As the California fires of 2007 swept across the landscape, and I have returned to my home in a cleared evacuation area, there are thoughts about the handling of information, and the systems in place to get that information to the people that are directly affected.
When one thinks of interaction they also think "design", which usually denotes some kind of product that communicates with its users. The problem is that some information must be communicated in existing channels. There can be no reliance or assumptions about new devices for interaction. Instead, it must travel through means that already exist for other purposes.
Luckily, humans today have many devices that specialize in handling different parts of communication: television, phones, radio, and the internet being the big players. Unfortunately, as it currently stands, information that's connected to a region-wide disaster, needed for vital evacuation, is highly disjointed and could use further refinement.
Since the fires of 2003, San Diego has implemented a reverse-911 system that communicates evacuation plans or other emergency services to anyone with a registered landline. I found myself at a considerable disadvantage considering that our condo doesn't currently own a landline. While still fairly rare in households, the trend among teens and young adults to have all communication through a cell phone is becoming increasingly popular. With the land-based telephone facing opposition as a main form of communication, leaving only options that rely on power to operate can be very dangerous. Therefore, systems that take advantage of cell towers (a third mass-communication technology) like UCSD's newly implemented emergency-texting system should definitely be something the city pursues.
To avoid confusion, weeks 5-8 do not have weekly blog posts.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Monday, October 15, 2007
Challenging Innovation (Week 3 Post)
This weekend, I took part in the Qualcomm Innovator Challenge. The event began on Saturday morning with a presentation about an upcoming chipset from Qualcomm code-named Snapdragon. In their own words, the chip "pairs industry-leading processing with Qualcomm's proven wireless leadership." The two things that I were able to abstract from this? For a handheld, this chip was powerful (1 ghz), and every standard I could possibly think of was embedded in it.
23 teams were given 30 hours to propose an idea or product that could effectively leverage this power and flexibility. It's my humble opinion that the presentations that took place Sunday evening were surprisingly inside the box. There were no products that made me or anyone in the crowd just slap our foreheads and say "that's genius." I can hardly begin to critique the performances and ideas of my fellow classmates; the overwhelming time constraints no doubt weighed on every team's ability to effectively brainstorm and communicate anything with particular ease. Our team was no different. It may be of interest to note that the top three winning teams created a dual-screen compact laptop, an OLED retractable (paper-scroll) cell phone, and a dedicated medical monitor.
I felt that this blog has given me an additional opportunity to share our idea with others, as our 'product' is almost exclusively rooted in Human Computer Interaction. Below I've included my portion of the audio presentation, along with a few UI design mockups that I created to help visualize a few concepts we created. Since the theme of our idea (and as we felt, Snapdragon in general) was unified computing, there are a lot of details occupying a single visual space. The following is the last third of our presentation involving this particular implementation:
Design mock-up for a unified media timeline, or "Life Journal" (click to enlarge)
Example of sharing space and context-sensitive media sharing (highlighted by dots)
This is more or a less just getting into the types of features we were able to pull out of our weekend think-tank. I'll be sure to supplement this with any outlying factors I come across, as well as be more than happy to answer any questions. Comments and discussion are just as welcome!
23 teams were given 30 hours to propose an idea or product that could effectively leverage this power and flexibility. It's my humble opinion that the presentations that took place Sunday evening were surprisingly inside the box. There were no products that made me or anyone in the crowd just slap our foreheads and say "that's genius." I can hardly begin to critique the performances and ideas of my fellow classmates; the overwhelming time constraints no doubt weighed on every team's ability to effectively brainstorm and communicate anything with particular ease. Our team was no different. It may be of interest to note that the top three winning teams created a dual-screen compact laptop, an OLED retractable (paper-scroll) cell phone, and a dedicated medical monitor.
