I’ll be giving a short presentation about my Diary Study experience (same one I gave at UXCampLondon) at London IA in a Pub on October 14. There’ll be other presenters there as well, and it’s going to be a casual night of drinks and listening to some good talks. Space is limited to 50, so act fast.
boon :: Oct.04.2009 :: events :: No Comments »
This isn’t technically a food review, since it was part of a London IA “Field Trip” excursion organized by @AliceNWondrlnd. The main attraction of the restaurant was the interactive tables from which you could order your meal from. There are no waiters coming to take your order. They sit you down at a table, and each table has a “session”, during which you can order drinks, desserts, food, play games, change the table “wallpapers”, spy at the kitchen, track your order amount, and some other interesting stuff.
The tables are given an immersive environment via overhead projectors and a trackpad on the bottom right corner of the table. Despite the excitement, the table was not a touch sensitive surface – we had to use the trackpad just as you would a mouse to navigate the “hand cursor” to interact with the system. I actually think it would be hard to design a system like Microsoft Surface, as we were resting our palms and arms on the surface of the table and not wanting the computer to pick those gestures up as interactions.
A small menu slides out, showing icons that indicate “drinks”, “food”, “table”, “entertainment” and “service” (I’m assuming all this, because the icons were not annotated with text or mouseover help). Each item leads to other sub-menu items, and they’re fairly easy to navigate.
When you make an order, you select an item from the menu and it appears on your order list. When you’re done with the order list, you hit confirm and wait for the food to be served by a waiter – it sort of just comes “automatically”. There is no interaction between you or waiters between any of the orders unless you specifically call for them.
This is quite a novel experience, but some people were afraid that they might have submitted the wrong order. A waiter assured us that it is possible to revert an order even after it has been confirmed, which is a good thing – but I think the interface could’ve been improved to cater for this – a waiter actually confirmed that this problem happens very frequently.
Placing an order was way too easy, which meant that the bill just kept going up. It was a bit like Amazon’s 1-click system – and it wasn’t obvious at first how to remove items from your order list (you needed to hit the minus sign next to your item in the order list).
In between waiting for the food to arrive, the table “entertains” you by giving you the option of playing one of two games (battleship and those picture puzzles where you have to move blocks around). You can also change the “tablecloth”, which was quite a nice touch as that made the whole experience so immersive. You could also view the live “kitchen cam”, and see what the chefs are up to. I didn’t find the “entertainment” options too distracting that I ended up not talking to the others. And to be honest, our discussions weren’t always focused on the experience of the interactions, despite being user experience geeks and all.
Interestingly, the waiters didn’t take long when we used the interface to “call” them. Service was fairly prompt and cheerful, so no complaints there. My only rant was that my set meal was a bit small – I ordered the cod set meal, and it was not enough for my large appetite. Despite this, the food tasted really good but you really end up paying for the overall experience, really.
The table “session” stops once you hit the “call for bill” button. Once that’s pressed, you can no longer order anymore items (unless you call the waiter), nor can you check the total of your order – which was a shame because we had wanted to pay separately. Thankfully, they were able to provide us with a seat-by-seat breakdown of the damages.
The trackpad was okay except when I accidentally placed a small bowl of miso soup on it, and the undersides of the bowl had some sauce so it make my trackpad sticky. One person mentioned her left-handed accessibility issue.
It’s not the only restaurant in the world to integrate interactive order systems. I’ve frequented Sakae Sushi when I used to live in Kuala Lumpur, and they use a more conventional mouse and screen setup. But obviously Inamo wins hands down for sheer experience, food and otherwise.
boon :: Sep.11.2009 :: events, fun/weird, user experience :: No Comments »
UXCampLondon has been the best UX event I’ve attended so far. Maybe because it was because I helped organize it, or that it was all of us presenting such amazing stuff, or that the team was so fantastic, or that the sponsors were so awesome or that Addlestones provided cider perks for the barcampers at the end of the day – a perfect treat out next to the Thames. No, it was a combination of all of the above, and more.
Because I was half keeping an eye on the food order, I didn’t get to see all the presentations I wanted. But those I attended were really insightful:
Stuart Cruickshank’s UX for Search presentation provided insightful thoughts about better search interfaces because seriously, we’ve been stuck with old pagination paradigms for ages.
Angela Arnold made some insightful propositions for the use of images as internal tools to effectively communicate user needs to stakeholders – which I will definitely attempt to apply in my existing projects.
Alex gave a good talk about personalization – a tricky thing to design for, but no less compelling. A key takeaway – do users tend only to personalize things that they are familiar with, that they know they can’t mess up? E.g. sorting a sock drawer < theme-ing a Windows XP desktop < pimping an automobile.
