Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real word.

They think paper and many other objects could be manipulated by touching them, as with a touchscreen. This system doesn’t use any special hardware, instead it consists of just a device like an ordinary webcam, plus a commercial projector. Its capabilities are achieved by image processing technology. Using this technology, information can be imported from a document as data, by selecting the necessary parts with your finger.

I think that design principles are important to bring clarity within the team at a fundamental level. Everything else will build on it. I want you to understand the extreme importance of them. Here is a presentation to let you know more about it.

“They are a tool that helps project teams establish a common language, make day to day decisions, and deliver a better, more consistent user experience. An added benefit of design principles is that the process of defining and agreeing on them helps a project team form a shared understanding of the design goals for a product. This presentation discusses how to create design principles that stick and how to use them to speed up decision making and drive user experience improvements.”

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.

1. The Difference Between a Heuristic Evaluation and an Expert Review
2. Future Healthcare Concepts
3. When Introducing UCD in an Organinzation, Technical Capability is Only Half the Story
4. Karen McGrane on Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content
5. RIP Bill Boddgride of IDEO (1943-2012)

Concept 1: The Phone of the Future- Your Guardian Health Angel

Looking into the future, I see you’re phone as your personal health angel. When it comes to taking care of your health, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to think about anything. The phone will take care of it for you.

Why the phone? Because it is the one object that is with you at all times. You change clothes, you change locations, you change accessories. But the phone is there with you throughout the day and besides the bed while you sleep. It will be your health monitor. You use it in different positions and moods- crouched up, walking, when you’re calm, when you’re tense. With all the data it can sense from you, every single day, nobody better will know your health than the phone, which continuously monitors your health as long as it is with you, which is probably all the time. Forget about getting an additional device to look after your health, the phone is all you need.

If there’s anything of concern to your health that you can cure or prevent on your own, your phone will let you know. If there’s anything of concern that you can’t fix, the phone will contact your doctor or the nurse who will get in touch with you on the phone through video. You won’t ever feel sick and need to take action because you’re phone will have acted on the situation before it happens. Of course, the phone will not be able to detect everything. That’s why you’re medical monitoring report will constantly be streamed to the doctor who will go through it every month and in case he does detect something unusual, he will get in touch with you.

Your health matters and you need to concentrate on the things that matter in your life. But the phone of the future will do this for you, so you have to concentrate on one thing less, and more on enjoying life.

Concept 2: The Children’s (Not)hospital

Do children like hospitals? Of course not. It’s scary. It’s not fun. It doesn’t make them happy.

If I were to design a hospital for children, I would take them one by one to the hospital (when they’re sick, of course) and start talking with them about it what they thought about it right from the gate, all the way till the time they are discharged (well, I would use a modified cultural probe method to record their feelings about it over time if it was a longer stay). What is it they like or don’t like and why?

If I were to design it, I would design it based around what fun is for children. This concept is based upon creating a Disneyland experience to remove the fear of a hospital and gameification to make children heal faster by wanting to heal faster.

If children like fantasy, cartoons and games, why should the hospital not be it? So here’s a story about Anna who has the flu and is being taken by her parents to the hospital.

Far before Anna reaches the hospital, she can see giant waving inflatable jokers at the gate. Anna shows mom sitting with her in the back of the car and asks her what that place is. Mom smiles back while dad drives right through the gate where the guard dressed as a pirate tips his hat. Anna opens her mouth in awe and says, “I thought we were going to the hospital!”. “This is the hospital, my love”, says mom.

They drive for a mile before they reach the hospital and all throughout the way, Anna is busy looking at the larger than life cartoon characters pegged by the sides of the road she loves so much.

When they enter the hospital, she see’s ambient walls filled with fairies, toadstools and funny looking gnomes. While she waits, Peter Pan (the attendant) gives her a pair of gloves that let her play games sitting right on her chair. She moves her fingers which are tracked and suddenly, along with the other children, she’s helping the fairies thwack the funny looking gnomes every time they try to steal a pastry from the spread laid out for their toadstool party. She’s in her own fantasy land right now and there is no hospital and no sickness for her right now. There’s only joy and happiness, a lot of it.