I felt that this blog has given me an additional opportunity to share our idea with others, as our 'product' is almost exclusively rooted in Human Computer Interaction. Below I've included my portion of the audio presentation, along with a few UI design mockups that I created to help visualize a few concepts we created. Since the theme of our idea (and as we felt, Snapdragon in general) was unified computing, there are a lot of details occupying a single visual space. The following is the last third of our presentation involving this particular implementation:
As Matt and Woody have already said, the power of Snapdragon is its unification. Bridging all aspects of mobile technology will eliminate our limitations and create a much broader canvas for innovators to create.
Where can we go from here? Where are the trends headed in mobile computing? If we’ve learned one thing from the internet, it’s that putting the tools of creation into the hands of everyone is a socially significant and empowering phenomenon.
What types of advantages can a mobile environment bring to this content?
Let’s start with GPS. We can know where we are, and which way we’re headed. What could benefit from this knowledge? Well, let’s take our cameras and give our photos and video geographical context. Well, okay that’s great. We have a way to tag positional data and orientation. Now let’s integrate and transform this into a shared experience.
Imagine you’re on a vacation to San Francisco, and you’re at the Wharf getting ready to take a scenic shot of Alcatraz. You don’t consider yourself to be a professional photographer, so you pull out your device, and with the aid of geographic context, you look up the last 20 photographs that have been taken in that exact same spot. You now have some great ideas for composition, and can even borrow recommended exposure settings that others have used to produce optimal results.
And what about video? Video is still a fairly elusive property in the mobile space. How can we flesh this out? Video exposes a moment in time more fully than a single photograph, but can also be much more cumbersome to film and often requires more cooperation from the subject in a frame. We all know what it’s like to be conscious of someone videotaping you.
Let’s go back to the same example of the user in San Francisco. One way to increase the image’s context would be to include both video and audio for every picture taken; finding a way to utilize “idle time” to increase the photo’s imprint and broaden the context (and candidness) of that moment in time.
Design mock-up for a unified media timeline, or "Life Journal" (click to enlarge)
So we’ve created a new way to experience photo and video by paring it with GPS. A remaining problem is now the question of how to actually use this information in new and exciting ways. This is where THIS comes in. Your own personal timeline, your “life journal” if you will.
Visually construct your life, hour by hour, using all the kinds of content your Snapdragon powered mobile device can throw at it.
Your travel, phone calls, pictures, and video all synchronized and laid out in front of you. What we have here is our mockup of a potential interface for viewing and managing all of this content.
At it’s core, the values of a calendar interface and a map interface are combined. With some form of timestamp, your device can visually trace your day, and mark any particular places of interest.. based on stagnated movement, or other such criteria.
Really though, the most important thing we realized at this point is that there’s no reason to have this one space while we ignore the time-sensitive things we already record. Events, appointments, to-do lists, contact information and more. A fully documented event calendar and to-do list could seamlessly be integrated into this timeline, and even be aware of separate influences inside a specified time frame. If I had a concert planned in my calendar for sunday night, and took a bunch of videos once I was there, I could automatically see my stuff placed into my timeline the next day tagged with “concert” and appropriately sorted.
Example of sharing space and context-sensitive media sharing (highlighted by dots)
There’s no reason that every part of your digital life can’t be a part of your social timeline. And more importantly, there’s no reason why this can’t be shared with anyone else, in the same visual space as your own. If I travelled to school and needed to collaborate on a project with other students, we could work in a virtual space where all necessary media was intelligently combined. To this end, sharing media is nothing new, but sharing it in the context of “space and time” on its own is an entirely new approach.
Unification of services promotes the unification of our lives, and every digital entity that follows us. Snapdragon is the machine that’s capable of driving this kind of collaboration.
This is more or a less just getting into the types of features we were able to pull out of our weekend think-tank. I'll be sure to supplement this with any outlying factors I come across, as well as be more than happy to answer any questions. Comments and discussion are just as welcome!
