Summer School 2006
After Ivrea, Roma, Split and Timisoara the 5th Convivio Summer School came to Edinburgh, August 14th-25th.
The theme this year was: "Technology, Enjoying or Enduring it? Visions, Boundaries and Transformations in Extending or Replacing Human Capacities."
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Archive for the 'User Experience' Category
12-12-2006 by
Don Norman on simplicity.
In “Simplicity Is Highly Overrated” Don Norman stirs controversy by turning a critical eye onto the real value of simplicity:
“‘We want simplicity’ cry the people befuddled by all the features of their latest whatever. Do they really mean it? No.
Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity.
You do it too, I bet. Haven’t you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more?
Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person.
Why do (companies) deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them?
Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.
Yes, we want simplicity, but we don’t want to give up any of those cool features.
Simplicity is highly overrated.“
Posted in User Experience, Human Centered Design | No Comments »
11-12-2006 by
The complexity of simplicity.
In “The Complexity of Simplicity” Luke Wroblewski looks at how simplicity, often hailed as the holy grail of interface design, is quite hard to get right (if at all):
“Many of us carry a few preconceived notions about simplicity. We assume things that are easy to use don’t have a lot of options and, as a result, shouldn’t appear cluttered when we first encounter them.
Conversely, a perception of complexity can turn customers, clients, or business stakeholders off before they ever actually use a product.
Cultural context can also sway people’s perceptions of simplicity.
Regardless of the specific biases of individuals, notions of perceived complexity can prevent potential users from discovering the simplicity of a product’s actual use.
While there are many reasons why keeping things simple is difficult, I’ve encountered the following three causes quite frequently:
1.
Perceived simplicity can often conflict with actual simplicity of usage.
2.
Actions that provide real value, and drive revenue, often have formidable learning curves.
3.
Gradual engagement, the most frequently cited solution for managing complexity, is actually quite difficult to design and build.”
Posted in Interaction Design, User Experience, Human Centered Design, User Interface Design | No Comments »
22-11-2006 by
Experiencing Experience.
In UX Magazine’s “Experiencing Experience” Tom Guarriello turns an enthusiastically critical eye on the field of “experience design”:
“As a psychologist who’s spent over 30 years focusing on human experience … it’s exciting to see so much energetic interest in understanding users’ experiences, and designing environments that lead to desired user and customer experiences.
Phenomenological psychology’s insights can be very useful in helping businesses gain a sharper focus on their users and customers.
I think about these things every time I hear people talk about ‘designing’ experiences. Because, the truth is, it can’t be done.
Designers design occasions for experiences; experiences themselves are personal. That’s why different people have different experiences in (what are supposed to be) the same situations.
Ah, but there’s the clue: the situation isn’t the same for all participants because each of us brings a unique set of perceptions, perceptions rooted in unique personal histories, to everything we experience.
Technically, most designers are attempting to design meaning, not experience. But, most often, designers must create experiences for people they don’t know.
So, how can designers create opportunities for meaningful experiences for people they don’t know? By paying close attentions to patterns.
We can’t remove an experience from its context.
‘Context’ is just another way of speaking about where an experience fits into an individual’s life (hi)story.
More accurately, what the experience designer is doing is creating conditions that invite the participant to engage with the atmosphere from a particular perspective and therein experience this range of meaning.“
Posted in User Experience, Human Centered Design | No Comments »
20-11-2006 by
Natural Interaction.
Natural Interaction is an iO research center that investigates novel approaches to interactions with digital artifacts:
“Natural Interaction investigates the relationships between humans and machines following this vision: we create interactive artifacts that respect and exploit the natural dynamics through which people communicate and discover the real world.
Our research is aimed at creating technology-enhanced spaces that sense and understand human behaviors and expressions, and present digital content as it was real, physical stuff.
Our interaction design work is based on intuitive schemes, that need no explanations, so that common people in public spaces may spontaneously dialogue with the artifact.
Differently from traditional research facilities, Natural Interaction experiments and proposes a vertical, vision-driven, lightweight research model, that directly impacts the real world.
We think the world needs to interact with machines in a simple, human way. And we also think that small is beautiful.
The Center adopts a craft approach, like in a Renaissance ‘bottega’, where researchers address all the issues that affect the interaction experience.
