Making digital human

1 month ago

Will the iPad save traditional broadcast media?

For years, technology innovation has been drawing audiences away from broadcast media, siphoning attention off into a land of free and non-monetizable content. But the advent of the iPad holds the promise to redefine how the world produces and consumes media, and may just bring us all back under the wings of the major media houses. Through parallel storytelling, shared experiences, and new social interactions around media, the iPad — and ideally many new devices to follow — can give broadcasters rich new ways to engage us, our friends, and our families in their media events.

Parallel storytelling

Take a look at the media we consume today: nearly all of it is in the form of a single stream of content. Stories told among friends, books, movies, and broadcast media are all constructed from a series of vignettes that combine to tell a story. However, reality is much more messy: multiple things are going on at once; there are subtexts and back stories. Even when movies explore time shifting (Pulp Fiction) or alternate outcomes (Run, Lola, Run), the underlying format is the same: a string of events. However, people have a thirst for multiple streams of information: think record album liner notes, DVD extras and director’s notes, and the 1990s hit “Pop-Up Video” television show on VH-1, which visually overlaid little snippets of information on top of music videos.

With the advent of the iPad, media producers will be able to capture this thirst for additional information and explore new realms in parallel storytelling. Rather than just sitting back and passively watching a TV show, for instance, people will be able to simultaneously explore the back story. Imagine leafing through coffee-stained pages of the CIA dossier on Jason Bourne while he hides in the Caribbean, or training a virtual spycam on Godot to see what the heck he was up to while Vladimir and Estragon were endlessly waiting. And this doesn’t necessarily have to all happen on the iPad itself; we’ll see the rise of simulcast media, watching the main story on satellite or cable on the big screen in the living room and interacting with this sidecar content on our iPad from the comfort of the sofa.

Read the rest of the story on VentureBeat.com

3 months ago

LukeW | Touch Gesture Reference Guide

We’ve been watching the fragmentation of gesture-based interfaces for a while now, since some early work with the iPhone and with Synaptics. Interesting guide by LukeW and team on gestures across popular platforms.

3 months ago

When in doubt, tab, tab, and tab again

A lot of sites end up using tabs as a visual crutch when they don’t know what else to do with their IA. Take, for instance, earlier iterations of Amazon.com, which had a maddening array of tabs across the top until they finally collapsed them into the left-hand column.

But when you have three (count ‘em - three) sets of tabs across the top of your site, it’s time to take your architecture out back and shoot it.

3 months ago

Our CHI2010 booth in Atlanta

We’ve definitely got the brightest booth at CHI2010, probably due to the massive use of orange and our easy-on-the-feet fake grass. If you’re at the conference, drop by booth 12 and pick up some of our mini cards with findings and tips from our product innovation work!

3 months ago

It’s the subtleties that count

Complete the customer survey online, and get $5 off a family pack - which may inadvertently skew their survey population towards families. If that’s the skew they want, that’s fine - but otherwise, it’s an important reminder to pay close attention to structuring research.

3 months ago

The little things add up: Getting out-of-box right

Interesting bit on the ‘Flip-ification’ of the Cisco Valet router. According to Pogue, they’ve done a great job of making the router a much more approachable device, but it’s the little things that are getting in the way - like the “Plug in Easy Setup Key to get started” sticker on the back.

We noticed something similar recently when evaluating the Google Nexus One phone. The packaging was very well done, visually appealing with a nice unpacking sequence, but there were three things that really stood out: The box itself was hard to open for people with small hands, the power adapter had a poorly-printed sticker slapped on it at an angle, and the twist ties around all of the cables were the ‘cheap-o’ variety. Little things, sure, but they added up to sully the overall impression.

State of the Art - A Hot Spot Shortcut, Lost in the Weeds - NYTimes.com

“We added a new feature to the Twitter web site that allows you to attach location data to individual tweets. This feature may not appeal to everyone so it requires that you activate it first in your Account Settings.” Twitter doing privacy right.

3 months ago

What we’ve learned, for CHI 2010

We’re going to have a booth at CHI in Atlanta this year, and have printed up a batch of little cards with UX-related tips and tricks that we’ve seen recently in our client work. Take a look at our cards, and drop our booth for an orange soda if you’re at CHI next week.

If You Need to Explain It, We Should All Agree, Then the Design Isn’t Doing Its Job

“Placelessness is a huge problem. With a paper magazine, newspaper, or book, you know where you are and how much remains based on the pages in your hands.” - Daring Fireball

Completely agreed with Gruber on this one. This is something that continues to show up in digital interactions. If the user doesn’t have a mental picture of the dimensions of the thing they’re trying to interact with - the number of products, extent of the feature set, or whatever - then it’s that much harder to engage with the experience.

That’s one of the biggest differences between the philosophies behind the iPhone and Android interfaces: the iPhone typically exposes most of the features available on a particular screen; the Android requires that you long-tap or use the menu.

4 months ago

“I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: Design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories, but essentially useless when it comes to breakthroughs.” Don Norman in Interactions Magazine: Technology First, Needs Last: The Research-Product Gulf

Who's writing?

Will the iPad save traditional broadcast media?

If You Need to Explain It, We Should All Agree, Then the Design Isn’t Doing Its Job