Is interaction

This is a really cool application that analyzes Flickr images for colours. Select a colour (up to 10 different colours can be selected at one time) and then see images that contain those colour(s). Once the system returns the images, go in and select the ones you want to use for your digital mood board. Easy.

There is now a kit available for house plants that lets them twitter you when they need water. I don’t think I will be going out and spending the $100 any time soon on this one, but thought it was worth mentioning. Read more about it at Gizmodo.

A few notes on interaction design taken from Dan Saffer’s talk Interaction as Material from the 2008 Event Design Summit in Hollywood.

What is Interactaction?

• Although technology is often involved, interaction is not a technology
• Not necessarily about “interactives” either
• It is a way of designing
• Interaction (design) starts with behaviour
• You design from the inside out

“An honest job of design should flow from the inside out, not from the outside in.” Henry Dreyfuss, 1955

Moments that matter (via IDEO’s Spaces That Matter)

• Time + Space + Emotion
• Halo moments influence others, but pick the right ones
• Serendipity, not staging
• Not every moment matters

The best designs are those that “dissolve into behaviour.” Naoto Fukasawa

Well, from my perspective, I think that the concepts and concerns about designing ubiquitous computing environments, software, and hardware — and the problems, challenges, and opportunities of all three — have just gone a little more mainstream. Or at least a little more mainstream within the design community. A first article and announced regular feature column appeared at UXmatters. To my mind, this pushes this ubicomp design out into the more mainstream realm  of interaction and usability designers. UXmatters isn’t really at the bleeding, or even cutting, edge of design. UXmatters is for the in the trenches, established, working usability community, most of whom are working on tried and true Internet sites and applications. So the launch of this regular column on “Designing the Ubiquitous Experience” at UXM is a testament to the impending avalanche of advances and change coming soon from ubicomp. An impending flood that, as the article itself states, most designers of all stripes are not prepared for. That UXM is addressing everywhere computing adds further credence to my initial intuition to start this blog and explore the exciting realm of physical computing in the first place. There haven’t been many updates here lately in regard to physical comp. because I have decided to clear off a few older projects that were started and put on hold for various reasons - once I clear my plate up a bit more, I will definitely be returning to physical comp projects. From the sound of it, the sooner the better.

Finally, here are my notes from UX Week 08 hosted by Adaptive Path.

Day 1: The Fundamentals of User Experience

Keynote Speaker: Don Norman

• Don is on a crusade to change the terminology. Stop calling them users, call them people. User Experience is now Experience Design.
• From Don’s perspective, things are getting better and worse at the same time.
• The same lessons are being learned over and over again.
• Don invented the term User Experience.
• The total experience has an impact on memory.
• Create a great, memorable experience and people will gloss over the smaller/other things.
• Interaction Designers should be reading the Harvard Business Review.
• Marketing calls Experiential Design “Empathic Design.” So it is important to understand and speak marketing’s language.
• Design: products, services, and operations.
• Suggested reading, Factory Operations. Services are all operations, services are recursive.
• The Apple iPod is successful because it is seamless; the iPod was created with an entire design ecology in mind. The iPod is simple because the designers realized that it is only one part of the design ecology. The iPod leverages iTunes to do the heavy lifting - iTunes resides on the computer - the computer has better I/O devices for creating play lists and managing music. The store then hooks in to iTunes so the users people can then purchase and download music to the local computer.
• By The Way - iTunes runs on SAP…

Don on how to convince executives to invest and get behind users experience experience design.

• Go to the VPs and CEO with a spreadsheet and show the benefits of changes.
• Show how change will make more money.
• Work with senior marketing allies.
• Do what marketing does, show some numbers.
• Do what marketing does, make some number up (make them look realistic and rationalize them the way marketing does).
• Good design is good business.

Don on Socialable Design

• Devices need to be more sociable with each other.
• Design for people who are multi-tasking.

