Because they are a cycle or two behind. While they are catching up with features and throwing in an extra bit or two (see 3G and GPS), companies like Nokia and Apple are already testing their next revisions for the next release that elegantly solves major issues and more.

So a whole bunch of news is trickling down the pipes with new phones coming out of every mobile handset carrier. The ones getting most attention are the ones with touch screen, 3G, television, music, fashion something, blah blah blah. However, a lot of these kinds of ambitious handsets came out post-iPhone (speaking more to the marketing than actual technology/implementation). What I’m trying to say is that without companies like Apple and Nokia taking a leap in design, consumers wouldn’t have these kinds of wonderful interaction models for another several product cycles. But ever since big names like Apple entered the market, the whole house goes crazy with finger flicking interfaces and tiled buttons. Yes, these are great products, and they are designed and developed by smart people, but the business side didn’t get it until someone else did it first. What does that say about the whole vertical (in America)? Do you believe you will get the same kind of awe inspiring experience daily from such a thing? I question that.

Japan is way ahead of us because of their bold steps to try something different or created a handset that was for a very specific niche. What’s nice is that they get to try out very interesting and immersive user experience models that could inspire new ways to do mobile for the regular joe. These companies are the same ones thinking about the future and are positioning themselves for success with multiple product/service deployments for the next several years. Game changing models. Not the, “well people want 3G so lets give it to them, or and a 10 megapixel camera too! too expensive? okay make that 5.” WTF would you do with 5 fucking mega pixels on a lens smaller than your IQ? Wonder why you couldn’t get that night shot of that Justin Timberlake picture with your phone? because you fell for the marketing. 3G? why do you think the Black Jack comes with two batteries?

My point is not to say my needs are your needs, because their not and you have every right to want certain things. However, you should think about the details: the interaction you have with your phone on a day to day basis. Is it fun to use all the time? Is it easy to get to where you want to do? Do you feel delighted to have such a product? How do you talk about it with your friends? What kinds of words do you use to describe it? Are you even excited about it when you talk about it?

Those “Wow” features are only Wow-tastic if it really does enable something greater, like saving me time and frustration by finally letting me listen to voicemails in any order I want and stop and play as I want. Or show me text in a way that acts like a conversation (IM) thread as opposed to an ugly list of text where I need to click in and out of screens to read the messages from the same person within the same conversation! Form and Features (should) follow Function.

What does your phone really enable you? Notice the commercials Apple used to show off the iPhone. They didn’t talk about features, they told stories about how those features affected your life beyond the phone. That’s a forward thinking product. That’s a design thinking company. That’s the kind of company I can trust in making sure I enjoy what I buy, even if it cost me $600.

Okay, so the new iPods are out, and they are hot (minus the nano, sorry). Wireless iTunes. Ringtones. 8GB iPhones get a $200 price cut. Starbucks partnership. So while everyone is getting their knickers in a bunch for whatever reason, this announcement brings many compelling questions to mind:

Apple is leveraging the huge iPod user base and pushing their technology adoption rate at incredibly fast speeds. By lowering the barrier of entry and by eliminating any major switching costs, more people will be familiarizing themselves with virtual keyboards and mobile web experiences.

Multi-touch interfaces are going to blow up and just about every mobile handset creator will be on this bandwagon if not already. We are looking at a periodin time where gestures, touch based computing and the like will be even more important to figure out in interface design than ever before. This is more complex than the mouse and keyboard days. Touch based computing will go beyond just these tiny screens. We might start seeing these screens embedded in the physical world. Crazy huh? Think Minority Report.

Anyways…

For most consumers, the iPod and iPhone will be their first significant experience with touch based computing. They will shape their understanding and model these interactions based on how Apple defines that experience. Given Apple’s track record, they do a damn good job of creating magnificent user experiences, so other competitors will have a very hard time overcoming this when everyone is deeply invested in this way of doing things on the iPod’esque interface. This is more than just a feature, this is building the right interaction model. This is about making sense with new technology and using it the right way. It’s the small details. Boy do I feel like my studio will be getting a lot of proposals on touch based interface work.

Exciting times.

Also, just extrapolating this idea: imagine gesture enhanced touch pads on mac portables, cinema displays with touch based screens and more. Use your imagination!

And finally, the whole Starbucks thing, should include a 1-touch ordering system that also keeps a history of your favorites. I mean c’mon! I’m expecting that within the year, otherwise I’ll be a little disappointed. For the record, this was a problem I had to solve as part of my interviewing process. Yea, my studio rocks.