It’s time for the doctor to see Anna and she goes in to be greeted by a magician (the doctor, of course!). After he pulls a rabbit out of his hat that has Anna in squeals, he does a quick checkup with his brightly colored medical apparatus and gives Anna three bunny bottles in pink, blue and green (that she can add to her collection of toys once she’s done with the course).

He then goes on to pull out a few medals out of his hat. “Which one are you going to get, my love?”. “I want all of them”, says a laughing Anna. “Well, you can’t have all, but if you want the gold, here’s how you can win it!”. He tells her that if she takes her colored skittle pills from her colored bunny rabbits as mommy gives them, and she recovers quick and comes back to the hospital with no more flu, she’ll get the gold. “Oh well, if you do that, I’ll give you all three of them! How does that sound?”. Anna looks in disbelief to mom while mom strokes her hair.

Anna comes back in a few days fit as fiddle. She’s laughing before reaching the gate and slips into her fantasy world while she drives through it to reach the hospital, enjoying everything she did the last time round. The doctor, or should I say, the magician, is amazed and says he never could have imagined little Anna would recover so quick. He not only gives her the three medals he promised, but he also gives her a certificate after taking a picture of her with her medals (and him sporting a wicked grin) which she can always look back at with pride to remind her of her amazing victory.

She recovered quickly because she wanted to recover quickly. What the mind can conceive, it can achieve, and this is proven by research available today. She wanted to come back to her fantasy land and she wanted the medals, and she wanted to add the three cute bunny rabbits to her family of toys. She wanted to see the magician again and she wanted those medals.

The whole process of going to the hospital, getting diagnosed and cured was not about going to a hospital, not getting diagnosed by a doctor, and not taking horrible pills. For Anna, it was about fantasy, awe, encouragement and victory. It was something she enjoyed very much.

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.

“In this eBook, ‘UX Storytellers - Connecting the Dots’, 42 UX masterminds tell personal stories of their exciting lives as User Experience professionals. The book brings together authors from around the world who paint a very entertaining picture of our multifaceted community.”- Amazon book description

My story, “Technical Capability is Half the Story” aims at helping User Experience professionals understand the real challenges involved when trying to introduce User-Centered Design (UCD) techniques in an organization where the goal is to ultimately integrate UCD into the organization’s Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC). It talks about how arming ones self with technical capability is only half the story, the other half being a team’s ability to effectively deal with soft issues and successfully engage with stakeholders. I hope you will learn from it and be able to put it to good use if you come across such a situation or are already in such a (tricky) situation.

A Story

Once upon a time, there were two internet companies that had recently introduced interaction design teams. Both of these companies managed to hire talented interaction designers (IxD). While they did hire some good IxDs, they were not following a User Centered Design (UCD) process.

Their process was basically as follows. The product team would come up with the information architecture (IA) of a new product and the interaction design team would come up with the user interface (UI) and iron out creases from the flow given to them at a low level (micro IA). Changes would be made to the product once it went live, based upon studying how it was performing through reports from the Management Information System (MIS) and web analytics.

Now this was not a very optimal method of doing things. It would often be the case that after going live, the IA and UI would be modified. This would have been perfectly acceptable except for the fact that these modifications were to be made on high level structures—both in IA and UI. This, of course, was not easy to do, since the entire web application or website rested on these high level structures. All of this cost the company dearly in terms of time and money, which was being spent on issues that were never anticipated.

At this time, none of the companies were conducting any form of user research or usability evaluations. The interaction design teams in both companies were aware of this and around the same time, both teams, frustrated with the state of affairs as they were, and for the good of their respective companies, decided to try and introduce UCD techniques into their organizations.

The interaction designers thought that conducting user research would help them provide product management with better inputs for developing a better IA validated by representative users. Not only that, it would also help them design a better UI by validating its ease of use throughout the Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC) through conducting usability evaluations. Both teams managed to grab opportunities for usability testing during development of new products around the same time.