We create experiences through an original conjunction of art and science.”
Their white paper “Designing Natural Interaction” ( 116 KB, PDF) is a nice introduction to their design philosophy.
(via Bruno Giussani)
Posted in Interaction Design, User Experience, Ubiquitous Computing | No Comments »
18-11-2006 by
Empathic Economy.
Steve Hardy interviewed IDEO’s chief creative officer Jane Fulton Suri to better understand her ideas about an “empathic economy”:
“When I refer to ‘the empathic economy’ I’m talking about a future possibility in which a similar level of empathy and imagination might be applied to the many different kinds of people who populate the business ecology of a particular industry, not just customers/end-users/consumers.
In an empathic economy the provider/supplier of goods and services would be keen to reach an empathic understanding not just of consumers, but also of many other people within the business network upon whom business success depends.
This is a matter of fostering an organizational cultural in which people all respect, even like and enjoy, one another, one another’s ideas and diversity in different work-styles, knowledge and skills.
An organization that doesn’t do that internally will have a hard time encouraging others to participate with it in creative ways.”
(via InfoDesign)
Posted in User Experience, Human Centered Design | No Comments »
09-11-2006 by
User Experience Research.
Andreas Pfeiffer’s “User Experience Research” introduces the concept of User Interface Friction, another measure to gauge the quality of the User Experience:
“How do we compare technology?
In our innovation-driven society, we tend to compare technology almost exclusively by looking at features and performance.
This functionality-centric approach is utterly natural … (but) as technology matures, features are not that important any more.
So if we don’t look at features any more, what DO we look when we try to decide on the comparative merits of two products?
Design? Style? Both are difficult to measure, and don’t do much on their own.
Of course there is always “user experience”, an increasingly important aspect in the success of technology-related products, but an equally elusive one.
These considerations led us to come up with a new concept, that has proven extremely useful in conducting technology analysis.
Since in nature it is somewhat similar to the physical notion of friction, we called it User Interface Friction (UIF).
UIF is the resistance imposed upon a user-guided process through the operating system and the way the user interface reacts.
In most cases, it has nothing to do with functionality: we use the term User Interface Friction to define the difference in fluidity and productivity that can be observed when running the same program or procedure on different computer systems, or when trying to achieve the goal on two similar digital devices.”
(via InfoDesign)
Posted in Interaction Design, User Experience, User Interface Design | No Comments »
02-10-2006 by
Stop Designing Products.
Peter Merholz recently presented “Stop Designing Products” (1.8 MB, PDF) during Shift 2006, in Lisbon, Portugal.
Inspired by Adam Richardson’s “The System is the Product” mantra the talk focused on the ever more complex task of successfully designing artifacts for our interconnected world, in which every single touch-point has to work in synergy with the other ones in its “system”to ensure the quality of the user experience:
“The world is changing and old approaches to design and business aren’t working as well as they used to.
Many old principles still apply but in new and different ways.
With the rise of globalization, the Internet, etc., people, their activities, and their objects are more interconnected than ever before.
Thus, the products and services they use become more deeply embedded in the messiness inherent in people’s lives.
This integration has led consumers to become more savvy and have higher expectations of the experiences they have in all their interactions with companies.
Old approaches to design and business that focused on static, stand-alone products (e.g. ‘making one great product’) don’t work anymore.
We need to understand people as people, to embrace and embed design approaches, to create and drive toward larger business strategies, to evolve our organizations to support these approaches, to embrace flexibility, adaptation, and agile development, to contribute to and draw from the ecosystems of products and services already in use.
For a product to feel harmonious the user, the system that surrounds it must be harmonious.
No product is outside of a system, though not all products are systems.“
Posted in User Experience, Human Centered Design | No Comments »
31-07-2006 by
Fifth Conference on Design and Emotion.
The fifth Conference on Design and Emotion will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, on September 27-29, 2006, at the Chalmers University of Technology.
“Emotions arise towards people, towards places, towards food, and towards things. Emotions influence our well-being as well as our purchase decisions.
From a design perspective, we need to know more about how artefacts elicit emotions.
We also need to know more about the way we can identify the relevant emotional aspects and how we can evaluate the emotional impact of a particular design.
