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...]

Our regular visitors probably have noticed we were offline for a few days. We were attacked with a SQL injection but luckily everything is restored back to normal and we are up and running again. BAck up, back up, back up is the keyword there!

The security has been tightened and hopefully we can focus again on writing and publishing articles and concepts.

A really nice concept video made by the company INVIVIA for Microsoft. The purpose was aimed to “explore in a poetic narrative way how certain developing technologies could begin to blend and augment our daily lives”.

The word XUI stands for experience-user-interface and you have to keep in mind that this video is made with the intention to ‘inspire’. Often such concepts are not far away from the truth, many examples of that exist today.Enjoy the video below (in the post). [Continue reading...]

A short news update!

1 We removed the well known ‘No follow’ protocol, that blocks google from counting the pagerank in the comments, so comments contribute to your pagerank.

2 We added the section ‘Concept collection’ and ‘Design’, next to Home and About. In this sections we will post ‘concept collections’ in different categories and show new designs that are related to, of course, interaction design and usability.

3 We moved to a new server as our last server could not handle all the traffic. Especially our posts 20 cool interaction design concepts and other concept collections generate a lot of traffic. Please let us know if the site is slow as we want to give you the best service. If you are satisfied with the sever speed and would like to know which hosting provider we have, see the banner below. If you sign up using this banner we get a discount on our hosting costs as well!

4 Some adds are shown through the website, hopefully these can help to cover the high bandwidth costs.

I read many reviews about the book ‘designing for interaction’ of Dan Saffer so I had high expectations of reading the book. Here I will share my opinions after reading the book.

Dan Saffer has tried to give an overview of interaction design in which he partly succeeded. He describes what interaction design is about and introduces some design basics, research and typical interaction design methods such as personas, storyboards or use cases. The advantage of the book is that it gives an overview of what interaction design is about, but unfortunately always stays on a superficial level. Other authors have written books and books about personas while Dan Saffer does it in five pages. This is my main negative point, because Dan Saffer created overview he also lost focus, don’t expect to be able to put methods or tools in the book into practice. For that everything has been described in a too general level. [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...]

When you are fresh from university and start working as a freelancer you still have to learn all the pitfalls of the freelancing world. Below are the most common lies companies use to freelancers. Whenever you hear these statements your ‘radar’ should go off.

1. “Do this one cheap (or free) and we’ll make it up on the next one.”
2. “We never pay a cent until we see the final product.”
3. “Do this for us and you’ll get great exposure! The jobs will just pour in!”
4. ” On looking at sketches or concepts: “Well, we aren’t sure if we want to use you yet, but leave your material here so I can talk to my partner/investor/wife/clergy.”
5. “Well, the job isn’t CANCELLED, just delayed. Keep the account open and we’ll continue in a month or two.”
6. “Contract? We don’t need no stinking contact! Aren’t we friends?”
7. “Send me a bill after the work goes to press.”
8. “The last guy did it for XXX dollars.”
9. “Our budget is XXX dollars, firm.
10. “We are having financial problems. Give us the work, we’ll make some money and then we’ll pay you.”
[Continue reading...]

‘Unpressable buttons‘ has written a nice post about sound design in products. There are numerous examples where companies spend tons of money just to get the sound right. Volvo is known for testing endlessly just to get the typical Volvo sound for closing the door. A second example are the coffee machines that use beans. Nowadays the beans can be grind without any noise but that coffee machine would not sell at all. The customer wants to hear heas beans being grinded; it is part of the coffee brewing experience.

Unpressable buttons use the example of artificially created shutter sound of a pocket sized digital camera which you still have with modern SLR’s.These camera’s work so silent that they use this sound for either enhancing the user experience or (more importantly) to give audible feedback to the user about the status of the product. [Continue reading...]

The people at MIT have developed a brush that allows you to brush whatever it can see. The brush scans the surface of an object by putting the brush on the object. The brush turns this scan into a texture which can be used to brush on a wall.

But not only can the brush use stills for brushing it can also capture movements of the object that is being scanned. Likely with a camera this is captured and after brushing this texture the movement stays alive and is displayed on the wall as well. In the video one example is shown of capturing ‘blinking eyes’ which are then brushed on the wall. Also on the wall the eyes keep blinking, that is cool! [Continue reading...]