I had a lot of fun at Darren’s session playing team-building games, a nice break and bit of variety from all the other presentations.
Cennydd and Dees’s discussion panel about location was really engaging – a lot of people sharing their thoughts and perspectives on what we really mean when we say “location” – x/y coordinates are not used in the same context as “in the pub with me mates”.
My own presentation on Diary Studies went fairly well. I was really nervous, but I think based on comments and questions from people showed they got good things out of it, and I was delightfully surprised to hear some perspectives about Diary Studies from other people as well – particularly how Diary Studies can be used to explore the entire user journey of a person.
Working with the team was absolutely brilliant. I got to know some really great people, and seeing it all come together and how everything sort of fell into place was just fantastic. I volunteered to help sort out the food order for the day and that was well received, so despite all the madness of ordering Indian food (waiters passing the buck, failed promises on call returns, GPS-less cab delivery) it all went well in the end. Suffice to say, you’d be better off ordering from somewhere else other than Dawat from Tooting. Mark my words.
I really love being a part of the UX community here. It’s small enough that you do meet some familiar faces fairly often, but big enough that you meet new people who are genuinely interested in building better experiences. It’s also amazing to meet ex-UCLIC students who are now established in the industry, like David Whittle and Whan Kim, and even more amazing to learn crazy stories like how I almost bought a used copy of Bodyspace a year ago from David and realizing that it got sold at the last minute this another guy who turned out to be Fabien.
I’m looking forward to the next one!
boon :: Aug.23.2009 :: events, user experience :: 2 Comments »
Mark your calendars! UXCampLondon will be held on 22 August 2009, at the eBay/Gumtree offices in Richmond. As with all Barcamps, UXCamp will be highly collaborative, self-organising, and gather people from all sorts of UX-y places (interaction design, usability, user-experience, information architecture, HCI, etc.).
Paraphasing TheRulesOfBarcamp:
Ticket details will be announced soon at http://uxcamplondon.org or http://barcamp.org/UXCampLondon
You can also follow on twitter: http://twitter.com/UXCampLondon
boon :: Jun.01.2009 :: events :: No Comments »
I just got my ticket at the very last moment yesterday, and I was psyched. And then I realized the event is taking place much sooner than I realized – this weekend. Anyway, I’m prepared to go. I sort of have an idea about what I’d like to talk about, although I’m not quite sure I will be talking. If I do, it’ll probably be about getting feedback from people who have used the Kohana PHP framework and what they think about it.
I’m not entirely sure there’ll be UX people there. Probably more developers. But I’m thinking there might be interesting things that will surface related to UX, like gestural interfaces and stuff. Who knows. This is my first Barcamp. I know nothing!
I remember that there was a Barcamp that took place about a year ago in Kuala Lumpur that I chose not to attend. I didn’t think it was going to be as exciting as the Barcamps that were taking place elsewhere. I guess I have this poor impression of the scene back home, but that’s not very healthy.
Need to make a list of stuff to bring.
boon :: Mar.26.2009 :: development, events, technology :: 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:
Good news for:
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:
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 at a UXCorner meeting last night, and it was organized by the kind folks at UXMedia. They had some interesting speakers come share their experiences about mobile user experience.
Mobile Design
One of the speakers, Anthony Ribot, gave some insightful bits about user experience from a mobile perspective. Maybe it’s the fact that I haven’t spent that much work on developing real-world mobile applications – but he’s right in saying it’s really competitive to be in this space.
“A single early failure = non-returning user”
… it said on one of his slides. That’s enough to put shivers down a lot of developer’s spines.
“data snacking”
was another term he mentioned, referring to a common european trend for users to log-in to check for new messages, posts, news, updates. “simple but repetitive”.
Another 2 tips for mobile developers/designers:
The slides are here.
UX in London vs. US
I was chatting with Scott Weiss from Human Factors International, who was also one of the speakers, about his experience between the UK and US user experience industries – which one did he think was more “ahead of the game”. To my surprise, he seemed to think that UK has it together a little more than in the US. And I think he may have been referring to how tons of companies still aren’t very into this kind of stuff, not counting most of the major cities.
In fact, speaking to one of the folks from UXmedia, I didn’t realize that they’re not based in London, although they do a lot of work in the city. The Southampton-based agency is certainly getting more active in London, but I was humbly surprised to find so many small but great agencies doing this kind of stuff around the country.
2009 – a UX year?
This is one of three UX events that area already taking place the first month of the year. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for the rest!
boon :: Jan.10.2009 :: events, interaction design, mobile, usability :: No Comments »