The side-effects of touch interaction

We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the way how we interact with consumer devices – we’re moving away from key-based interaction towards touch-based interaction. The evidence can be found especially in mobile devices such as the latest smartphones and tablets, like the iPhone and iPads, as well as in-car navigation systems. It’s fair to expect that this type of interaction will expand into other areas of consumer devices, for example consumer electronics and home appliances.

But the exciting new technology comes with its own set of problems. One annoyance of the touch interaction is the constant grease that accumulates on the screen as the result of our fingers. Here is the difference after one evening of iPad use.

The fact that fingerprints tell a UI story is interesting, but may have negative impact on the security – for example, Android’s graphical password system, which requires that a set pattern be swiped in order to access the phone, is susceptible to hacking. Fingerprints residue may also raise potential health issues, as the germs can be transfered by sharing the device.

There is no simple solution to the problem. At least it’s good news for the microfiber cloth industry as they increase their sales of “iPad cleaning kits“! Are we going to see “cloth charms” next?

Mobile UX Design and Research Resources

Several people have recently asked me about pointers to mobile UX design and research.  It’s great to see interest for the mobile UX field.  A lot of the mobile part is embedded into already existing (mostly web-related) sources, even though there are a few mobile exclusive sources.  Below are some of my favorites.

Books:

• Joanna Lumsden (2008). Handbook of Research on User Interface Design and Evaluation for Mobile Technology.
• Matt Jones and Gary Marsden (2006). Mobile Interaction Design.
• Barbara Ballard (2007). Designing the Mobile User Experience.
• Dan Saffer (2008). Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices.

Magazines:

• Wired
• T3
• Interactions

Conferences:

• MobileHCI
• UPA
• SxSW Interactive
• CHI

LinkedIn groups:

• Mobile Phone Design
• Mobile User Experience
• Mobile User Experience Professionals
• Mobilists (Innovators in mobile industry)

Other resources:

• UXmatters
• Kicker Studio blog

Emotional Experience Design

In a recent report, Forrester suggests that companies need to invest into creating more engaging connections with their customers by focusing on Emotional Experience Design – “Creating interactions that engage users by catering to their emotional needs.” To accomplish this, firms need to focus on three key pillars:

1. Addressing customers’ real goals,
2. Developing a coherent personality, and
3. Engaging a mix of senses

To get started with Emotional Experience Design, Forrester suggests – among other things -investing in ethnographic research, extend personas to encapsulate higher-order needs, and gathering emotional feedback during evaluation and testing.

While this sounds reasonable, in reality most companies have not completed the groundwork needed to focus on emotional experiences. According to Forrester’s own Website Review Test, only 3% of the 1300 evaluated sites have passed – suggesting that the firms need to focus on providing good functional experiences first. In that respect, creating emotional experiences is like putting a skin on the body.

Mobile marvels

The New York Times has written about it previously, and now The Economist’s “Mobile marvels” discusses how cell phones are changing the way of life in developing countries for the better. Here are the key takeaways:

• In 2000 the developing countries accounted for around one-quarter of the world’s 700m or so mobile phones; by the beginning of 2009 their share had grown to three-quarters of a total which by then had risen to over 4 billion
• China is the world’s largest market for mobile telephony, with over 700m subscribers; India is adding the biggest number each month 15.6m in March 2009 alone; and Africa is the region with the fastest rate of subscriber growth
• A World Bank study showed that an increase of ten percentage points in mobile-phone adoption in a developing country increased growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points
• In the developing countries new phone-based services, which go beyond voice calls and basic text messages, are becoming feasible because mobile phones are relatively widely available – data services such as mobile-phone-based agricultural advice, health care and money transfer could provide enormous economic and developmental benefits; these text-based services, though they fall short of full internet access, have the potential to unlock a range of social and economic benefits to users of even the most basic mobile phones
• Mobile broadband will become a global phenomenon – it will be the dominant form of broadband, surpassing fixed broadband in 2011, and with estimated 1.4 billion mobile-broadband subscribers by 2014

Rise of UX jobs

BayCHI jobs

The economic downturn has clearly impacted various professions and UX was no exception. It seems, however, that the worst time are behind us – at least judging by the UX jobs in the Valley. BayCHI provides its members with a weekly update of job openings. The chart shows the number of open jobs each week for the last year. After the low of less then 10 open jobs a week in April, we’re currently back at around 40. It looks like the UX job market is recovering – everyone polish their portfolios!

