand.

Per: I’m guessing it’s also time to market and I’m guessing in the fitness world the FuelBand is a lot more used. The FuelBand though does not have the sleep monitoring, I think. It only has steps.

James: Yeah, steps. What’s that with the little satellite thing, the little – there has got to be a name, the little thing that you put on your trainers.

Per: Oh, that you put in your shoe. I actually have shoes that one of those fit in.

James: It’s called Jeremy or something. No, not Jeremy. It has got like a man’s name.

Per: I don’t know.

James: I’m sure it has but that’s another little thing. Is that something you have in addition to the band or you have just that and an app?

Per: Just that and an app I think.

James: Right, OK. That measures steps as well.

Per: Yes.

James: Yeah.

Per: That was a Nike Plus thing that they – that’s the first launch they did together with Apple I think, one of the first devices that could actually talk with your phone and give you information about how far you were running.

James: Right, yeah. One of the first ones on the market. But this whole – back to the question about whether I still – I think generally it’s just geek stuff. To go mainstream, with almost all of these things we know that to go mainstream, involves a level – I think a level of simplification that isn’t there yet or a level of desire that isn’t really there yet.

Per: Right, and something that they are trying to do is be able – you’re making people able to personalize these armbands more and more and have your own colour. They’re trying to design them in a way to make them more appealing as well. So that’s one big aspect of these arm bands is that they have to be designed really well for people to even want to wear them and that’s one reason that my wife actually doesn’t have an armband. She doesn’t want to wear one though all the time. She has the one that she has in her clothes even if that means that she sometimes forgets to put it on.

James: The thing there is you could use it sometimes with these telephones and have apps on their telephones.

Per: Oh, yeah.

James: But I get the impression they’re really – even less accurate. I’ve got that impression.

Per: Yeah, I can’t really say.

James: Also you don’t wear it around – it’s not with you maybe every single hour of the day, so you can see things.

Per: And having the phone on your arm when you’re sleeping isn’t really that comfortable and believe me, because I’ve tried because there are apps for that. Oh, actually when you attach it to your chest.

James: You mean you strap an iPhone.

Per: You strap an iPhone to your chest. I have tried this but not – like two times.

James: Like Iron man. The generator thing in the middle of your chest.

Per: And that was the first one time I tried what you have in the Jawbone UP which I don’t have in the Fitbit Flex where it actually wakes you up when you’re in light sleep.

So that’s one of, I think, the main features that I am sort of envious of you that you have is that it wakes you up. It can tell when you’re moving around a lot so it wakes you up before you’ve set your alarm for it, before the time that you set the alarm for it because if you wake up now, you will feel better than if you wake up later or maybe in deep sleep.

James: Exactly, that’s the thing. It is a Smart Alarm and you’re right. This is my killer feature with the UP and I love this. I’ve changed using this every single day now as my alarm. You give it an alarm window of 20 minutes or half an hour and you tell it this is the latest time I want to get up. Say 20 past 7:00 and if you get an alarm window of 20 minutes, the band will – it will of course be monitoring your sleep. It’s monitoring your movements and if it notices you’ve come up from deep sleep into light sleep or rather if it notices you in deep sleep when it’s your alarm time. It won’t wake you. It will wait as long as it can to let you come out of deep sleep naturally and start moving around a bit. Then a few more minutes and it will vibrate unless it reaches the end of it.

It’s right. What happens is that, that you wake up more naturally. You wake up at a point where you’re actually ready to wake up and you feel much less tired than that car crash of an alarm when suddenly something starts wailing at you at a certain time. You have move around then to go to snooze and so on. It’s an excellent feature. I’m hoping they develop it a bit more to make it a bit more – a little bit more flexible.

Per: And I’m hoping that the Fitbit Flex will develop it because I mean that is a software feature that they have the data so they could implement it afterwards.

James: Yeah.

Per: It’s what I’m thinking.

James: Yeah, it’s software mainly but at the same time, I’ve noticed that you can only see what alarms are set by looking in the app.

