Microsoft Future Vision
Posted by Silvia | Filed under Interaction Design, Technology
If we all were astonished with Microsoft Surface, wait untill you see the following video, which is not precisely new, but just today I got the opportunity to watch it, and got very impressed.
What amazed me here wasn’t the future vision of Microsoft on how devices will be so deep inserted in our environment. There is nothing new about this since it has been described already for some time by different authors.
I’ve read substantial material about those ideas, but one thing is to read, and another is to see, to visualize it. I have to remember my visual literacy teacher at university: “One image tells more than thousand words”.
This video shows an inspiring vision on how the future of devices could be. Let’s not forget to pay attention to the exciting user interfaces (emotional ones), eligible use cases, and certainly a superbly produced movie.
I hope to live to see that working!
Are Use Cases the death of good UI Design?
Posted by Silvia | Filed under Design tools, Interaction Design
It is an editorial from almost 10 years ago, but maybe still actual.
From uidesign.net - View Article
UML 1.3 has been released. The 3 Amigos ( Booch, Jacobson and Rumbaugh ) are each publishing a book about UML. Many others have already been published and many more will follow. Jacobson’s Objectory Methodology has been renamed and repackaged as Rational Unified Process.
UML is complex! Of that there can be no doubt. Because it comes with the hitherto impossible dream of “unification” of design methods, the software community are eager to take it up. Professionals are afraid of being swept away by the adoption of this new technique and they are afraid of looking silly in front of their colleagues. How many of you right now have a half thumbed book on UML lying on your desk?
I find this hysteria worrying. For greater reason than I find any hysteria worrying. The problem with UML is that it comes as part of Rational Unified Process. RUP aka Objectory is particularly important to UI Design and Development because it is about Controllers and Controllers are about behaviour.
In his 1994 book, Ivar Jacobson proposed the Use Case as the specification for the controller in an MVC architecture. This leads to the adoption of Model, View and Controller Stereotype definitions in UML. The controller in theory is a state machine middle layer which controls the program flow between Views and Model (persistence) layer. The Use Case describes the User interaction with the system. It has even been advocated that the Use Case is the System Test plan, already written.
Since, the original papers and book, there have been many proposals on how to write a Use Case, when to write it and what to write it about. Even in recent material such as UML Distilled by Martin Fowler, the water is muddied by a vague definition and indeed two proposals as to what a Use Case is, and when to write one.
The basic problem with all of this is that a Use Case takes the form of a narrative which reads: the user does this; the system does that; the user does something else; the system does the next thing. More specifically this may read like; the User selects an item from the list; the system highlights the item and opens a dialog of item attributes. This is undoubtedly a system design. In fact it is more than that, it is an Interaction Design. Interaction Design is the job of a User Interface Designer.
So who I hear you ask do Jacobson et al propose should write these Use Cases - these Interaction Specifications to use another term? Well there are two schools of thought on that one also. First off - the Business Analyst or Domain Analyst. It is the job of a Business Analyst to write the specification. They should understand what the system must do functionally. What the business needs the system to perform. The second school believe that a requirement should not detail such things and Use Cases should be written by programmers at the Design Stage of a development project. Uh huh!
So in conclusion the User Interaction is developed by either the Business Analysts or the Programmers. Neither sets of people have necessarily any training in User Interaction, so there is little hope that they will make a good job of it.
There is a further complication with this process. Lets imagine that the project does have a User Interface Designer or a number of programmers with interface design skill. If they should modify the interaction at development time so that it is more usable, then two things happen. The design which is built will no longer match the design as specified which means that the Use Case can no longer be used for testing. Secondly, tracking what has actually been built in terms of functionality and where it can be found, against the original functionality which is buried inside the Use Cases, becomes next to impossible.
The reality is simple. You cannot have good User Interface Interaction Design and Usability together with Use Cases. It would only work if the Interaction Design and Prototype Usability Testing were done up front before any Use Cases were written. In a real project this would never happen. Besides, if the Use Cases are the requirement document, how can it be possible to design the User Interaction without a requirement. If the requirement is an Interaction Design then why employ an Interaction Designer?
The adoption of Rational Unified Process in its complete form is likely to set the development of good User Interface Design back by perhaps 20 years.
