Posts filed under 'events'
Actually we were going out to play pool and bowl anyway. It just happened to be World Usability Day on November 13 but we watched very carefully and didn’t see anything get magically easier. In fact, setting up our teams to start bowling was predictably frustrating… more on that in a minute.
‘Usability’ is starting to make its way into vernacular but it may be losing its usefulness. Often it’s used too specifically to mean just things like fixing button names in the usability lab at the end of a project. It can also be used too broadly to be useful, including any kind of customer feedback or best practices.
Let’s take the bowling console as an example. It isn’t just the names of buttons that get in the way. There are buttons that only work if you’re in league mode or before you begin a game. The controls are separate from the hanging monitors, limiting your ability to make connections between your actions and their effects. And the feedback on your current state (editing names or frames, normal play, re-racking) is minimal. If you were designing one of these and found such problems at the end, the budget you set aside to fix button names won’t do the trick. So how should the design process have worked?
The goal is an experience the user may enjoy but doesn’t have to think about. Setting up a game shouldn’t be the memorable part of your night. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get there. Careful choices about what information is required when, how to get it, and how to interpret it must guide design. User involvement (even on a budget), is one way to set the project on the right path. Heading off the large issues before they are too far advanced to correct makes thisan investment rather than a cost.
It’s glib to suggest a “cell phone should be as easy to use as a doorknob,” but it shouldn’t take 3 people to set up a bowling game, either. Is the popularity of ‘usability’ helping us advocate for better process and better experiences?
Well done Kevin with the high score, and Ken for Miss Congeniality!
November 14th, 2008
Twenty years ago, my college roommate majored in computer science while I worked on a fine arts degree. In contrast to our individual areas of study, our creative interests pulled us in other directions. We liked to joke that computer science people secretly desired to be artists, and artists secretly craved computer interaction. Today the line between computer science and fine art is blurrier than ever. This was evident in two notable talks from this year’s Design Management Institute (DMI) conference. Muriel Cooper prize recipient Ben Fry (no relation) and Jason Salavon each spoke to the continued merger of the science of computers with the art of design.
The Muriel Cooper Prize “recognizes outstanding achievement in advancing design, technology and communications in the digital environment”. Named for Muriel Cooper who cofounded and directed MIT’s Visible Language Workshop at the Media Laboratory, it honors uniquely talented individuals who demonstrate unconventional thinking. Fry and Casey Reas received this year’s award. From data visualization techniques to the invention of new graphic tools, Fry’s talk featured several software demos illustrating the potential of computers to express information in new ways. It was not a conventional DMI presentation. His use of homegrown illustration tools underscored the pitfalls of using off-the-shelf software to create visual design solutions.
Following Fry’s talk, Jason Salavon presented his own digitally-created pop-art. Jason’s work expresses pop culture with novel data visualization techniques. His work is a fascinating approach to illustrating trends and archetypes in data, from how
homes look in different real estate markets to trends in adult magazine imagery. His work is often beautifully abstract: a formalist representation of data without real-world reference. He demonstrates how visually alluring data can be.
Both Fry and Salavon underscore an important lesson for design: Let your vision - not the tool - guide your innovation. In Fry’s case, he creates new tools that break the conventions of today’s graphics applications. I appreciated Salavon’s rant where he argued that
Adobe Illustrator’s constraints as a tool are evident in the redesign of several
NFL logos from the 1990s. Each team logo looks like it was drawn by the same hand using the same pen; technology overwhelming creativity.
The work of Fry and Salavon are a better marriage of engineering principles with art principles. Their work relies on computer-related technology as a catalyst for creativity and a medium for expression. Additionally, their work illustrates possibilities, provokes thought, engages emotionally, and asks for viewer participation. The same principles can be found in the best of design.
November 13th, 2008
This last Thursday (October 23, 2008) a bunch of interaction and game designers made the trek across 520 or across campus to the IxDA’s local monthly meeting hosted by Office Labs.
The theme this month was “Lessons from Game Design” with three speakers who have worked or participated in the game design industry to present on their experience and insights. Microsoft was kind enough to host the event in their building 33 Conference Center and also provide hungry designers with free dinner, er, i mean hors d’oeuvres.
