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 May, 2006
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 »
24-05-2006 by
Architecture, Hackability, Interaction Design.
In “Architecture and Interaction Design, via Adaptation and Hackability” Dan Hill has gathered his thought-provoking ideas on the role that adaptiveness should play when designing interactive artifacts:
“Essentially, all products lives start when in the hands of the consumer, long after the designer has waved bye bye.
Design is a social process.
This reinforces the idea of adaptation as a basic human desire.
This should really be a question of can products be purposefully made more or less hackable?
If we are to invite the user in, we need to leave some of the seams and traces open for others to explore; some sense of what the process of design, or un-design, might entail.
This is beyond affordances (which concern predefined usage).
This sense that the fabric of the product should communicate its constituent parts and how they are assembled runs counter to ‘invisible computing’ thinking and much user-centred design, which argues that interfaces should get out of the way.
As the distinction between hardware and software blurs, their behaviour approaches the malleability of software.
Arguably the most interesting things about these emerging products and devices is their ability to create or contribute towards a sense of self … there is huge potential to build devices which become increasingly, personally meaningful, which can adapt to personal context and preference like never before.
This requires that the products have at least some ‘understanding’ of both their own behaviour - essentially, tracking their behaviour, usage patterns, and context wherever possible - and are built by both designers/researchers who understand ‘the social’ in depth, and can ultimately be adapted by their own users.
In adaptive design, designers must enable the experience/object to ‘learn’, and users to be able to ‘teach’ the experience/object.
So, it’s a two-way interaction, in which the user wants to adapt the product, to make it useful to him or her.
Designers shouldn’t aim to control, but to enable.“
Posted in Interaction Design, Human Centered Design | 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 »
19-05-2006 by
Designing for Interaction.
Dan Saffer’s “Designing For Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices” is almost ready to be published.
With a master in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University and as one of the partners at Adaptive Path Dan has all it takes to provide insights into the faceted practice of our evolving discipline.
“Explore the new design discipline that is behind such products as the iPod and innovative Web sites like Flickr.
While other books on this subject are either aimed at more seasoned practitioners or else are too focused on a particular medium like software, this guide will take a more holistic approach to the discipline, looking at interaction design for the Web, software, and devices.
It is the only interaction design book that is coming from a designers point of view rather than that of an engineer.
Filled with tips, real-world projects, and interviews it covers interaction design fundamentals, approaches to designing, design research, and more, and spans all mediums–Internet, software, and devices.”
Take a sneak peek at the Table of Contents and read excerpts on UX Matters:
“For interaction designers, who create products and services that can be digital (software) or analog (a karaoke machine) or both (a mobile phone), the design elements are more conceptual.
Interaction designers are very concerned with behavior: the way that products behave in response to the way that people behave.
They work in both 2D and 3D space, whether that space is a digital screen or the analog, physical space we all inhabit.
Interaction designers need an awareness of time. Some tasks are complicated and take a long time to complete, for instance, searching for and buying a product.
How something looks gives us cues as to how it behaves and how we should interact with it.“
Posted in Interaction Design | No Comments »
18-05-2006 by
Making Ubicomp Approachable.
“Making Ubicomp Approachable: Interaction Design For Augmented Objects“, is a really interesting workshop that will be held on September 17, at Ubicomp 2006.
The submission deadline is June 16, 2006, and the full proposal can be downloaded here (PDF, 140 KB)
“For more than a decade the Ubicomp community has worked on the problem of distributing computational power into the environment.
One strategy to achieve this goal is to augment items already present in our everyday environment.
Approaches that incorporate commonly used objects range from enriching these objects with new functionalities, to using them as a means to trigger the presentation of extra information to the user.
The meaning of objects is often related to the history and ritual of their use: interaction design should augment daily gestures as much as the objects themselves, leading to a natural and intuitive interaction paradigm.
We believe that using an object or gesture as a basis, or “anchor”, for a new interaction can facilitate intuition and social acceptance, making the Ubicomp paradigm in general more approachable for real users.
