Niv Calderon

To tell you the truth, in all my ten years being a cellular user, I never went out of the Nokia family of phones except for the short time i worked in Tapuz People, of whom the mother company called Sunny brings employees the real shitty Samsung devices you feel like you're back in the Soviet Union where it is known the soviet engineers didn't have the phrase "User Experience" in their lexicon while sending men to space (or to sit in a car or whatever).

Anyway, after a long phone talk with a technology reporter yesterday I realized not everyone customize their cell phones to fit their needs and wishes. I never thought about it before but i'll give you my two cents about personal customization of your cell phone.

I'm talking about the Profiles you have. Forgive me other brands users, I just don't know how it goes on other devices so I'll speak in the Nokia language for now.

A profile, if you dont know what I'm talking about, is the family of customable ring / light / vibrate settings you can change at will.

So, one of my most important changes I do when I get a new phone is to choose my ring tone naturally, but the second thing I do is change the profiles settings, including their names, if possible. My favorite example for this is my "Sleep No Vibe" profileI invented for myself. You know how you hate waking up from a ring or from sms? me too. I wanted to create a profile where if I choose it I will have a ring that will wake me up, but in a nice way. I saw that when I forget to change my phone from it's everyday general profile the rings wake me up and I'm all scared and act and feel like "what, what, what happened?!". The "Sleep No Vibe" I created has a nice slow ring, the sms beeps muted and the vibe option shut. It changed my life. No, really, I was at a job , as a photojournalist always "on call", that they could wake me and did wake me at odd hours, I needed something to protect my sanity.

Anyway, this was just one example of it. You can take it to other areas… like you know how it's irritating when you're in a meeting, with your cell phone is on the table at mute (cause you're a good guy) and than it starts brake-dance vibrating ? Change your "Meeting" profile, see for yourself and decide if you put your cell phone in your bag, on the table or in your pocket. Most times you'll act as before… going to meetings and touching our phones is something we do mechanically and automatically in our heads.

The interface creates and navigates your experience in life. I'm not talking about graphical user interface, I'm talking about interface in general. You interface with the city, the UX (user experience in short is UX) people there are called architectures, you interface inside your home, where most of the times you're the UX guy, you go to personal UX mechanic called a psychologist or to friends or to your mom… everything is interfaced and it's always about the interface, and if we're talking about cell phones, it's the small bits of time you use it as an alarm clock that'll light your day, one way or the other.

I have a new game in Facebook, it's called Blocking and it's all about my user experience.
How many of you just hate getting those notifications from "so called" friends that use those dumb applications such as potatos, tomatos, causes, flowers, beers, maps and so on?

I mean, le'ts face it, we'd prefer if we didnt got all those apps, and we'd prefer if we saw an app on a friend's profile, loved it and went to look for it. Like in Firefox for example. And also, why do we have to send this app to everyone even before we got to see if we like it or not? Why not test it, and than send it to friends to evaluate?
Those apps became the modern (Facebook) era junk mail.

So, as my time in this so called "Social Utility" is precious to me, first, I'd rather not deal with junk and second- i'd rather have fun. So I thought of a game. All you need for it is a tab enabled browser.

This game has two play options:

1- You wait till a friend sends you an invitation to add an app, you click on the app link instead of the ignore button, go to the down right corner of the app page and click Block This Appliction link.

The Block- Click to enlarge

2- You go to the apps page on http://www.facebook.com/apps/, choose the apps you want to block, opens them in new tabs and block'em one after the other.
It's a fun game I play every few days. I play it for 2 minutes each time and block around ten apps each time. Than I get bored with it. But it works… as you'll start payng the Blocking Game on facebook you'll see you dont block everything, you'll probably want to block the apps you statistically get most emails about. You'll feel very good about it because it'll be like doing a good search engine optimization (SEO) to yourself only without any search engine involved. You'll automatically have more fun on Facebook, not futilly ignoring new apps but sofisticatedly blocking them, because Resistance Is not Futile.