33 posts tagged “user experience”
The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is "Googley" – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world.
Ten principles that contribute to a Googley user experience:
- Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams
- Every millisecond counts
- Simplicity is powerful
- Engage beginners and attract experts
- Dare to innovate
- Design for the world
- Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business
- Delight the eye without distracting the mind
- Be worthy of people’s trust
- Add a human touch
As keynote speaker at the IA Summit 2008, Jared Spool puts his foot in it:
Jared Spool, the IA Summit 2008 keynote speaker, posited the idea that UCD was an out-dated methodology that should be retired by the UX community. Why? According to Spool , in the last 30 years, there has not been one website or other digital innovation that can point back to UCD as the defining factor for its success. He floated the idea that design dogma, methodology and formal process were inferior to a well understood shared vision, frequent user feedback and a robust tool box of design tricks & techniques.
Read entire article (with Jared Spool presentation)
[via experientia]
Sohrab Vossoughi, the founder and president of ZIBA Design, argues in an article for Business Week that companies are flourishing when they try to create holistic experiences by emotionally engaging their consumers.
“Advances in manufacturing technology and the global reach of the Internet have leveled the playing field in the product marketplace. It wasn’t long ago that time-to-market was two years, then 18 months, and then 12 months. Now, a competitor can knock off your “innovation” in six months or less. Many businesses understand that being “new” or “different” is no longer a differentiator. Countless companies are elbowing their way to the top with designs that are also “feature-rich” or “patent pending.” Innovation in product design has lost its meaning and, therefore, its value.
There is still one frontier that remains wide open: experience innovation. This is the only type of business innovation that is not imitable, nor can it be commoditized, because it is born from the specific needs and desires of your customers and is a unique expression of your company’s DNA. Yet the design of an experience is often overlooked in the rush to market.
Companies intending to be relevant today must learn the art of creating experiences that genuinely engage their customers. Choice-fatigued consumers are not looking for another product that hasn’t taken their true needs and desires into consideration. They are looking for companies in which to believe and give their allegiance. They are looking for experiences that cater to their deep-seated desires. This type of engagement requires much more than the latest technological breakthrough: It requires emotional engagement.”
[via experientia]
The Morph is a concept device designed by Nokia and the United Kingdom's University of Cambridge that explores the future of portable gadgetry when married with nanotechnology, and its creators really went wild. It can take various shapes such as a tablet, handset, headset and wristwatch — thanks to the morphing nano-bits composing it — and has an impressive, unheard of list of features: it's self cleaning, durable, changes the feel of its surface to your liking, and is covered with grass-like fibers that absorbs energy from the sun. The fibers also allow it to "sense" the world around it, providing you with information about your surroundings.
From the press release:
Nokia and University of Cambridge launch the Morph – a nanotechnology concept device
New York, US and Espoo, Finland — Morph, a joint nanotechnology concept, developed by Nokia Research Center (NRC) and the University of Cambridge (UK) - was launched today alongside the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition, on view from February 24 to May 12, 2008, at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Morph features in both the exhibition catalog and on MoMA’s official website.
Morph is a concept that demonstrates how future mobile devices might be stretchable and flexible, allowing the user to transform their mobile device into radically different shapes. It demonstrates the ultimate functionality that nanotechnology might be capable of delivering: flexible materials, transparent electronics and self-cleaning surfaces.
Dr. Tapani Ryhanen, Head of the NRC Cambridge UK laboratory, Nokia, commented: “We hope that this combination of art and science will showcase the potential of nanoscience to a wider audience. The techniques we are developing might one day mean new possibilities in terms of the design and function of mobile devices. The research we are carrying out is fundamental to this as we seek a safe and controlled way to develop and use new materials.“
Professor Mark Welland, Head of the Department of Engineering’s Nanoscience Group at the University of Cambridge and University Director of Nokia-Cambridge collaboration added “Developing the Morph concept with Nokia has provided us with a focus that is both artistically inspirational but, more importantly, sets the technology agenda for our joint nanoscience research that will stimulate our future work together.”
The partnership between Nokia and the University of Cambridge was announced in March, 2007 - an agreement to work together on an extensive and long term programme of joint research projects. NRC has established a research facility at the University’s West Cambridge site and collaborates with several departments – initially the Nanoscience Center and Electrical Division of the Engineering Department – on projects that, to begin with, are centered on nanotechnology.
Elements of Morph might be available to integrate into handheld devices within 7 years, though initially only at the high-end. However, nanotechnology may one day lead to low cost manufacturing solutions, and offers the possibility of integrating complex functionality at a low price.
