Category: General Discussion

MEX: Mobile User Experience Conference, 09

December 1-4, 2009, I attended the MEX 09 conference, held in London, UK. I attended the conference on a scholarship I received from the conference organizers. Flight and accommodation were not included, but thankfully a friend of the family allowed me to stay in her flat. There were presentations over 2 days, but I only have time to write about 2 now. I’ll update more from my notes at a later date.

Sofia Svanteson of Ocean Observations gave a talk on incorporating creativity into your design team. At one point, she asked: “What’s more important? A great idea or a great team?” Answer: “A great team. A mediocre team will kill a great idea, but a great team will save a mediocre idea.” Other points she brought up:

  • Pixar’s operating principles:
    • everyone has the freedom to communicate with everyone
    • make it safe for all to offer ideas
    • stay close to innovations in academia
  • Design process need a mix of culture, people and ideas. If it were all about the process, we could all be Apple.
  • Use the same vocabulary: for instance, go so far as to make a dictionary of terms. As an example, she discussed the ever contentious UX/IA/ID/UxD/IxD etc, terms used to describe pretty much the same job.
  • Be candid but critique with empathy. Remember, ideas are fragile.
  • Finally, she mentioned The Idea Book, by Fredrik Haren.

Sofia also got everyone bringing up the question: What would Jason (Bourne) do? Her reference is meant to link the skills that Jason Bourne has in noticing many details of his surroundings that would also be similar to designing for the mobile user experience.

Dr. Chris Roas of Sheffield Hallan University discussed user-testing in multiple platforms. Some of his pointers:

  • Remember, you’ll never be able to test all possible platform combinations.
  • This is about understanding users; it’s less traditional, in terms of user testing and usability

In experience design, it’s important to keep in mind if you’re designing for an experience or the experience. AN experience, is something that might change your world view, such as your first trip to Africa. THE experience is something with tacit awareness, like going to work.

He quoted this paper, presented at CHI 09: “User experience over time: an initial framework”, by Evangelos Karapanos, John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, Jean-Bernard Martens. Here’s a quote from the abstract: “This paper presents an in-depth, five-week ethnographic study that followed 6 individuals during an actual purchase of the Apple iPhone™.” Looks like a good read, actually.

Challenges: Use a provocative situation and embrace the challenges. Reduce any major experience effects, which will help provide a good basis for feedback. For your testing, put randomized tasks all around the building.

And seek stories – what would Jason do?

Michael V. Roeder of Iconmobile, discussed Cloud Computing

He gave a few example of such services: photoshop.com, dropbox.com, Vodaphone 360. He described Cloud computing as an integration of several services with users going to each one individually.

The Cloud User’s Hierarchy of Needs, include:

  • Bandwidth
  • Storage
  • Acces
  • Interface
  • Context
  • Omni Cloud

Using Arduino and Processing together

Today I got up early and fooled around in Processing…for hours. I was playing with the Minim sound library, which I’d planned to use for my Intro to Computing Media project, an mp3 player. After sitting around for so long, I could how I was getting both noticeably older in age, but also wiser about Minim. Why sit around and program something completely different when I could put the two together? Well, my fear with combing my two projects, ICM and PhysComp, was that I’d skimp out on one or the other and not fully challenge myself. However, due to the MEX conference – to be blogged about soon! – my schedule is shorter than I’d like. Something’s gotta give. Sadly, it’ll have to be a little bit here and there on my projects.

Anyway, today, I worked on combining my Arduino code and my Processing code using serial output to play a song. Before discussing this, a little recap:

Create the code to turn on/off LEDs set at a threshold. Using the map() function and an if/else statement, I can now reliably turn off and on an LED as though it were a switch.
Here’s the code for the mapping and if/else statement part:

phoVal1 = analogRead(phoPin1);
  //map the photocell values and turn on the light
  phoVal1 = map(phoVal1, 0, 255, 255, 0);
  if (phoVal1>=0) {
    digitalWrite(pholed1,HIGH);
  }
  else{
    digitalWrite(pholed1,LOW);
  }

Here’s the code for the FSR:

FSRValue = analogRead(analogFSR); // read the left FSR value
  analogWrite(motorpin, FSRValue/4);

The next step was to combine this code with the Minim library in Processing. But first, write code in Processing! Here is where several hours with Minim came in handy. I was able to hobble together enough code to be able to play and pause a song. I haven’t yet created any arrays, for a media list, but that’s next, as well as the ability to move through the array. After that I sent the output in serial DEC to Processing. I just added this little bit of code:

if (xpos > 100){
 song.play();

After that, I was able to use the serial output from the FSR and Photocell to trigger the song.play(); function. I suppose, I could find a audio visualization program to tweak, so that I can make a pretty picture show when a song plays, assuming I play a song.

Next I’ll need to refine all the code, and plan out more of how I want the sensors to interact with the plants. And, I need to get some plants.

UPDATE: Code is not working as expected. Processing is just playing a song when the sketch is run. I need to figure this out some more.

