Adaptive Path Blog

Nicholas Chen of the University of Maryland presented an interesting talk on navigation techniques for for dual display e-books. Unlike the Kindle, Nicholas and his colleagues wanted to experiment with a form factor that was similar to a book or magazine. So they built a prototype with dual screens. The form factor allowed them to experiment with embodied interactions, like opening and closing the device (he referred to the interaction as “clapping”) or folding the device so that the cover and back are facing and turning it like we do a magazine (he referred to the interaction as “fanning”). They tested the device with users and came up with some interesting pros and cons.

Some of the benefits of a dual display:
Easy to read the content
Better for assessing length of the content
Helpful for finding new articles

Downside of dual displays:
Clunky - he device was heavy so opening and closing the cover was awkward as an interaction
Confusing - the single screen was simplier and less confusing
Restrictive form factor - grip required to hold device was awkward

Nicholas’s conclusion was that dual displays are better for serious reading but one display is more convenient.

If you’ve ever used a bot like SmarterChild, pause and pay a moment of respect to the late Joseph Weizenbaum who died March 5, the news of which is only now making the rounds. Weizenbaum was the creator (in 1966) of ELIZA (play with the web simulation), the first software program whose purpose was to make the computer seem like a human being, with human-like responses. ELIZA was (and remains) ridiculously seminal in HCI circles, and its influence can be seen in everything from IM to text-based adventure games to Clippy.

Weizenbaum had some wrong-headed, disparaging things to say about the internet (”a garbage dump”), but his caution about the possible evils of computers sounds like he was warning us about SkyNet long before anyone else was. He had a great concern with the ethics of technology and strongly advocated that computers never replace human decision-making.

Another one of the old guard is gone, and we are all lessened for it.

Michael “Rands” Lopp, a senior engineering manager at Apple and the author of the great book Managing Humans, let slip in a talk at SxSW a little about Apple’s design process. Since, up until now, their design process has mostly been such a black box, even this tiny view (as reported by BusinessWeek) is pretty interesting.

What struck me most was this:

10 to 3 to 1
Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good,” which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

While it is standard practice in visual design to come up with three strong concepts to present and choose from, I’ve found that it is rare to do so in interaction design. And especially to the level that Apple seems to do it, down to pixel perfect mockups. For months. This also echos what both Alan Cooper and especially Bill Buxton had to say at Interaction08, with both urging interaction designers to plan to throw several designs away. Obviously, if Apple is any indication, this is sound advice.

At UX Week 2007 and UXI Vancouver 2007, I did a presentation on where to look for ideas when designing. I finally got around to posting the slides. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see the video clips here, but I urge you to track them down if you can.

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Microsoft is holding MIX, its annual “future of the web” conference in Las Vegas next month. Kim Lenox and I are excited to be bringing our message to this venue as part of the user experience track debuting this year. On March 6th we will lead four intensive sessions over the course of the day. Each session includes hands-on activities where you get a chance to really learn something new. We are focusing on design strategy, interaction design, information architecture and design methods. Participate in the entire day with us and you will take away all the techniques needed to be successful in defining and designing your next product.

If spending a day with Kim and I in Vegas is enticing enough by itself, then maybe you’ll want to come check out a sneak peek of new IE8 features or compete against your peers in Rock Band.

If you are going to attend, then please drop me a line at <danh at adaptive path dot com>. We hope to see you there!!

I’ll put it out there…. I think that this year we will see some terrific mobile interfaces. We’re just wrapping up CES and the second week of January and already there’s so much promise. After next week’s MacWorld expo and whatever announcements Apple has in store for the iPhone, I predict that we will be even more excited about mobile UX.

Google’s new Android operating system shows promise for bringing terrific experiences. Based on what Google has already shown us, the user experience was front and center during product design. Add to this the openness of the new platform allowing developers to build the best apps without restrictions.

Yahoo! released a new version of Go, a free download for your mobile that brings together all of the Y! services into one slick application. This app also allows developers to create widgets that plug-in to the Go framework. While the 3.0 version doesn’t yet work on my Windows Mobile device, I was really happy with it’s predecessor and this new one looks to fix my core issue: customizing functionality. Offering an application framework that will work on EVERY smartphone, instead of focusing on one carrier or device is a good move.

Microsoft is working on Windows Mobile 7. Screenshots and interaction models have been leaked, showing a bunch of great improvements. Of course, Microsoft is borrowing a bit from Apple and the iPhone with a touchscreen and accelerometer. I am a fan the WinMo operating system, having worked with HTC for a bit and used an 8525 for the last year. I think we’ll start to see some interesting multi-touch coming to mobile from the Surface UX team up in Redmond.

All three of the the big guys above are poised to bring some terrific innovations to users. What I am most excited about, however, is what smaller groups are doing right now. There’s the hackers who wanted more from their iPhone pushing Apple to release an SDK. There’s .NET, Java and Ajax developers building tons of great, small apps for their respective mobile platforms. And then there’s PointUI who said “we can create a better experience” and just did it. I have been using the PointUI Home interface replacement for Windows Mobile for a week and it’s awesome! Home is a thin app that sits on top of the standard OS interface. Many of the lessons learned from the iPhone, such as large hit targets gestures and simplicity have been incorporated. Check out this video or download the free software for yourself.