This workshop will explore design decisions and technical issues related to these broad categories, encouraging the development of a discussion aimed at extrapolating general design guidelines and broad reflections on the topic. The activity will be centered around two design exercises, which will be carried on by participants in small groups.
Each group will be given a number of seed objects and a kit containing modeling tools.
The teams will be asked to mock-up an augmentation and create a scenario around its use. A presentation and discussion will follow each exercise.
We invite researchers and practitioners from industrial and product design as well as ubiquitous computing to present design concepts, sketches, and critical questions related to the area in the form of a poster.
We ask participants to submit a description of their work or idea in 3 to 6 pages in the standard CHI 2006 Extended Abstracts Format, encouraging rich use of illustrations.
A maximum of 25 applicants will be selected to participate in the workshop based on a review of their papers by the organizers.“
Posted in Interaction Design | No Comments »
17-05-2006 by
How Bodies Matter.
Stanford’s Klemmer, Hartmann, and Takayama’s paper, “How Bodies Matter” (PDF, 3.8 MB), is a great read for designers who, like me, are interested in embodied interaction.
“One of the most powerful human capabilities relevant to designers is the intimate incorporation of an artifact into bodily practice to the point where people perceive that artifact as an extension of themselves; they act through it rather than on it.
Our physical bodies play a central role in shaping human experience in the world, understanding of the world, and interactions in the world.
We introduce aspects of human embodied engagement in the world with the goal of inspiring new interaction design approaches and evaluations that better integrate the physical and computational worlds.
This paper presents five themes that we believe are particularly salient for designing and evaluating interactive systems.
The first, thinking through doing, describes how thought (mind) and action (body) are deeply integrated and how they co-produce learning and reasoning.
The second, performance, describes the rich actions our bodies are capable of, and how physical action can be both faster and more nuanced than symbolic cognition.
The first two themes primarily address individual corporeality; the next two are primarily concerned with the social affordances.
Visibility describes the role of artifacts in collaboration and cooperation.
Risk explores how the uncertainty and risk of physical co-presence shapes interpersonal and human-
computer interactions.
The final theme, thickness of practice, suggests that because the pursuit of digital verisimilitude is more difficult than it might seem, embodied interaction is a more prudent path. ”
The paper will be presented at DIS 2006, Designing Interactive Systems, to be held on June 26-28, 2006.
Posted in Interaction Design | No Comments »
16-05-2006 by
Participatory Design Conference
PDC 2006, Participatory Design Conference, Expanding Boundaries in Design, will be held in Trento, Italy, on August 1-5, 2006.
“The theme Expanding Boundaries in Design focuses attention on the multiple contexts in which design takes place and on an expanding range of possible design outcomes.
While participatory design principles and practices are most often applied to the design of technical systems and artefacts, increasingly there is both the need and the opportunity to focus these approaches on other domains, such as physical environments, organizational practices, and IT-enabled services.
Likewise, the contexts in which Participatory Design is practiced has grown to include teams of globally distributed designers and practitioners; actor networks that span organizational, expertise, cultural and linguistic difference; and activity areas beyond the workplace, such as domestic and leisure.
Finally, Participatory Design has a significant role to play at various stages of design, from initial concept development, to system configuration, to implementation, to integration within the context of use, and ultimately to ongoing design in use.“
Posted in Conferences | No Comments »
12-05-2006 by
Interaction Design Patterns.
Jenifer Tidwell’s “Designing Interfaces, Patterns for Effective Interaction Design” is a very valuable introduction to the use of pattern languages in the practice of user interface design.
Originally conceived by Christopher Alexander for architecture and made famous in his books “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction” and “The Timeless Way of Building, pattern languages have been repurposed to become popular tools in software engineering circles.
Designing Interfaces applies Alexander’s approach to interaction design:
“Designing a good interface isn’t easy.
Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use.
Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market.
Your UI technology, Web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices, may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well.
UI designers over the years have refined the art of interface design, evolving many best practices and reusable ideas.
If you learn these, and understand why the best user interfaces work so well, you too can design engaging and usable interfaces with less guesswork and more confidence.
Designing Interfaces captures those best practices as design patterns, solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand.
Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color.
You’ll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warnings on when not to use them.