Being a UX Team of One: Leah Buley

5 Tips for a Team of One

1. Get comfortable with pen and paper. Other people can participate with paper. Staying low-fi encourages feedback, participation, and iteration. Plus it’s cheap and fast - people don’t get anchored as easily to things when they are more disposable and less effort.
2. Think Big Picture. tinyurl.com/sketchboards
3. Be a Good Host. Get the clients/stakeholders/users people in the room and get them to share. Be nice to them, guide them, steer them, feed them, respect what they say. Get Them To Share - share their knowledge and ideas.
4. Decorate Your Space. Show your work, show your thinking along the way. Make it accessible. Pin up your sketches, drawings, diagrams, post it notes. Show the activity. Get the knowledge out of your head and off your screen so that it is out in the world.
5. Clarify UX Needs. Business Needs + User People Needs = Design Criteria. tinyurl.com/designcriteria

The Story of the Ribbon: Jensen Harris

• Jensen and his team redesigned Office 2007.
• The main issue with the 2003: people could not find the functionality already in Office.
• Word 2.0 set the top level navigation that continued to exist up to and including Word 2003 (20 years).
• Office 97 = bloated.
• Office 2000 = reduced perception of bloat.
• 2K introduced personalized menu. Word kept moving the items on/off the short menu = misguided UI affordances.
• 2002 Word introduced task panes.
• Word 2003: 31 toolbars and 19 task panes.
• Office Design Process: Research > Design Tenets > Prototypes > Evaluation
• Research revealed that there was a sense of lost mastery. People didn’t feel in control of the software or have a sense of completely understanding the software.

UI Redesign Goals

• Make the software easier to use
• Help people save time
• Help people discover more of the power of Office
• Help people create beautiful, powerful documents

Design Tenets

• Take the idea and validate it against the design tenets
• Tenet: Straightforward is better than clever.
• Put the design tenets right into the prototype (literally, they make great placeholder text and it makes them easy to access and review when assessing the prototype in question).

Evaluation

• Longitudinal studies were very useful.
• Eyetracking - uses special monitors that track where the eyes look, no special headgear worn by the participant.
• Heat mapping
• Gaze tracking - where the eyes go and where the mouse goes can be extremely divergent.

To get things right, sometimes you will have to do it a few times.
See, read, or view Jensen Harris’s presentation.

Day 2: Media and Service Design

Our Mission is User Experience: Scott Griffith

• Zipcar has a Director of Experience
• Their service has some complexities - they use videos on the web to help on-load new customers.
• Something that is changing in the states is that in some places, some priority/prime parking locations are being reserved for Hybrids, this creates another incentive to drive a hybrid. Zipcar offers hybrids.
• Self-service is growing and will continue to grow. Self-serve opportunities with the web and mobile are vast.
• Zipcar is about a lifestyle - participation in a car rental program is a lifestyle choice.
• Zipcar places focus on the experience - the experience starts with a cultural foundation.
• They created a set of Zipcar core values.
• They also fostered a sense of community - be a Zipster.
• Develop a sense of belonging and an unparalleled experience.
• The C level executives and VP level executives & executives: this group sponsors the entire experience across the organization.
• They have a kaizen trained expert and the company undertakes kaizen initiatives when it feels it needs to. Such cases include creating the new member video and sorting out the payment of parking tickets by Zipcar members.

Behind the scenes:

• The experience is the brand.
• There is a focus on the basics.
• Meeting the needs of the customers at each and every interaction is everything.
• Traditional product marketing has been replaced with an experience team. There is a dedicated experience team.
• There is reliance and action on member feedback and input.
• Internal alignment on priorities. What we should do and what we should no do.
• Strengthen social contract with members. Use tools like surveys, interviews and contextual observational learning, member and panel forums, and usability test, test, test.

Zipcar has a social contract with its members in place.

• There are 6 basic rules: report damage, keep it clean, no smoking, fill it up, return on time, pets in carriers.
• The brand is the experience and the experience is everything.
• It takes a commitment to the experience approach from leadership.
• The leaders have to be there to make the hard choices.

