General Discussion – Page 28 – Thoughts from the Underground

Great Dance has published a post on Apple’s patent of gestures for multi-touch sensitive devices. Doug Fox posed the following questions. I’ve included my response to them.

My question for choreographers and dancers is whether you believe that Apple has entered into territory traditionally thought of as the domain of dancers and movement experts?

Yes, I think so actually. But, I see the difference in that Apple is using their gestures to interact with their hardware and their own digital devices.

And what will happen as new patent applications eventually go well beyond seeking to protect hand gestures and attempt to protect full-body movements generated by the arms, legs and torso?

I think it’s a good question to think about. I don’t think that designers consider these types of things at all. It seems silly to think that one day someone might patent walking, or running.

Are we just talking about ways to control computer interfaces or do these Apple filings have much greater importance–in particular to the dance community?

If a bicycle manufacturer patented the cycling motion required of riding a bicycle, I wonder how we would all feel? It’s utterly ridiculous to think that it could happen, but it’s not really all that different from patenting human gesture. The dance community is affected since all of human gesture, included what has yet to be aesthetically timed to music, is part of the repertoire of choreography.

Recently at work I’ve been tasked with reviewing a handful of internal, CMS websites for a single division within the company to see how usable the sites are and to come up with a few good usability practices that will work for all the sites. The sites are all in various stages of being developed. Some are still in the planning stages. Others are nearly fully baked.

Only one of the sites took a user-centered approach to the development of their site. They found an intern, who went around and talked to people on the team. Then they took that information and turned it into the design and navigation of the site. Brilliant! For this team, I was able to simply talk with them about how they plan to manage the documents within their CMS, and discuss some of their future plans.

In another case, the team simply asked their current web administrator – who was not necessarily the web designer – to take on the building of the new site for his team of roughly 75 people. Uh, not so brilliant. He was pretty confused about how he was going to go about building out the site using the functionality provided by the CMS, and he was even more unsure of what it was that his team needed.

I talked with him about what the other sites were doing, and I sent him a short list of questions that he could ask his team to help them scope out their site. I don’t believe in blanket usability responses but I do think that the questions I sent are pretty universal.

Here’s what I provided: