Interaction design

Microsoft launched their vision for productivity in the future. When I saw the video for the first time I wondered whether this is stupidity or a imaginable outcome of the next ten years? Some reflections… [Continue reading...]

The company ‘Oblong’ has develop the ‘g-speak’ a way of interaction with gloves in a ‘minority report’ style. So why is this new? The technology uses two gloves that not only read spatial movement from left to right like Softkinetic but also from front to back. This allows you to manipulate or control objects in a much richer way.

Selecting an object can be done for instance by closing the hand palm; grabbing an object, just like in the real world. Now you start to realize how unnatural the whole idea of a mouse is. By moving your hand forward or backwards you can for instance zoom in and out of a picture. This way of interacting gives people the possibility to select and manipulate objects in all three axis. [Continue reading...]

A revolutionary way of creating messages is called Swype. The company founders Cliff Kushler and Randy Marsden with their team have developed a system that recognizes words when you slide over the qwerty keyboard with your fingers. Instead of typing the words, like hardware keyboards this is a touch screen. When you want to write a word you simply connect the dots and the program will recognize the word.

QWERTY history

This reminds us about the QWERTY keyboard history. Originally Christopher Sholes developed another keboard layout for the first type writers. He had problems with the first designs however; typists were so fast that the key got stuck into each other, causing a jam. The solution was simple but with great consequences; reorder the layout in a less logical way to keep typists from typing too fast. Other systems such as the ‘Dvorak keyboard’ can type around 400 of the most common words in English without leaving the middle row while the QWERTY keyboard can only reach up till 100. Another statistic; the middle row of the Dvorak system do 70% of the work while QWERTY only does 32%. [Continue reading...]

James Patten and Ben Recht have developed the Audiopad, a multi touch screen that transforms motion into music. On the touch screen different parameters can be controlled be by dragging and resizing which directly influence the music you hear.

With traditional DJ sets and mixers the feedback is purely led lights that switch on or off while the audiopad also gives visual feedback on the touch screen. In our opinion this makes mixing / creating music is more intuitive as you don’t only have audible feedback but also visual feedback.

How does it work? (from the audiopad site)

Audiopad has a matrix of antenna elements which track the positions of electronically tagged objects on a tabletop surface. Software translates the position information into music and graphical feedback on the tabletop. Each object represents either a musical track or a microphone.

[Continue reading...]

The Microft surface table is introduced in the Shariton hotels. Earlier we wrote about the unveiling of the new surface table and the introduction at AT&T. As with the surface tables at AT&T the ones for the Shariton are specially programmed for this hotel chain. But the working principle remains the same: navigating through the menu by touch or multi touch. [Continue reading...]

The company ‘Visual Planet’ has developed interactive foil that can be used as a touch screen. One major advantage is that it can be glued on every surface that is not metallic. Consider the possibilities. Now displays in public will get vandalized less easy as the display (read foil!) can be glued on the inside of windows / plastics.

Two configurations
The foil comes in two configurations; a see through window configuration or an interactive poster configuration. Especially the see through configuration has a lot of potential as it keeps working with a glass thickness of 25 mm. This more ‘vandalize proof’ display could open doors for such displays at buss stops, shopping centers that lack the social control at certain times during the day. [Continue reading...]

What is actually the difference between interface and interaction design?

The term ‘interface design’ suggests that in web design the coding, users and how a message is relayed (interface) can be regarded separately. One major problem of isolating design at the interface level is that it allows programmers, or product designers to reason that an interface will be glued on it afterwards. It postpones design after programming or sketching. If you want to offer a carefully designed user experience all three components support the user experience.

‘Behavioural design’ tells how the product (website or consumer product) should respond and communicate to users. Like behavioural designers interaction designers also work from the inside out. Interaction designers start with the goals user want to achieve and distillate that into broader goals.

‘Conceptual design’ takes it even one level deeper; instead of looking at the goals it looks at the what is valuable for the users. The way to fulfil this is still open, it could be a new product, but suits better to the needs of users.

Where does the interaction designer belong? In all of them! The interaction designer first investigates what is most valuable for users by thinking conceptually, after that the behaviour gets detailed; how should the user fulfil his goals and finally at an interface level. How should the interface look like to get this particular user experience? [Continue reading...]

With the introduction of Microsoft surface and the Iphone many people wonder if the new windows platform (Windows 7) will support a multi touch screen as well. It seems it will [Continue reading...]

In earlier posts we wrote about the usability of one particular parking meter in the Netherlands and proposed two interface alternatives. After discussing both concepts one interface has been further developed. [Continue reading...]

A while ago we wrote about the poor usability of parking meters. We now would like to share two alternatives for operating a parking meter. [Continue reading...]