Business vs. Experience decisions
A) Is it value add or can we add extra for it?
B) Does this simplify things in some way? What looks like a cost in one way becomes a savings in some other way.

• Use kaizens on different things - Ask: is there a better way?
• Focus on the “it just works” mentality.
• Zipcar: a marketing and IT firm that happens to have a cars.

Call Center

• Think about important moments that require a call.
• Try to take every other call away.
• Provide competent help on the phone when you need it.
• Manage things from a metrics-centric position.
• The experience team heavily tracks metrics.

5 Calls that matter in descending order of importance.

1. Accidents
2. Breakdowns
3. First time user issues
4. Extensions on time
5. Sales calls
6. On the web - live chat is really working for them.

What Makes a Memorable Service Experience: Jennifer Bove & Ben Fullerton

• Objects decay
• Experiences don’t - they can last a lifetime.
• Engender desire into non-physical services.
• The service experience evolves and emerges over time.

6 Characteristics of Service Experiences

1. Responsiveness - Services are complex and multifunctional. Design for different circumstances.
2. Consistency - Tangible evidence tells customers what kind of service to expect.
3. Adaptable - Design checks and balances into the system. Anticipate problems and provide solutions before problems occur. Services should anticipate potential fail points.
4. Tailored - A service can learn from customer behaviour and anticipate needs.
5. Efficient - Getting the internal business processes right will create a more consistent customer experience. Read How to Design a Service by G. Lynn Shostack. Operational efficiency is important.
6. Rewarding - Service loyalty can be designed into the details. Let customers see the value. Design for loyalty. Create delight. Create memorable moments.

TheDailyShow.com: Audrey Chen

• Know your content.
• With the type and amount of content on TheDailyShow.com design to encourage play and exploration.
• The quote overlay allowed them to distinguish content pieces given that almost all clips are John at a desk.
• Inside Comedy Central, the success of TheDailyShow.com relaunch highlighted the value of being less precious about the content. The benefits of getting the content out has more value than holding tight to it.

TV With an API: Rob Naber and Dan Levine

• Current TV: 3-5 minute shorts on the TV.
• Current.com: publish then filter, it reverses the usual filter then publish model predominant with Current.tv.
• Current.com: needed to create a clear path from getting web content onto TV.
• They are setting up a Creative Commons license for their content.
• Unlike the Internet, Al Gore did help to create Current TV.

Creating Service Envy: Workshop with Jennifer Bove & Ben Fullerton

• Creating good services is an exercise in coordinating across touch points.
• Why services are important: 80% of North American economy is service based.
• The tools and methods: User Journey Frameworks, Service Ecologies, and Service Design Blueprints.
• User Journey Frameworks: Aware > Join > Use > Grow > Share (advocates) > Leave (design for leaving - make that pleasant and memorable too).
• Map across the journey - block it out across the lifecycle.

Service Ecologies

• A large number of large systems that all need to work together to deliver an integrated service experience to the user.
• Map out the different actors and how they interrelate and interact.

Experience Prototypes

• Fake them to test ideas out. You do not need something that is high-fidelity or fully functional (or functional at all in most cases).
• Role play, charades, etc.
• Look for change opportunities.

Service Blueprints

• A design that can be handed off to a development team.
• Design includes front stage and back stage areas.
• The service blueprint shows the orchestration of the entire process.

User Journey

• Aware: How does the user learn abut the service?
• Join: How do they sign up , get involved, or come into contact with the service?
• Use: How do they engage with it?
• Grow: How does the user’s involvement grow over time?
• Share: How and why would they share the experience with others?
• Leave: How would they leave the experience?

The service: How is it going to work?

• What are the processes?
• Who are the actors?
• What are the dependencies?

Building Brands the Build Community: Katherine Jones & Randall Macon

• The “B” word - Branding.

What Really Matters

• What in your life makes life make sense?
• Look to build connectedness.

