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“Thatgamecompany co-founder Jenova Chen set out to create not only a new video game experience but a new emotional experience, with the multiple award-winning PlayStation hit Journey…this free 60-minute lecture explored Chen’s desire to make an online multiplayer different from his experiences with World of Warcraft. He wanted Journey to be genderless and ageless, with gameplay that was neither about achievements nor empowerment. Prototyping for the emotional Journey actually began around its music. Chen said that he always does so because ‘music is the most effective and powerful medium that can create emotion.’”
Link: Designing a new emotional experience in Journey (gamasutra.com)
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- Capturing fleeting emotional experiences
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An interview with the UI designer who created the displays for Star Trek Into Darkness.
“In practical UI, you are trying to give the user an elegant way to make choices. With film UI, I am trying to give the viewer the illusion of choice. I am trying to deliberately direct the viewers eye to whatever story point the director wants revealed at the time he wants it revealed. The job becomes more about illustration, especially in post where we can see how the interface is framed within the shot. We paint a small part of a much bigger picture, and our work needs to visually support what’s on screen so that we don’t disrupt the rhythm of the viewing experience.”
Link: Interview: Jorge Almeida (inventinginteractive.com)
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Arguing for multi-purpose devices, Berkowitz writes: “It’s true that my GPS-enabled camera takes better pictures than my smartphone, and can tell me they were taken in California. But learning to share the pictures with friends takes more effort than it is worth. In the new marketplace, devices people can’t master in five minutes will result in a lot of returned items, which very quickly makes a product unprofitable.”
On the opposite side, Saffer writes: “It’s not just professionals who care about quality, either. Yes, the speaker on a phone is good enough to listen to a song in a pinch. But to really enjoy the music, even your multipurpose device must be supplemented with a product like the brilliant Jambox, designed to play music loudly and well.”
Link: Are Multipurpose Devices Better Than Products That Perform One Function? (wsj.com)
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Attention to detail. In this case: knobs.
“Ferguson Stereophonic – Antique Knob…The Knobs are what I’d expect from a lovingly built Hi-Fi. Axial Skew doesn’t exist. The weight behind the rotation is deliberate and weighty. The on-click feels like I’m providing the power myself! Why can’t people make them like this now? What is stopping manufacturers from this attention to detail?”
“Marantz NR1504. The input selector here has notches that for me aren’t notched enough, we know Marantz can do it because of the Pearl-Lite already reviewed. The volume Knob doesn’t have enough weight behind it. And the icing on the cake of disappointment is the plastic… It feels terrible.”
Link: Knobfeel (knobfeel.co.uk, via)
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“Firefox OS Simulator is a test environment for Firefox OS. Use it to test your apps in a Firefox OS-like environment that looks and feels like a mobile phone. After installing it, go to Web Developer > Firefox OS Simulator to access its features.”
Link: Firefox OS Simulator (mozilla.org)
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CNET identifies some of the upcoming changes we might expect in our pocket computers.
- “Sensitive sensors track the world in real time: …the gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, and so forth – are starting to get more friends in the neighborhood. Samsung, for instance, slipped pressure, temperature, and humidity sniffers into the Galaxy S4.“
- “‘Appcessories’: …highly specialized peripheral software that fulfills very targeted needs, stuff that most people wouldn’t want their everyday phone.”
- “Rise of gestures and touch-free input: …Gestures and voice may be starting the trend, but other, more sophisticated transitions and input methods will soon move from wacky option to normal ways of interacting with devices.”
- “The larger ecosystem: …smartphones will come with more components and communications tools to interact more than ever before with people and other devices.”
- “Wearable tech and you: …Your smartphone is still there, still essential for communicating with your environment, but it becomes only one device in a collection of other, even more personal or convenient gadgets, that solve some of the same sorts of problems in different or complimentary ways.”