After a year had gone by, one team had managed to set up a small unofficial but recognized user research group which their company was quite pleased with. Not only that, they had a pipeline of projects to keep themselves busy for the coming months. On the other hand, the second team was faring rather badly. Nobody wanted to let them conduct any usability tests. A new product was in the making and they did not get to conduct any user research for it either.

Their plan to introduce UCD techniques into the organization had pretty much failed and they were beginning to give up because of the lack of results they had seen. They were unimpressed by the response of the organization. Likewise the folks in their organization were unimpressed by the result of this group of interaction designers, who they thought would have saved time if they had simply stuck to what they were assigned to do in the first place.

It is common to hear people people using these terms interchangeably. An expert review is termed as a heuristic evaluation when in actuality the evaluators evaluated the usability of the product referring to their own knowledge of right and wrong rather than explicitly referencing against a set of heuristics.

This article explains the difference between a Heuristic Evaluation and an Expert Review and tells you when to apply which method.

What is a Heuristic Evaluation?

A heuristic evaluation is the evaluation of the usability of a product against a set of heuristics. Issues are found and reported and recommendations are made explicitly referencing this set of heuristics.

What is an Expert Review?

An expert review is the evaluation of the usability of a product by an expert in the usability domain and preferably in the domain the product applies to. An expert may or may not directly refer to a set of heuristics during the evaluation and while reporting issues and recommendations. Besides this, an expert will evaluate the usability of the product against what the expert has learned throughout their
experience of working on usability of products- through data yielded on their own or accessed from existing research.

When to Use a Heuristic Evaluation and When to Use an Expert Review?

It would be safe to say that higher the expertise of the evaluator performing a heuristic evaluation or an expert review, the higher are your chances of yielding useful results. Also, an expert review will yield better results as compared to a heuristic evaluation when performed by experts since this incorporates knowledge about the domain and their own experience which in most cases may go beyond what a set of heuristics might help one find.

However, in the case a usability evaluation has to be done by a group of evaluators that do not have much experience in usability or the domain the product applies to, a heuristic evaluation will have higher chances of yielding better results than an expert review, since these evaluators will have a set of heuristics (rules of thumb) to refer to, as opposed to utilizing their own experience to make judgments which in this case will be very limited and may yield a considerable number of ‘false alarms’.

The Problem

This product is a solution to a very specific problem- changing the volume of your music device while running.

When running, we often have to change the volume over the course of the run, especially if we’re running in the city. We come across different volumes of environmental noise (running by a busy road, passing by a construction site, what have you). This means we need to turn the music volume up and down quite a few times throughout the run.

Now changing the volume can be a pain, depending on where we’ve placed our music device. If we’re not using a remote control earphone, then we need to take it out of the pocket and change it, which means slowing down and distracting ourselves from simply enjoying our run. Even using an armband requires us to slow down or bit, or stop moving the arm its on to change the volume… not something we like to do when all we want to do is zone out.

A remote controlled earphone is no better (something I personally use) because we still need to temporarily slow our speed down and get hold of the volume control on the earphone wire. I certainly don’t enjoy it, and believe you don’t too.

The Solution

My solution to the volume changing hassle is an easy, ‘don’t make me think’ one. It is an earphone for runners, where the volume is controlled through the earphone itself rather than the music device.
The difference is that the volume is controlled through a rotary knob (just like those on the old television sets) and this knob is placed on the earphones itself (as you can see in the picture I’ve attached- the extruded portion is supposed to be the rotary knob).

Changing volume is as easy as rotating the knob on either headphone. This means we no longer have to slow down while running. We no longer have to get distracted from having to cumbersomely change the volume. It’s as simple as volume changing should be while running.

Key Features

The product is an earphone targeted at runners and joggers. It solves the specific issue of the cumbersome process of changing the volume of music over the course of a run. It is special because I believe there is no other solution out there which makes it as easy as the this product.

Product Comparison

I am aware of none at the moment

This is a fantastic presentation on NPR’s COPE concept- create once, publish everywhere. Karen asks the right questions- why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will live on a web page? Why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow has to keep up. And she does a good job of providing the right answers on how we can we adapt to creating more flexible content.