• Community approach - brand as platforms.
• Brands can become entangled and become memorable, lasting experiences.
• Community is the sense of belonging that individuals feel when they connect with other people.
• Belonging is that sweet spot in the Ven diagram where experiences and values overlap.
• Livestrong: 60 million wristbands sold. At the peak it was selling 100K/day.
• The Blanton Museum of Art (in Austin Texas): art is experience. Milkshake Media worked with the Blanton staff to come up with brand solution that could help create community and involvement. They came up with “Art is .” and invited the community to help provide answers in various ways.

Day 3: Play and Immersion

A Game Designer’s Perspective on the Future of Happiness: Jane McGonigal

Jane is interested in the user experience of reality. She designs alternate reality games. The alternate reality gaming movement got started after the movie The Game, starring Michael Douglas debuted.

• 68% of people report playing a game at least once every two weeks.
• Reality is broken - it’s a quality of life problem.
• Predicting the future: in order to predict the future, you have to look back at least twice as far.
• UX Designers are committed to making users happy.
• Add the real to the “virtual.” If you are playing a football game in Atlanta and it’s raining in Atlanta, then it’s raining on the field in the game. (Relatively easy, have the game connected to the Internet with access to the Weather Network’s data feeds).
• People throw off massive amounts of data that we generate just by being.
• Games and gaming as teaching tools, for example, the work by Katie Salen.

Your Phone is Your Controller: Jury Hahn

• MegaPhone
• It runs on really low bandwidth.
• It is easy to set up and is very portable.

Goals

• Make new experiences possible.
• Make idle time valuable.
• Socialize the phone experience.
• Massively multiplayer (there is double-entendre here…)
• There is an API - you can develop games yourself.

New Paradigms for Interaction in Physical Space: Jake Barton

• Media design in physical spaces.
• New paradigms in physical space.
• Storycorps.net. They designed this experience completely and with a lot of heart and attention to detail.
• This is a really nice interview with Jake Barton.

From Kahlo to Contemporary: Designing Contexts for Connecting with Arts at SFMOMA: SFMOMA Interactive Technologies Team (Tana Johnson, Tim Svenonius, and Erica Gangsel)

• Extended Object Label (see the image that will make it into this post eventually) can be replaced with a brochure that can provide more information and context - it also helps people step back and appreciate the art piece instead of having to be up close to the side of the piece to “understand” it.

Extended Object Label Function: Discusses the most compelling features of a work of art or answers the visitor’s most pressing questions. Length: 100 to 150 words

• Mathew Barney, best known, for his film series, The Cremaster Cycle (5 films in all) had a showing at the SFMOMA titled Drawing Restraint, 2006. Barney insisted that there could be no extended object labels displayed with the installation pieces displayed in association with the films.
• So SFMOMA answered the challenge by creating a series of brochures, recorded guides on handheld devices, and digital kiosks in a learning centre adjacent to where the artwork was displayed.
• Visitors opted for the analog 1st and would then explore the digital components. This makes sense - see if this is something of interest before committing more time and effort to it.
• Art Museums > Not just about exhibitions > also about educating people about the artwork.

Visitor Research and Evaluation

• Develop and test principles for exhibit design.
• Assess and encourage.
• Engagement
• Scientific thinking skills
• Attitudes
• Conceptual understanding

How Do We Do It?

• Interviews/Surveys > Attitudes & Knowledge
• Tracking & Timing > Engagement
• Audio/Video > Skills, Engagement, & Knowledge

Instrumenting Chaos: Understanding the Visitor Experience in a Free-choice Environment: Ken Finn

• Try to keep groups of people together, keep them engaged at the same rate.
• Design for multiple visitors at the same time.
• If engagement occurs at the same time at an exhibit, total engagement time increases.
• Social interaction aspects are built into the design. E.g., with a single seat at a display, if there is a boy sitting in the seat and another boy or girl arrives at the display, the first boy will continue to occupy the seat and engage with the display. If a girl is sitting at the display and another boy or girl arrives, the girl will get up to give the next person a turn. However, with a two seat design and there are two girls sitting at the display and another boy or girl comes along, the girls will continue to interact with the display without getting up right away for the newcomer.
• Use treatment and control displays to reduce reactivity when they are doing observational research with a family.
• The reactivity to observation is the same to both the control and the treatment case, so any difference can be attributed to the experimental variable.
• The research methodology changes when a group (e.g., family) of visitors is involved, there is more of a reliance on video.

