Designing a remote control for bionic ear implants

May 11, 2012

Shane Morris and Matt Morphett talk about designing a remote control for recipients of Cochlear hearing implants and their carers.

“Designing a physical hand-held device presents a number of unique challenges. Designing that device predominantly for use by folks with impaired physical abilities introduces another layer of complexity. Ensuring that the experience is appropriate for an audience ranging from five year-old kids to ninety five year-old retirees while they control one of their primary senses is just downright difficult.”

Link: Matt Morphett & Shane Morris: Switching On My Ears (vimeo.com, via)

Tactile touch, the next big problem for device user experience

May 9, 2012

As physical buttons have rapidly disappeared over the last few years, to be replaced by smooth planes of glass, this photo is a nice reminder of one of the next big mass-market device user experience and technology challenges: haptics.

Link: If a key button on a remote isn’t easy to find… (imgur.com, via)

Optimising mobile UX for real reading behaviours

May 3, 2012

Harry Brignull writes about the failures and then successes of bringing a print magazine to the iPad.

“The ad team wanted to sell fixed position ads. So like in print, the HSBC ad would appear by the finance section, and so on. Now, we were determined not to have the app ruined by invasive ads. We didn’t want ads appearing on article pages. We didn’t even want them appearing between the pages of an article. So we pitched this idea that we’d have only full screen ads that would appear in between the section pages…[But] They were coming into the issue, tapping through to a section, and then casually flicking through all the sections…So even though the ratio of ads to content was really low on a per-issue basis, when you looked at these real life desire lines, users were seeing an ad every other page.”

Link: From Print to iPad: Designing a Reading Experience (90percentofeverything.com, via)

Search, sort, filter: patterns for mobile UX

April 25, 2012

Theresa Neil takes a look at patterns for manipulating information on mobile devices: explicit search, auto-complete, dynamic search, scoped search, saved & recent, search form, search results.

Link: UI Patterns For Mobile Apps: Search, Sort And Filter (smashingmagazine.com, via)

Wearable computing, past and future

April 17, 2012

A recent addition to the Interaction Design Encyclopaedia goes in deep in the topic of wearable computing. The article was written by Steve Mann, who’s been working in this field for decades.

“An important distinction between wearable computers and portable computers (handheld and laptop computers for example) is that the goal of wearable computing is to position or contextualize the computer in such a way that the human and computer are inextricably intertwined, so as to achieve Humanistic Intelligence – i.e. intelligence that arises by having the human being in the feedback loop of the computational process…An example of Humanistic Intelligence is the wearable face recognizer (Mann 1996) in which the computer takes the form of electric eyeglasses that “see” everything the wearer sees, and therefore the computer can interact serendipitously. A handheld or laptop computer would not provide the same serendipitous or unexpected interaction, whereas the wearable computer can pop-up virtual nametags if it ever “sees” someone its owner knows or ought to know.”

Link: Wearable Computing (interaction-design.org)

Tablet landscape transformation of 2011

April 17, 2012

Punchcut put together a great analysis of how the tablet landscape evolved in 2011, including some interesting thoughts about niche players, and a perspective about what is to come.

“Manufacturers that ship stock Android devices will still have to compete on hardware features alone: cameras, storage, network support, battery life, screen size, etc. Manufacturers will still face the same issue of keeping up with new OS versions from Google. Without UI and significant feature differentiation to insulate them, manufacturers will be battered every 3 to 6 months by device announcements that are only just incrementally better. This environment means that to the tech bloggers, the press, and those they influence only one Android tablet will matter at any given moment: the latest.”

Link: The Great Tablet Flood (punchcut.com)

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