Per: True.

James: An app will only show you the alarms when the band is connected and because the UP isn’t wireless, you have to plug it in. So to check your alarm for the morning, is actually quite complicated especially – it’s happened several times – I get into bed, put my band to sleep into night mode. Then realize, “Oh god, have I actually set the alarm for the morning?”

So I have to get out of bed, go to my phone because I don’t charge my phone in my bedroom and plug the band into the app, open the app, check the alarm, see that it sets and undo all that. Go back to bed. It takes minutes whereas if there was some kind of display, it could just tell me so many hours the next alarm.

Per: Right. That’s true. Yeah, I agree and I’ve been comparing the Jawbone UP because I’ve had both with the Fitbit Flex and what has been surprising for me is how enormously different these two arm bands are based on – well, they’re supposed to be doing the same thing really, measuring steps and like monitoring your sleep.

They’re designed very differently. Just studying these two devices, it’s interesting from a UX perspective looking at how they actually implement it and how you charge it, how you sync it which is wireless for the Fitbit Flex if you have certain phone times like the 4S and up, iPhone 4S and certain Android phones as well.

James: Does it use Wi-Fi or does it use Bluetooth?

Per: It uses a special type of Bluetooth. I’m not sure if it’s called Bluetooth 4.0 or low energy Bluetooth but one of those and not all phones have it.

James: It might be the same thing. I’m not quite sure.

Per: It could be.

James: Yeah, OK. That’s interesting but I like the fact that the Jawbone UP needs to be charged every 10 days and it’s pretty much true. It’s more than a week anyway so I change it every Monday morning.

Per: I can easily say that the UP has better battery life than the Flex and the Flex does not always last a week which means that I can’t have like a set day in the week that I can recharge it because I have to monitor it and there’s another big issue with the Fitbit Flex as well actually. It does not have a battery indicator which is …

James: At all?

Per: … insane. Yes. There is an API and there is a third party app for – that I’m using that actually emails me when it’s getting low in battery but I’m so surprised they haven’t implemented it on the device.

James: I mean that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about, this extra step, these little extra things you got to learn and tweak and do to make this work which implies that it’s clearly not ready for mainstream.

Per: Right, which makes me think also because I mean the display that my wife has on the Fitbit One, it’s a large display. You can just look down and see how many steps you walked. It has a clock which none of our devices have and stuff like that and I’m not sure if it shows the alarm. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. But you can see so much more without having to sync it, without having to go into the app, which I think is a real benefit as well for the most people who are just getting started with this device and who are more accustomed to the old types of pedometers and stuff.

James: I mean I wonder if the whole quantify self thing is kind of doomed to be like low adoption and inaccurate, given that we know that most people don’t bother configuring things. Is it ready out of the box? And just with quantified self, it’s incredibly personal. You’re measuring you and so if you are prepared to customize, and most people aren’t, then how can you make a product that is a one size fits all?

Per: Exactly. I think that’s a really good point and I mean just one example is that both of them comes at actually – you’re supposed to walk 10,000 steps everyday.

James: Yeah.

Per: And there are a lot of people who don’t do that and aren’t able to. So what happens is that you get all these sad faces and red alerts and stuff that you haven’t and you get that for two weeks and I mean you’re ready to give up and the thing about UX and your experience in behavioural psychology is that you need to get quick wins fast. You need to see the benefits of using it really fast. So it should be set like at 5000 and then my recommendation is usually set it at 5000 and when you manage to do 5000 steps everyday for a week, then raise it to 6000.

James: But if you’re a jogger, wouldn’t you be really kind of frustrated and disappointed with that, that you get this thing, new thing and even the first week, it’s kind of like oh my god, you’re utterly fantastic. You’ve done 30,000 steps. I mean you’re just going to go, “Come on. Of course I am. I’m running.”

Per: Yeah, yeah.

James: Again, one size fits all. It’s a very different use case.

Per: You need the quick setup guide.

James: Yeah, me and you and not runners. So we don’t knock up that kind of number of steps in the same way because we’re just walking.