Intro to Physical Computing: Final Project…Rejects

How did I come to my final idea. Well, I rejected many other ideas first. For instance…

UV-Sunlight Watch: I thought I’d try to make one of my fantasy devices. A UV-Sunlight watch that helps you get a good amount of daily sunlight. However, after some research, and learning that UV calculators really do exist, I was a little put off by the idea. A sunlight detection watch is useful, but I wanted to try something original and something that I would like. (Not to say that the idea of a plant that responds is completely original….)
UV-Sunlight watch

Interactive Floor: I thought about some kind of sidewalk/responsive floor. This came from the knowledge I’d gained in making a switch for the balance board, media controller. I considered a few options for this: the Moonwalk sidewalk, a child’s play area, etc. After I while, I thought that while it could be very colorful and fun, I wanted to try something a little bit more substantive.interactive floor

Others: I thought about a never-ending puzzle that would use an accelerometer to control a ball’s descent through a visual maze. Seemed really difficult.
maze


Also, I didn’t properly document it, but I thought about a portable photo booth. I got this idea from a rectangle that had been left in the junk bin and reminded me of a frame. I thought about walking around and seeing the world in photographs. How would this work? Well, my idea was that you would carry a frame on your shoulders and people could take photos with you if they wanted in your photo booth. I did not go with this idea out of fear of the expense of potentially additional camera equipment.

Light-Piano: This idea was to create a grid of LEDs and photocells that, after reaching a certain threshold, would trigger a sound.
LED Piano1


The sounds I wanted would correlate to a musical scale, so essentially you could play a grid of LEDs. I kind of went with this for a while. I thought it would look pretty and you could put it on a wall. I sort of wanted it to look like this, but cost MUCH less.

I talked about these ideas to other students and they appreciated all of my ideas, and they came up with suggestions for me as well. But, something about the idea seemed…oh, unspecific. Like the project was not thoughtful enough. Eventually, as I thought about sensors and realizing that I could use a much smaller grid, with my own sounds, somehow the idea of sighing came to me. Possibly because I was sitting by a window and there was a small plant nearby.

Well, I’ve talked to my fellow students again, about my new idea and they all like it, too. This time however, when I say, “The plant will sigh, like it’s happy to see you, when you come close to it,” they say, “Awwww….” Cute.

Applications: What investors look for…

Last night, in my Applications class, we had 3 grads of ITP discuss their experience with entrepreneurship and working together. At one point, they discussed financials and working together. They listed several personality traits that apparently investors look for…I found this useful and inspiring.

integrity
passion
experience
knowledge
skill
leadership
commitment
vision
coachability
fearless

Applications of Interactive Telecommunications

This week, my group finally presented for Red Burns’ Applications of Interactive Telecommunications. My group consisted of Chris Allick, Hana Newman, and Andy Jordan. Together, we successfully worked together to produce a presentation on our reaction to Craig Newmark’s talk the previous week. Not only did the class enjoy our presentation, we also enjoyed and didn’t feel like we were imposing on the other students at all.

Here’s the PowerPoint/Keynote presentation that describes our process.

What we ended up doing was coming up with a compliment for each of our 108 other classmates, plus our instructors. Everyone left feeling much better about themselves. What we thought was great about this activity was that thinking nice things about other people cannot help but lead to a better community, and Craigslist and Craig Newmark are all about building community. Many people have said that they really enjoyed our presentation. So, nice job us.

——-

After that, we had our guest speaker’s presentation. This week our discussion was on Assistive Technologies. In my experience, I spent 4 years in a school that incorporated students with relatively severe physical handicaps, some to the point where they could not speak. And, my step-brother has some cognitive impairments.

Overall, my impressions of Assistive Technology were a). There’s a lot of focus on physical impairments. What about cognitive disabilities?; and b). Is the motivation more to help people keep up with other people, or is it to just have a decent quality of life? I don’t know…. I think about my brother a lot while I’m here. I want him to have a fun childhood, because you only get one. I feel like there must be something I can do to help him not only keep up with his peers, or do things they cannot, but also to just have a decent quality of life.

They may not make much sense, because I was just jotting down notes, but my comments on the speech were the following:

  • Why use a QWERTY keyboard in Assistive technology interfaces? It’s not the most efficient keyboard available, even for people who type.
  • Why use a keyboard metaphor for people who cannot use their hands?
  • Lots of focus on visual iconography – suppose you cannot see very well?
  • Saw an example of an FSR game controller
  • Boring Physical/Occupational Therapy is a problem – There is a need to make things fun
  • People with sensory problems are very responsive to sound
    • Difficulty in verbalizing emotional state is also an issue
    • Weighted vests/deep pressure is comforting for people with sensory issues
    • There is little quantitative data available; this can be an issue for creating solutions for this market
    • Ideas: A squeeze vest that you guess where the pressure comes from
    • Music instruments for assistive technology; see what you hear
    • Make an Illustrator lite program, for people who have a difficult time creating shapes, counting, writing, etc…
  • Potential Future ITP Class: design for one