Each chapter’s introduction describes key design concepts that are often misunderstood, such as affordances, visual hierarchy, navigational distance, and the use of color.
These give you a deeper understanding of why the patterns work, and how to apply them with more insight.
Experienced designers can use it as a sourcebook of ideas. Novice designers will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design, with enough guidance to start using these patterns immediately.”
Designing Interfaces’ accompanying website also provides designers with plenty of inspiring patterns, nicely organized under headings such as Organizing the Content, Getting Around, Organizing the Page, Commands and Actions, Showing Complex Data, Getting Input From Users, Making It Look Good.
The added bonus of the website?
It’s all for free.
Isn’t life wonderful?
Posted in Interaction Design | No Comments »
11-05-2006 by
The (User) Persona Lifecycle.
A comprehensive book on User Personas has just been published by Morgan Kaufmann: “The Persona Lifecycle. Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design“, by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin (via Peter Bogaards).
Here’s what none other than Don Norman had to say about it:
“Personas personified. The definitive word on why personas are better than people in guiding your designs.
Filled with case histories, sidebars, and helpful, useful guidelines as well as deep, penetrating analyses.
A big book, and for reason. This book is unique in that it is truly for everyone: the practitioner, the researcher, and the teacher.
Did I say this was essential reading?
Well, it is: if you use personas, if you have thought about using them, if you don’t even know what they are, this is the book for you.”
A free sample chapter can be downloaded here (PDF, 768 KB); excerpts below:
“Why is it so difficult to be user centered? The problem is threefold.
First, being user centered is just not natural.
Our more natural tendency is to be self-centered, which translates to taking an approach to product design based on our own wants and needs
Self-centered design is perhaps better than technology-centered design, but most of the time the people on your product development team are not representative of the target audience for your product.
Self-centered design results in inadequate products.
Second, users are complicated and varied.
It takes great effort to understand their needs, desires, preferences, and behaviors.
And unfortunately, it is sometimes the case that pleasing some users in a given situation necessarily conflicts with pleasing others.
Third, those doing the user and market research to understand who the users are and how they vary (and others who are just more in touch with your users, such as the sales team or the support team) are not typically the people who actually design and build the product.
If the important information about users isn’t available at the right time, or is difficult to understand or to remember, product teams forge ahead with designing and building features they thinkthe users would like (or more likely, what is easiest and least costly to build).
When User Centered Design was a new idea, simply introducing the word user in a design and development process was powerful:it challenged the status quo.
Unfortunately, incorporating the word user in everyday corporate discourse is not enough to foster effective UCD.
We need to move beyond our habit of referring to ‘users’ and find a better way to communicate about and focus on real people, the people we want using our products.
Once we do understand the user,and even if we effectively communicate that understanding, we still have to tackle the difficult challenge of incorporating that information in the design of the product.
To take it a step further,how do you get them to empathize with user perspectives and take them as seriously as those elements that affect their own daily development jobs?
You need a variety oftools to make this happen.
This book offers one such tool that,although immensely popular and frequently discussed,until now has been only loosely described to practitioners.
Enter personas.“
Posted in User Research | 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 »
04-05-2006 by
People. Research. Nokia.
Mobile phones are quintessentially personal objects.
Whether they are referred to as personal shrines or remote controls for life they have become indispensable prostheses that assist us in our daily stroll through life.
In light of these considerations it’s not surprising that the current market leader, Nokia, keeps in constant touch with how the world perceives and uses mobile phones (sorry, multimedia computers, as Nokia now wants them called now), and also with how emerging socio-cultural needs could be met with networked handheld devices.
Jan Chipchase, one of Nokia’s researchers, runs Future Perfect, a wonderful blog where his world-encompassing research activities are documented with an enticing stream-of-consciousness flow of words and pictures.
The “publications” area has many interesting, visually inspiring presentations.
“Out There: Using Field Research to Inform and Inspire” (PPT, 3MB) and “Exploratory User Field Research in the Nokia Mobile HCI Group” (PPT, 3MB) are both rich introductions to Nokia’s research process, documenting people’s whys, whats and wheres to “figure out what the world is like today to understand how it could be tomorrow”.
