Do you know what type of behaviour you or your company want to provoke? And is that aligned with how people actually want to live their lives? Empathy is the key to understanding and changing behavior.
HCI
HCI
RIP Bill Boddgride of IDEO (1943-2012)
October 17, 2012
I am saddened to say that Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, designer of the first laptop, author of the book ‘Designing Interactions‘, important role player in promoting the human-centered approach in design passed away last month on September 8, 2012. May his soul rest in peace.
Rajat Paharia on Influencing User Behaviour through Game Dynamics
October 5, 2011
Rajat talks about how designers can address fundamental human needs and desires (like status, achievement, reward, competition, self-expression) to make experiences both compelling and satisfying.
He talks about how game designers have known for years on how to incentivise and motivate players by addressing these needs through the use of mechanics like points, levels, leaderboards, virtual goods, challenges, and real-time feedback. He covers the migration of these mechanics out of the gaming world and into the world at large, including destination sites, devices, productivity applications, corporate intranets, and the professional networking platform, LinkedIn.
About Rajat Paharia
Rajat Paharia is the founder and Chief Product Officer of Bunchball. He created the world’s first gamification platform for brand engagement, Nitro, in 2007. Rajat’s skill set combines a unique expertise in technology, design and human behavior that he developed while working at the design firm IDEO, and through his masters in computer science with a focus on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) at Stanford university.
Bunchball’s clients include Fortune 500 companies like NBC, Warner Brothers, Comcast and Hewlett-Packard, who are helped with crafting gamification strategies that engage customers, partners and employees.
Related Links
Rajat Paharia on twitter: @rajatrocks
Bunchball website
Bunchball on twitter: @bunchball
The UX Bookmark- the best UX links for the smartest User Experience practitioners
May 18, 2011
I created the UX Bookmark a few years ago to separate the wheat from the chaff, here you will find only the best of articles, from journals, conferences and the web, that will help you evolve to being a more knowledgeable user experience practitioner.
From the feedback I have received, I could not be more glad in knowing how much it has helped many of you- at times when you have needed it most, or how you have used it to slowly build your knowledge in user experience or a particular area within it.
If you are a usability engineer, user researcher, human factors specialist, interaction designer or an information architect, then the UX Bookmark is a resource specially for you.
UX Quotes- Quotes on User Experience
March 1, 2011
This website of mine features a wonderful collection of quotes I have gathered over the years related to usability, interaction design, typography, etc.- the whole gamut of user experience. It lets you build upon your user experience wisdom through serendipity one quote at a time.
UXQuotes
David Kelley on Human Centered Design
May 2, 2010
David Kelley, chairman of IDEO, says product design has become more about the user experience than about hardware. He shows a video of this new, broader approach, including footage from the Prada store in New York.
About David Kelly
David Kelly is the founder of IDEO. He helped design the first mouse, the Treo and the Leap chair. Kelley has also been teaching design at Stanford for more than 25 years and now leads the university’s design school there.
What is Information Architecture (IA)?
February 6, 2010
Information Architecture (IA) is both the process and the product of organization of information to facilitate efficient access to that information by its intended audience.
This is my definition for IA which is also my entry for the the Explain IA contest.
Update: I won a copy of Peter Morville’s new book Search Patterns at ExplainIA. I am looking forward to receiving it since the sample chapter I read was promising.
10GUI- a conceptual intput device and supporting GUI as an alternate to the mouse
November 14, 2009
10GUI is Calyton Mill’s concept for an input device that uses all fingers that expands the bandwidth of interaction that is otherwise restricted by the mouse. The video talks about how the mouse restricts interaction and how multi-touch monitors are stressful because the user has to stretch out to use it- (something I fully agree with and believe will lead to its failure). It goes on to illustrate a GUI that is better optimized for usage with the proposed input device.
Related links
Lionhead Studios demos the capabilities of Microsoft Project Natal
September 30, 2009
Code named Project Natal by Microsoft, this sensor device that will be able to be added to any XBOX 360 will allow for a controller-free gaming experience. Through Natal, the user will be interact with the Xbox 360 using gestures, spoken commands or presented objects and images instead of the regular game controller we use today.
To be released in late 2010, the Project Natal sensor is the world’s first to combine an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor running proprietary software all in one device. Unlike 2-D cameras and controllers, Project Natal tracks your full body movement in 3-D, while responding to commands, directions and even a shift of emotion in your voice.
In this video that demo’s project Natal’s capabilities, the user interacts with the video game character called Milo who is capable of recognizing the user’s face, voice and emotions and respond accordingly.
This is quite a feat as it significantly reduces the ‘amount’ of suspension of disbelief required to immerse one into the game than is required otherwise at current.
Related link
g-speak: Minority Report Gesture based User Interface now Reality
November 23, 2008
What we see above is no longer something that’s can only be part of sci-fi movie. The g-speak spatial operating environment (SOE) is a new computing platform that has been developed by Oblong Industries. The platform on which multiple users can work at a time using interacting through the gesture based interface is optimized for largedata sets and time critical work.
As is mentioned on Oblong’s website:
…g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles… Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.
Some of the SOE’s core ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong’s founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT. The g-speak platform braids development arcs begun in the early 1990s at MIT’s Media Laboratory, where Oblong’s principals produced radical user interface advances, distributed and networked language designs, and media manipulation technologies.
From academia; into popular cinema; and out broadly into the world as commercial product: it’s an unordinary path for technical thought and effort, but one — leading to g-speak — that seems now logical and even necessary. The people who work in Oblong’s Los Angeles and Barcelona laboratory offices are as concerned with design as with programming, with humanist principles as with running a company. Synthesizing these concerns is the only way to insure that the metamorphosis of human-computer interaction we offer the world will be one of beauty and durable worth.
What do you think if g-speak? Have you come across other cool stuff that was part of the movies but is pretty real now?
