Topic : Technology

26
Jan 11

Yahoo Bus Stop Derby

Now this is just fun and cool and engaging.

Yahoo recently rolled out a marketing campaign for its mobile apps called Yahoo Bus Stop Derby that lets people at 20 San Francisco bus stops play games against each other. The derby features four games played on 72-inch LED touch screens at the bus stops. The games allow people to indicate the neighborhood they live in for an added element of citywide competition. The campaign ends Thursday and the winning neighborhood wins a concert by the band OK Go (North Beach was winning this afternoon).

Further proof that the convergence of wireless and multi-touch technologies is changing everything.

Published in: Interaction Design / Technology / User Experience
24
Jan 11

Marty Cagan and Designing Great Products

Last week I had the good fortune to spend two days learning about designing great software from Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group. Cagan’s approach to creating great consumer software products comes from years of working on wildly successful ones, such as Netscape, AOL, and eBay, and is a radical change from the traditional approaches many companies still use.

Cagan’s two-day seminar presented the topics raised in his 2008 book Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love along with advice tailored directly to the audience, in this case my company, Cars.com.

One of the key aspects of Cagan’s approach is a focus on a core working relationship between the product manager, the lead engineer, and the lead interaction designer supporting a product. His method places heavy emphasis on a great user experience as a key part of making software people really want to use. He also advocates delegating product design decisions down to the product manager and empowering that person to make the right choices, while people managers and other leaders are tasked with doing what needs to be done to develop their product teams so they can be trusted to execute.

The book is a quick read and well worth the time as it opens up a new way of thinking about product management and software design.

Published in: Interaction Design / Product Management / Technology / User Experience
23
Apr 10

Design Tools for iPad

Apple’s iPad has been out only a few weeks and already clever software developers are building design tools for this amazing new platform.

The Omni Group, makes of the popular OmniGraffle wireframing tool, have released OmniGraphSketcher for iPad. Priced at $14.99 in the iTunes App Store, OmniGraphSketcher allows you to create attractive charts, graphs, and other data visualizations on the iPad.

And Endloop, a Canadian iPhone/iPad development company, has released iMockups, a wireframing and diagramming tool for the iPad. Available on iTunes for $9.99, the app allows designers to create Balsamiq-like wireframes using their fingers.

I haven’t used iMockups but Endloop says in its blog that upcoming features include snap-to grid lines, a border and background color picker for UI controls, improved customization of UI controls, additional UI controls, more icons, and the ability to export to email, XML, or PDF. iMockups gets a 3-and-half-star rating from users in the iTunes store and the few reviews there comment about the app not being 100% ready yet.

It will be interesting to see how OmniGraphSketcher, iMockups, and other diagramming apps for the iPad add to the collaborative design process. For now I’m still keeping my sketchbook handy, but this could be the first wave of exciting new additions to the interaction design toolbox.

Published in: Interaction Design / Sketching / Technology / Wireframes
16
Apr 10

Google’s 3D View of NYC

Google is once again using its technology to allow us to explore our world in new and exciting ways, this time helping New York City tourism promoters create 3D tours of selected parts of the city. In a marriage of high-resolution 3D streetview photography and digital maps of New York, Google’s partnership with NYC & Company gives us a glimpse into the future of immersive, exploratory experiences.

Using the Google Earth API and the new hi-res images, NYC & Company has added the 3D tours to the interactive wall and table displays at its information center. The 3D fly-throughs also are available on your desktop in Google Earth.

For more information, see Google’s case study.

Published in: Technology / User Experience
8
Apr 10

A Delightful iPad Experience

With the launch of the iPad a few days ago we’ve been bombarded with countless commentaries and critiques of the user experience and potential new business models made possible by Steve Jobs’ “magical” new product. But sometimes you just have to sit back, relax, and watch someone totally engage with a product to remember why it is we UX designers live to create great experiences — we do it because it’s just plain fun.

A video surfaced on YouTube this week of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl playing with an iPad while her dad asked her to do different things. The dad, Todd Lappin, on whose telstarlogistics YouTube channel the video first gained attention, wrote that his daughter likes to play with his iPhone, but that this was her first iPad experience. While she clearly enjoyed herself, she also stumbled in a few places based on her previous experience with different devices (and who hasn’t seen that before).

The joy in this is seeing her complete immersion in the moment. She’s happy and excited not because of great UX or technical accomplishments, but because she’s having fun. It’s a great reminder of why we get up every day and do what we do.