Link: Smartphone innovation: Where we’re going next (cnet.com)
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“Glass is essentially several layers of timeline. You have your main timeline. Kinda like your twitter feed of things you’ve done and received. You have a timeline with information (or cards) hiding in bundles. You have a timeline of options (share, reply, etc.) hiding in cards. Yes, it’s still a little bit complicated to understand, because surprisingly there’s still no one video presented by Google that drives the idea forward. But most work flows will involve tapping something you’re interested in, then sliding through cards, then tapping a card, then sliding through options.”
Link: First Look: How The Google Glass UI Really Works (fastcodesign.com)
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“So here’s my theory: I believe that introducing visceral elements into an app will take it past the point of just being awesome. It will make your app speak to the subconscious, built-in affinity that humans have for the physical properties I mentioned before. I believe that even if you designed the most perfect and useful app possible, that the act of adding in these visceral elements will make people love your app on an even deeper level.”
Link: Visceral Apps and You (mysterioustrousers.com, via)
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“…It’s helpful to understand one of the basic mechanicals of reading: saccades. Instead of moving smoothly across the page when we read, our eyes actually make discrete jumps between words, fixating on one word for a short period of time before making a ballistic movement to another one. We call these movements saccades.”
“But despite their “ballistic” nature, these rapid eye movements actually improve our reading capabilities. While we process the words immediately within our focus, we use the additional information just outside of it to further guide our reading. As readers, our time to comprehension is aided by the context of adjacent words-to the extent that we are often able to automatically process (and thus skip over) shorter functional words like and, the, of, and but.”
Link: Setting Type for User Interfaces (typekit.com)
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Philip Battin writes about using game design techniques to carry out progressive disclosure in complex UIs.
“Televisions have evolved from being signal receivers into universal multimedia hubs offering features such as Skype, Internet browsing, hard-drive recording, streaming online content, and apps, making operating a television much more complicated than it ever has been before. The complexity itself is not a bad thing. We do not buy televisions for their simplicity but for their features. However, complexity can be managed and presented in a manner that reduces clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload. In order to design a prolonged user experience, complexity has to be sequenced into challenges that match the skills of the users, giving them the chance to learn progressively and feel satisfied while doing so.”
Link: The Next Big UI Idea: Gadgets That Adapt To Your Skill (fastcodesign.com, via)
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“…Scaling the current Android 4.x action bar scheme may not be realistic or ergonomically desirable for all applications or device types. I’m proposing C-Swipe as an alternative navigation pattern, based on the natural ergonomics of the human hand. C-Swipe can be used to bring up a contextual menu anywhere on the touchscreen by swiping the thumb in a natural semicircular arc along the surface. This gesture is roughly in a shape of the letter C when executed with the right hand – hence, the name of the pattern (the gesture is called a “reverse C” when executed with the left hand).”
Link: C-Swipe: An Ergonomic Solution To Navigation Fragmentation On Android (smashingmagazine.com)
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Punchcut has put together some nice thoughts about the future of television.
“…As TV evolves, it’s abandoning many of the characteristics that made us fall in love with it in the first place. Aspects of that original attraction are being lost as TV becomes distributed across space and time. But these modern failings can also be opportunities to reclaim and reimagine certain popular behaviors of the past and create a better TV for today.”
- Access – Free viewers to explore and share content
- Immediacy – Rediscover the satisfaction of instant on
- Continuity – Create seamless viewing experiences
- Purity – Distribute the experience to save the big screen for content
- Restraint – Simplify and streamline TV interactions
- Chunking – Parcel content to aid discovery
- Chronology – Put TV back on schedule
Link: Lost Signal: 7 Lessons from TV History (punchcut.com)
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A fantastic (and 22,000 words long) article about the history of Palm products.
“Palm realised that in order to make a handheld device that people wanted to use, it needed to break with the convention of the time that more equals better. So, Palm made two very bold decisions. First, it would only implement a very small set of features that it believed customers needed. Second, and related to this, Palm actively deemphasised the importance of specifications like processor speed and amount of RAM…“
“…Palm understood that instead of “how to get natural handwriting recognition to work”, the real problem was “how to input text on a handheld”. To solve this problem, you really didn’t need natural handwriting recognition at all – a simple, single-stroke alphabet that was easy to learn was a far better solution, since it required far less processing power and RAM, which in turn meant better battery life and smaller devices. Since the recognition system only had to work with a small set of possible variations, it was also a lot faster and more accurate.”