But enough about food, let’s get on to some good gaming… can you figure out how to rescue the princess?
Daniel Cook first spoke on “Prototyping and Sketching” by describing how to apply game design methodology to software interaction design. He did so by attempting to rebuild the common “Rescue the Princess” game scenario as a general software or productivity application.
This little gem (figuratively and literally) above is the “Web 2.0” newly improved version of “Rescue Princess Enterprise 2008.” (Although that one button design may descrease the time needed for users to complete the task, it’s probably still not as fast as these guys). Through these and many other examples he described how the secret ingredient to game design is “Exploratory Learning.”
Exploratory Learning provides that:
- You are given a goal
- You aren’t told how to reach it
- You can fail
- You can succeed
- Delight comes when you figure it out on your own
and most importantly:
- The designer has to believe the user is smart
In game design where the user is constantly rewarded in the game and pulled through a narrative story (usually with a healthy dose of jaw-dropping visuals) this makes sense and works. It reminded me of a typical “Usability Study” where a piece of software is tested to see how well the user can use it on the first try. Typically, success (or failure) rates are measured in how long or how many tries it takes the user to figure it out, with 0 being the ideal. But in game design, failing is part of the experience and provides greater reward when the user figures it out on their own.
Purposeful failing is typically something that is avoided at all cost in software applications, where the user’s goal is to accomplish a task quickly rather than blow off some steam shooting space aliens. Dan proposes that both can be possible - that the use can accomplish tasks while having fun at the same time. It’s something to think about.
All of this reminded me of a TED Talks video (part 3, timecode 16:40) I watched recently about a educationally-challenged student who became self-taught in computer programming because it was “fun” and “rewarding” as opposed to learning to read which didn’t seem to have any value to him.
Take a look at Dan’s blog post and linked powerpoint deck to read more about his presentation.
Next up, Mark Long, founder and co-CEO of Zombie Studios, spoke on the role of “Narrative in Game Design”, and how it then may apply to software interaction design.
In particular, Mark descrbied how games like Grand Theft Auto IV have built on the narrative rise and fall in classic story telling, tying the user’s interactions directly into that story. But he also wanted to show that game design is, can, and should develop beyond the current “grammar set” that has been established and used since the early days of film (reaching its full vocabulary with Citizen Kane) by debunking 2 faults of typical games:
- using rewards as a way of dragging the user through a mediocre story
- fixating on telling a story from a single character “hero’s” perspetive
He proposed that games, or some iteration thereof, will become the defacto entertainment of the future and, like the Nintendo Wii, will incorporate more advanced methods of interation.
At the end of the evening, George Amaya, User researcher at Microsoft Game Studios, spoke on his work conducting usability studies on local multiplayer (social) games like SingStar, and others while developing the Xbox 360 game “Lips.”
Among the interesting findings, they discovered that karaoke and karaoke games is very different between Japan, the US, and Europe (Germany in particular). Totally different dynamics and style of play were discovered in these different regions via these user research sessions. They also discovered interesting dynamics within groups - different behavior and interaction between the performers and the observers.
The one universal take-away? Karaoke games like Lips are a lot more fun when you’re drunk.
Amen, brother.
Note: It was stated that a copy of the slide decks and a full video of the session would be posted at some point on the Office Labs blog. So far, we haven’t seen it but will update this when it comes live.
October 30th, 2008
At the Forrester Consumer Forum 2008, there has been a lot of discussion around the importance of maintaining momentum on innovating, even during times of economic woe. Understandably, the B-School will tell anyone that when times are rough, wallets get tight and businesses go into survival mode that diminish opportunities for new ideas. These changes in consumer behavior might be true, but that’s a short-term, short-sighted perspective. We took some notes from Paul Jackson’s talk on Innovating in a Time of Recession, as well as incorporated pieces from James McQuivey’s presentation on “Satisfying Consumers for the Next Decade:”
“The need to differentiate continues even in a recession.”
