Posts tagged “interaction”

Announcing the winners of the IxD12 Student Design Challenge!

Whew! Our wonderful judges have sifted through the 56 entries! We heard from a number of judges how impressed they were overall with the quality of the entries and the creativity and passion that the group overall had to offer. Of course, this makes the selection process a difficult one. We’ve thought to ourselves “Well, what if we could take them ALL!!!” but of course, we can’t.
We managed to find four wonderful and inspiring entries among all the bounty of goodness we received from around the world. Our winners are (in no particular order)

  • Diksha Grover – National Institute of Design, India
  • Siri Johansson – Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden
  • Jaime Krakowiak – Austin Center for Design, USA
  • Priscilla Mok – Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Here are each of their videos

The Future of News, a film by Diksha Grover

Diksha


Siri


Jaime


Priscilla
Thanks to our judges for their wonderful work and for all the entrants who contributed such a great set of videos. Our winners will now be working between now and Dublin where we’ll have a two-day masterclass and design activity before the conference. We are now exceptionally enthusiastic about the upcoming experience in Dublin.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from julienorvaisas] What the Luddites Really Fought Against [Smithsonian Magazine] – [Conniff re-contextualizes the term "Luddite" for the digital age. Rather than a rejection or ignorance of technology, being a Luddite is about deliberately and continuously questioning its role in our lives.] The original Luddites lived in an era of “reassuringly clear-cut targets—machines one could still destroy with a sledgehammer”, making them easy to romanticize. By contrast, our technology is as nebulous as “the cloud,” that Web-based limbo where our digital thoughts increasingly go to spend eternity. The original Luddites would answer that we are human. Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology, but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives. It’s about small things, like cutting the cord, shutting down the smartphone and going out for a walk. But it needs to be about big things, too, like standing up against technologies that put money or convenience above other human values.
  • [from julienorvaisas] Observed: The Death of the File System? [Johnny Holland] – [The question of digital file management and navigation is one we find ourselves pondering here from time to time. Our mobile lifestyle and shift to an app-oriented way of interfacing with devices suggests that a new vision for navigating files is in order. But in the end, is the staid but flexible file-folder metaphor holding up OK?] “Projects” are just one type of organizational scheme. As a user experience designer, I’ve seen a lot of professionals in other fields organizing a lot of stuff in a lot of different ways. So even attempts at inter-app organization around the concept of a project, such as Microsoft’s Project Center, are not effective replacements for an infinitely flexible organization scheme like simple folders. …We still need a high-level organization system of some kind. And that is the challenge. It’s a challenge because that problem has already been solved by the file system. The challenge is to solve it better.

Steve interviewed in Digital Book World

I was interviewed for an article in Digital Book World. Anne Kostick and I spoke about the Reading Ahead project and what has or hasn’t changed since then. The whole article is online but here’s an excerpt:

We discussed what’s happened in the months since the project ended more than a year ago. Although the study gathered great feedback from individuals and professionals, he still doesn’t see a lot of people trying to really rethink what it means for “analog activity to become digital activity.”

Still, the primary goal of digital-book development should be creating good user experiences: creating things people can use that don’t disappoint on some social, physical, or conceptual level that the designers and manufacturers hadn’t known about or taken into account.

There exist, of course, basic principles, but Portigal notes that “we’re at that inflection point where we bring our analog expectations to digital. It’s hard to adopt new technology if it’s not done really well, and we don’t have a model for a digital reading experience.

“New behaviors are emerging as a result of digital experience,” he explained. We can handle operations that change-for example, that have preference settings-and there are actions that are moot now (for example, removing the jacket from a hardcover book before reading). But there’s so much potential for new functions and innovations; are readers ready for that? They lose something from not having the physical book, but don’t yet know how much they may have to gain.

