A last minute booking: I shall be doing a panel session at the fascinating-looking Quantified Self European Conference this weekend, in Amsterdam.

Looks to be a great event, and I've been getting steadily more interested in this stuff since this talk I researched and gave back in 2009.

The modern mobile phone is chock full of sensors: accelerometers, GPS, microphones, cameras, altimeters, barometers, temperature - and more every year. Mobiles can see lots of things we can't, and give us new senses.

Lots of approaches to augmenting our senses are visual: the cliché of Augmented Reality apps is a camera's-eye view of the world with graphics overlaid. But at the same time, we're also easily distracted visually: interfaces that demand our attention can be counterproductive in some circumstances. Sometimes this happens to amusing effect: Microsoft riffed on it nicely in some recent advertising, and I love that the Geocaching have appropriated this problem with their hobby and stuck it on a T-shirt; but the consequences of distraction when you're driving really aren't funny.

The good news is that we're quite good at listening to things without getting distracted: the cocktail party effect demonstrates our ability to pay attention without conscious effort, and we consider the radio to be a standard part of a car. Plus it's considered entirely normal to walk around a city listening to music, nowadays: you'll get a few funny looks if you're glued to a phone screen, but white headphones are more than tolerated, they're a fashion statement.

I loved the work that BERG and Timo Arnall did with light paintings and wi-fi signals, and have been wanting to play with something similar for a little while. So at OverTheAir a few of us played with generating reggae from ambient signals, including Wi-fi; but we failed to get the Rasta Far Eye (as it was dubbed, in homage to The Great Upsetter) complete in time for the demos. This was all the more frustrating for my wanting a tool like this for my own use over the weekend, as I wandered around the beautiful Bletchley site trying to find somewhere with good connectivity to park myself.

So at the Power of Minds hack day being run by Rewired State this weekend, I gave it another go - constraining myself to watching wi-fi signals only, and regretfully dropping the reggae aspect of the original. It's an Android app which can look either for any open wi-fi networks, or track a specific network, and plays loops of music which get stronger and more percussive as the strength of the network you're looking for increases... or fade out into the background as your connectivity weakens.

I'm going to have a play with it over the next few days, try using it around town or on campus, and see if it's actually useful.

I think this class of thing might be handy for in-car usage, where attention should be carefully rationed - perhaps in this case tracking GSM signal strength would be more useful. When I last drove regularly I had a few occasions when I wanted to find an area of good mobile reception to make an important phone call, and this would help.

It's also occurred to me that most of the sound that phones pump out today is designed to alert the owner across a room - i.e. to stand out, be a little bit piercing, wake you up, or annoy. Once you're designing audio for ambient consumption or headphone use, I wonder if you'll need different sorts of sound? More research needed.

In a couple of weeks time I'm going to be speaking at Online Information 2011; I'll be presenting some tips for mobile success, based on what we've learned launching mobile products at FP. It's an interesting looking event, spanning librarianship, Internet and mobile - and a nice mix of industry and academia as a result. I'm planning to talk about some of the less shiny, but no less important, aspects of mobile.

I'm speaking as part of the "Going Mobile" session on day 2, alongside Steve Wing of the Guardian and the ever-present Chris Book.

If you're interested in other places to catch folks from FP and Vexed, there's a helpful list you can check out here. And if you're at Droidcon India today, run, now, towards the talk James Hugman is giving on Kirin.

A couple of entries in one for the HCI Diary, today.

First: observation exercise and surveys.

As I wrote before, we were sent out into the wild to practice our observation skills. The brief was to pick an aspect of public transport and, working in a group, plan and carry out some observations of users and run a survey to gather some quantitative data, then compare the two and present back to the class.

Our group chose to look at the stresses of public transport for those travelling with small children ages 2-8. This involved spending 40 minutes at Brighton station one evening feeling incredibly creepy whilst we identified parents entering the station with kids and followed them through making notes on their behaviour. As an observer it was tough to know how much detail to note down; I tried to get as much as possible, on the basis that it would give us more to work with when doing analysis, but found the more I was writing, the less I was observing. A definite case for pair work, or in future taking notes using something like Griffin iTalk: I could comfortably read out observations and look like I was on a phone call, I think. Alternatively, working very carefully in pairs - one observing, one noting - might help.

This we followed up with a short survey posted to Mumsnet and sent to friends with children of a relevant age.

We ended up watching 5 families in the station, and having 6 responses to our survey. It definitely felt strange and creepy to be watching people: we weren't subtle and I'm sure a couple of them noticed it. As for patterns in behaviour: families tended to use seating in the station, sit for about 10 minutes, go and stand near the departure boards for a couple of minutes, then head to their train. We're not sure why they'd stand near the departure boards before boarding - they're visible from all parts of the station.

The other consistency we noted was the excitement of young children heading through the automated gates. The older kids made a big deal of trying to wander through by themselves (demonstrating how grown-up they were, perhaps?) and there was a tendency for groups to head through the manned gate: mother and children first, father (carrying the tickets, no doubt in case they were attacked by bears) last.

We correlated some data around wait times with that from our surveys; no-one waited more than 15-30 minutes for a train, the majority of folks less than 15 minutes. And about 60% of the survey respondents found ticket machines difficult or very difficult to use (though most used them anyway).

Once again, I found it hard not to be proposing solutions to problems as I saw them. I'm not sure, but I think that one of the keys to doing good observation might be training yourself to avoid analysing: just concentrate on what's around, stay aware, note it down, and plan to think through it all later. I'm led to think about six thinking hats and mindfulness.

The second piece of observation we've done recently was around video games. Pejman showed us a sequence of 10 short video clips of games: game-screen, biometrics of the player, and a video of the player running inset. We were invited to note usability issues and prioritise them; to my mind, they broke into three categories, prioritised thusly:

1. The player wasn't in control of their "character", and couldn't work out how to be. This either manifested itself as verbalised frustration ("how do I jump?"), or as staggered or artificial in-game movements (very noticeable in FPS games). This struck me as stuff that ought to be fixed;
2. The player was controlling their character, but in an unskilled fashion: they'd drive a car into the wall by the roadside, or jump up and down in a situation where they were trying to be stealthy. Practice would help here, as might instructions, training levels, or a rethinking of controls;
3. The player couldn't work out what to do. Going through this pain seems to be the heart of many games - without challenges, what are they - and I noted that in every case we saw, the player worked it out, after some initial frustration.

There were some positives, too: players seemed delighted to notice unexpected depth in the games (the ability to shoot out tires). And there was a little pattern of delight when they got high up and could see far around them (in FPS games), which felt like it might be deeply rooted in our evolutionary history: good visibility means safety, the ability to see threats or food a long distance around. What's not to like about that?

It's been a while since I posted a link-dump, so here's a few that have popped up on my radar recently:

• A brief rant on the future of interaction design: "I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.";
• The social graph is neither: "…we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good";
• How people use tablets and what it means for the future of news: " A plurality of tablet news users (40%) say they get their news mainly through a web browser. Another 31% use news apps and the browser equally, while fewer, 21%, get their news primarily through app"