Day 4: The Future of User Experience

Small Teams, Complex Pipelines: Writing Software for Making Movies at Pixar: Michael B. Johnson

• Pixar: Small teams; complex pipelines
• Art as team sport; Design as team sport.
• If it doesn’t work in low-fi (in story boarding), it won’t work anywhere.
• Storyboarding is really story-reboarding
• Fail as quickly as possible.
• Iterate and criticize
• Tools are about power: consolidation from many to one.
• Tools create a redistribution of power. Most tools shift some portion of power from one area to another.
• As much as possible, try to operate in the medium in which it will be delivered.

Giving a good note:

• Point out a problem.
• Propose a solution.

Lessons from Oz: Designing for the mobile experience: Rachel Hinman

• Mobile devices have greedy interfaces – everywhere you look you see people atomized; you see people staring at the device, disengaged from the world.
• Rachel went and tried out using “real world” objects as mobile devices. The goal was to find out how the form factor affects the experience.
• Looked at the mobile device as pet: think Roomba or tamagotchi.
• Influenced by the idea of status: where you are and what you are doing. Think Twitter 24/7.
• Considered mobile services from the perspective of the refugee.
• Mobile computing is still not taking advantage of all of the human senses.
• Think of the mobile device as a memento collector: think of how people use their devices to collect, keep, and share mementos. People personalize and make their devices personal.
• See Rachel’s site, 90 Mobiles in 90 Days
• Look at how and why the One Laptop Per Child project got scathed. Hint: eurocentricism.

Designing Our Way Through Data: Jeffry Veen

• Worked on Google Analytics.
• Cholera epidemic data (think Tufte regurgitated).
• Don’t make me think.
• Indiana Jones map story from the designer’s mouth.
• Find the story in the data.
• Assign different cues to each dimension of the data.
• Remove everything that is not telling the story.
• The data is the interface, use the data to navigate through the data.
• Story telling – Discovery
• Visual Cues – Interactivity

Greebles, Nurnies, Tiles and Flair: Visualization By Analogy: Michal Migurski

• Trulia Snapshot
• Background and foreground: look at things in a magazine – there is style and format.
• Take inspiration from movies and video games.
• {Modest Maps}
• Create a continuous surface of info and data.
• Use slight of hand.
• Create credibility
• GPS tracking trails. Traces of taxi movements. It creates an immersive experience. It creates a stylized and intimate story from the data.
• Remove advertising from an image: notice that the image then rings “false”. This is attention to greebling.
• Collaborative mapping: social feedback loop, data visualization becomes collaborative projects.
• Use as a prover: greebles add credibility.

The Challenge of Emotional Innovation: Denis Wixon

• GUI is to be replaced with the NUI: Natural User Interface.
• 1st it was the CLI: Command Line Interface. Text. Driven by recall.
• Then GUI: Graphical User Interface. Graphics. Driven by recognition. Exploratory.
• The NUI: Objects. Driven by intuition. Contextual.
• Intuition: the things you expect to work will work.
• Contextual: it will know and understand the environment in which it lives.
• NUI evocative – JJ Gibson’s Ecological Psychology.
• Principles of Performance Aesthetics
• Principe of Direct Manipulation
• Principe of Scaffolding
• Principe of Contextual Environments: the environment suggests what we should do
• Principle of the Super Real: logical abstraction beyond real.

Super Principles

• Social – facilitates interaction
• Seamless – direct manipulation
• Spatial – Objects. Real: not icons, symbols or abstractions.

Intuitive Expertise

• Emotional connection
• Games have behaviour
• Behaviour creates emotional connection
• Organicism: Doug Englebart

XUI
Experiential User Interface: An organic system

• Synthesis: combining things
• Anticipatory: in a meaningful and useful way. Constant interaction between user and system.
• Extensive: extends beyond what it can currently do.
• Fluid: between the user and system.

