“When you touch your own body, you feel exactly what you touch – better feedback than any external device. And you never forget to bring your body.”
The human body as touchscreen replacement
Quantified self becomes a HCI topic of study.
All posts about
HCI
Interaction design: What we know and what we need to know
Increasing the relevance of HCI in the world. After people, now it’s business, government and health.
“(…) three successes: transformative technology, the importance of experience, and the user-centric design process.”
(Steve Whittaker ~ ACM Interactions Magazine) courtesy of markvanderbeeken
Touchscreens ‘a small step’ in innovation
Big foot takes smal step.
“One big suggestion gaining traction is the notion of the invisible interface. The idea is that the best design will make all technology move so far into the background that it’s not even noticed and just works without even being thought about. This concept has been around since the 1990s but what this is pushing, from examples so far, is the idea that everything is so intuitive to use that it isn’t even noticed.”
(BBC News)
Flat design done wrong
You start to wonder if it’s just flat thinking as well.
“Unfortunately, too many flat designs focused solely on the flat and skipped the part about fundamental design principles.”
(Steven Bradley Glicksman a.k.a. @vangogh ~ Vanseo design)
When the UI is too fast
Speed and attention, two challenges for UX.
“Users might overlook things that change too fast – and even when they do notice, changeable screen elements are harder to understand in a limited timeframe.”
The future of user interfaces
Minority Report in laymen’s terms. HCI for academics
“We are web designers and developers. As obvious as our work is (we build interactive media applications) there’s a deeper meaning to what we do. We analyze design problems and explore different concepts to solve them. This also means that we think of the communication between a device and the user. We develop that communication. We design what the user sees and does.”
(Sven Lenaerts a.k.a. @svenlen ~ tut+)
It’s not enough to change the light bulbs: A conversation with Brenda Laurel
Brenda presents a holistic view of technology, humans and the planet Earth.
“I see us developing technologies and design practices that reduce cognitive distance for people who use them. I hope that we will continue to create alternatives to the trivial pursuits currently favored by the marketplace. (…) Technology is an extrusion of the human spirit.”
In defense of floppy disks: The vocabulary of the interface
Librarians and their iconography. A perfect match.
“But librarians are a naturally curious and skeptical people and one round of qualitative research would not satisfy them.”
(Lis Pardi a.k.a. @LisPardi ~ Boxes and Arrows)
Opportunities and challenges for touch and gesture-based systems
“Touch. Sweet touch. You’ve given me too much to feel. Sweet touch. You’ve almost convinced me I’m real.”
“(…) getting the technology to work is hard, but the really hard part is getting the human-system interaction right, making it easy for people to use the systems. Here are the issues. Touch and sensing technology is becoming more and more popular, whether it is on mobile telephones and tablets, navigation systems, or even cooking appliances. These give great opportunities, and of course, great opportunities also pose great challenges. Some are technical, but more and more they are interaction and design challenges – how to ensure that the capabilities of the technology are well matched to the needs and capabilities of the people who use them.”
Forget Google Glass. These are the interfaces of the future
Getting lured by the latest gadgets is indeed not the way to go.
“Future civilizations will know we were crazy when they see clips of us talking into our screens.”
(David Gelernter ~ WIRED)
A talk with computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland
Another giant with strong shoulders.
“I couldn’t end a conversation with one of the fathers of computer graphics without asking him where he thought the field might go in the next fifty years. I should have remembered, though: Sutherland had already explained to me that he’s not into the prediction game.”
(Harry McCracken a.k.a. @harrymccracken ~ TIME.com)
40 years of icons: The evolution of the modern computer interface
Knowing where you come from is a great foundation.
“The greatest thing is that this has sort of become a sandbox for the mind. It’s a medium, not just a calculating machine. We now have this thing in front of us, it allows us to paint, to write, to listen to music. It mesmerizes us and steals our lives. I think it is the invention of the last 500 years. And we’re waiting to see what it does next.”