We worked through some storylines to help make sense of our screens and find any gaps in information. We quickly discovered a lot of complexities with the information we were working with. List creation, inventory browsing and product comparison were all important elements that we need to incorporate, but were difficult to organize. We drew up on the whiteboard a lot of different layouts and screen interactions and came up with some UI elements we felt would be interesting to test in front of users. We came up with sliders to create the boundaries the user was willing to shop in and have the products fade in and out highlighting those that met the parameters. More information would be disclosed as few items were highlighted and given more pritority in screen real estate on screen.

Jumping forward in time..

Another challenge was integration with the physical device we were using: the keychain. How would this device be synced?, when and what does the interaction look like in store? This was something I personally enjoyed because the keychain afforded the event of having lighted shelves give immediate feedback on what the person can choose as a better alternative. However, looking at it now today, it just makes our system far too complex given our time constraints, and lack of testing. So we dropped the whole idea. No keychain. No lighted shelves. Sad story. My baby died, but at least we are making it easier for our user.

Instead of using a separate device and reinventing the wheel, we are going to adopt the usage of club or membership cards currently used by these stores that track transactions. This is practically the same data we want to record and report progress for our shopper.

We’ve presented our first round of prototyping to our class and also three guests from Microsoft (one MSR researcher, two MS product designers). We received some constructive feedback. Reiterating what I’ve stated above, we need to drop a few items. In addition, we have changed our model of being store independent to making a shopping application for Whole Foods. In order to show the success of comparison shopping and informing the benefits of better choices, we need to focus more specifically on a scenario our audience is familiar with. We needed to give them an example they can visualize and predict, like a story. We have our problem, a protagonist, but we needed a setting. Whole Foods will be our new playground from which our design will build upon.

Another bit of feedback that we were already concerned with going into the presentation was our usage of color to inform quality. The colors derived from the initial idea of using lighted shelves to show what choices would be better, same or worse than the shopper’s current boundaries. We had difficulty translating this into the entirety of the system. So we dropped it. It didn’t inform how much a product is better than others or even an absolute value of it’s quality in general. Time to hit the information design books for some inspiration.

We are now left with 2 weeks left to prototype another iteration, make it fairly polished and prepare our material illustrating our process. I have to admit, we have been doing a poor job of documentation. I’ve used this blog as an informal method of capturing some important events. Even then, I haven’t made that many updates. It’s a shame. This week will be dedicated to design and partial documentation - at least organizing how our process should be laid out. I will do my best to update next week on our progress and provide links to past prototypes/sketches/deliverables.

Here are some more at work photos:

Past entries:
Ambiguous Beginnings
Research and Analysis
Concepts and Design

Speaking to my experience with MySpace - it is quiet painful. I’m sure there is a way to turn off notifications, but I thought I did that alreadyNevermind, found it. Wait, that was just for bands, who wanted me to listen to their music for no unique reason than just because. I’m all for it, but it loses it’s originality quickly and it feels really impersonal. I’d rather hear about it from my friends as a recommendation.

I do see how MySpace has it’s place and does well, but what would make it better? Maybe making settings a little more obvious and visually informative to the person? Facebook does a pretty good job of that.

Anyways, I’m going to keep my MySpace account open (for now) because certain groups of friends are on it and it is unfortunately the only way I keep in contact with them. In the meantime, I will be giving Virb a chance. Think of it as the cleaner version of MySpace.

At the end of her talk, Sara Ulius-Sabel asked all of us, “How do we sustainably get to WOW?” Her point being, we can get to developing products that deliver a delightful, transcendent experience occasionally, but often unpredictably. So how can we get there consistently?

Well, I tried to answer it by synthesizing the main themes I heard over the course of the event, and turning it into a couple of sentences. (Main themes are in ALL CAPS):

By achieving EMPATHY we realize an EXPERIENCE STRATEGY that gets us to DESIGN BEYOND PRODUCTS (and maintain focus when MAKING MISTAKES).

This requires SYSTEMS THINKING (which in return requires TEARING DOWN WALLS), that produces TRANSFORMATION for your MATRIXED(?) ADAPTIVE organization.

Peter Merholz [via Adaptive Path Blog]

Diagrams and themes provided.

MX 2007 @ SF [via Vi]

School has been hassling me for my attention and so far it is winning. The drastic contrast between working at my co-op just 2 months ago compared to where I am today with school is insane. While working in the “corporate” world afforded me routine schedules, meeting interesting people, and not having to worry about any work after 6PM was nice, so is having to learn something completely interesting and engaging everyday and pushing my levels of creativity until my mind collapses during class.

sign

More after the jump

Anyways, my projects have been interesting none the less. In my Industrial Design Studio class (ART 317), we are working with understanding the implications of designing robots and the challeneges they possess. I’ve taken the road of nanotechnology that doesn’t really have too much phsyical design per say, but the interactions are pretty radical. How do you engage with something that you can’t see with the naked eye? So far I’ve come up with some sketches about different ways the bot could conceivably look and operate. Now it’s time to work on a proposal document since Industrial Design isn’t a huge factor in nano robotic production. Some of the ideas are borrowed from other research that exists by Robert A. Freitas Jr’s work on nanomedicine. I’ll share more insights about the physical, emotional and psychological interactions on microscopic and embedded devices later.