As strategists, we need to be aware of what is going on in time that will ultimately alter the way people are motivated to act. The focus here is on presenting a value proposition that clearly identifies with the person’s current need. Enough so that they are willing spend their limited source of funds to acquire it. There are four things to look at to help innovate on your business’s offerings:
- Watch for what consumers consider luxury vs. essential
- Make sure all the fat is trimmed
- Squeeze extra revenue out of existing products via component optimization, upgrades and pricing
- Fight to maintain funding for innovation
One company demonstrating this innovative push is HTC. This is a brand we are quite familiar with and have recently partnered with to help innovate on their next generation mobile handset experience. We worked together with their design team to conceive and prototype their now developed, TouchFLO™ 3D operating system. The innovation was their recognition in making a social phone for the socially aware consumer.
The TouchFLO™ 3D experience is something that has evolved from an evolution where HTC was just a commodity manufacturer. Over time, they have broken out of that and onto the stage with the rest of the handset competitiors like Nokia and Apple. They’ve created a strong offering that is appealing both in usefulness, and desirability across many products including the Touch Diamond™, the Touch Dual™, the Touch Pro™ and the Touch HD™. HTC transformed itself into a branded offering that let them gain more control over pricing and functionality.
Out of the box, it helps connect consumers with their networks on the web. HTC wasn’t building an entirely new network here, instead they piggy-backed on existing networks so that the customer would feel comfortable with adopting this phone and having it integrate with their existing lifestyle.
HTC is an example of how the company is committed to introduce new and better investments in experiences in order to stay competitive. As John Wang, their Chief Marketing Officer puts it, ”It takes close to 1,000 ideas to turn up a few projects that are worth running.” It’s not about quick wins, but about long term investments that will showcase what it means to provide a premium mobile user experiences long after a recession lifts.
The result of these careful decisions HTC made regarding their approach to hardware and software design made them rise above the crowded market space. That attracted Google to partner with HTC to release an Android phone; the T-Mobile G1 handset.
How do we talk about innovation to our customers?
The four items listed above mention how you can market a product and begin to lay the processes to maintain innovation in a company with a temporary, smaller budget. In conjunction with that list, we can look a little closer at James McQuivey’s Consumer Needs Profile definition to help determine which need should be satisfied at their convenience through design.
Consumer Needs Profile (We will go in greater detail on what this means later on and give our two cents.)
In brief, Maslow had something going with the pyramid, but it didn’t account for the way consumer needs fluctuated over time due to their environment, and it implied that the needs were entirely hierarchical (e.g. that a hungry person could not have any need for self-actualization). We all have the same four needs:
- Connectedness
- Uniqueness
- Comfort
- Variety
These four are constantly being traded off depending on where we are in life, during the day, or during a time period. As a result, we can look to these to understand how behaviors will change and adjust the way we design experiences to satisfy what’s most important to them at that time.
In a time of an economic recession, connectedness and comfort are going to outweigh the other two because both consumers and businesses (they’re people too) are looking to reduce risk on how they spend their money. In turn, they look for ways to satisfy their need for comfort and safety in their activities such as shopping. They are also looking for greater convenience in connectivity because they might be looking to reach out to others who are going through the same situation as they are (related to comfort).
So what?
Jackson points out that on a typical product life cycle, innovation happens within three stages:
- Creation
- Growth
- Decline
Right now, companies are steering away from innovating within the Creation stage. That might be okay, but we push you consider otherwise. It can be small and it can fail. As long as the thinking is there, these small investments can result in a big idea that stands on its own. Companies can remain competitive and position themselves for exciting long term product growth as long as they can navigate through these ambiguous times early on. Fortunately, there are tools and guides here that can help make those decisions easier.
Innovation shouldn’t stop, or even slow down. Instead, we need to take a closer look at how the trade offs in consumer needs impact our decision making process. By designing functionality that makes it more convenient to achieve the need for connectedness and comfort during hard times, it will be easier for users to identify with a product’s value and ultimately select that brand above the rest.
October 28th, 2008
Just wanted to give a friendly reminder that the Seattle IxDA October Event will be hosted by Office Labs in Building 33. Three speakers will join the event to discuss how interaction design can learn from the challenges game design face everyday. It is also a great opportunity to network with other designers in the area who are passionate about what they do.