Sunday, October 14, 2007
On The Wall, or A Great Fall? (Hall of Shame Nomination)
Brookstone has come a long way since posting a classified ad in Popular Mechanics from 1965. The company, whose present day motto is “innovations for home and life,” has expanded into the retail space where they now command a brand image as unique as their approach to design. These descriptions, however, do not mean much without a particular context and perspective. As a result, where certain points can be given towards its look and feel, more will be taken away by the actual interaction with the device. It’s true that many will make usability exceptions (turn a blind eye if you will) for the sake of aesthetic qualities, but from a designer’s perspective there should never be a premeditated compromise on the drawing board. Brookstone’s intentions and philosophies can be fleshed out by zooming in on the decisions they made for one particular device. Introducing Brookstone’s solution to the everyday bedside alarm clock: the “Bob” 5-in-1 Wobble Clock.
A small, egg-shaped alarm clock. Images come to mind of children's toys from a previous generation that seem to defy gravity as hidden weights provide the proper leverage. In the same vein, the egg wobbles, always providing its own energy to make its way back to equilibrium (a process that unfortunately takes over a minute to reach, often reorienting and moving itself for the duration). A quarter-sized porthole on the front contains the liquid crystal display, and a four-direction button pad resides on the back to provide additional functionality.
There’s no doubt that, putting personal opinions aside, the clock can be recognized as generally “fun” in the most broad of contexts relating to the basic look and feel of the device. It even comes in a variety of colors. What it does successfully is accentuate a room by being an active part of a user’s decorating. A clock is useful to have in all utilitarian contexts, but it’s not always something that adds to a space’s visual value. All of these generally nice touches add positive experiences to time keeping, but reaching the destination of actually using the clock is a whole new beast entirely.
Beginning where any common user would, the manual is fairly plain and straightforward. The introduction sets the stage for each of the 5 modes, and walks one through the initial steps required to get the clock to a point of useful operation. Physically inputing data into the device is similar to most other desktop clocks on the market, requiring some arbitrary combinations of holding and pressing keys that don’t immediately convey any kind of natural metaphor for their purpose. The idea of losing this manual for a person not on top of today’s internet resources is surely on track to receive a fancy paperweight by the time the batteries run dead, and a re-programming is required.
By far the most important feature of the clock is the way in which the user manages their way through the different functions on the display. The 5 features of the clock are cycled one at a time on the display. The functions are time, date, temperature, alarm, and a timer. Each mode has its own assigned background color that is backlit until idle. It’s worth noting that this is a very effective tool to assign more than one sensory identity to each function and eases memorization for human users. Observing how these functions are actually changed, the user simply taps (or makes any kind of contact with) the top of the egg. This action is entirely unrelated to the egg’s wobble, which can be difficult to discern. Trying to make contact with the surface while keeping the egg from rapidly swaying off its tiny base proves to be quite a difficult task.
As the video above shows, the action of mode-changing was not approached in a way that assumes it will be the most common action performed on it. Namely, the surface will not acknowledge additional hits in rapid succession to get to a particular mode. Easily recognizing where you are in the lineup of options helps very little when you have to patiently work your way to the desired state. It’s reminiscent of “missing” the channel on you wanted to watch on TV, and having to make your way “around the horn” to make it back to the channel you skipped. It only makes it worse that any accidental contact with the clock almost always triggers the change, which means several hits just to get it back to showing the time. To confound things further, the activation of the “sleep” function on the alarm is given significant interface priority on almost all alarm clocks that exist today. For the egg, putting the alarm clock to sleep involves this same, precise touch at the top, where most users would assume a simple nudge to initiate the wobble is the most sensible approach, as it also symbolically represents the crabby and reluctant nature that we all expose when having to wake up early in the morning. If you want to shut off the alarm, hitting one of the buttons on the back is required. And just to give the user one more reason to accidentally hit the top surface, a full grip is all but required to easily use the buttons on the back, otherwise its wobbly nature translates to constantly dodging your touch.
Outside the scope of arbitrary button commands, the information presented is relatively straight-forward and clear. The display itself is relatively small, and wouldn’t render itself legible much farther away from a desk or stand at or near the foot of a bed. One glaring oversight is absence of a continuous backlight. After a short duration from a status change, the colored backlight turns off and you’re left with a light-less liquid crystal display. Under anything but well-lighted conditions the egg’s visibility is next to zero.
