Engineering Difficulty
I broke my iPhone before I left for my honeymoon and a friend was kind enough to lend me an old unlocked Nokia. The phone worked out fine and not having access to all the iPhone holds was probably a bit of a blessing (though I’m pretty seriously missing it now that I’m back home and can’t get my hands on a 4G).
Anyway, as part of having a phone with a keypad (not even keyboard) I went back to T9 (you remember it, predictive type for SMS messages).1 The struggle to send a simple message made me think about how we are likely going to need to start add elements to our interfaces that actually make tasks harder, not easier. Imagine how many fewer emails you’d write on your iPhone if you were forced to use T9 for instance.
While it’s not the perfect parallel, something like WriteRoom lets you block out everything else when you’re trying to write (Pages now has a full screen option as well, actually) and I remember hearing about an application from a few years ago that turned off your WiFi until you restarted the computer so you could get something done. It’s funny to think that we’ve reached a point where things are so easy that we need to start making them hard again.
[PS: I'm married, honeymooned, done with Cannes and back in NYC.]
1 As a side note, the guy who invented T9 has a new text input method for touchscreens called Swype. ↩
Hi, I'm 
I lost my phone for a few days last week in my house. I had the ringer off and the battery was going dead. I knew it was in my house since the night before it went missing, I used it as a flashlight in the middle of the night to find my way to the fridge… Anyway it was very annoying that I could not find it but knew it was in my house…
I did manage to live with out it for a few days. It was liberating and terrifiying at the same time since I did not know what text messages were comming in. I kept checking my voicemails but i did find myself forced to clean my house very throughtly to find it. Finally i found it in my bike bag. I must have put it in there, post my midnight snack in a sleepy haze. I ride by bike 3 times a week to work, so it took a look in there to finally find it.
The good news is a) I can survive with out a phone for a little while anyway, b) my house is now clean c) you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. I appricatiate my phone more, and take better care of it.
PS. Welcome home. Hope France was tres fantastique! The wedding was a blast! Congrats again!
This reminds of a much older concept related to relaying the credibility of one’s commitments: tying one’s hands. The premise is that in order to convince another of one’s resolve to carry through on an undesireable act one must design mechanisms that would make it impossible to avoid following through. The beauty is that it helps to signal credibility because by tying your hands you are making it impossible (or, nearly impossible) to respond in any other way. It’s an extreme version of choice architecture.
I don’t know if we need these services more than ever because of technology. Rather, I think technology makes it easier for people to employ such strategies on a daily basis and use them to their advantage. We can’t all burn the boats like Cortez, but technology gives us a reasonable approximation.