The International Conference on Design & Emotion is a forum where practitioners, researchers and industry meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion.”
The conference will focus on many sub-themes, such as attachment and behaviour, brand and identity, methodological and theoretical issues, emotion and culture, surprise and delight, space and environment, unpleasant emotions.
Posted in Conferences, User Experience, Human Centered Design | No Comments »
25-05-2006 by
Findability is Ambient.
Peter Morville, author of the “bible” of Information Architecture, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web“, and of “Ambient Findability” was interviewed by Aiga in “Findability is Ambient“, where he talks about how the way we’ll relate to information and where and when we’ll find it is changing fast.
“Ambient findability describes a world, at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.
Today, we can design for findability at both the system and object levels.
I use the term findability to encompass wayfinding in natural environments, as well as navigation and retrieval in digital spaces.
What’s new is the use of technology, much of it coordinated through the web, to create trans-media wayfinding experiences.
We’re importing huge volumes of data about the physical world into cyberspace, and at the same time, we’re designing all sorts of new interfaces to our digital networks.
Physical and digital are increasingly “intertwingled.”
There’s no question that the web and mobile devices will serve as outboard memory.
Why remember facts, figures, names and dates when they’re always instantly findable?”
Sounds a lot like Connectedland to me…
Posted in User Experience, Ubiquitous Computing | No Comments »
23-05-2006 by
Experience Design. New Levels.
In “New Levels of Experience Design” PingMag’s Matt Sinclair interviews Liisa Puolakka, Nokia’s Head of Brand Visual and Sensorial Experiences.
“(In User Experience Design) I think the main thing is that rather than just designing an object you take a more holistic approach.
That means the design language and how it relates to other products; how does it feel to use, both rationally and emotionally.
When I started at Nokia there wasn’t really a discipline of trends analysis, certainly not lifestyle trends, so I worked with consumer research specialists to establish the process by which these trends could influence the work of designers.
Even today my work is still very much involved in understanding and recognising trends and the way people or societies are changing.
One of the important things is to realise the difference between ‘long-term’ societal trends and ‘short-term’ lifestyle trends, but also to understand that some short-term trends have the potential to cross into the mainstream of society, where they become much more influential.
The main thing is to start with an understanding of the user, the consumer, and the life they are living.
What’s important is a sensitivity to what’s going on, observational skills, and the creativity to distill those observations into stories, themes and product possibilities.“
Posted in User Research, User Experience | No Comments »
22-05-2006 by
New Laws. Digital Technology.
In “Why Features Don’t Matter Anymore: The New Laws Of Digital Technology” Andreas Pfeiffer describes the 10 fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology.
“One key aspect of modern digital devices is that technical specifications are easily copied and replicated: mega-pixel count in cameras, storage capacity in music players or processor speed in personal computers are the same everywhere.
As a result, they provide only poor distinguishing factors for consumers when it comes to choosing between different brands.
That’s where the overall user experience comes in.”
- More features isn’t better, it’s worse.
- You can’t make things easier by adding to them.
- Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
- Style matters.
- Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
- Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.
- Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use.
- Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.
- Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.
- Less is difficult, that’s why less is more.
Posted in User Experience | No Comments »
09-05-2006 by
Understanding Experience.
A bit oldish but still very valuable: Jodi Forlizzi and Katja Battarbee’s paper, Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems (PDF), presented at DIS 04.
“Understanding experience is a critical issue for a variety of professions, especially design.
To understand experience and the user experience that results from interacting with products, designers conduct situated research activities focused on the interactions between people and products, and the experience that results.
This paper attempts to clarify experience in interactive systems.
We characterize current approaches to experience from a number of disciplines, and present a framework for designing experience for interactive system.
We show how the framework can be applied by members of a multidisciplinary team to understand and generate the kinds of interactions and experiences new product and system designs might offer.
Our research has led to a common way to understand experience, and to understand how social interaction and collaborative product use influence the individual’s product experiences and the meanings those experiences come to
have.
We offer an understanding of the experiences of the individual and co-experience as a sensitizing concept to help in interpreting meaning from a social interaction perspective.
This process needs to be visual, empathic, and emotionally driven to be ultimately successful in supporting inspiration and gaining insights into user experience.“
Posted in User Research, User Experience | No Comments »