This month’s topic is ” Lessons from game design”
this is a chance to learn where the fields of interaction design and game design overlap. It’s a chance for IxD to learn more about how games challenge, reward, and engage players. We’ll hear how game designers use prototyping and sketching (Daniel Cook), about User Research on Social/Party Games(George Amaya ), and how narrative and storytelling immerse players in experiences (Mark Long).
If you haven’t already, RSVP through Upcoming now!
October 22nd, 2008
Folks, we will be attending the Forrester Consumer Forum 2008 next week, Tuesday October 28th until the 29th. As we finalize our prepartions here in the studio, we wanted to give you a heads up that we will be live blogging during each presentation. It’s going to be an exciting event with lots of great insights and demonstrations of what’s going to happen in the future.
If you want to learn more about the event, you can visit the Forrester site. The basic premise is on social computing and mobile technology. These are two hot topics that we’ve had the pleasure to research and design solutions for our clients. This will be a great opportunity to build on our learnings and discuss with other brilliant minds the kinds of things we went through to innovate in a crowded market.
So check back in with us! I will be following the consumer research track, while Agnieszka focuses on product strategy and processes.
We’ll be uploading photos along the way on our Flickr account, dropping tweets on our favorite blue bird application, and serving up fresh entries here on the blog with commentary on what we’re hearing.
For those of you who are attending, add us, follow up, friends us, or all of the above! See you there!
October 20th, 2008
Multitouch is all the craze these days and it is becoming more commercially available with products such as the HTC Touch Diamond, Microsoft Surface and the iPhone. Since multitouch allows for direct manipulation and gesture recognition, it opens up the opportunity for designers to explore new interfaces that are natural and intuitive for users. A classic example is the zoom gesture that has become a table-stake in multitouch experiences; i.e., zooming in and out using two corner touch points that move in opposite directions on a photo or a map, for example.
With this in mind, us Artefactians set out to join the do-it-yourself craze to investigate ways to build our own multitouch table on the cheap that we can use as a testing platform for multitouch experiments. Our goal was to build a table as quickly and cheaply as possible that would recognize multiple fingers and blobs simultaneously so we can get started with our investigations.
Check out what we built
October 13th, 2008
Join us for our monthly IXDA meeting - hosted by Microsoft’s Office Labs on Microsoft’s main campus - Building 33.
This month’s topic is Lessons from Game Design
This is a chance to learn where the fields of interaction design and game design overlap. It’s a chance for IxD to learn more about how games challenge, reward, and engage players. We’ll hear how game designers use prototyping and sketching (Daniel Cook), how usability techniques are used to fine-tune casual game play (Mac Smith), and how narrative and storytelling immerse players in experiences (Mark Long).
Details
Thursday October 23, 2008 at 7:00pm
Microsoft Convention Center - Building 33
16070 NE 36th Way
Redmond, Washington 98052
Seattle IxDA Meetup [Upcoming]
October 13th, 2008
This post has been long overdue, but we have good reason for it, which I’ll cover in a second. First and foremost, I’d like to share a couple thoughts with you on the things that Bill demonstrated to us that day that really resonated with the group: you can sell the design by mimicking the experience on the spot, and that the best way to know how something works is by making it yourself (even if someone else has done it). Together, these examples make a great case on the power of prototyping and experimentation as a way to understand things.
For the uninitiated, Bill Buxton has been in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) arena for some time exploring the various ways people may interact with software experiences through input methods like touch, pen, etc. In other words, he has helped advance the understanding of all things cooler than the mouse, and more.
Selling Design by Example
Here’s a scenario: You’re in a review meeting, and your client isn’t quite bought off on the idea yet. They didn’t quite understand what a “synchronous multi directional touch based media reconfigurator” was, but the idea sounds cool enough! So how do you get them to really get it the same way you do? Mimic the experience, or really, live prototype. A live prototype enables you as a communicator of ideas and insight to demonstrate the vision by having someone participate in an activity that resembles the concept. The example Buxton makes is by pretending you’re Charles Xavier and you can move the mouse by waving your hand . While they waved their arms in the air, you would move your mouse according to their gestures. Yes, it sounds a bit crude, but the aha! moment is completely worth it.