“Mobile Essentials - What People Carry and Why” (PPT, 2MB) is a fascinating look into what people carry while on the move.
The study was conducted in 4 cities across the world and involved shadowing 17 people in their daily activities.
Researchers identified core mobile essentials and extended mobile essentials, together with the problems people encounter to remember to have such items on the way out of their houses and the strategies they adopt to avoid forgetting them.
The study was also presented at DUX 2005, and a version with detailed written explanations was published on AIGA’s Gain, where it’s also available for download (PDF, 380 KB).
Mobile Essentials can be nicely integrated by a paper presented at Mobility 05, “Where’s the Phone? A study of Mobile Phone Location in Public Spaces” (PDF, 340 KB) and by “Physical Personalisation” (PPT, 1MB).
The first one is study conducted in Helsinki, Milan and New York that looks at where people store their mobile phones and how these habits can (negatively) impact receiving calls and the like.
The second study is a review of 6477 used mobile phone covers in Japan, that shows how people customize not only visible but also invisible parts of their handsets.
We are complex creatures indeed.
Posted in User Research | No Comments »
03-05-2006 by
Ethnography. Implications for Design.
A few days ago Paul Dourish, author of “Where The Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction“, presented a though-provoking paper at CHI 2006: “Implications for Design” (PDF, 324 KB).
Dourish expresses a quite critical point of view on the role that ethnographic research has been playing in the world of user-centered design(-at-large), possibly undermining some of its very methodological principles.
Well-worth reading.
Here are a few excerpts.
“ Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the metrics by which it should be evaluated in HCI.
Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic study is the implications it can provide for design.
Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that “implications for design” may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.
I want to explore the ways in which the “implications for design” may underestimate, misstate, or misconstrue the goals and mechanisms of ethnographic investigation.
In reducing ethnography to a toolbox of methods for extracting data from settings the methodological view marginalizes or obscures the theoretical and analytic components of ethnographic analysis.
Ethnography is concerned with the member’s perspective and the member’s experience, but it does not simply report what members say they experience.
Ethnography theorizes its subjects.
Ethnography is interpretive, and indeed, ethnography’s outputs are often not analytic statements purely about members’ experiences, but about how members’ experiences can be understood in terms of the interplay between members and the ethnographer.
The particular issue I want to explore is how the idea that the goal of ethnography is to generate implications for design construes the disciplinary relationship.
The “implications for design” model postulates design as the natural end-point of research inquiry, and therefore designers as the gatekeepers for that research.
In doing so, it places ethnography outside of the design process itself … (and) it places those whom ethnographers study outside of the design process.
By contrast, ethnographic perspectives suggest a different perspective on the creative processes by which people put technology into practice.
In particular, these are seen as natural consequences of everyday action, not as a problem (to be eliminated).
Technology, here, is a site for social and cultural production; it provides occasions for enacting cultural and social meaning.
As with technology, so also with space, gender, family, time, animals, food, death, emotion, and everything else.
In this way, the domain of technology and the domain of everyday experience cannot be separated from each other; they are mutually constitutive.
It is practice that gives form and meaning to technology; the focus of ethnography is the ways in which practice brings technology into being.
From this perspective, and drawing again on the notions of reflexivity raised earlier, we might suggest that what ethnography problematizes is not the setting of everyday practice, but the practice of design.
Certainly, though, what it does is to refigure “users” not as passive recipients of predefined technologies but as actors who collective creating the circumstances, contexts, and consequences of technology use.
As a focus of HCI research attention, “design”, in this sense, goes beyond giving form to technologies to encompass appropriation: the active process of incorporation and co-evolution of technologies, practices, and settings.
In that spirit, then, my argument is certainly not that design recommendations are poor things to include in ethnographies.
What I do want to suggest, however, is that the presence or import of “implications for design” are not the appropriate criterion by which ethnographic contributions should be judged.
What matters is not simply what those implications are; what matters is why, and how they were arrived at, and what kinds of intellectual (and moral and political) commitments they embody, and what kinds of models they reflect.“
Posted in User Research | No Comments »