(Jesse Hicks a.k.a. @jessehixxx ~ The Verge)
Transitional interfaces
Animation conveys meaning.
“Folks keep throwing around the word ‘delight’ when referring to animation and cute interactions. Cool and great for those guys. Guess what though? Animation can be used functionally too. It’s not just an embellished detail. Animation leverages an overlooked dimension – time! An invisible fabric which stitches space together. You don’t have to be a math dork to understand this. Let’s take a look at some simple ideas.”
“The music is not in the piano”
One of the giants on whom’s shoulders we stand.
Interview with computing pioneer Alan Kay ~ “One way to think of all of these organizations is to realize that if they require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed, then the corporate organization and process is a failure. It means no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea. All the companies I’ve worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent “agriculture” we could put the world back together and all would prosper.”
(David Greelish ~ Techland)
What UI really is (and how UX confuses matters)
DTDT: UX is everything not-UI.
“People mix the terms UI and UX together. UX is tricky because it doesn’t refer to any one thing. Interface design, visual styling, code performance, uptime, and feature set all contribute to the user’s ‘experience’. Books on UX further complicate matters by including research methods and development methodologies. All of this makes the field confusing for people who want to understand the fundamentals.”
(Ryan Singer) courtesy of thomasmarzano
Flat or skeuomorphic is the wrong question: It’s about satisfaction
Isn’t hybrid always the best of both worlds?
“The point of this process is to determine what style appropriately conveys the attitude and personality of the app itself. The intended impacts of each theme are not mutually exclusive – in fact, the hybrid direction we ultimately recommended deliberately borrows meaningful aspects of each.”
(Adam Faja a.k.a. @adamfaja ~ Specky Boy Design Magazine)
A great UI is invisible
“The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.” once said the legendary Mark Weiser.
“A user interface that is invisible and that provides seamless interaction possibilities will help the user focus on their goals and direct them to what they need.”
(Patrick Cox a.k.a @pcridesagain ~ Codrops)
No to NoUI
When you use it, it has an interface. Even a paper book has one, the text
“Of course the interfaces we design may become normalised in use, effectively invisible over time, but that will only happen if we design them to be legible, readable, understandable and to foreground culture over technology. To build trust and confidence in an interface in the first place, enough that it can comfortably recede into the background.”
Testing dialog design in a speech application
Scenarios, back/front-stage, stories, personas, scripts, and now … dialogs. Sounds theatre to me.
“The best testing plan for speech applications will combine the methods above or will be a variation of one or more of them. When collecting user feedback on a speech application, it’s usually a good idea to capture response files at the same time in order to perform more in-depth speech tuning. Full recordings should be enabled when doing Wizard of Oz testing, and so on. These methods will allow the designer to understand how real-world users interact with a speech system, and provide instructive input for improving and enhancing the quality of the dialog design. More generally, the same testing methodologies can also be adapted to other types of user interfaces outside of speech recognition. This includes the UX for web transactions, web chat, call center scripting, kiosk interfaces, and other systems where user input may be open ended or require semantic interpretation. The more real world testing that can be performed prior to building a system, the closer the launched product will serve its intended purpose right out of the gate, and the less rework will be required.”
(Stephen Keller ~ UX magazine)
Teaching and learning human-computer interaction
HCI is alive and kicking.
“Human-computer interaction as a field of inquiry necessarily evolves in response to changes in the technological landscape. During the past 15 years, the speed of change has been particularly dramatic, with the emergence of personal mobile devices, agent-based technologies, and pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Social networking has also profoundly changed the way people use technology for work and leisure. Who would have predicted a decade ago that (smart)phones would offer constant access to the Web, to social networks and broadcast platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and to hundreds of specialized apps? Who could have anticipated the power of our everyday devices to capture our every moment and movement? Cameras, GPS tracking, sensors—a phone is no longer just a phone; it is a powerful personal computing device loaded with access to interactive services that you carry with you everywhere you go.”
(Elizabeth Churchill, Anne Bowser, and Jennifer Preece ~ Interactions March-April 2013)