With such an unstable nature, it seems fair to ask if Bob faces the same metaphorical fate as Humpty Dumpty. There are clearly good things to be said about the device. In a literal sea of desk clocks on the market today, there are few that stand out from the crowd. One can surmise that this drives Brookstone’s goal principles and therefore becomes a primary design solution. This is enough for most consumers; a major factor towards making a purchasing decision. In a culture that has grown accustomed to setting the time on the VCR, so have we grown accustomed to following a rigid clock-operating formula that does little to help its users. To say that it’s not particularly worse than the products surrounding it is not a compliment at all, and thus in the grand scheme of human-device interaction the 5-in-1 “Bob” Wobble Clock follows Humpty’s poor example and gets officially nominated for the Hall of Shame.
A small, egg-shaped alarm clock. Images come to mind of children's toys from a previous generation that seem to defy gravity as hidden weights provide the proper leverage. In the same vein, the egg wobbles, always providing its own energy to make its way back to equilibrium (a process that unfortunately takes over a minute to reach, often reorienting and moving itself for the duration). A quarter-sized porthole on the front contains the liquid crystal display, and a four-direction button pad resides on the back to provide additional functionality.
There’s no doubt that, putting personal opinions aside, the clock can be recognized as generally “fun” in the most broad of contexts relating to the basic look and feel of the device. It even comes in a variety of colors. What it does successfully is accentuate a room by being an active part of a user’s decorating. A clock is useful to have in all utilitarian contexts, but it’s not always something that adds to a space’s visual value. All of these generally nice touches add positive experiences to time keeping, but reaching the destination of actually using the clock is a whole new beast entirely.
Beginning where any common user would, the manual is fairly plain and straightforward. The introduction sets the stage for each of the 5 modes, and walks one through the initial steps required to get the clock to a point of useful operation. Physically inputing data into the device is similar to most other desktop clocks on the market, requiring some arbitrary combinations of holding and pressing keys that don’t immediately convey any kind of natural metaphor for their purpose. The idea of losing this manual for a person not on top of today’s internet resources is surely on track to receive a fancy paperweight by the time the batteries run dead, and a re-programming is required.
By far the most important feature of the clock is the way in which the user manages their way through the different functions on the display. The 5 features of the clock are cycled one at a time on the display. The functions are time, date, temperature, alarm, and a timer. Each mode has its own assigned background color that is backlit until idle. It’s worth noting that this is a very effective tool to assign more than one sensory identity to each function and eases memorization for human users. Observing how these functions are actually changed, the user simply taps (or makes any kind of contact with) the top of the egg. This action is entirely unrelated to the egg’s wobble, which can be difficult to discern. Trying to make contact with the surface while keeping the egg from rapidly swaying off its tiny base proves to be quite a difficult task.
As the video above shows, the action of mode-changing was not approached in a way that assumes it will be the most common action performed on it. Namely, the surface will not acknowledge additional hits in rapid succession to get to a particular mode. Easily recognizing where you are in the lineup of options helps very little when you have to patiently work your way to the desired state. It’s reminiscent of “missing” the channel on you wanted to watch on TV, and having to make your way “around the horn” to make it back to the channel you skipped. It only makes it worse that any accidental contact with the clock almost always triggers the change, which means several hits just to get it back to showing the time. To confound things further, the activation of the “sleep” function on the alarm is given significant interface priority on almost all alarm clocks that exist today. For the egg, putting the alarm clock to sleep involves this same, precise touch at the top, where most users would assume a simple nudge to initiate the wobble is the most sensible approach, as it also symbolically represents the crabby and reluctant nature that we all expose when having to wake up early in the morning. If you want to shut off the alarm, hitting one of the buttons on the back is required. And just to give the user one more reason to accidentally hit the top surface, a full grip is all but required to easily use the buttons on the back, otherwise its wobbly nature translates to constantly dodging your touch.
