Happy (belated) New Year, one and all - I do hope 2010 turns out to be a smashing success for everyone.
I figured I’d start things off with a video made by my friend and colleague Etan (@Zaqintosh). It’s a concept for what an iPhone app designed to measure experiences (any experiences, from surfing a website to hopping on BART) could look like, and even though it’s crude, I think it gets the potential across.
Can you imagine if we were able to rate experiences on the fly, all day every day? I, for one, would love to track which ones get me up, and which bring me down. The trick, I think, will be to get people used to rating their life experiences; Yelp’s easy because it’s tied to businesses, but it might not be obvious to people that rating a bad jog, conversation, taxi ride (due to traffic, not the cabbie) or plane ride is just as valuable as rating your local Starbucks.
In any case, without further ado, voila:
iPhone experience measurement concept - EchoUser
Sometimes I come across positively delightful tidbits as I trawl the web, and this one, the “coming soon” page for Hosteeo, totally got me.
Nice look and feel? Check.
Mystery? Check.
Sense of being privy to something secret? Check.
Provides me with a way of finding out that secret? Check again.
All in all, a pretty effective way of getting my email address - but more importantly, my attention. Thanks to Chris Spooner for finding this gem.
Finally, Google has decided to remove the “On Behalf of…” message from Gmail that so many of us had to put up with when forwarding email under the guise of a work account.
I’m surprised that it took Google this long, since they make a living by being responsive to their user base. I remember emailing the Google Labs folks a suggestion to remove the offending three words almost 2 years ago, when I realized that I couldn’t rely on Gmail for my work email needs, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.
As Google grows up and slowly - or not so slowly - maneuvers to corner the business market, I’m guessing we should expect more of these changes. Or at least, I’m hoping ::fingers crossed::
A big part of the guiding philosophy for how I work revolves around the concept of “fun”. Sure, creativity, passion, drive and actually delivering are all part of a job well done, but if I don’t feel I have the license to have fun, good ole fashioned feel-like-I’m-a-5-year-old-again fun, then my overall motivation suffers quite a bit.
I imagine the same is true for our end users. Fair enough, they signed up for a 2 hour usability test, but who says they can’t have fun in the process? And what of our clients - I know that it’s often a very serious affair for them, with jobs in the balance, nay, lives on the line (or it would seem, anyway), but why can’t they get to play as well? “Putting the user first” is all very well as the governing maxim of User Experience, but if it means at the expense of my team and my clients - well, I’ll have none of it.
Fun, I think, should be for everyone.
Design 101
Experience design, I thought, was a staple of the design community. Phone design, airplane design, coffee shop design, car design, everything design - I just assumed that designers made sure to actually conduct basic user research and usability testing before investing hundreds of millions into a product potentially nobody will buy.
As it turns out, Ford is a little late to the party.
Read more…
Design from a Distance
I spent part of the morning last Friday with the team at Architecture For Humanity (and a South African Design Fellow on the ground), brainstorming potential design solutions for FIFA’s Football For Hope program. As it turns out, FIFA has decided that the World Cup 2010 will be like no other: rather than just a sporting event, FIFA aims to use the Hope program to “bring together, support, advise and strengthen sustainable social and human development programmes” in areas affected by the tournament. FIFA’s plan? To build 20 community centers and football pitches throughout Africa, part of its “2o Centres in 2010″ program, and a concerted attempt to leave a legacy beyond the World Cup 2010.
To me this sounds like a great plan but, were it not for the involvement of Architecture For Humanity, whose team brings an amazing breadth and depth of community design knowledge, I would mostly write it off as a CSR/greenwashing play. I mean, let’s be honest, do 20 towns in Africa actually need community centers? Read more…
I spent last night at a lecture organized by San Francisco BayCHI, hosted by PARC down in Palo Alto. It was my first BayCHI event, and the group seemed lively enough - both speakers elicited quite a few laughs, and audience members weren’t afraid to shout out comments and retorts during the lectures.
First up was Ted Selker from MIT Media Lab and IBM fame. Ted seemed like a nice enough guy, and his talk tackled the various trials and tribulations he encountered as a technology product designer over the last 15 years or so. It was definitely interesting to see how he used ‘experimental design’ extensively to explore the intersection of humans and technology - and what its future might look like. This open approach to concept development - and their subsequent failures, many of them in fact, to reach market - resulted is dozens of inventions with varying applicability and real-world usability. However, to be fair, Ted has come up with some interesting inventions over the years, which is certainly a testament to his perseverance, even if very few seem to have made production. I would hazard a guess that this is because A) Ted was trapped in big organizations that resisted his avant-garde ideas, and B) he ignored one of his own “3 Principles of product design”, the use of art and aesthetics. In short, everything I saw except for the One Laptop Per Child (for which as I understand it, he designed the keyboard and ears), was a little on the plain, boxy side. If Steve Jobs had a less successful, less aesthetically-obsessed twin, Ted is the guy. All in all, though, his body of work is definitely impressive.
Next up was Dan Roam, author of bestselling book The Back of the Napkin (and here). Read more…