Per: Right.

James: Yeah. So we need a quick setup in the beginning. Yeah, that maybe it is.

Per: It would help at least, I think.

James: Yeah. I mean we’ve focused an awful lot on just these bands in the show because that’s probably because we both got them and we’ve been talking a lot about this during the summer and you’ve written a blog post in Swedish about this. But I don’t think the problems are limited to this type …

Per: No, it’s all the same things. How do you get started? How do you talk to it? I mean the Jawbone UP has a physical button. The Fitbit Flex, I have to tap it, different stuff like that. How do you get it to talk to the device, to the app?

James: The interaction itself.

Per: How does the app talk to you? Is it telling you stuff that aren’t true and how do you react to that? Like the example I gave with waking up seven times even though you haven’t and there are so many aspects in UX to this – since it’s a physical device in which I love about it and you have to think about – well, from the point that you wake up in the morning and how you interact with it during the day and how many days before you charge it and stuff like that and all of those things combined is what creates your experience.

I mean the main reason for me, using the Fitbit Flex right now is because I’m competing with my wife who has also a Fitbit device. But I mean I can’t say that there’s a clear winner between the both of them even though they’re very different in design and functionality. They both have benefits and well, disadvantages to them. But there’s so much more to do in that area actually I think.

James: I didn’t realize until we talked about it a little bit ago that you have to shake the Flex to tell it what to do because there’s no button. I had no idea …

Per: Well actually, you have to tap it and you like tap it twice and you see how far you went. Oh, there’s an indicator for how far you’ve reached, how close you are to your goal and you have to tap it like four times quickly in a row when you’re telling it that you’re going to sleep and usually that fails for me and I have to do it like three different times.

James: Have you seen – there was a sketch on an American – one American talk show kind of late night – late evening talk show ones where they did Google Glass and he was tacking the mickey – go back glass back! And he was shaking it flicking his head flicking his head and it looks like you’ve got some kind of crazy tick because you’re going to do this head motion thing to make it go back.

Per: And sometimes I have an alarm going off when I’m like in the store or something or standing by the cashier and I have to start tapping violently on my wrist and they can’t really understand why. At one point I actually – I was shaking a juice carton and I realized that my band was set to sleep because it thought I was tapping it.

So I mean that type of interface has lots of disadvantages to it. I mean you have to think about people actually move their arm in real life even though they’re telling you that you should put it on the arm that’s not your strongest. I mean that doesn’t always like solve all the problems that you can encounter during the normal day.

James: Fascinating, but it’s – there’s a lot of stuff here and a lot of stuff to do that you said, the interaction and about a two-way interaction with a physical device and communication feedback. Not just feedback in the from of graphs but feedback from a small visual acknowledgements or sensual acknowledgements.

Yeah, it’s a fascinating area when it comes to these bands, but even with some of the other quantify self things and how you – why do it, what you can do from it and the incentive side of things is crucially important. I’m thinking of Memoto there and taking the photos all the time and trying to build up some excuse as to why the hell you would want to take a picture every 30 seconds of your life. I can say that that’s definitely not going to go main stream. Same thing with Google Glass. I just can’t see why or maybe I’m just being old there, Per. Are we being old again?

Per: I’m not sure. I was sort of thinking the same thing. Are we being too old? This spring I was – at a talk with – there was a Quantified Self Stockholm meetup and Kevin Kelly came.

James: Oh, yeah.

Per: He’s the founder of all this quantified self groups and also the founder of Wired, a co-founder of Wired Magazine. But he was talking about how important it is to keep measuring even though you don’t know why you’re measuring.

James: He’s right there.

Per: Yeah.

James: Absolutely.

Per: Because sometimes you just find stuff because you’re measuring.

James: Yep.

Per: Yeah, and I really love that, what he was saying there because that’s really an important point. If we stop measuring, if we don’t see the point of it, then we’re not going to discover anything new. But if we start collecting data, as much data as we can and start seeing trends, then all of a sudden new stuff is going to appear that we can draw conclusions from and probably change the world basically in the end.