The Future of the Web Browser: Jesse James Garrett

• This was actually a panel discussion about Adaptive Path’s creation of the Aurora browser concept and associated videos.
• The future of the web browser includes a semantic profile of the data feed.
• Mozilla is working on a mobile browser.
• The browser of the future will incorporate the Natural User Interface.
• Important to create a consistent browser ecxperience across devices.
• The team felt that they created something that was radical yet plausible.

Tap is the New Click: Dan Saffer

• We are in the midst of an interaqction deswign revolution.
• In 2 years time there will be over 1 billion touch screens in the world.
• New interfaces are free form - there will be a wide variety of forms.
• The secret sauce for these new interfaces, jestural, touch, and otherwise: sensors.
• The use of multiple sensors.
• Design for kinesiology and physiololgy: for example, reverse the location of items to avoid covering them with the hand.
• Requires having to communicate to the user, via the interface and other contextual/environmental cues that interactive jestures are required.
• Requires creating an attraction affordance.
• The complexity of the jesture should match the complexity of the task. Simple task, simple jesture; complex task, complex jesture.
• “The best designs are those that dissolve into behavior,” Naoto Fukasawa

Designing Natural Interfaces: Darren David and Nathan Moody

• These guys are from Stimulant
• Make every effort to get rid of administrative debris. E.g, browser chrome (make it go away).
• Start first on paper. Use wireframes, storyboards, sock puppets, whatever it takes.
• Prototype.
• There are latency issues with projection hardware and sensors. The greater the distance, the greater the latency.
• Be natureal
• Be Social
• Be aware

Ubiquitous Computing User Experience: Michael Kuniavsky

• Has a book, Observing the User Experience
• His startup is ThingM
• Ubiquitous computing has started to expand.
• Info processing has gotten super cheap.
• There is no screen required for these kinds of computing devices.
• They leverage wireless networking.
• Processing becomes another material.
• Networked devices: use identifing marks to get meta data about objects.
• Wine, for example, has a large “information shadow.”
• Meta data = information shadow.
• An information shadow is a rich resource.
• Ubiquitous computing is about mashing the physical world with object’s information shadows.
• When a machine is ID’d and tracked, shared object ownership becomes possible - they become subscription services.
• Objects vbecome temporary, physical manifestations of services.
• A mobile phone is an avatar of the service.
• An iPod is an avatar of iTunes.
• Zipcar is a service.
• Kindle is an avatar for Amazon’s books.
• The data cloud has made services dirt cheap (and they will get cheaper…)
• Augmentation object possibilities (not sure what this means…)
• Observe people. Pick an activity. Look at it.
• You are building tools.
• Design research is mandatory.
• Prototype with film and stage.
• The product is what you learn from doing the exercise.

Human-Robot Interaction: Aaron Powers

• The Roomba.
• Best to view images at Flickr for this presentation.

Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote (and other HCI Projects): Johnny C. Lee

• The Wii guy.
• Best to view images at Flickr for this presentation.

Endnote: Bruce Sterling

• Bruce Sterling: Design crtic, cyberpunk and science fiction writer.
• In the beginning there was command line.
• Belgrade sounds like it sucks.
• There is a Serbian grievance narrative in Belgrade.
• Conspicious proletarianism in the Balkans.
• Individuals in the Balkans are themselves Balkanized. The people are in the midst of an internal struggle.
• Look for cold war East German industrial and furniture design examples. Apparently it uses a lot of injection plastics with the results being freakish and alien.
• The gypsies in Belgrade know what is good design and remove it from the garbage.
• Interaction designers need another hat, a gypsy hat. We need to know what is worth preserving, we need to learn what is intrinsicly good and worth pulling out to save and put away.
• It should not always be a case of renewal and replacement.

Please note, at some point I will augment this post with pictures and scans from my Moleskin.