To me this is entirely new and refreshing. Apple demonstrates how specific technology, like IR sensors and accelerometers are used to create useful functions in real world settings. Often times, these technology features are not truly understood or misinterpreted by the consumer. For instance, the introduction of Bluetooth promised a lot of great stuff like wireless handsets and communication. People used Bluetooth the same way Google has turned into a synonym for “search,” however I’ve observed poor usage of “bluetooth” - not to mention “internet” and “wifi.”

Anyways, the point is that these terms get lost in translation and become unappreciated. With these short visualizations, I have become both informed and impressed with the clarity of understanding gained by watching them. This is good for the consumer because this gives them more power to make better decisions about product purchases and where to place value in the functionality that is respectful of their own context of use.

It’s true that these technological achievements are anything but revolutionary, but because Apple clearly demonstrates how it is broken down and worked within simple use cases, more trust is placed in the marketed product. This is far beyond just reading text and looking at comparative charts.

I hope more companies put more faith in their products that merit this kind of attention. Otherwise, more and more mediocre products will be bought and ruin another person’s day. Not to knock on Samsung, but they make fantastic products, but they turn out a new cell phone design for production every 6 weeks or less!

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

Again, I’ll post some stuff on our earlier work to keep the flow going.

In the meantime, here is a snippet of dialog I just had with my partner as I’m thinking about how to visualize aggregated user data (caveat - we want to make our system fun and engaging, almost like a game)…

1:46:37 AM kdubz313: we should do a hang man thing
1:46:42 AM kdubz313: every time someone buys a red item, it starts to draw the hang man sketch
1:46:51 AM pandahachiroku0: lol
1:46:54 AM kdubz313: that’d be hilarious
1:47:04 AM kdubz313: and we can tell them how many times they died
1:47:07 AM kdubz313: so cruel..
1:47:13 AM pandahachiroku0: LOL
1:47:15 AM pandahachiroku0: that is so cool
1:47:16 AM pandahachiroku0: haha
1:47:19 AM kdubz313: haha
1:47:19 AM pandahachiroku0: u know
1:47:24 AM pandahachiroku0: when he said make something fun
1:47:26 AM pandahachiroku0: I was like
1:47:30 AM pandahachiroku0: shit…we should make it a game
1:47:36 AM pandahachiroku0: seriously
1:47:40 AM kdubz313: well remember
1:47:41 AM pandahachiroku0: we should come up with a kick ass game
1:47:43 AM kdubz313: we want to keep a positive light
1:47:49 AM pandahachiroku0: ya
1:47:55 AM kdubz313: that’s the tricky part
1:47:58 AM pandahachiroku0: so if it’s a guy
1:47:58 AM kdubz313: it’s easy to make people feel bad
1:48:04 AM pandahachiroku0: they get a virtual chick
1:48:07 AM pandahachiroku0: and if it’s a girl
1:48:13 AM pandahachiroku0: they get a virtual guy
1:48:23 AM pandahachiroku0: to strip for them
1:48:25 AM kdubz313: ..
1:48:28 AM kdubz313: haha
1:48:33 AM pandahachiroku0: c? japanese mind in thinking no offense
1:48:45 AM kdubz313: hahaha no kidding honestly, we were laughing at each other…
1:49:36 AM kdubz313: or we can make a health bingo
1:49:43 AM kdubz313: oh!
1:49:47 AM kdubz313: a social network game
1:49:52 AM kdubz313: where you play connect four!
1:49:56 AM kdubz313: or tic tac toe
1:49:59 AM kdubz313: hahaha
1:50:13 AM pandahachiroku0: nice

Nikon Universal Scale

Let’s hope whiteboards will be like this someday! with digital stickie notes! o man that would make my day.

Multi-touch [Fast Company]

wtf does that mean?!

Simply, it is a metaphor of our purpose. A single pebble dropped into a calm pond, causes ripples to spread further and wider. There is a dualistic relationship here: One is that the change the pebble has made spreads farther over time and reaches the edges of the pond. This is indicative of the change and impact we as individuals have on the whole. Secondly, the wave formation is also a pattern of knowledge spreading. Each educated person will share their insights and pay if forward. As more individuals become involved and active, the more influence will rapid transform our old way of living into something new, cleaner, healthier and simple better.

So back to the concepts and designs.

Our group has come up with two strong candidates. The first being a list making system that uses a profile of an individual to create a list that is used during grocery shopping indicating healthy alternatives. The recommendations would not replace the list of goods normally purchased by any individual, but provide them knowledge of alternatives and details of why it is healthier. There are two components: An online system where detailed information is researched and tracked while the other is the list itself acting as a simple artifact of transferable knowledge. Other similar systems exist, where individuals can provide a service provider with options of food to be delivered to their home. While this is great, there can be more involvement from the user to make it more exciting, educating and useful.

Secondly we have the mobile (wearable, think bracelet, watch, keychain, etc) senor. This idea spins off the notion of boy scouts and their badges that they earn. Imagine you had this keychain where it knew when you decided to recycle instead of trash the can of soda or you decided to ride the bus instead of taking your car. Hell, you decided to walk instead of riding the bus. Each instance triggers the keychain to calculate new values of how much carbondyoxide you are eliminating from your everday decisions. These values can be viewed from an online profile (yes another one, but they are necessary to do anything personal these days, unless I’m oblivious to something revolutionary). Going even further, if these values are traced over time, then trends can be inferred showing to some estimate the awesomeness that you are by being a little bit wiser. Even better, you could possible infer the money saved by not driving your Hummer or BMW.

More to come as we sketch out some scenarios and I can get some scans in to show you all the cool stuff we’re working on. Stay tuned!

Thank you Gizmodo for sharing yet another interesting entry on bad ass technology. You have to admit, the scenarios illustrated in a elegantly stitched storytelling of vignettes is pretty frikkin’ cool. I’ve heard Intel is doing a lot of different kinds of work - yes they do more than just micro chips that make your laptop go vroom - and this is evidence of that quality. While I could probably go off on how sweet it would be to just reply to emails with simple voice commands (not the robot sounding kind either), tell your computer to query the web for news reports and updates, automated cruise control and ambient displays that offer just enough attention to tell you your best friend calling about clubbing tonight, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is actually what people want?

There are a lot of instances where we want to do all these cool things with wicked awesome technology. But then, we find ourselves going back to what we were so comfortable with like paper, the pencil, simple calculators and printing reports instead of reading them online. Then again, a lot of the interactions modeled in the video do not necessarily involve low fidelity technology, infact, they require incredible sophisticated technology that has no replacement. It’s still fun to think about though. Enjoy!

Intel’s Video [YouTube]