Link: Palm: I’m ready to wallow now (osnews.com, via)
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Summary of a recent SXSW presentation by some Google folks about Android design principles.
“Roeber and Garb used the visual metaphor of two jars filled with “positive emotion” and “negative emotion” marbles. Certain design approaches cause those hypothetical jars to fill with more “negative” than “positive” ones. For example, placing a graphical indicator to show that a user has reached a “last screen” when swiping back and forth through Android icon menus sparked positive emotions; without that graphical indicator, users felt they were doing something wrong-i.e., leading to a jar full of negative marbles.”
Link: How Emotions Determine Google Android’s Design (slashdot.org)
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My favourite design read at the moment is Little Big Details.
Link: Little Big Details (littlebigdetails.com)
Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more
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“This isn’t to argue that touchscreens are useless. They’re a great way to cheaply interact with a small electronic device-like, say, a phone. But the problem is the outsized role the touchscreen has taken in our pop cultural understanding of computer interfaces. The “hovering multitouch” interfaces of Iron Man 2, Total Recall, and Tron have become pop culture’s vision of what’s state-of-the-art, even outside of Spielberg’s movie. None of these are fundamentally different from Minority Report’s technoscreen-they just have varying distances between fingertip and graphic. But all of them are, essentially, what design critic Bret Victor has called “pictures-under-glass.” They are interfaces that look good, rather than interfaces that work well.”
Link: How ‘Minority Report’ Trapped Us In A World Of Bad Interfaces (theawl.com)
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The MEX conference is publishing videos of old MEX talks over the coming weeks as part of 30 MEX sessions in 30 days. Here’s one about the design of Swiftkey.
“Ben Medlock came to MEX in December 2011 to share his insight into how digital experiences can be made to feel more natural. Ben’s talk is drawn from knowledge gained during his PhD in computational linguistics at Cambridge and the hands-on experience of developing SwiftKey, an intelligent, predictive software keyboard and one of the best-selling Android applications of all-time.”
Link: Ben Medlock on understanding natural, innate UX (mobileuserexperience.com)
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“In 1947 he persuaded Bell Labs to create a unit, originally called the User Preference department and later Human Factors Engineering, to study these larger questions; Mr. Karlin became its head in 1951. An early experiment involved the telephone cord. In the postwar years, the copper used inside the cords remained scarce. Telephone company executives wondered whether the standard cord, then about three feet long, might be shortened. Mr. Karlin’s staff stole into colleagues’ offices every three days and covertly shortened their phone cords, an inch at time. No one noticed, they found, until the cords had lost an entire foot.”
Link: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94 (nytimes.com)
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“We realized that the best way to deal with fatigue was to enable users to rest their elbow on a table or the arm of their chair. Our tests showed that for the first two buttons on the right side, the users had great results. Fatigue was minimal even after several minutes of interaction. To reach the two buttons on the left, however, the users had to raise their elbow, which brought back the problem of fatigue. This proved to be true even when we put all four buttons in a stack formation or a square formation. We kept coming up against the issue that only some of the points were convenient to select without having to bend the wrist or elbow in an uncomfortable way.”
Link: Designing a Practical UI for a Gesture-Based Interface (omekinteractive.com)
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“Results suggest several benefits to learning including an increased motivation to learn; increased parental engagement; more efficient monitoring of progress between pupil and teacher; greater collaboration between teacher and pupil and between pupil and pupil. It appears that one-to-one. Tablets offer a sense of inclusion that allow children, irrespective of socio-economic status or level of attainment, an opportunity to thrive through a new pedagogical model of pupil-led learning.”
Link: One-to-one Tablets in Secondary Schools: An Evaluation Study (PDF, tabletsforschools.co.uk, via)
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