Published in: Interaction Design / Technology / User Experience
30
Mar 10

FRONTLINE Probes Evolving Digital Nation

PBS’s FRONTLINE recently took a fascinating look at our evolving online culture in a film that explores the pros and cons of the brave new media world we all inhabit. The film, titled Digital Nation, challenges assumptions about the negative effects of digital culture on childhood learning while also questioning if we even understand the social changes wrought by our always-online culture enough to render a verdict on the effects our virtual lives are having on society.

Showing a more optimistic attitude, Philip Rosedale of Second Life argues that in the last 50 years we have gone from movies shared in theaters to movies shared by a small at-home VCR audience to movies enjoyed solo on our iPods to a new social experience in which we can be physically alone but still communicating in real-time with many others via Facebook posts and Twitter feeds (remember the CNN/Facebook/Obama inauguration?). Have we come full circle and is the technology that once separated us now advancing to the point it can bring us back together, albeit in new ways? Great questions indeed. Answers TBD.

The film is available free online at PBS.org. A trailer is provided below.

Published in: Social Media / Technology
17
Mar 10

New Mobile Features for United and Target

United Airlines and Target last week both introduced new mobile features for smartphones, becoming the latest national brands to try and increase customer loyalty with time and money saving mobile features.

With United Mobile Check-in you can have your boarding pass sent to your mobile device via email for some itineraries. No printing is needed. According to United’s website, once you receive your boarding pass, you can scan the barcode on the screen at airport security checkpoints and at the gate during boarding.

The service is currently limited to eight airports: Chicago O’Hare, Dallas – Fort Worth, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York LaGuardia, San Francisco and Washington Dulles. United said they plan to expand the service to other airports. If there is a seat change, upgrade or change in departure gate, your boarding pass can be refreshed to display the new information.

Target meanwhile introduced mobile coupons last week.

Target claims it is the first major retailer to send scannable coupons to cell phones, although there have been other coupon sites offering mobile coupons in the last year, including Cellfire, Coupon Sherpa and Yowza.

To enroll in Target’s mobile coupon program, you can register at Target.com or text the word “COUPONS” to 827438.

The service sends text messages with links to a Web page that features various coupons. CNET reported that the program works with any phone that has a mobile browser and data plan for Internet use.

Target reportedly will replenish coupons as they expire, and the coupons are good at any Target store but not at Target.com.

JCPenney announced last year it was partnering with Cellfire to pilot a scannable mobile coupons program at 16 stores in the Houston area.

The timing of the mobile coupon offerings takes advantage of growing use of mobile devices to access the internet. Industry publication Internet Retailer reported earlier this year that online coupon redemption increased 360% in 2009 over the previous year, indicating consumers’ appetite for discounts is exploding just as more people are embracing the mobile internet for shopping.

Target Mobile Coupon Signup

Target Mobile Coupon Signup

Target Coupon Confirmation

Target Coupon Confirmation

United Mobile Check-in

United Mobile Check-in

Published in: Mobile / Technology
13
Mar 10

Performance is User Experience

Thinking about a website’s user experience cannot be limited to just the design of the user interface and people’s interactions with it. From the consumer’s point of view, their experience extends to everything that happens from the moment they first visit the site to when the product or information they seek is delivered.

One important aspect of the user experience, perceived site performance, can be particularly vexing to site users and designers alike. That’s because when a site is slow to download or respond to user actions it causes the visitor to focus on something that is getting in the way of what they are trying to do. The guidance around response times Jakob Nielsen provided in his 1994 book Usability Engineering is still true today, perhaps even more so given people’s increased exposure to broadband internet access at home and work.

Fortunately there are many tools out there for measuring how your site is performing in terms of download speed and response time. Here’s a few free ones I use:

Firebug Net Performance

Firebug Net Performance

YSlow from Yahoo!

YSlow from Yahoo!

Tamper Data

Tamper Data

Bandwidth Place

Bandwidth Place

Firebug: The Net tab in the popular Firefox Add-On displays the size and download speed of each of the individual elements that make up a particular web page. It displays the information in a waterfall graph showing when each object’s download begins and ends, allowing you to easily see when a Flash object or other large file may slowing down the site’s perceived performance. This is especially useful if your site has third-party advertising served from a network you don’t control.

YSlow for Firebug: YSlow is an extension to Firebug from the Yahoo! Developer Network. YSlow measures a site’s download performance across 22 categories and provides guidance on how to improve performance. YSlow looks at things like file size, the number of HTTP requests needed to deliver the entire page, and image scaling.

Tamper Data: This Firefox Add-On gives you an extremely granular look at a site’s HTTP and HTTPS requests and responses. You can see file sizes, duration of requests and responses, and HTTP response code your server sends back to browser. This is useful if your site is experiencing slow response times because of requests to third-party content or if there is a problem in your content distribution network.