Tags: Design tools, Interaction Design, RUP, use cases
Microsoft Surface: A New Computer Generation
Posted by Silvia | Filed under Interaction Design, Technology, User-centered Design
I think it’s the first time in my life I see something like this happen: A Microsoft release that impressed from apple to penguin lovers. For who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, Microsoft has announced their newest product: Microsoft Surface.
I, particularly, never understood that fanaticism of certain people to the point of catching Bill Gates and his multibillionaire Microsoft and throwing them into fire (ok, I understand more or less, but for me that only happened with religious fanatics and Marilyn Manson fans). Anyway, I bet everyone will be impressed with what they are to see.
Everything started when I read Microsoft would announce a revolutionary product. I confess I thought: “it will be just a mobile phone, something like the Apple iPhone, but less refined.” And I confess again, I got surprised when I saw the Microsoft toy. Actually it looked like a table, but in reality, it was not just a table, but an interactive computer-table!
Microsoft Surface is basically a computer in the format of a table, integrated with a 30″ touch screen: you don’t have to use mouse and/or keyboard, but your own delicate (and of course clean) fingers or any other object at hand. You and your friends can touch the screen at the same time and it will react to all the commands.
There are some features in the Microsoft surface that make me pleased as interaction designer, mainly the gestural commands and the object recognition system.
The gestural commands put the user definitively on control of the machine. Gestures (and no more in between devices) are responsible for the interaction with the system. This makes me remember my grandma holding a mouse for the first time and asking why she had to use such thing if it was much easier to touch the screen, like on the ATM machines.
The object recognition system makes possible a great integration with portable devices such as: digital cameras, cell phones, smart phones and PDAs. You just have to put them on the table to access their content.
Watch the video below to get an idea what the future (and Microsoft) promises.
You watched it and now you’re there completely excited, aren’t you? Well, forget it for now. This toy will only be available in the winter 2007, just for Microsoft partners as hotels, casinos and restaurants for the delightful price of 10 thousand bucks. Drool at will!
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Paper prototype
Posted by Silvia | Filed under Interaction Design, Usability
By Silvia Reitsma
Even the smartest people make faults. This is particularly true for project teams. As a project advances, assumptions and well-meant but poor decisions build up, turning hours of effort into a poor user experience. Intelligent teams reduce their faults by means of a procedure called UI prototyping. Combined with usability tests, prototypes help teams to keep on the right track.
There are quite a few expertises and tools which can be used for creating prototypes. Think on the kind of design you’re wanting to make a prototype of and the objectives of your prototyping work as you choose what for expertise or tool is good for you considering their advantages and disadvantages.
Paper is often used in rapid assessments and the quickest way to prototype a design proposal. Using a drawing tablet, Photoshop or any tool you are comfortable with, produce screens that express the design, and print them out on paper. You can simulated walkthroughs If you make enough screens, verifying if users make the right decisions concerning the navigation flow and experience the design. Though, for prototypes of reasonable intricacy, producing paper prototypes can be awkward. Projects which involves a high level of interactivity as chat rooms or games are not suitable to be reproduced on paper.
Paper prototyping is the perfect method for recognize common complex problems that can ruin websites. It takes only 5-8 possible users to identify mistakes and prevent more than 80% of them to happen:
Layout
Hand-drawn prototypes let users give a broad range of responses. They can help you conclude if pages have too little or too much content, and if the common layout of the page is efficient.
Navigation flow
It is a good way for testing a website’s navigation flow. Users can help you decide whether the website’s structure is intuitive and whether the terms used in the navigation is logic.
Interactivity
By offering users mock-ups of your website’s interactivity, you can see if the planned functionality will be exploited and appreciated by users.
For example, it can assist in verifying if a determined tool will be used successfully by users.
Content
Paper prototypes are an ideal technique to check the efficiency of your website’s content. You can discover if the content and writing style is suitable for the intended users. Users normaly help finding out if there is content missing, imprecise, or pointless.
When to prototype?
Depending on the range of the prototype and the level of necessary details, prototypes can be made at any time throughout the project. Normaly prototypes are developed in the beginning of the project, in the specification phase, before developers produce any code. That is the phase when investigation is necessary and when the time investiment is still plausible.
Narrative Design Process
Posted by Silvia | Filed under Interaction Design, User-centered Design
If you didn’t read it yet, you should give a look at the article by Zapata at BoxesandArrows. He writes about the narrative design process with the help of wireframes.
