On The Brink (a must see)
On The Brink - we discuss the past, present and future of connectivity with a mix of people including David Rowan, chief editor of Wired UK; Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; and Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of Soundcloud. Each of the interviewees discusses the emerging opportunities being enabled by technology as we enter the Networked Society. Concepts such as borderless opportunities and creativity, new open business models, and today’s ‘dumb society’ are brought up and discussed
How does the new ‘Subscription’ feature affect the Facebook manifesto?
Some time back Facebook launched the subscription option which allows one to subscribe to the updates of people (if they have enabled ‘subscribe’ option) without necessarily befriending them. Considering the huge network of friends on Facebook, sharing has a personal touch and is protected by strong privacy control (One can set privacy settings for a post and target it towards particular audience). From one perspective, this offers its users a unique way to know about a person who is not in the friend-list, and is different from e.g. Twitter, due to the presence of personal network.
Just for our interest in how this great social network is evolving, we have a question,
Does new Facebook manifesto = Get to know, ‘What’s on the mind of Friends?’ + ‘What’s on the mind of the most happening people around?’
We have taken a creative stand to imagine some vague ideas around this for exploration. If it falls in Facebook’s interest, in the near future we might see subscription taken to the next level. Here are some ideas and high-level conceptual thoughts which could be enhanced further:
As of now there is no dedicated place for suggestions on Facebook. Say there is an option to ‘Explore Facebook’ on the dashboard and a dedicated area where one can filter say ‘most popular’ people using tags and subscribe as shown in the above wire-frame.
What we predict is that super-users will definitely look forward to this feature and may be, find themselves a new interest.
(Source: whiteshapes.com)
XBOX Kinect Experience - Gesture Recognition System/ Working/ Processing etc.
The XBox Kinect with its awesome sensors delivers a great gaming experience; as User Experience designers, we can only imagine the complexities and challenges involved in designing the gesture system like that of Kinect. In this post we discuss our initial observations, working and a bit of programming related with Kinect.
Our initial observations:
1] The navigation to browse across applications and perform selection are intuitive and very easy to learn. Although, while performing selection, one needs to hold the arm stationary for some moments which might get annoying in the beginning. But one must say it is a great job of simplifying a very complex gesture, considering a situation in which the arm does not have any support.
2] There are feedback issues in the process of transferring control to the new player. To start playing one has to wave the arm from left to right to take control; this is not evident to the user. When a player is exhausted and moves out of the ‘working area’ the cursor/control over-shoots boundaries, making it very confusing to restore back. At this particular event (and many important stages before, in this event) there is no feedback to the user.
Overall, it is a great gesture recognition system and makes gaming on kinect very addictive
The Engineering Blog of XBOX Live has pointed out that,
The well-established rules for HCI didn’t always apply when designing interactions for a living room with a 10-foot gesture experience, but that’s what made the process exciting! Through play testing we were able to better understand how users behaved, how much body movement was comfortable while gesturing for extended periods of time, and what natural gestures conflicted with the gesture sets we were exploring.
Working:
(Image courtesy: wired.com)
Click here to read more about the working of Kinect.
Kinect & Processing:
If you are also a programming geek, then do not miss this detailed documentation of the kinect library by Daniel Shiffman.
Few examples here:
Depth Test:
Processing Kinect Library IR Image Bug from shiffman on Vimeo.
Point Cloud:
Kinect Point Cloud demo in Processing from shiffman on Vimeo.
Average Point Tracking:
Simple “Average Point” tracking with Kinect in Processing from shiffman on Vimeo.
With such powerful gesture recognition system, it has opened new avenues for designers and coders to improvise and come up with new systems, and apply the technology in innovative ways.
(Source: whiteshapes.com)
Samsung cites Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ movie as prior art against iPad design patent. (Via FOSS Patents)
Here is clip from the movie..
Marc Hassenzahl explains the fascinating concept of User Experience and Experience Design
Marc Hassenzahl explains the fascinating concept of User Experience and Experience Design. Commentaries by Don Norman, Eric Reiss, Mark Blythe, and Whitney Hess
Writing a reply in Facebook
A small usability bug that existed few weeks before in the messages section of Facebook is now removed. Earlier, the ‘Reply’ button was absent and a message could be sent on pressing ‘Enter’ while composing. The issue was that one could accidently send incomplete messages with the intention of performing indenting operations while composing. Voila!
Using Pass-code in iPhone
Using ‘Lock’ in iphone could be irritating; even bothersome to an extent that one might choose not to use it, in spite of its need. That is because, accessing an application in iphone requires a lot of pressing and swiping. In spite of the fact that the process is fast; with the passcode ‘ON’, it can become tiresome.
Let us break it down with an example:
1. Pressing the sleep button to wake it up
2. Swiping to unlock
3. Pressesing 4 keys to enter the pass-code
Total interactions in this case = 6 (To see the face of the app!)
If one thinks of switching the Pass-code, ON/ OFF only when needed; then one is automatically forced to remember these actions. Considering the frequency of these actions, this task flow amounts to a usability problem and can force users to not use the lock.
