masimuddy

Last week I attended one day of the weeklong UX Week 2008 conference put on by Adaptive Path in San Francisco. The topic for the day was “the future of Interaction Design”.  Here is a summary of my highlight for the day.

Michael B Johnson of Pixar talked mostly about the process they use at the animation studio. It was a nice parallel of what happens (or could happen) when designing products. At the end, he also talked about the development of in-house tools.

This was probably my favorite talk of the day. Not because he showed lots of cartoons, although that was nice, but because he talked a lot about creative processes that Pixar uses. I’ve been thinking about processes a lot lately, like how other creative process are similar and different from design processes. Expect some blog-posts soon.

Rachel Hinman, a researcher at Adaptive Path, talked about how to create a vision and showed recent examples of a mobile vision project.

Jeffery Veen discussed telling a story through info graphics and what that might mean in an interactive world. He presented a few well known infographics and then compared those with data visualization tools that are more interactive (infointeractives anyone?)

Mike Migurski of Stamen talked about adding evidence of realism to web applications. He called this “greebles” after the term used to describe the bits model makers placed on sci fi models to make them more real.

Dennis Wixon a Research Manager at Microsoft talked about his work in the Surface group. He talked about the principles of the Natural User Interface (the NUI) that apply to the touch screen UIs his team is working on. ( I personally prefer the term Touch UI to describe this category of interfaces, since it better describes the interaction method of the approach.)

An Adaptive Path panel told the story of how they created the Aurora concept project video. You can see the video and a description of the project at their project site.

Dan Saffer from Adaptive Path talked about our move to touch UIs and some of the aspects we need to consider when designing a Touch UI. He presented a few good guiding principles if you’re new to the area of designing TUIs. (download slides)
2 gentlemen from Stimulant talked about their process of creating Touch UI installations for customers.

Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM talked about UbiComp and the aspects digital devices afford, and why he thinks UbiComp is more possible today. I particularly like Mike’s ideas around objects having digital shadows that leave a trace in the digital world. Being a wine-lover, I also like his presentation of WineM, and RFID enabled wine sorting system, by my wine collection of 4 bottles doesn’t really warrant such a device (but one must have goals!)

Aaron Powers of iRobot talked about human Robot interaction and some of the things his company considers when design the interface. Are they fully autonomous or tele-operated? What is the distance of operation? What is the input method?

Johnny Lee of Microsoft talked about the hacks he’s done with the Nintendo Wiimote and discussed some of the future projects he’s interested in. You can see a lot of his work on YouTube and download his code to try some of these hacks out yourself.

He had some interesting things to say about the accessibility of the Wiimote. The $40 device and some free code has made digital whiteboards accessible to many schools. It’ll be interesting to see what else can be done on the cheap.

Closing the day, and the conference, was Bruce Sterling. Who spends a lot of time in the Balkans, and described on aspects of what it’s like there.

Overall, I found the conference to be quite interesting and I plan to attend again if the opportunity presents itself.

UPDATE: There are slide decks for some of the sessions available for download.

I like this little snippet from the article Can interfaces be evil? on Bokardo:

Evil design would be when the designers intentionally deceived users by design. In other words, evil design is when designers(in this case the people making design decisions, not necessarily the coders or visual designers) know they aren’t being straight-up with users, and created the interface in order to keep it that way. There are many examples of this…one of which being the Facebook Beacon platform.

(as an aside, I’m sure I’ve made evil designs before, too…this isn’t evil as in Satan evil…it’s more like deception that creeps into an interface over time…and the designers know better but do it anyway)

Bad design would be when something unintentionally happens as a result of the design. This is very different. The designers simply didn’t know what would happen in all cases. I would suggest that most user frustration is caused by bad design…there are so many unintended consequences in the interfaces we make.

Things to keep in mind as we work. Good design vs. bad design. Evil design vs. honest(?) design … what is the right word for that? Or is it always just ‘Good’ design?

From wired article : How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

“Apple’s successes in the years since Jobs’ return — iMac, iPod, iPhone — suggest an alternate vision to the worker-is-always-right school of management. In Cupertino, innovation doesn’t come from coddling employees and collecting whatever froth rises to the surface; it is the product of an intense, hard-fought process, where people’s feelings are irrelevant. Some management theorists are coming around to Apple’s way of thinking. “A certain type of forcefulness and perseverance is sometimes helpful when tackling large, intractable problems,” says Roderick Kramer, a social psychologist at Stanford who wrote an appreciation of “great intimidators” — including Jobs — for the February 2006Harvard Business Review.”

Innovation through intense, focused processes? Yup, that’s what school was like.

An article over at Wired about “The Brash Boys at 37signals” (makers of Backpack and Ruby on Rails) has prompted a bit of a debate in the blogosphere.

Donald Norman wrote an article asking “Why is 37signals so arrogant?” and 37Signals wrote a follow-up describing “Why we disagree with Don Norman“. Have a read, it’s an interesting debate on software design philosophy.

All articles bring up interesting discussion - is there a single and correct product design process? Probably not. I think the important take-away here is that there are multiple processes and philosophies of product development to consider. But I believe there are some processes better suited for certain situations. The choice of process is only one of the many choices any company has to make on their road to success or failure.