James: Now he’s absolutely right with that. You can never go back and start collecting data again. You don’t do it. That’s true of everything, whatever we’re talking about, analytics for our website or temperature values from your house or your wristband that’s measuring you.

Per: And that’s something we haven’t talked about today is the data that we’re actually collecting can be used by our respective apps and the companies that they’re behind, so you can actually get – I mean you’re inputting your age, your weight, your height and everything. So you can get on the whole population. You can start seeing trends on how much our people are walking during the day in different age groups and what is the norm and what is the mean and what should be the recommendations. We’re seeing that people are walking less over time and you can start seeing that over the next 10, 12 years if people are using these types of apps.

James: Yeah. Why don’t we just all get the chips fitted?

Per: I mean it’s inevitable, isn’t it?

James: To be honest, I’m starting to think probably. It’s going to be so much – I mean you’ve already had the night clubs. A few high end night clubs have the little chips inserted, injected into your arm.

Per: Oh, yeah.

James: It is a way of kind of having VIP pass and non-transferable. So I think there is going to be a growing group of people who are quite willing to have a little thing injected somewhere. Now people have got tattoos and all the rest of it, and piercing. So I can’t say there would be too much of a problem with a chip, provided they’re reassured about the integrity side of things. You’ve got control over it and it’s not some kind of like dog tagging system where you are getting hooked up to a government database somewhere to monitor how much you’re sleeping.

Per: I think the conclusion here is that I mean these devices that we’re talking about, the sensors and the self-quantification, I mean it’s ripe for the picking for us geeks and it’s fine for us early adopters but it’s not really there yet for the mass market. But perhaps that’s what we’re for, that we have to use these devices so that they can like calibrate them and make them better over time so that more people can use them.

James: And learn a huge amount. This is an excellent opportunity for us to analyze what we’re doing, analyze and to look at – how does this physical object that we carry with us all the time, how does it work? What’s making this work, user-interaction-wise or UX-wise? What don’t work? I mean give us a little chance to experiment. That’s what us early adopters are for. We are for testing up.

Per: We are guinea pigs.

James: Yeah, we’re guinea pigs and we like complaining about it a bit and so on. But it’s fun and I mean that’s the most important thing to remember of the quantified self stuff. It’s actually fun.

Per: Exactly. Yeah. Good point. It’s getting really, really hot in this car.

James: And me too. I shut the windows so I’m up to 30 degrees now in here and I need to stop. But before we go …

Per: Yes.

James: A little reminder, now that our Swedish listeners have come back and come back to work after the summer break. We’re going to be at Conversion Jam 3 on the 10th of September like we were last year.

Per: Really, really fun.

James: It was really good fun. It’s a really intensive day of speakers here in Stockholm, Sweden. Really well-organized little conference and …

Per: Lots of international speakers.

James: Yeah, including one of our favourites, Craig Sullivan.

Per: Yes.

James: Also Brian Massey. He did that last year too. Sorry, André Mores was there last year. So no, it’s normally a really good day and for you listeners out there, we have a discount code if you want to come along or you are in Stockholm or in Sweden and want to come along.

Per: And just for the sake of meeting us.

James: Yeah, that works too. The code is simply “UXPODCAST” if I can remember correctly.

Per: Yes, it is.

James: Yeah, UX Podcast and you get …

Per: When I saw it, it said “UX Podcast” in capital letters. I don’t think that matters.

James: If you don’t get the 200 kroner discount with it in lower case, try it in capitals..

Per: Oh, yeah. I’m really looking forward. Yeah, we will be recording our shows on location there as well, which would be excellent fun.

James: Yes.

Per: One great way to get access to the speakers.

James: It’s, as always, great fun. So thank you very much for listening today.

Per: Yes, and we will talk to you again in two weeks.

James: What do you say?

Per: I say remember to keep moving.

James: I say see you on the other side.

Per: Ah, that’s it.
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