Author: Erhard Wimmer

Master of Desaster

Video Prototyping

In a project from 1992 (!) called “STARFIRE A Vision of Future Computing“ the well know Interaction Designer Bruce Tognazzi “… launched a project at Sun Microsystems in an effort to both predict and guide the future of computing…

http://asktog.com/starfire/starfire.mp4

…The output of this effort was threefold:

  1. Starfire, the Movie, showing a day in the life of a knowledge worker in the far-off distant year, 2004.
  2. Starfire, the Book, entitled Tog on Software Design, which not only covers the film in intimate detail, but lays out several more equally thought-provoking scenarios developed during the initial phase of the project.
  3. Starfire, the Paper, originally published in CHI Proceedings, outlining the rules we followed in attempting to build a scientifically accurate video prototype…

(from: http://asktog.com/starfire/) Unfortunately I couldn’t find an embedded version of the video but please enjoy it under the following link. It’s real fun, because some of the occurring things remind me on (meanwhile) existing apps like iChat,…

http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/archives/images/iChatTiger.jpg

But again (like mentioned in Paper), I am fascinated about the opportunities of prototypes. In that case the video really gives you a clear imagination of “things” which do not exist yet. And this can definitely help e.g. collect feedback from users, or to get venture capital for a new product, … Technorati-Tags: , ,

Paper

On april 29th an 30th I had the opportunity to take part on a workshop called “From User Stories to User Interface Design“ held by catalysts, (Christoph Steindl and Christian Federspiel). These guys are rather not User Interface Designers but more Software Engineers and Project Managers who got a lot of experience in software development projects at e.g. IBM, Siemens and VAI. So I was very curious about the workshop.

Actually I just had time to visit the second day, but nevertheless it was a great experience and brought me some kind of aha-effects, which I’ll try to describe.

Bill Buxton’s book “Sketching User Experiences” layed the base for most of the examples we went through. But get a bit more into detail. Of course every UI Designer knows about Paper Prototyping. But when was the last time you built a paper prototype in a group of 3 to 4 Interaction Designers, tested it with real users, redesigned it and presented the whole stuff to an audience? And all that within one hour?



pictures: http://www.nngroup.com

Of course one and one the most stunning points is quality & speed. When you create a paper prototype, test it (with three to five users) redesign it on base of this feedback and do this process again.

Using e.g. HTML prototypes for this procedure normally takes me several days. Concentrating too early on the graphic-design is also one of the problems I have to face as a designer. But the second (and maybe far more interesting) point for me is that when I use paper for a prototype (which takes me normally 30 to 60 minutes) I have absolutely no problem to throw it away again. And this is definitely not the case with my HTML prototypes: “Well, now I spend that much time yet, I can’t do this all again. Let’s see what we can use”. The barrier for making a compromise is much, much lower with paper. And that’s an interesting argument, I think.

As mentioned, several examples can be found in Bill Buxtons book. Here is one I really love …

For over 40 years Bob Spence has pursued research in two fields, engineering design and human-computer interaction. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

SIGCHI conferences in 2008

I just found this quite extensive list of SIGCHI conferences for 2008. Awesome that there is a special International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in Aeronautics 🙂

E x c e r p t:

CHI Impressions 2008 (part 2)

As mentioned, the CHI report is being continued…

Mobile Devices, Touchscreens and Maps

iPhone, HTC and other mobile touch devices brought up a strong, fresh trend. The user experience seems to be new and a bit unusual, so I’m pretty sure we will see a lot of upcoming applications, which of course also need their own interaction design.

Escape: A Target Selection Technique Using Visually-cued Gestures

This is a nice solution to reach several targets on a small mobile device using “thumb-gestures”. The question that came up was how can we display more informations concerning these (huge amount of) targets. (And would I display so much targets at all ?!)

Multiuser Touch

For me it came out very clear that the challenge of multitouch used by more than one user is not the technology itself but much more the behavior between different users. We saw a great video of a (really huge) touchable wide screen placed in the city of Helsinki, were people could interact with. Besides “How can people interact together on these screens” of course the question came up, “Which kind of applications are useful in such an environment?” Quite interesting.

Short introduction

Helsinki citywall used by more than one user

And further …

DRAGON A Direct Manipulation Interface for Video Navigation.
The video is available here.

K-Sketch: A “Kinetic” Sketch Pad for Novice Animators
A Video-Prototyping Tool

CHI Impressions 2008 (part 1)

Puuh… well I personally found it great. One exciting thing for me was the difference between high technology in the conference halls on one side and the historic flair of the old town of Florence on the other hand. That was quite impressing for me.

First I wanted to mention that I describe my personal view of the CHI and this will be seen through a designers glasses. So I am not a scientist, not a student or teacher, nor am I working for Microsoft or Google Research.

For me the CHI is the best place where you can discuss with interaction designers from all over the world (except the vienna IXDA scene – CURE, wienweb and Keith Andrews kindly excepted ;). And you have the chance to meet the guys from Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, … and discuss with them. And that is really great.

Ok, first I wanted to start with a quick overview. The trends as I saw them …

  • Mobile Devices, Touchscreens (and Maps)
  • Multiuser Solutions
  • Social Networks
  • Data Analyzing
  • and a bit of Agile

So far, so good. Quite exciting also was a presentation of Bill Buxton and Saul Greenberg (University of Calgary) named Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful.
Very free and short summarized: “… Usability Evaluation is good to
find out what the current situation is about. But we also need methods
to find out what the future of interaction designs can be…” This
paper was very controversial and the hall quite full. These are the
slides:

to be continued …

Apple's Design Process (or better – an excerpt)

via adaptivepath respectively businessweek.

My personal highligths:

“… Pixel Perfect Mockups (…) causes a huge amount of work and takes an enormous amount of time. But (…) “it removes all ambiguity.” That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mistakes later on.

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…”

Fascinating.

I also wanted to embed the two videos of Alan Cooper and Bill Buxton at Interaction08, adaptivepath shares.
Continue reading Apple's Design Process (or better – an excerpt)

4th USABility Symposium, 20 & 21 November 2008, Graz

4th USABility Symposium of the Workgroup HCI&UE of the Austrian Computer Society 20 & 21 November 2008, Graz University of Technology

“Usability & Human-Computer Interaction for Education and Work” (HCI4EDU)

Today in education computers can be found everywhere; they are both ubiquitous and pervasive. Systems supporting educational or work scenarios are extremely sophisticated and technological performance increases exponentially. However, human cognitive evolution does not advance at the same speed. Consequently, the focus on interaction and communication between human and computer is of increasing importance in education and work, since the daily actions of the end-users are the central concern and must be supported by surrounding technology, in particular with new & emerging technologies.

Continue reading 4th USABility Symposium, 20 & 21 November 2008, Graz

UX Design Productivity from Google

via Swissmiss respectively changeorder.typepad.com.

“…Last Thursday, I attended a free session organized by SIGCHI, Puget Sound region at Google Seattle HQ. Jake Knapp, a very well-spoken user interface designer, entertained a packed house with a speech on 17 tactics that he uses for creating strong UX work in “the flood” of projects that pour through his UX department from month to month….”
Continue reading UX Design Productivity from Google