The Seattle Interaction Design Association group would like to officially invite all members and students to the next event! We’re very excited to announce that the theme of this event will be on natural user interfaces (NUI) and the future. We will spend some time exploring NUI interactions and the implications for it in the future five years and beyond. To help us with this discussion, August de los Reyes, Dennis Wixon and Sabrina Boler will kick us off with a talk on their insights on their experience with Surface and other input technologies. Following will be an open floor for conversation, networking and some hands on experience with NUI related stations. Please join us for this exciting occasion where we will discuss, learn and story tell the next generation in user experience!
RSVP with Chrish or Kevin [at] artefactgroup [dot] com
This will be a catered event with light snacks and beverages (alcoholic and non alcoholic).
Parking is available on the street as well as across the street in a paid lot.
The event is also free.
RSVP: Contact Chrish or Kevin [at] artefactgroup [dot] com including any additional information regarding number of guests or questions about the event.
Recently at Mix, I ran into a couple of UI folks from Netflix. We got into a over dinner conversation where we talked about some of the UI issues with their service. They asked at the end of dinner if I’d care to write a critique of the site. We conducted a brainstorm with about 8 Artefact people (all Netflix users) for a couple of hours and generated a list of maybe 30 big and small issues and opportunities for Netflix and their site. I wrote up the notes, then was about to hit Send when the Netflix team did a fairly significant update to their site rendering allot of the issues redundant. It took a week or two to re-do this list and Kudos to the Netflix team their site dramatically improved in this release. Overall their site UI is pretty good, we rate it an overall B, but there’s lots of small and large opportunities for them to make the Netflix site the best Movie authority destination on the internet. The picture above shows a concept featuring a movie preview on the home page, with the ability filter in the individual movie bands.
Once we sent the document, Netflix immediately responded with some very nice feedback answering many of the issues this document raises. They asked I keep thier feedback confidential. You can read the document here.
Arstechnica recently wrote a preview article on AT&T’s desktop web browser. It’s an interesting development considering the changing habits of web browsing (see: snacking, RSS, social media) and the advancements in web page implementations (see: RIA, Silverlight, AIR, etc). The web space is becoming more of a place than a collection of documents serving up bits. Behind that content are consumer goods, social relationships and answers to research questions. As they become more engaging, more advanced controls will be necessary to manage emerging habits.
While it is still in private beta – aka broken – it toys with the idea of a changing browsing experience. Instead of making something more efficient, it introduces functionality that helps organize pages, and collection of pages (which they call “cells”) for user’s to manage as opposed to favorites and hierarchy of favorites. Another component to Pogo is the notion of a visual history. While I haven’t personally experienced how this feature interacts, I’m curious how this is realized and why they see this as a large unmet need. I mean, they made it 3-D and extremely visual. AT&T is really experimenting with the market new ways we as consumers will potential engage with our online world.
Flock is another interesting implementation of web browsing in that it exposes the practices in the context of social media and interactions. It is still a rather traditional web browser, with similar metaphors, but it is built around the embedded access points into social web sites like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. Shiira is another emerging web browser (based on the Webkit foundation, like Safari). These browser are introducing new ways to manage multiple pages at once and visualizing them in ways other than tabs.
The question this raises is how this will impact the relationship between client side (browser) functionality and server side (RIAs) functionality. Do I Digg to bookmark? Or do I bookmark within my browser? Benefits? Drawbacks? Anyways, just food for thought.
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
Daan Roosegaarde of Studio Roosegaarde is doing some pretty cool sensor projects. This one connects proximity sensors and audio sensors to hundreds of little fans to create an interactive wind installation.
This spawns from a recent discussions we had about head tracking and creating very believable VR on a 2D display. It looks like that crazy Wii-mote guy has done it again - headtracking with a wiimote!
“Ikea’s Dreamkitchen offers a tremendous visual experience: visitors navigate in slow motion in 3D through IKEA products. Interesting effect: the volume of the music changes as you pass throught the “IKEA universe”. Further examples: Dromkok, Demo. In the latter examples you can flip through 3D-rooms as well.” [Smashing Magazine]Ikea Dream Kitchen via Smashing Magazine »
“Now there is a three step process. For the first step, over a period of 100 frames, the gravity orbs paint their cross-section onto the paper where it intersects it. The second step, also cumulative over 100 frames, has the particle orbs raining down a mist of ink. The third step is where it gets fun. Every 100 frames, all of the geometry collapses onto the paper. Voila! Instant chaotic hair balls.” [Vimeo]
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.
Jim Gasperini is experimenting with simple GIF and Flash animations that display a 3D image on a standard display. It sounds like the frame rate needs to be about 10 fps to work so you end up with a weird strobing effect. Still, it is quite interesting and I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work with video as well.