Best practices in UX design

In a recent report “Best practices in UX design“, Forrester argues that improved user experience translates directly into three key benefits:

• More customers will be willing to purchase
• More customers will resist doing business with competitors
• More customers will recommend you

They have numbers to support this and convince the skeptics. Further, they point out three key elements of great user experiences:

1. Usefulness: Can users achieve their goals?
2. Usability: How easily can users achieve their goals?
3. Desirability: Does the site appeal to the users’ emotions?

Many companies still focus on the usability evaluation (#2), but ignore evaluating the usefulness of a product or service, let alone the desirability. Which begs the question: How does one evaluate the desirability of a product?

UCSC course on interface design

The course on “Methods and Principles of Interface Design” starts on April 14. The lecture applies towards the Certificate program in Web Design and Development at the University of California Extension, Santa Cruz.
This course provides a conceptual framework for creating and evaluating both visual and interaction design of software products in a variety of professional product-development environments. Students are introduced to current academic and industry formalisms with regard to standard and experimental methods and tools.

Expect iPhone applications

iPhoneDevCamp is an upcoming un-conference to develop web-based applications and optimize web sites for iPhone. It is a non-commercial event, organized by volunteers, with attendance free to all. By the completion of the weekend event, a number of iPhone-ready web applications and web sites will be launched to the public. The event will be held at the San Francisco offices of Adobe.

How to announce a SDK without having one

Steve has done it again! Following his announcement of the iPhone some weeks ago, without actually having an iPhone, today comes a deja-vu. At the opening keynote for this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, he revealed the secret behind the rumored Software Development Kit for the iPhone. And, there is none! Instead, the developers rely on the capabilities of the Safari engine to create third-party applications. The technology seems to be promising: Web 2.0, AJAX, security, and phone service integration. Still, it remains to be seen as how happy the developer community will be with the apps being sandboxed in the phone, providing just enough control over whatever Apple thinks is appropriate.

Three cornerstones of lifestyle design: user, user, and user

Kelly Goto‘s recent talk on “Design for lifestyle” at the monthly BayCHI meeting made me think about the values of designing for lifestyle…

Interaction design has always been concerned with the design of the technologies which suit user needs. However, sometimes the focus of interaction design is to much on the interaction itself. I see three cornerstones of designing for lifestyle:

Number one: the user herself. That is, the individual with personal predispositions, beliefs, goals, preferences, and actions, but also weaknesses, fears, impairments, and skepticism. This means that understanding the user in the most inclusive way possible is a crucial factor in the design process. The development of current methodologies already goes in the right direction by incorporating cultural probing and ethnography-based methods, but still lacks methods for special areas like mobiles and future “ambient intelligence” / “ubiquitous computing” environments.

Number two: the user as a constitutional part of the interaction with the system. This is the area of traditional interaction design, and still a major factor in designing systems. However, like the other aspects, this is changing as well. The interaction is not limited to a single device nor it is limited to a specific point in time – it is becoming what can be titled as “patchwork interaction”: multi-channel, multi-modal interaction based on timeless time and space of flows.

Number three: the user embedded into the environment. Unfortunately, this has often been a view of the user being located somewhere in a particular moment in time (setting aside the fact that time no longer is simply time – see #2 above…). The research on context and context-based systems, which is especially important with mobile applications, has somewhat broaden the view by incorporating various other factors. Still, the focus is on the sensory environmental information, rather then the user being a part of a social system. While recent activities in social software suggest the importance of such factors, only a few designs take them explicitly into account.

To summarize, it’s not just about user focus, nor about interaction design, nor about incorporating contextual factors – it’s about lifestyle design! By lifestyle design, I mean developing technologies that fit into the continuously and rapidly changing requirements of the users embedded into their vast everyday activities.