By no means do I think that the mobile space is going to be all roses. There will be the continued bickering between carriers, hand-held manufacturers, designers and users. There will still be attempts to woo customers with goofy features over tangible benefits. Nonetheless, after just a couple weeks into 2008, I think that we are in for one awesome year in mobile.

Leah and I have been piloting some new approaches to get around some of our frustrations with the limitations of wireframes:

• they can focus time and attention on all the wrong details and activities
• they constrain creativity
• they split up designers and teams to work alone

We call our approach “sketchboards,” a technique that allows designers and teams to explore and evaluate a range of concepts, getting to better UX solutions faster. We’ve found that this approach:

• allows us to iterate faster towards more creative solutions
• better supports the design of flows and highly interactive experiences
• incorporates the input of the entire team; our clients and partners love it
• defines what we need to document in wireframes, or just skip ahead and begin prototyping

The video below takes you quickly through the sketchboard technique, but be sure to read the essay that contains more details, templates, and examples.

Leah and I will be sharing this as an agile-friendly approach in a workshop titled “Good Design Faster” at UXWeek 2008. Come join us!

Ever since I got back from the monster IDSA conference and looking towards some of the speakers at Interaction08, I’ve been thinking a lot about the worlds of interaction design and industrial design. Far apart, yet so close. Far apart in that there is still a gulf in that, for the most part, many interaction designers don’t know what industrial designers do and how they do it. And visa versa. From an interaction designer’s perspective, the hardware is just a container for the UI. From the industrial designer’s perspective, the UI is just the screen that gets put in after their design work is done.

Except this is a horrible way to design products. We’ve all suffered through these kinds of devices for years. Look at the Razr. Awesome industrial design, terrible interaction design. Or take most laptops. Decent interaction design, lousy industrial design. For the best experience design, the hardware and software need to be integrated in profound ways. In the same way interaction and visual designers work together for digital projects, with physical products that have a digital component (which is to say, behavior that a microprocessor affords), industrial and interaction designs should work closely to create the best possible experience for the products’ users.

Apple realized this years ago, of course, and insisted on control of both the hardware and software–a risky gamble that nearly took the company down, but has yielded some serious dividends in the last decade. And not just profits: some really enviable, desirable, beautiful devices that work well and feel holistic. Devices that, as we know, have changed markets and how we think about devices in general.

I have heard some amazing statements lately–on both sides of the industrial-interaction design divide–that sound to my ears just painfully ignorant, especially considering the amazing industrial/interaction design devices around now, like the Wii. “So you think industrial designers should work with interface designers?” one industrial designer asked me in all seriousness a few months ago. “Industrial design is just a commodity service,” was a comment I heard just two days ago. The truth is, both disciplines have a gun to the other’s head. “My interface can ruin your form!” “Oh yeah, well, see what happens when I leave out the jog dial, jerk! Let’s see them navigate your menu now!” “If you are going to be that way, I might just forget to put in the controls for your lovely speakers there.” And so it goes. We need to work together or everybody loses.

The fact is that the division between the digital and the physical is slowly but surely being erased. “One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible,” noted William Gibson recently. And it’s true. Is your laptop physical or digital? Your mobile phone? Your…house? (Go find it on Google Maps before you answer.)

We need designers on both sides (and in the middle!) who understand this. We had the “luxury” of having separate design worlds for a while now, which is in fact no luxury at all, as we both could have learned a lot from each other. It’s time to dissolve the artificial barrier. We’re all in this together.

There isn’t a conversation in our studio that doesn’t take place using a whiteboard. While the reasons for that are fodder for another post, or perhaps a group therapy session, this new interactive whiteboard concept certainly caught my eye.

Johnny Chung Lee, an HCI Researcher at Carnegie Mellon, recently posted some information on a low-cost, multi-point interactive whiteboard that he created using the Wiimote.

His system used the Wiimote to capture movement of an IR-emitting pen device. The Wiimote tracks and relays the information back to a PC. Any surface can be used, including a wall, table top or even your laptop screen. If you use two IR pens, you can even do multipoint manipulation. The video shows it all and you can download the software free from his site.

You may recall that Johnny is the one who wowed us with his hack to utilize the Wiimote to track your finger movements, al la “Minority Report” interaction.

Check it out here.

The big news for our 2008 events is that we’re coming home. We’ll have three major events in San Francisco, starting with our UX Intensive, a 4-day hands-on workshop addressing the essential disciplines of user experience: Design Strategy, Design Research. Interaction Design, and Information Architecture. The event takes place February 19-22 at the Hotel Kabuki, in the heart of Japantown (great parking for locals!).

We’ve got an end-of-the-year sale going on with our events, with heavily discounted pricing through December 31. (For example, all four days of UX Intensive SF are currently priced at $1,695, compared to the full registration rate of $2,495. Use promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.) Don’t let your 2007 training budget go to waste!

Last month, I traveled to Vancouver for our most recent UX Intensive (and even taught the Information Architecture day, as Chiara couldn’t make it). I took photos of the event, which featured a remarkable number of activities that ensure you just don’t learn about these UX methods — you practice them.

Some of my favorite pics:

Brandon sketches, and a video camera shows what he’s talking about…

There was lots of writing on walls…

Though some groups preferred the floor…

And lots, and lots of stickies…