Outside the scope of arbitrary button commands, the information presented is relatively straight-forward and clear. The display itself is relatively small, and wouldn’t render itself legible much farther away from a desk or stand at or near the foot of a bed. One glaring oversight is absence of a continuous backlight. After a short duration from a status change, the colored backlight turns off and you’re left with a light-less liquid crystal display. Under anything but well-lighted conditions the egg’s visibility is next to zero.
With such an unstable nature, it seems fair to ask if Bob faces the same metaphorical fate as Humpty Dumpty. There are clearly good things to be said about the device. In a literal sea of desk clocks on the market today, there are few that stand out from the crowd. One can surmise that this drives Brookstone’s goal principles and therefore becomes a primary design solution. This is enough for most consumers; a major factor towards making a purchasing decision. In a culture that has grown accustomed to setting the time on the VCR, so have we grown accustomed to following a rigid clock-operating formula that does little to help its users. To say that it’s not particularly worse than the products surrounding it is not a compliment at all, and thus in the grand scheme of human-device interaction the 5-in-1 “Bob” Wobble Clock follows Humpty’s poor example and gets officially nominated for the Hall of Shame.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Why Design? (Week 2 Post)
Society is becoming increasingly reliant on convergent electronic devices to guide us through our everyday lives. The increasing complexity of these devices creates a need to organize and streamline their output for proper human consumption. There is a lot to consider when thinking about the ways to design a product. The majority of things we interact with are not designed with their users in mind. Whether it's something simple like an alarm clock, or more complicated like a PDA, we find ourselves constantly struggling to take full advantage of our digital lifestyles. How many times have you tried to use something and thought "I could have designed this better myself"? I face this sentence several times a day it seems, and it causes me considerable frustration. Fortunately, principles of good design are slowly making their way into the general population. Interaction Design has become a tangible discipline which hopes to maximize our productivity and eliminate poor design. It's no longer a stretch of the imagination to witness a life augmented by technology that is powerful, fun, and easy to use.
Exactly what types of interfaces do the general population expect from their products? It seems that the biggest hurdle to truly great design is the user's expectations and standards. Why can't we demand more from our products? As much as I hate to use Apple as an example time and time again, they truly are at the forefront of HCI design for the masses. They've proven (perhaps a little ahead of the curve) that there is a lot more to using a product than simply looking at the technical specifications. Interface, aesthetic, and interaction design require a premium in research and development. However, as Apple has shown, giving users strong interaction principles can pay dividends in huge ways. As any devoted Apple follower will tell you, it's easy to justify a premium for the promoted exclusion of technology-induced headaches.
Exactly what types of interfaces do the general population expect from their products? It seems that the biggest hurdle to truly great design is the user's expectations and standards. Why can't we demand more from our products? As much as I hate to use Apple as an example time and time again, they truly are at the forefront of HCI design for the masses. They've proven (perhaps a little ahead of the curve) that there is a lot more to using a product than simply looking at the technical specifications. Interface, aesthetic, and interaction design require a premium in research and development. However, as Apple has shown, giving users strong interaction principles can pay dividends in huge ways. As any devoted Apple follower will tell you, it's easy to justify a premium for the promoted exclusion of technology-induced headaches.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Introduction
This blog has been created to document my personal observations and feelings towards Human Computer Interaction. More specifically, the topics and themes covered by the college course COGS 120 taught at the University of California, San Diego.
Over a year and a half ago I took a class titled 'Engineering Psychology'. For one of the only times in my college career, I felt like I had received a small push in the right direction, and am now on my way to a minor in Cognitive Science. Let's hope that here in this department I can find the answers I've been looking for.
Over a year and a half ago I took a class titled 'Engineering Psychology'. For one of the only times in my college career, I felt like I had received a small push in the right direction, and am now on my way to a minor in Cognitive Science. Let's hope that here in this department I can find the answers I've been looking for.
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