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?

World Usability Day 2010

For this year’s World Usability Day 2010 I will be giving a talk at the Michigan State University.  The annual conference focuses on Mobile Communication this year.  Here’s what I will be covering.

The Art of Mobile User Experience Research

Mobile UX research differs from Web based research in many ways, while retaining the basic principles. This talk highlights key aspects of mobile UX research and shows how it fits into the development process, business needs, and product strategy. The talk references specific examples of mobile research on award-winning consumer products.

 

User Research Friday 2010

I attended User Research Friday 2010 a few weeks ago. It’s a casual half-day gathering of Bay Area user research experts who get together for advanced discussion, beverages, relaxed learning, and heavy socializing. Every other year, Nate Bolt from Bolt|Peters research firm lines up a handful of great local researchers to present their views on user research. In 2008, I presented “What Mobile Research Accomplishes in 15 Minutes”, but this time I was listening in the audience.

Brynn Evans was up first. She talked about social interaction design – “Interpreting human interactions as though they originated from a bunch of crazy space monkeys”. One of the cool things she showed was “Bodystorming” – play-acting in order to illustrate the many moving parts and influential factors of a social system. Brynn’s approach made me think about the importance of out-of-the-box thinking and innovating on research methods. More often than not, we’re compelled to stay within our comfort zone by relying on true and tested research approaches.

Rob Aseron, who I worked with while at Yahoo! and who is now heading up user research at Zynga (the company behind MafiaWars, FarmVille, and other ridiculously addictive social networking games), talked about creativity and design. More interestingly, he talked about creativity and design in lieu of clickability of web links. While it may sound strange to discuss creativity based on whether the blue link on a website is underlined or not (really, how much creativity does this require?), Rob’s talk pointed out an important fact: The role of user research is to understand the question precisely and come up with a creative approach to answer it in order to support the creativity of the designs. But sometimes, it’s just telling the product managers that links need to be underlined .

Then it was time for some real tangible stuff! Ed Langstroth of Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory talked about the role of user research in automotive industry. He contrasted the approaches of a German company (“Bob the Builder”) to his previous employer, Japanese Nissan (“Curious George”). Essentially, the approach of Bob the Builder is to first create the car based on internal knowledge – and then monitor, measure, and ask consumers how they like it. Curious George, on the other hand, spends a lot of time conducting upfront research before eventually building the car. Both approaches can be very costly in an industry with a product cycle time of 5 years. This really puts into perspective user research within software services industry!

Last but not least was Michal Migurski of Stamen who stood up in front of a room full of folks interested in user research and proclaimed “I’m here because Stamen Design doesn’t do user research, and I hope I can explain why we’ve made that choice in our work and continue to stand by it.” He went on to argue that user research is limiting and controlling and that it strives for predictable outcomes. The examples that he showed ranged from Google Buzz (“a total, unmitigated cluster f#$k”), Flickr, QR codes, Twitter visualizations, etc. The underlying message is that there’s no need for user research, if you have a caring, trusting relationship between the service and its users. I would argue that tapping into the relationships with consumers is user research, just at a different level.

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.

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?

DIS2008 kicked off in Cape Town

DIS2008, the ACM conference on “Designing Interactive Systems”, started today at the very south tip of Africa. It is a venue for serious reflection on the practice of designing interactive systems, exploring the aesthetic, social and cultural dimensions of new technologies. It is also the first DIS conference to be held outside the USA or Europe, and as such aims to challenge participants to reflect on designing interactive systems for users outside these established markets. This is especially relevant as these markets are fast becoming more lucrative and influential.
Co-located with the DIS conference is the “Design Indaba Expo“, the biggest design show in Africa.

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.

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.