Portigal suggests we tease and challenge the reader to learn more about what a digital reading experience can offer, and then let us know how they like or dislike a feature. Maybe readers will be able to navigate content based on reading expectations: What kinds of books do people read in bed? before sleeping? In transit? Readers may want to choose their content based on feeling, word length, density of prose, device and platform, for different situations and activities.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] ThatsMyFace.com – [Technology continues to trickle down, where image processing and digital printing previously associated with movie special effects and commercial printing now enable little businesses to crop up, offering fairly unique types of products] Gifts with personalized faces, including custom action figures, celebrity action figures, 3D portraits, masks, jewelry, papercraft, and ornamental heads.
  • [from steve_portigal] How to Have an Idea [Frank Chimero] – [A little comic that amuses as it inspires and teaches, suggesting that creativity is tied to doing, not just thinking or (gulp) talking. Manifests so adroitly while we believe user research really comes alive when you use it to start generating concepts for things to make and do] No one crumples a blank sheet of paper.
  • [from steve_portigal] The Medium – E-Readers Collective [NYTimes.com] – [A Kindle feature takes advantage of the inherently digital nature of the medium, but has consequences for the experience] But many writers don’t write aphoristically, and many readers don’t read for aphorisms. In a popularly highlighted world, we all may begin to. The dotted line, like the distinctive hue or underscore that signals a word is clickable on the Web, may be a new kind of punctuation that affects contemporary style. (Amazon's most heavily highlighted books include Gladwell’s “Outliers” and Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture”) Readers coming to e-books freshly purchased from Amazon might be taken aback to find them already marked up. Stumbling on a passage that other people care about, framed as though you should care about it too, can seem like a violation of virgin text. It’s bad enough that vandals have gotten to your “new” edition before you have and added emphases unendorsed by author or publisher. What’s worse is that they invariably choose the most Polonius-like passages.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] DVRs Can’t Handle New Show’s Title [NYTimes.com] – [A UI edge case that wasn't designed for ends up becoming a mainstream concern. "What are the chances that'll happen?" comes true, and now workarounds must be created] It turns out that the search tools on some DVRs cannot find the new show, “$#*! My Dad Says,” because the symbols cannot be read. (Maybe some DVR developers could not foresee a world where TV shows would have a dollar sign in the titles.) Before the show’s premiere on Thursday, CBS released a viewers’ guide of sorts on Wednesday to help people program their DVRs accordingly.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flow [Nieman Storyboard] – [Via @kottke. While many decry the loss of personal connection that our devices lead to; here's a theory that says the opposite, that it creates feelings of greater connectness] I was traveling with friends, and one of them took a call. Suddenly, instead of feeling less connected to the people I was with, I felt more connected, both to them and to their friends on the other end of the line (whom I did not know). My perspective had shifted from seeing the call as an interruption to seeing it as an expansion. And I realized that the story I had been telling myself about who I was had widened to include additional narratives, some not “mine,” but which could be felt, at least potentially and in part, personally. A small piece of the global had become, for the moment, local. And once that has happened, it can happen again. The end of the world as we know it? No — it’s the end of the world as I know it, the end of the world as YOU know it — but the beginning of the world as WE know it.
  • [from steve_portigal] The Acceleration of Addictiveness [Paul Graham] – [Via @waxpancake. He describes how slowing down by taking hikes gives him a mental and creative freedom that his addictions have rendered otherwise inaccessible] Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating. We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much.
  • [from steve_portigal] Exactitudes® – [Thanks @MicheleMarut! Pattern-matching is a fabulous way to develop observational skills] Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek have worked together since October 1994. Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, they have systematically documented numerous identities over the last 14 years. They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

From Pain Points to Opportunity Areas

The subtle difference between a knob and a lever.

An unexpected interaction with a familiar object.

At a restaurant in San Mateo, the knob from a stove replaces the toilet flush lever. Each of us who use the toilet that evening come back to the table struck by what an unexpectedly pleasant experience it is to turn the knob.