Really interesting article. If you want to read click here.
Measure the right things to define success
Posted by Silvia | Filed under Interaction Design, User-centered Design
by David Fore
The job of interaction designers is to provide pleasure and power to people through the design of products, services, tools, and processes that satisfy their goals. With the discipline of interaction design still in its infancy, some people believe the medium in which we work is pixels. But this is manifestly untrue. On the way to coming up with a design of an artifact such as a sales tool or an infusion pump, we must examine, and often change, the nature of roles, processes, and workflows. True, many of our recommendations are ultimately manifested in software displays and controls with which people interact. But by simply locating a widget on this screen rather than that one, we are profoundly, if not subtly, altering people’s perceptions of their work…and often the outcomes as well.
Activities such as describing roles, values, priorities, business processes, workflow models, domain object models, toolsets, business rules, and the like are the bread-and-butter of interaction designers. Sure, you need to collaborate with others to get this work done—particularly the pick and shovel work, as well as change management—but interaction designers are uniquely skilled at synthesizing complex data, resolving contending points of view, and communicating processes.
Often designers are asked to begin their work with activities such as task analysis and eye-ball tracking studies. However interesting the data yielded by such research, it is time-consuming and often misleading. Partly this is a matter of confusing tasks with goals, while ignoring context. Assigning much meaning to quantitative behavioral studies can be a little like assuming that the guy with the drill in his hand wants to do harm to the woman lying there in the chair. Sure, he might be a madman. But more likely he’s a dentist and she’s his patient.
Focusing on such measurements is most dangerous when your organizational change team lacks people with design skills. You carry out a task analysis that records how people use CD players, but it will only tell about how people use CD players. It will give no insight into what people like about music. The result of such an effort? Perhaps the design of a better CD player…but you’re never going to come up with iPod. You just can’t get there from here.
So then why do so many people put stock in these methods? I daresay it’s because eyeball movement can be tracked and measured. Which is to say, if it can be counted, it must be important. And if the conclusions of the study lead your efforts astray, you can blame the data, leaving your judgment unquestioned.
Moreover, many business and technology managers simply don’t believe in the existence of someone with the skills and insight necessary to take a qualitative and creative approach to defining complex problems and designing appropriate solutions. And so they content themselves with incremental process improvements, the unofficial slogan of which is: Change is good so long as it resembles what we’re already doing. But an organizational change initiative staffed, in part, by interaction designers can adopt a more productive slogan: Change is good so long as it satisfies the goals of people and the objectives of the organization.
This is no pedantic distinction. The difference between something designed around tasks and something designed to serve human goals is the difference between breaking ahead of the pack and biting the dust of the lead dogs.
Interaction Design Definition
Posted by Silvia | Filed under Interaction Design
Dan Saffer
Interaction design is the art of facilitating or instigating interactions between humans (or their agents), mediated by products. By interactions, I mostly mean communication, either one-on-one (a telephone call), one-to-many (blogs), or many-to-many (the stock market). The products an interaction designer creates can be digital or analogue, physical or incorporeal or some combination thereof.
Interaction design is concerned with the behavior of products, with how products work. A lot of an interaction designer’s time will be spent defining these behaviors, but the designer should never forget that the goal is to facilitate interactions between humans. To me, it’s not about interaction with a product (that’s industrial design) or interaction with a computer (that’s human-computer interaction). It’s about making connections between people.
Since behaviors and mediums are always changing, the discipline of IxD shouldn’t align itself to any of these in particular. The rise of digital devices and the internet created a greater need for the discipline and many, many new opportunities for interaction designers. But it isn’t the only place for our talents; analog situations can use our talents too, to create things like work flows and systems of use. As the internet and digital devices become more and more ubiquitous, interaction design will be involved in nearly every aspect of our lives.
Focusing on the behavior of products as our reason for being, is, to me, missing the forest for the trees. Perhaps I’m an idealist, but I certainly hope interaction design is more than just optimizing machine behaviors. To me, it’s about a lot more than that. It’s making things pleasurable to use, affecting emotions. It’s about asking not only how this work should, but why: Should this be done at all? Will it affect people’s lives in a positive way?
When we get right down to it, and past the nearly-automatic response of “meeting user goals,” the larger, big-picture goal of interaction design should be to create things that make people’s lives better, that make us all more connected to each other.