Illustrator rendering of one idea…

My Human-Computer Interaction’s (T C 319) team just finished doing some ethnographic studies on students and classroom participation in class and online. We uncovered some interesting trends and comments about behavioral patterns and motivations. Readings by Jonathan Grudin and A.J. Brush from Microsoft Research have also been extremely helpful. The readings discussed the potentials of anchored discussions, document annotations and multimedia usage for asynchronous distance learning. Our project’s initial goal was to suppliment live classroom lectures with a collaborative, video annotation interface of recorded presentations. However, I have a feeling that the scope of our project is going to focus more on group activities such as studying for tests and preparing for papers. This stems from the observations that most group activities (think CSCW) happen when extreme necessity occurs. Who knows, ideas need to be fleshed out in our next meeting this Thursday.

Finally in my Computer Supported Coordinated Work (INFO 447) class, I’m working on a, wait for it… project, on access control mechanisms related to the television in home environments. Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) and TiVos introduce an interesting array of interactions and behavioral shifts in television watching that we are trying to investigate. Some research has been recently put out in past conferences, and we are looking to these exploratory ethnographic studies to propose storyboards and clickable user interfaces address access control concerns. If time permits, we may look more into routines and information sharing.

Movie Trailer

Now that the nerd talk is over, I’d like to point out that the trailer for Ocean’s 13 is out! Even though Ocean’s 12 was a little lack luster, I still love them.

Design News

This is also an interesting article on Cnet News.com about Human Factors and it’s increasing impact on businesses today.

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When user’s have too much control, it could be a bad thing. Some general insights about how to design a progressive learning curve and empower the user. Kathy Sierra rocks. Creating Passionate Users rocks even harder. My favorite part:

“canyon of pain”

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Barack Obama has gone Web2.0! He even has ways to connect to him through Facebook, YouTube, blogs and more. Interesting how political campaigning has progressed.

What The Duck

One Last Note

DRM should die, RFID is scary and long live Free Culture!

Tech Specs for those who like numbers and other marketing garbage

More details and toughts after the jump…

Wide Screen iPod Capability

• Multi-Touchscreen UI
• Coverflow Feature
• Built-in Speaker
• 3.5″ Widescreen

Mobile Phone

Internet Communications

Other Niceties

• Force Feedback Panels
• 2 Mpx Camera
• Built-in Mic
• Automatically Rotating Display (think Canon PowerShot)
• Runs on OS X
• Thinnest SmartPhone Evar!
• Syncs everything (all media and information like bookmarks)!
• Works on PC too!

So What?

The designers at Apple and Steve Job’s vision to make the cellular phone experience easier and more exiciting for you as a consumer takes form today. A lot of the technology that has been implemented in the iPhone isn’t revolutionary, but the application in which they are used is significant. Before proceeding any further, I hope you have a chance to watch the various different quicktime demonstrations that step by step show each capability.

(Hopefully) After seeing some of the videos, you can see that this unit is offering a lot of control to the person interacting with it. Clean icons that are big and easily understood. Minimalistic design. Dynamic buttons that actually give you a touch feedback on the screen! This is significant because with all the different things you can do with the iPhone, the controls are optimized to make it easy for you to use. Think about how many different menu screens you have to click up, down, left and right to just set your alarm clock? It reminds me of an old Nintendo code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, a, b, a, b, select, start) back in the day. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I’m talking about.

Some features that I particularly enjoy: Multi-Touch Screen, Visual Voicemails and the SMS interface.

Multi-Touch Screen
Hands down awesome. Now I don’t believe that this sort of application can be used as effectively on say, your laptop or desktop, but this could be great for whiteboards and devices like the iPhone. Things like the Minority Report where our hero swipes images and videos back and forth isn’t as usable as you think. Your arms get tired very quickly, and I digress. A multi-touch screen that lets you flick to scroll and “pinch” images to resize photos is nothing new, but has been elegantly used within the iPhone. Applaus goes to Apple for using it appropriately, and not go overboard. The screen also affords gestures as mentioned before in the form of flicks and slides that is naturally understood more clearly. Why use a stylus and super thin, hard to touch scroll bars at the edge of the screen? Just “move” it like the picture was physically infront of you on a table!