As a researcher or designer, you are not going get to this surprisingly delightful interaction if you constrain your thinking around the idea of pain points – i.e. what is not working for people. Of course no one is going to buy your company’s toilet if it leaks or doesn’t flush – products need to perform their primary functions reasonably well – and as part of an exploration of user experience it’s necessary to find out whether this is indeed the case. But if you are laser-focused on the question “What’s not working for you?” you’ll miss all sorts of opportunities.

In our research engagements we like to include discussion with people about the things in their lives that are working really well for them – inside and outside the focus areas of the project. By figuring out what’s at the heart of these interactions, we might learn, for example, something about the way a service works that we can apply to the development of a product. Or a person might say “I just love the way the big chunky knobs on my Viking stove feel.” And it might be the transposition of this small finding in an ideation session that helps our client go on and create innovative toilets.

We encourage our clients to move from focusing on pain points to thinking about Opportunity Areas. We use what we learn out in the field to point them in promising directions, with a focus on asking “How can we __________ ?”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Subway To Start Tessellating Cheese July 1? [The Consumerist] – Three years after the protests began, it seems Subway has finally listened to its customers and will start tessellating cheese on its sandwiches, according to what appears to be an internal weekly newsletter. As anyone who has gotten a Subway sandwich knows, most Subways layer their isosceles-cut cheese in an overlapping fashion. This means one side of the sandwich gets more cheese than the other and leaves pockets of zero cheese, resulting in a uneven flavor and texture distribution. As the newsletter says, "This will improve the cheese coverage on the sandwiches."
  • Reading Lolita On Paper [graphpaper.com] – Throughout the final terrifying third act of the book, Nabokov knew that the reader would be constantly, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, seeking (or deliberately avoiding seeking) a single word, a word whose distinctive typographical form would light up like a flare in the reader’s peripheral vision, paragraphs in advance, impossible to miss. Every time you turn a page, even if you avoid it, your eyes will, in an instant, claw through the one-thousand characters in every new two-page spread to find it, the word, the single characteristic letter. He plays with this visual expectation so thoroughly — torments the reader, in fact — that it’s inconceivable that he wasn’t always thinking about printed words, words on pages being turned in a reader’s hands. Oh, how glad am I that I was unable to find Lolita in any sort of eBook format.
  • Kno is a digital textbook that is about to change the way knowledge is transmitted and the way students learn – First we did our homework about the way students do their homework. We studied the way they study. We probed them about the best way to re-imagine the analog studying and reading experience in the digital world. The Kno’s two generous panels open like written material has opened for hundreds of years. The experience is reassuringly book-like. Indeed, because we respect and honor the textbook, content of 99 percent of all textbooks – including the charts and graphs – fit flawlessly. No material spills beyond the screen, so there’s no awkward scrolling or manipulation required. If Kno only transferred existing textbooks into a digital form, we might as well sleep in and skip class. Kno pushes further than that. Our mission is to create a new kind of immersive, fluid, fully-engaging learning experience – made possible because the power of the physical is combined, for the first time, with the potential of the digital. It’s a whole new form factor that feels natural because it is natural.
  • Christina York’s sketched notes from UPA2010 – [Her summary of my presentation begins on slide 5] This was the perfect complement to Rachel Hinman’s opening keynote. Steve enthusiastically dives deeper into cultural clues, cues and gaps that impact our work and our own experiences in this world. In this session I sat at the front, which I usually don’t do (I like to observe the entire room). However, I am a fan of Steve’s and was like a groupie in the front row. How embarrassing. But Carol sat next to me, and I felt better about myself. Steve delivered an impassioned talk and engaged an audience that richly represented the cultures present at this conference. The group discussion was as rich as the presentation and I really appreciated that Steve’s focus was to give us something to think about and not try to ground everything in application.
  • Complete Beginner’s Guide to Design Research [UX Booth] – Valiant attempt to take a complex volume of expertise and boil it down to some essentials. Not sure what it means to be a "luminary" in this field but certainly the company we're listed with is pretty awesome. Curious to hear what others have to say about this piece.

