I’m on the interactive jury for the Art Directors Club Awards this year, which I am very chuffed about. Not least because I get the chance to go to New York for the first time ever.
Of course, the USA’s Department of Homeland Security being what it is, I have to give them plenty of personal information via one of the most awfully designed forms ever. But the real alert box abuse is this:
User experience FAIL.
I seem to have been writing about Jonathan Harris rather a lot recently. Following the piece on Flash on the Beach I wrote in Creative Review in November, an interview I did with Harris has just been published on the Creative Review blog.
He had some interesting things to say about the nature of software and blogging in terms of human experience – surprising, perhaps, given his use of both of those technologies in We Feel Fine. We were discussing the nature of blogging and its lack of emotional context on the micro level and I felt that the snippets of blog posts in We Feel Fine reminded me of the beauty of found objects and notes that are usually removed from their context. Harris replied:
“The reason why that touches is you is because micro is beautifully done. A found object is powerful because you found it in the gutter. If you saw a digital representation of the picture with the text in 12pt Times New Roman it wouldn’t have the same nostalgia, it would be like a blog post.”
Whilst I was at my parents over Christmas, I dug through all my old photos and I know it was a very different feeling from browsing my Lightroom archive. I wonder what kind of experience it will be for my grandchildren, or whether I will have generated so much digital data that they won’t even bother.
It is an issue that really hasn’t been dealt with much, but is going to be a future headache and/or interaction and user experience challenge. It is an issue much like wondering what will happen to my online presences in the event of my death. For some reason I have been thinking about this quite a bit recently – I have some ideas for potential solutions, but they would need funding and security expertise that I don’t have, should anyone out there be interested in taking this further.
Thought I had posted this weeks ago and found it loitering in my scheduled posts.
Entertaining set of preferences descriptions for Fenec, Mozilla’s new mobile browser.
Interaction design is all about changing people’s behaviour. Without the action > reaction part, there is no interaction. Whether you click one button instead of another or stop to play with an interactive shop window , the art of interaction design
Taken to a broader context, these principles have been successfully applied in areas such as service design and sustainable design. It is something we tried to look at in the Visualising Issues in Pharmacy project too.
But what about economics? Robert Fabricant from Frog Design has written an insightful piece on Frog’s Design Mind blog called Design For Impulse. He makes a good point about interaction design education too:
“If I was starting an Interaction Design program (like Liz Danzico at SVA) or taking one over (like David Malouf at SCAD) the one academic subject I would be sure to cover is Behavioral Economics.”
He then goes on to quote David Leonhart’s New York Times article about behavioural economics and the Obama administration’s interest in it:
“Behavioral economics sprang up about three decades ago as a radical critique of the standard assumption that human beings behaved in economically rational ways. The behaviorialists, as they?’re known, pointed out that this assumption was ridiculous.”
To explain behavioural economics more simply, I’ll quote the next paragraph in the article:
“Would-be weight losers pay $100 a month to belong to a gym they rarely visit. Borrowers get fooled into taking out a loan with an appealing teaser rate. Patients fail to follow even a basic regimen of prescribed drugs — a failure that can leave them with serious medical complications and Medicare with big hospital bills.”
Essentially, we all do things that make no rational or logical sense, even if we say we wouldn’t. And we’re especially irrational with money - who hasn’t shopped around for a tiny saving on groceries and then stopped to drink an over-priced coffee afterwards, negating the savings? (Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational is a good starting point, apparently. I haven’t read it yet.)
As the world we interact with becomes ever more interconnected and our need to understand everything from the economics of what we are designing through to the life-cycles of everything we use, understanding this psychology becomes essential. For interaction designs (and, I would add, some product designer and architects), this kind of thinking is, or should be, built into what we do. As Fabricant says:
“Outputs, Outcomes and Impacts are VERY different things and clients often confuse the two. As an Interaction Designer you better know the difference.”
It seems to me that Obama’s administration understand the psychology of interconnectedness very well. It will be interesting to see if they can put it to work on such a large, messy problem.
Out with the economists, in with the interaction designers I say!
(Once again, thanks to the ever-excellent IxDA discussion list for the heads up).
I have noticed I have been posting a lot of videos recently – I’m not sure if that’s me being lazy or that some things are simply a lot easier to explain when you see them in action (or interact with them).
One interface area that has not really changed a great deal over the years is in video editing and compositing. The two choices are timeline (such as you see in Final Cut, After Effects, etc.) or the kind of patch module used in Shake and other compositing tools. Both of these borrow heavily from their analogue roots (A-Roll/B-Roll film and video editing and optical printers).
If you have ever had to motion track a piece of video in order to glue a layer to a moving object in the video, you’ll know it’s pretty time consuming, even with the best of tools. This demonstration by Dan B Goldman from Adobe Systems shows how much easier this could be with a much more direct interface. I expect we can hope for it to be integrated into Adobe products at some point.
If you want to get technical, you can a PDF of Dan’s research paper is available on his site.
(Via Designing For Humans.com)
Karl reminded me of two new games for the Playstation that depart from the normal 3D extravaganza. The first is another EyeToy game called EyePet. Basically you draw with a special pen and your doodles become 3D and part of the mixed-reality world of the game and your virtual ‘pet’.
The second is Echochrome, which seems to be a bit like Portal (PC DVD)
It’s very encouraging to see this trend towards games that designed from a point of view of ingenuity rather than pure 3D rendering power. There’s nothing wrong with full-on 3D games rendered in luscious detail, but I don’t feel games as a medium progress much when that’s the only focus.
There is little difference between the basic gameplay of Wolfenstein 3D:
and Call of Duty
Apart from the amount of pixels you are shooting at of course.
Just spotted Amazon’s Christmas-themed shopping cart. Sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference.
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