Some exciting news this morning! We’ve been recently interviewed by a couple different journalists about our work in natural user interfaces and mobile user experience. It has been an exciting process for many of us.
Seattle Firm Artefact Joined HTC on Touch Diamond™ (via RCR Wireless)
The first article reports on the emergence of several mobile handsets that build upon the Windows Mobile OS. Martijn and Agnieszka were asked to speak to the process and benefits of design for greater user experiences in the mobile industry with HTC as the leading example.
The Evolution of Natural User Interfaces (via Smart Device Central)
In a way, this article by one of PC Magazine’s contributing editors, Jamie Lendino, builds on the IxDA event we held back in June on NUI. While we will see many more products that include NUI experiences, there are still many design challenges that are left to resolve. Not to mention, NUI does not mean it will replace GUI entirely just yet. Not until we all have the ability to control things with our minds.
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!
Nokia just launched their new campaign for the 7610 handset, Somebody Else’s Phone. It’s a pretty neat idea where the audience “stumble” upon three separate phones. Within them are text messages, intimate photos and other bits that look deeply into their lives. It’s pretty addicting for the vouyer inside all of us.
What’s most interesting is how Nokia leverages Facebook and user Pages to connect with their personas with the rest of the world. That got me thinking: Imagine, developing personas on Facebook, and populating it with media, messages, and other interactions to demonstrate who they are, how they operate and why they’re motivated to do what it is they do! While it’s not for everyone, it does put personas in a context that’s fitting (assuming the product or service is designed for the right demographic) for them and easily accessible for clients to veiw and follow at their leisure. Internal teams can grow and refine personas over time and keep it alive by regularly updating and pretending to interact with the real world. It takes less time to put together than a custom website, or poster, and it just feels more tangible.
Now there are a lot of problems with this: privacy, managing updates, everyone not having Facebook, or ownership of information, but the idea is interesting and something worth toying over the next couple of days.
While doing user research for our mobile design projects, we often see users having a hard time with multi-tasking and moving information from one application to the other. This video shows a solution to the lack of copy/paste on the iPhone that as simple, easy and natural as the iPhone user interface itself.
For reference, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken posted results on the state of iphone satisfaction. The chart clearly shows Cut and paste being the most-wanted iPhone feature at nearly 100%!
We have worked on several mobile software projects over the last year. One of these projects was our collaboration with HTC on the TouchFLO™ 3D software that runs on for example the HTC Touch Diamond™.
This phone is a good example of the user experience becoming a differentiating factor among mobile phones. TouchFLO™ 3D is an application with a unique user experience optimized for touch and media that leverages the platform it is built on, Windows Mobile 6.1.
Designing such an experience is like designing a building in an existing city. You can be quite innovative in how you design the actual building and you have full control over the user’s experience inside the building. However in the end it is a building that is part of a city, with other useful buildings. To make it work you have to make sure your utility pipes align with the city’s main utility lines and your exterior doors should end up on the street level and not on the 15th floor.
This is also what differentiates the design of the Iphone with HTC’s Windows Mobile phones. Apple set out to design both the city and the main buildings at the same time. It might be a smaller city, but for now the urban planning and architecture is tuned into each other quite well. In order for Apple to maintain this, they have setup a whole bunch of building codes; only if an application meets those requirements will they be allowed in the app store. Google’s Android follows a similar path, however here the city they built is more akin to a Wild West town, without much restrictions and guidelines.
There currently is a trend to create dedicated user experiences that are finely tuned to a user’s goal. The goals for Windows Mobile, the Iphone and Android are to build big metropolitan areas. It will remain an open question whether the user’s unique goals will be met by simply adding more applications.
My expectation is that we will see a lot more mobile user experiences that are like highly focused cities, with intent to plan around the user’s goals and lifestyles. For example a separate town optimized for doing business vs. one optimized for going out.
This concept shows a compelling vision of the promise of Augmented reality systems, which overlay digital data onto normal photographic views of the world. This looking glass concept has enormous potential for taking the huge amount of digital data currently locked away in map based mash-ups and revealing it in situe.
A friend told us about an exhibit he saw during a recent visit to New York’s Moma called Design and the Elastic Mind. He mentioned that the show seemed to be influenced by the Eames studio and process and that it is worth heading over to NY to take a look. Thanks Rodney for the recommendation!
“Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration. Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition. “ - moma
We have had a fascination with flexible displays (don’t we all?) for quite some time. Some of us even played around with funky double-hinged laptop designs that had a continuous display surface while in college (purely vapor concepts, of course). What an amazing thing, though, to be able to have flexible displays - particularly touch-enabled flexible displays. Well technology is catching up and real products are starting to trickle out.
“I will say that if you are impressed by the ‘touch features’ in the iPhone, you’ll be blown away by what’s coming in Windows 7. Now if only we could convince more OEMs that Windows Touch Technology is going to drive their sales.’I’ll believe it when I see it. Maybe we can get in on some of this action!’”
[Gizmodo]
This is similar to some of the wackier concepts we’ve had recently, this company is doing it for real. Browse through lists by tilting the phone, and more… Oh, and it’s really ugly.