Leading with Error Recovery


JetBlue counter, Sea-Tac airport

This sign directs JetBlue customers to a counter based on their specific situation. The first item listed is Kiosk “Oops” Messages. JetBlue is bold enough to acknowledge that things aren’t always going to work perfectly and they’ve made the path to error recovery prominent. This is good customer service, and it’s good design: allow for – and acknowledge that you are allowing for – failures, and reframe them positively.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • GameCrush: Pay to play–with girls [CNET] – The website GameCrush pays girls to play video games and live-chat with gamers who pay for the privilege. It's the gaming equivalent of buying a girl a drink to chat her up, the developers say. A Player (yes, they're called "Players") buys points–500 cost $8.25–and uses them to buy "game time" with a PlayDate (yes, they're called PlayDates). Players browse through PlayDate profiles, and once they find one they're interested in they can send a gaming invite. If the PlayDate accepts the invitation, she can set her mood to "Flirty" or "Dirty" and it's game on (though any real gaming girl would set her profile to "Hurty" and kick your ass). The pair can chat, play, or both for the amount of time purchased. When their time is up, the Player is invited to send the remaining 100 points to his PlayDate as a tip.
  • The Idea of the Book [Murketing] – Rob Walker's interesting series of posts that look at the physical performance of the "book" as it morphs into or is represented by or as other objects such as sculpture, food, planters, purses, etc.
  • Story Book inColor by AIPTEK – AIPTEK Story Book inColor is the 1st color E-Book on the market and there are 20 built-in illustrated audio stories. Children can open the Story Book inColor and enjoy the story telling with illustration instead of watching TV alone. AIPTEK also provide online bookstore for story book purchasing and downloading. AIPTEK Story Book inColor can store as many books as children want. Story Book inColor creates a whole new experience with fun and easy learning process which leads children learn to love the reading. The 4-way buttons simulated the scenario for children of searching favorite books on bookcase and also the page up and down feeling when reading. There is 1GB internal memory on AIPTEK Story Book inColor which can stores up to 45 story books. The story books also can be saved to SD/SDHC, MMC, MS pro, and USB drive. Besides, in order to protect children’s eyes, after reading over 20 minutes, AIPTEK Story Book inColor will pop up an icon to remind children to take a rest.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • The Book Club With Just One Member [NYTimes.com] – Reading might well have been among the last remaining private activities, but it is now a relentlessly social pursuit. …The collective literary experience certainly has its benefits. Reading with a group can feed your passion for a book, or help you understand it better. Social reading may even persuade you that you liked something you thought you didn’t. There is a different class of reader, though. They feel that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share. Ms. Stead remembers having had especially intense feelings about books when she was young. “For me, as a kid, a book was a very private world,” she said. “I didn’t like talking about books with other people very much because it almost felt like I didn’t want other people to be in that world with me.” Particularly with the books we adore most, a certain reader wants to preserve the experience for reflection, or even claim the book as hers and hers alone.

Sign up for “Well, we did all this research- now what?” at Interaction10

I’ll be leading my Well, we did all this research- now what? workshop at Interaction10 in Savannah, GA, in February. (Check out audio and slides from an abbreviated form the workshop here).

If you’re going to sign up before the end of the year, you can use my discount code: IxD10Special and save $50 off the conference registration.

One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of design research is that research projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. As designers increasingly become involved in using contextual research to inform their design work, they may find themselves holding onto a trove of raw data but with little awareness of how to turn it into design.

Participants in this workshop (a sell-out at last year’s conference), collaborating in teams, will learn an effective framework for synthesizing raw data (to be gathered before and during the workshop) into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts that respond to those insights. While the framework includes a step to identify key filters that will ultimately prioritize across all generated concepts, the emphasis in this workshop will be to think as broadly as possible during ideation, truly strengthening the creative link between “data” and “action.” By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a range of high-level concepts that respond to a business problem and integrate a fresh, contextual understanding of that problem.

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