Bandwidth Place: This website can measure your computer’s upload and download speeds and show if your network connection is creating a bottleneck. If your download speed is comparable to what your site users have, which is often the case for intranet applications, this can help you understand what your audience is experiencing.

For industrial strength monitoring, Keynote Systems and Gomez offer paid services that can monitor download performance and response time from a geographically distributed network of computers that allows you to see how the site is performing from a worldwide perspective.

Keynote and Gomez also offer continuous monitoring services in which intelligent agents repeatedly visit a site from numerous geographically distributed locations and run through a scripted set of actions like performing a search, adding an item to a shopping cart, and checking out. Their services also provide email and SMS text alerting when performance thresholds have been exceeded. Keynote also has a free service, Keynote RedAlert, that can be used for 30 days to test scripted monitoring.

Published in: Technology / User Experience
31
Jan 10

iPad Misses on Several Key Points

The world got its first look at the long awaited iPad from Apple this week. And after digging into it bit I think I can wait a little longer to actually get one, though, as Apple has missed some key functionality.

iPad Home Screen

A few of the key features Apple missed are:

No camera: Video chat is impossible without a built in iSight camera. With the hardware as large as it is there is no reason not to have a camera, and one better than the 2.5 megapixel on the iPhone.

No multitasking: There’s no reason a more powerful processor couldn’t have been included so that Mac OS X could be supported. And that’s another miss in itself.

No Mac OS X: Limiting the iPad to the iPhone OS removes a lot of key functionality for mobile users. Unless someone is planning to use Google Docs and other cloud-based apps there is a lot you can’t do with Apple’s “magical” new machine. Business travelers and many other users will find themselves having to carry an iPad and laptop.

Battery not removable: The 10-hour life of the battery is a big improvement over iPhone, but for the cost of the iPad it should come with a removable battery so a heavy user could charge it and swap in a backup.

Lack of clarity on GPS: It’s not clear if the iPad has a dedicated GPS chip or if that will be available on all models. The tech specs indicate Assisted GPS will be used, but not a dedicated GPS chip like one would find on a Garmin. It’s hard to believe Apple wouldn’t match the quality of location-based services available to the 3GS so I suspect this is more of a marketing or semantic problem than a technical limitation of the iPad.

While the iPad is a big advance in multitouch technology and will provide a great mobile web surfing experience, it does not offer enough functionality to replace the laptop, which is what many people were expecting. This is likely a business decision by Apple to not cannibalize the market for their Macbooks. The iPad may have strong appeal to BlackBerry users who want some of the iPhone experience without having to give up their Berry. Only time will tell if Apple made the right calls in limiting what iPad can do.

Published in: Mobile / Technology / User Experience
28
Nov 09

Beyond Mice and Keyboards

The ubiquitous keyboard and mouse that have dominated computing for the last 30 years are getting some company and competition as gesture interfaces become a reality outside the test lab.

Microsoft’s Project Natal for Xbox 360 promises an immersive user experience in which the interface becomes more invisible than ever before. With Natal the user is the interface. Looking to take the user experience far beyond Nintendo’s Wii, Natal uses a 3-D depth camera and microphone for motion, gesture, and audio input. Xbox claims Natal will let people steer an on-screen race car by moving their arms in steering motions and use gestures like actual kicks to move a soccer ball on screen. In one demo, Natal recognizes a person’s face and automatically logs them into their Xbox profile. Think Wii without the controller. Wikipedia has a brief article on Natal’s background and technology.

And if you think this is a just going to be a high-tech gamer toy, look at the opportunities for communication and commerce in this post on Engadget. Imagine manipulating your TV’s menu system with the same gestures you’d use on an iPhone. No convoluted controller or touch screen required. It’s like Minority Report in your media room.

Motion-detecting interfaces aren’t limited to efforts as ambitious as Natal. Here’s a look at Pek Pongpaet using the accelerometer in the WiiMote to control an on-screen X-Wing fighter. Many areas of education, from aeronautics to architecture, could be revolutionized with touchable and movable experiences. Pek also did a recent demo at DePaul University in Chicago where he used the Wii Balance Board to connect to a website through WiiFlash Server to steer a car on screen by leaning in the direction he wanted to steer the car.

It’s clear new ways of human-computer interaction are coming thanks to multi-touch UIs and gestural interfaces. Aching gamers’ thumbs everywhere will be rejoicing.

Published in: Gestural Interfaces / Technology / User Experience
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