Another example would be demonstrating different ways of doing collaborative white boarding. Bill asked yours truly to stand on the other side of our opaque doors. We would both write with dry erase markers at the same time. Surprisingly, we did not conflict with each other while writing and ended up with a nice image of a man and his dog smoking a cigar. The idea here is that as other people join the session to collaborate, their shadows provide enough feedback to indicate their position. This reduces the uncertainty in where and how people will work together in a shared spac;e especially thinking about this in terms of remote collaboration.
Now, this isn’t something that you do as a planned activity, but a skill that you become familiar with incase you need that extra bit of push to get things in the right direction. The beauty of this is how low tech it can be and how easy it becomes to learn about an experience without having to do so much work up front. This concept leads into the next idea of learning by doing.
MAKE Experiences
This isn’t exactly a new lesson learned, but a great one to remember. In the business of designing new experiences, our role is to be experts in that space. Sometimes the best way to really understand how that might actually work out is by simulating it right in front of you. Think of this as a live prototype, except you are afforded a little more time to play things out and use resources that have qualities that make for a better analogy. Those tools are coming out in a grassroots fashion where the Wiimote and all inclusive touch enabling projectors are becoming affordable components to hack and build on. We no longer need to wait for some company to commercialize the technology. We can go to the store and pick up the pieces and learn about emerging technology by being a part of the invention.
Closing Thoughts
For the most part, he discussed touch input and technologies, which is quite relevant to our times today. As the greater population familiarize themselves with touch enabled software beyond just the ATM, it is important that we continue to experiment and learn best practices regarding the various applications they will be engaged in. Luckily, we are becoming more fluent in methods that enable us to get to answers much quicker, without the need to break the bank.
The visit really helped reinvigorate the inventor in all of us. Everyone needs to continue to play and make things that don’t really result in anything but an understanding about the intricacies of different experiences. There are inexplicable things that we gain by practicing with our other senses. So we want to thank you, Bill, again for talking to us and sharing your spirit of getting down and dirty. We’ve taken that drive to continue our work with Frontier projects and the nifty little things that are coming out of it (link to DIY table). Now you see why we’ve been so busy getting this post out!
Additional Resources [Bill Buxton]
October 8th, 2008
I think it was Paris Hilton who said sometimes you have so many friends it’s hard to remember all of their names. Today I’m sitting on an Atlantic Ocean cliff in Ogunquit, Maine attending my sixth Design Management Institute conference, and I’m beginning to understand what she means. I’ve connected with old friends and met many new ones. With the number of elbows I’ve rubbed, I’m going to have a hard time remembering everyone’s name.
This year’s conference theme is “ReMix”. DMI President Tom Lockwood clarifies: “the role of design in business is undergoing a sea change” challenging the design management community with a new mix of requirements, responsibilities, and roles. As design becomes increasingly more relevant to business, design practitioners must be able to think bigger and do more.
When design has a place in the executive boardroom, the challenge is this: how do we not only remain relevant to business strategy, but help architect that business strategy? How can design extend beyond the material artifacts we deliver into the experiences that people have?
In his DMI talk, Engine co-founder and director Oliver King touched on the theme of moving beyond material artifacts as a way of introducing us to his presentation on “service design”. Service design has found its way into professional dialog and practice over the last few years, but I’ve remained skeptical of the need to create a new field in a world already choking on ways to characterize design. King started his presentation by describing his frustration with his increasingly niche role as an industrial designer. I loved his example of the Electronic USB Travel Mug as the epitome of misguided design. According to King, a service design strategy is about the process of “making something better for someone” and “the act of helping someone to do something.” King described service design practices, case studies, and principles that include systems of value creation, and systems of people, processes, and product. These methods and principles are useful things to leverage for generating design solutions, and very familiar to many of us doing design today. Something this familiar doesn’t need a new name.
Today even Paris Hilton is designing things. If we call Ms. Hilton a designer, then do we have the impetus we’re looking for to define a new discipline of design? No way. No matter how scary that sounds, I’m still not buying the need to slice up design into smaller pieces.
October 8th, 2008
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