Visual Voicemails
Don’t you hate it when you have to wait for the first two skipped messages to hear the third old message, or forced to delete even older messages before hearing the new ones? Or having to hit 7 twice to delete a message since waiting for it to finish just takes too long? A visual list that lets you pick and choose as you will and delete without even having to listen to it is a big step in convenience that the old system couldn’t offer.

SMS UI
It takes the form of iChat, or any other IM application. This is a personal favorite because I always find it difficult to see what my friends and I have talked about grouped together like a conversation. Instead, I’m forced to scroll through the different messages ordered by date going in and out of each text. SMS, or text messaging, is a huge communication method that is growing even more popular. News reports are talking about how text messaging is a new danger while driving, people getting phones with QWERTY keyboards and just the overall popularity has swarmed our culture. It really has become almost like instant messaging. So why not make it look like it?! Oh wait, they did!

Future Implications?

If OS X is running the iPhone, then in terms of network connectivity, then Bon Jour could allow ad hoc communication between other iPhones, or your Mac. Sound familiar? Zune, what? But the benefit this time is that like iTunes, you could possibly share content through a network connection without limitation (except downloading). No 3 day or 3 play rules. Just share! Be “social.” The possibilties are countless with OS X integration and the Apple ecosystem with the iLife suite.

There are some questions that come in mind about how the multi touch may interact with front end web technologies like Flash and JavaScript, but I’ll save that for later. You tell me, what are some concerns that we should still keep in mind?

Macworld 2007 Keynote
Hands-on Preview [Gizmodo]
Close up Pictures [TUAW]

Backstory:
I was a little worry wart a few months back concerned with the level of experience I’ve acquired towards being an interaction designer. In fact, I had little, other than school. So after browsing through the interweb, I found this awesome project where I would be working on a Media Player application’s User Interface. After reading over the qualifications, it sounded almost like the perfect opportunity. So I sent in my resume and they acknowledged receiving it. From what I understood the website said they would reach me sometime in December. Cool beans. I sent in the application a month ago hoping to hear back soon~

So here I am now, given this news I am still in consideration to participate in this wicked cool project, but I’ve already accepted my offer with the Center for Environmental Visualization mentioned a couple weeks ago. By all means having the opportunity to work with either groups is a blessing, but boy, would working on a media player be exciting. Why I’m emphasizing this fact is that I have plans to meet with the Senior Lead Developer for the Windows Media Player application early January. Having media player experience prior to graduation would give me huge leverage in my credentials as a usability/interaction/user interface (blah blah blah) designer.

Here’s what the project entitles:

Project Opening: GeeXBoX

The application

The GeeXboX is an awesome standalone media player. GeeXboX is a full operating system, running under Linux and based on the excellent MPlayer. No need for a hard drive, you just have to put the GeeXboX bootable CD into the CD-Drive of any Pentium-class or Apple Macintosh computer to boot it. The whole thing can be managed by a either a keyboard, a remote controller or a joystick, thanks to its full OSD (On Screen Display) Menu.

The project: Design a new, cool and usable media interface

For the next software revision, GeeXboX would like to improve not only the architecture, but the interface. You will get the opportunity to work directly with the developers to help create a new, cool, and usable media interface.

Project tasks include:

User research which includes conducting an online survey, interviews with acutal users, and creating user personas.
Conduct an expert interface review of the current system, and based on user research and your findings, propose redesign suggestions.
Work closely with the developers and iterate design changes, conducting mini-expert reviews after each interface revision until a new, cool, and usable media interface has been developed.

The Mentors

Your usability mentor will be Celeste Lyn Paul. She is an interaction architect in Washington, D.C. and an active contributor to the KDE Usability Project and OpenUsability.

Your Technical mentor will be Ben Zores, one of the core maintainers of GeeXboX. You will work closely with him during the development process to implement your recommended interface suggestions.

Your Qualification

This project requires experience in interface and interaction design as well as some experience in usability analysis methods. This is meant to be a learning experience, so don’t worry as long as you understand the basics in design and usability.

Anyways, I hope everyone is having a great break and I can’t wait to see everyone again!

Cheers

Tomorrow starts the Bite of Seattle! It goes on until Sunday at 8PM. Free admission, delicious cuisine and amazing Seattle summer weather. At night I will be celebrating my cousin Gary Locke Jonathan Lee and (frat) brother Nick Smith’s 22nd birthday. Happy early birthday guys!

Annual BBQ at Wangfest (don’t ask). I get to see all my old high school friends and play catch up.

Sunday is Microsoft’s company picnic all the way over in North Bend. This is turning out to be one eventful weekend. I better get some sun screen before I turn into a bronze gold by Monday with all the play time outside. Who am I to complain?