You will almost certainly have solved one of these in the last month, if not dozens:

The uptake of CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) has been swift and widespread, as they offer a straightforward and directly effective method of determining whether the user is a human or a computer. Their success rests on discovering something humans are extremely good at, and computers are extremely bad at - interpreting the content of images. Until computers get better at doing this, spammers will continue struggling to overcome the CAPTHCA barrier without having to somehow involve organic brain power.

It takes, on average, 10 seconds for a person to solve one before they continue submitting whatever they are submitting. Just quickly enough for it not to become too disruptive or inconvenient, so long as you don’t have to do too many. But what may only be 30 seconds a week for you, is actually 1,050,000 hours a week for mankind. The inventors, Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford, were worried about how much time their creation had begun wasting. Just think what could be done if a year of CAPTCHA-solving time was put to some other use, they recently thought….

Then they had a brilliant idea.

The benefit of computing limitations for spam-stopping is also a frustration for the good honest people who want to digitize the heaps and heaps of written text we cannot yet search, download or cut and paste from. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is used to automatically render printed text as machine-editable text, and has been put to work scanning the millions and millions of pages we want to make digital. But, as Stuart will tell you from his recent experience, it’s a highly imprecise method, returning a mixture of well-rendered passages and absolute nonsense.

Enter the reCAPTHCA Project, turning 150,000 hours of wasted human labour into something dazzlingly efficient and useful. The words that computers can’t figure out when digitising texts become the CAPTCHAs, and we do what we are good at - interpret images. But wait! How will it work as a spam-filter if the makers don’t yet know what the words are?! You translate 2 words - one a designed CAPTCHA, the other a word OCR mangled somewhere. If you get the CAPATCHA right, your answer to the mangled word is returned as being correct. The same word is then given to a few other users to improve the accuracy of the result allowing everyone to help digitise the world’s written history, something otherwise predicted to take 400 years.

Well done, aren’t you clever?

Shelter, the charity for housing and homelessness, are asking their supporters to build a virtual city as a fundraising initiative. The site has been live since September and is gradually gaining interest.

As contextual research for our snowflake project we had been looking at simple and engaging applications that have the potential to go viral. This seems to tick quite a few boxes - it’s playful, easy to grasp, a call to action, and has scope for personal customisation.

So how does it all work?

Each grid area as above (a neighbourhood) is divided into plots. Any SimCity enthusiasts (I was once obsessed) should be able to grasp the idea immediately. You select your plot, register, then choose a property to buy - houses are £10-20, department stores are £500 and skyscrapers are £1000. Beyond that, in a very canny (and fun) twist, businesses (or rich individuals) can have custom properties designed, with prices starting at £1500. Work in the Gherkin? Get your boss to donate… it’s good PR!

Once your house is built you can add your message, a photo and a link. It’s the critical viral step - get your friend to build a house next door to yours (keep up with the Joneses?) You can see ours here.

As the space fills up, the success of the project is quantifiable, and your contribution remains for all to see. The coherence of this, and the clear logical relationship with the campaign’s real intention, is an imaginative and effective way of visualizing the issues the charity confronts.

The site was built by Cimex in London.

I got the opportunity to speak at an event held by the Usability Professionals Association and LBi a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel on ‘openness of information and communities in Healthcare.’

Also there, were members of the NHS Connecting for Health team, who are developing some amazing interfaces and hardware, including this rather nice tablet.

The tablet has quite an interesting story behind it. Designed to be used by health care workers in hospitals, it has to meet an amazing list of requirements. The initial spec. was drawn up by the Connecting for Health team, and taken round a variety of manufacturers, they said they wanted something that was wipe clean, could be dropped without damage, had a five hour battery life, could be immersed in alcohol for sterilizing, had wifi, secure bluetooth, biometric security, barcode scanner, rf-id scanner, camera and just about everything else, for under £1000. Amazingly they now have the machine.

I spoke briefly on how we need to look beyond simply delivering health information, and understand the barriers to behavioural change that stop people getting the health outcomes they want. I was very pleased when, later in the day, the results of the user research project for the NHS Choices site was presented by another team. These findings broadly vindicated my position, and the fact that we are getting the same findings, on a research project that is a fraction of the size, really supports our approach.

For those interested, click the link for an outline of my talk:
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