A video about a project out of IBM’s research labs aimed to better support mobile email triage. Help is sorely needed in this area, and while this project definitely shows some research-labs rough edges, it’s got some interesting ideas for rethinking mobile email.
Link: Triage and Capture: Rethinking Mobile Email (youtube.com)
This is a review of some fascinating books, on a subject dear to my heart: designing objects for flexible / changing uses (or even misuse).
“How many ways can you use a plastic bag? What about a paper clip, a Post-it note, or a park bench? This isn’t a quiz; it’s about messing with design, about reinventing objects and endowing them with new uses. We all do it—you, your kids, your parents, your sister in the burbs. We’ve all slid a matchbook under a table to stabilize it and turned a sheet of paper into a dustpan, and in that sense everyone is a designer. Design doesn’t simply happen at the moment of creation, when an object is given certain attributes to solve a specific set of problems. It happens in the myriad ways a plastic grocery bag is reused, reconceptualized, reborn.”
Link: Redefining Design (metropolismag.com, via)
Fabio Sergio writes about using standard consumer devices as infrastructure for all kinds of touch-enabled devices.
“Apple’s smaller-scale touchware has become so ubiquitous that it’s easier to consider it as a foundation, rather than as a building. I am guessing that the same will happen at a larger scale, and the iPad will soon appear as touchfrastructure wherever and whenever a portable, comfortably-sized touchscreen will be needed. I can see lots of reasons why such scenarios won’t be rare. Quite the opposite, actually.”
Link: Touchfrastructure meets the hypepad (frogdesign.com)
“The goal is to clearly direct end users to the content they want. Metro interfaces are supposed to embody harmonious, functional, and attractive visual elements. Ideally, good UI design should encourage playful exploration when interacting with the application and people should feel a sense of wonder and excitement. A clear, straightforward design not only makes an application legible, it encourages usage.”
Link: Windows Phone 7 User Experience Guidelines (microsoft.com)
“With the iPhone, Apple put together an extremely simple modal interface that works, one that people of all ages and backgrounds understand right away…Microsoft’s approach is completely different. Instead of becoming another me-too cellphone, like Android and the rest, the Windows Phone 7 team came up their own vision of what the cellphone should be. In the process, they have created a beautiful user interface in which the data is at the center of user interaction. Not the apps—specific functions—but the information itself. At some points, in fact, it feels like the information is the interface itself.”
Link: Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple (gizmodo.com)
“Interface fragmentation seems to be a somewhat desirable thing. Okay, let’s call it “interface uniqueness.” You set the look of the product to reflect (or create) a brand feel that is related to the device it lives on, but is clearly differentiated from other apps or sites available to the same device. This is valid, and we work on projects like that all the time. Right this minute I have a team working on new interfaces for a mobile web browser. But interaction has to be grounded in the common device interaction language. We’re not changing the interaction for that browser in any notable way.”
Link: Interaction fragmentation, and avoiding it (littlespringsdesign.com)
“Nokia has the opportunity to play on a much wider field than that of Apple: it can serve the end of the market that wants a good phone that is not too smart; can offer smartphones with all crucial functions at the lowest price on the market; but also has to play at the high-end of expensive and attractive smartphones like the iPhone. It is the high-end market where cultural leadership is defined.”
Link: The huge challenge of Nokia’s head of design and UX (experientia.com)
“Here’s a sampling of user interfaces across compact cameras from every major digital camera maker: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Olympus and Fujifilm. User interfaces matter in these cameras more than ever because they’re increasingly the major way you drill down to change settings or switch modes—rather than manually cranking a dial, like on a pro DSLR. Some are pretty good (Canon, Samsung) while some are pretty bad (Casio).”
Link: Click: A Visual Tour of Camera Interfaces (gizmodo.com, thanks Dan)
“And then there’s the matter of compartmentalization. A large portion of Japanese citizens live with only a cellphone as their computing device — not a personal computer, said Hideshi Hamaguchi, a concept creator and chief operating officer of LUNARR. And the problem with the iPhone is it depends on a computer for syncing media and running software updates via iTunes.”
Link: Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone (wired.com)
Update: Nobuyuki Hayashi argues he was misquoted in the article (thanks Bruce)
Leaked photos of an upcoming Samsung camera show memory and battery gauges. Reminds me how wonderful analogue controls and displays are.
Link: New Samsung TL320 (WB100) has OLED display and analog gauges (1001noisycameras.com)
Published by Gabriel White.