From Worldchanging:
Sightline Institute’s blog The Daily Score recently noted that people always prefer streetcars and other light rail to buses. They aren’t just being subjective, either–history backs them up. In 2001 the Denver Business Journal wrote of new light rail systems being mobbed in Denver, Dallas, Salt Lake City and St. Louis because they were so much more popular than forecasted, saying “In Dallas, ridership on a new rail line was three times greater than ridership on an express bus that used the same route” and quoting government officials who were realizing “How people respond to rail is different than how they respond to bus”.
So, why the mysterious preference for light rail? Two words: Better design.
IVY is an external hard disk which shows the content of the hard disk
on its skin. When no data is stored on IVY, its skin will remain blank.
When you purchase IVY, it appears to be a normal hard disk, but when
you start using it by storing data, it will alter its skin visualising
the content of the hard disk, using an OLED screen. The representation
of the data is abstract and personal. Over time, the content of the
hard disk will change and the representation of the data will change
along with this. The visualisation of the data is based on Sequoia
View.IVY is customization, as its appearance depends completely on your
personal data. IVY also shows that manipulability is never ending as it
keeps adapting itself over time. The ideal state of IVY is not yet at
the beginning of use but will evolve over time.
At the recent Mobile HCI conference in Singapore, Donghoon Chang, vice president of the Mobile User Experience Design Group at Samsung gave a keynote talk entitled, "Emotion and User Experience Design of Mobile Phone: What’s Next?".
In a nutshell, the four crucial points that Chang’s design group has adopted, state that products must:
- be intriguing and innovative, with an aura of mystery that invites to discovery, without confusing the user;
- be multi-sensorial, i.e. stimulating the various senses of the users, also in ways never seen before. To illustrate the point, he shows a Samsung MP3 reader that can be put in the water when we take a bath and makes the water vibrate, by creating small waves that follow the music and come together again in the end;
- provide layers of experience to the user that reveal themselves progressively over time, thereby deepening the use of the product. Here he shows a mobile phone that can be opened and transformed in a micro “boom box” to share music with others;
- have an intuitive interface, i.e. guarantee the compliance with the more traditional usability perspective. And here it is of particular relevance to strive for the most intuitive use possible of the full-touch LCD, which is now becoming more popular thanks to devices such as the iPhone or the Samsung F700, which is now also available on the European market.
It seems to me that Samsung is indeed moving forward with people like Chang, who is pushing for a better emotion and user experiences.
Read entire piece...
"..The user experience is where many of Vista's
problems emanate." 1. Vista lacks user centered innovation that benefits users directly Vista lacks innovation that benefits users directly. Aero was touted
as the new innovation for users. While it provides eye candy like a new
glassy look, see through window edges, the true benefit to end users is
lacking. We are bombarded with more and more documents, email and web
pages and applications to manage. While the Windows Explorer has
improved organization and search, very little is done to help end users
make their computer experience better or more productive. Users are
forced to hunt for common everyday tasks like adding a printer or
connecting to a wireless access point. These should be easy. Managing
multiple windows and documents on the desktop haven't been solved by
Vista. 2. Vista and Office 2007 impose a big productivity loss Relearning and unlearning familiar tasks in Vista and Office 2007 is
frustrating and infuriating end users. More casual users are likely to
give up upon being frustrated or place a call into the IT help desk.
Microsoft has suffered a big setback in understanding how to help end
users increase productivity and instead has worsened the problem. Users
are more likely to downgrade to Windows XP unless there is some
external incentive to go through the learning curve of Vista and Office. 3. Vista performance is poor Boot times to come up to a fully functional desktop are still long.
Basic file copy operations that takes seconds on XP can take minutes or
tens of minutes on Vista. Applications like Outlook freeze and going
into "Not Responding" mode with a mouse click performing a basic task.
While hardware and software in the industry continues to work faster,
Vista steps backwards and is slower. 4. Vista has a high user annoyance factor Message balloons from past Windows operating systems are still
annoying users in Vista. In many cases, cryptic messages tell users
that a "host process has stopped working". What's a user to do? User
Account Control is the equivalent of putting an automatic look on every
door inside your house, so you must use a key to enter the kitchen,
study, bedrooms or closets.
Smashing Magazine showcases some of today's UX of the future:
A Vizoo’s product which can change our understanding of 3D for always.
Reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface.
Multi-Touch-based devices accept input from multiple fingers and multiple users simultaneously, allowing for complex gestures, including grabbing, stretching, swiveling and sliding virtual objects across the table. While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations.
Multi-Touch is also the core of Microsoft Surface, an interactive tabletop which allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects by putting them on the surface.
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation.
