Interaction

ACM publishes a fantastic journal on human-computer interaction. They’ve made the Jan/Feb ‘09 edition publicly available online.

Interesting article titles I skimmed from the “Contents” page:

• Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities
• 90 Mobiles in 90 Days: A Celebration of Ideas for Mobile User Experience
• The Washing Machine That Ate My Sari—Mistakes in Cross-Cultural Design
• Design Versus Innovation: The Cranbrook / IIT Debate
• Can “Wow” Be a Design Goal?
• The Value of Visual Design in Software Development
• What is Interaction? Are There Different Types?

Link source from experientia.

boon :: Jan.29.2009 :: books, innovation, interaction design, mobile :: No Comments »

I bought this multi-functional clock from Muji which features a fantastic gravity-operated design. You simply rotate the device the “Feature”-way-up to activate that mode. As you can see, it’s currently on Calendar mode. I rotate clockwise to get to the “Alarm” mode.

Very simple operation. A “beep” signals that the mode has changed. The settings are done via two buttons, located behind the device.

It’s price? £6.80.

With batteries included.

It did, however, spell “calendar” wrongly. A “calender” apparently means something else.

boon :: Jan.27.2009 :: innovation, interaction design, usability :: No Comments »

I attended the credit crunch event organized by UPA last week, and Gerred Blyth gave a brief presentation about the recession in general and opened the floor to another speaker (I can’t remember who) who spoke from his experience in previous recesssion.

Gerred kinda went through a list of industries which were benefiting from the recession and industries which were clearly losing out. Though not entirely revelational, it was good to get us started thinking about the topic.

Recession is bad news for:

• Housing
• Financial
• Financial
• Automotive
• Retail (there are exceptions, as you will see below)
• Advertising Expenditure
• Venture Capital

Good news for:

• Poundland, Morrisons
• UK tourism (£ is cheap)
• Do-it-yourself
• accountancy/law
• adult industry (not sure about this one)
• church?
• online retail (big one here)
• mass merchandising (related to online retail)
• beauty
• home and garden (people staying at home?)
• business software services
• online advertising

It seems the message seems to be that online is good, and that traditional biz is bad. But both good and bad reports are coming from usability professionals regarding the recession. Perhaps it may be that less projects are being awarded these days. Who knows.

The point of it is that the recession is apparently here, and so in order to “make” it relevant to us, we broke into three teams to brainstorm ideas about how to combat the recession. The teams consisted of:

• agencies
• in-house
• freelancers/individuals

Since my classmate and I were not part of any group, we decided to go into one we thought we’d best fit in – individuals. Ms. Be facilitated our session well as we brainstormed all the different ways in order to stay relevant in the business.

Of all the different things we shared, portfolios seemed to come up quite a lot, as well as networking. Staying professional and being on time was another. Another one you’d think would be difficult to do during a recession also appeared – smiling. I guess everyone around the table was maintaining a postitive attitude, a good reminder that we’re all human.

The speaker whose name I can’t remember said that if you’re good, you’ll get hired eventually if you do get fired. So, what about the not so good ones? Well, that will probably lead to other questions.

Some people mentioned that companies do hire graduates, for whatever that’s worth. Then I heard a blurb that it’s not easy for graduates to get freelance jobs. Either way, I think the signal is that it’s not impossible, but it’ll take some work.

However, I kept thinking to myself – there must be something we’re missing. People are still spending money, just in different ways. And if it’s not folks here in the UK, then there are people who are outside the UK spending that money.

And I even suppose some work wouldn’t even require money. Favors, perhaps. Who knows. I’d be interested to hear success stories.

As for me, I think knowing yourself is key to getting the job you want. I don’t think all jobs are made alike – so there’s no real competition here, and it’s always good to know what you want anyway.

boon :: Jan.26.2009 :: events, innovation :: No Comments »

I was attending a UPA talk yesterday, and although I came in toward the end of the session, managed to catch a glimpse of what was about to turn into a flame war about how companies aren’t really innovating to their fullest potential. The speaker also apparently implied that usability is becoming less effective a tool in making great innovation happen, to which some people clearly disagreed.

It’s interesting to note that Martyn Perks has mentioned these things before, in a similar way a few years ago, also at another UPA event, so it seems he’s making a name for himself on this.

I’m setting aside the obvious flame baits here, because innovation and usability can too often be defined in ways that mean lots of things depending on what you’re talking about. Maybe what Perks was referring to reads something along the lines of this research article, which evaluates how (occasionally rigorous or ’standardized’) usability work can hinder the creative progression that may be essential to produce effective innovation (whatever that innovation means).

I feel this comparison is partly pointless already, but I am summarizing my reasons as to why I feel this is so.

1. inevitably, all solutions are aimed at the long term and the wider good

Cast the net, aim for the greater good – let’s make both the usability and innovation folks happy. Let’s make them celebrate why they believe usability and innovation are so deeply connected to one another, it would be ridiculous to separate them – even if there are differences between the two.

2. don’t be afraid to use the P word

Politics are an obvious reason why we often do any innovating or usabilit-izing(?), or not. It may not have to be the case of the-bad-boss, since even small groups at peer level suffer from organizational behaviour influences. One case study I learnt this week revealed how a information architecture project failed because some people were afraid they would lose their jobs to an effectively redesigned website. This is one reason why I don’t think we’ll be seeing robots more than we’ll be seeing secretaries over the next 100 years (secretaries always do a better job).

3. many different people are good. many different people are bad.

Information architects. Brand strategists. Marketers. Usability testers. Users. Organizational psychologists. How many terms do we need for people who get paid to solve “new” problems for old and clueless people who can’t understand it anyway? And it seems that everyone has a specific trait, formed quite commonly by a shared interest in being really creative, solving real problems, and making real users happy. So why is there such an internal confusion? Let’s be nice to one another, since the future is inevitably ours since old people die anyway, and the clueless move on.

4. So what if the word usability and innovation has been overused?

Everyone knows what it sort of means, just work around it. We’ve beaten this to death.

I’ll do my best to attend the next and final UPA talk in London before 2009 comes around. Hopefully with less flame baits.

boon :: Nov.01.2008 :: innovation, usability :: No Comments »