Next December is going to be white, white and cold.
Seisdeagosto.com is packing back again and moving to Helsinki to work on a challenging project with Fjord, a strong company focused 100% on something we love here: Simplicity.
BBC, HP, Nokia, Orange, Vodafone or Yahoo! are some of the clients this Nordic company has already worked with.
See you soon Xinoxano! Moikka!!
I´ve been using Delicious as a tool for bookmarking since it was born, back in 2003, when it was a small project. Those times tagging was an emerging feature and users somehow weren´t really aware about how good would be if the www was tagged properly.
Delicious was only the beginning, more than a lab experiment, where we found deep intentions of introducing descriptions of information – in this case, when we were about to save them in our bookmark list- . Today, only 5 years later, we can see some interesting results while searching content on the web…
As we know, popular search engines use an algorithm to show users results based on their queries. These results aren´t “human oriented”: The answer we get from the system is a bunch of results based on something serveral servers evoke, showing you the results throughout a concrete interface, no matter if we´re talking about Google, Ask or Yahoo!: They all show you results from an algorithm perspective.
If I want to find out information about, let´s say, houses made of wood I can Google queries like “wood houses” getting the following SERP:
If you´re looking for specific slots of information probably you won´t know where to start (maybe you´ll click somewhere aroung Google´s Golden Triangle and depending on your expectations you´ll come back and try with another query or another search engine).
Typing the same queries in Delicious we get a different point of view, what I call the golden triangle of social search:
Summing up: Useful, human and simple, exactly the right approach we need to give to this huge growing amount of information we have flying online.
Curiously, since mid-2008 Google is trying to give Google SERP´s a more human/social approach, giving users the choice of voting and adding comments to search results. Although not everybody is happy enough with this idea, from my point of view soon or later we´ll need this kind of features to help us clicking on the right link, saving us time.
The interesting thing about Delicious is that users aren´t forced to put tags on their bookmarks, they do it because is something they get benefit from it: Having a neat and tidy bookmark list make scanning it less painful. And, extra ball, at the same time, they´re contributing to the rest of the community.
The more you use Delicious to find decent web results the more you realize you need it. Give it a try and you´ll see…
How many times have I dreamt about Tetri´s figures falling while sleeping?! Damn! Hundreds!! And I am sure I wasn´t the only one, lots of people have had the same experience: Addicted to this arcade videogame made of simple figures. Always thinking about how to erase lines to get to a harder level.
The person behind this game nightmare: Mr. Alexey Pajitnov, a computer engineer from Russia, who developed it in 1984 while working for the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, in Moscow.
Mr. Pajitnov was inspired by a popular game, Pentomino, played on an grid by two or three player where the figures were composed of five squares, connected orthogonally (The Pentaminoes. The ones with four squares were called Tetraminoes). The name “Tetris” was born by joining two of Mr. Pajitnov´s passions: Tetraminoes and tennis.
The history behind this game really deserves a film:
As he was a worker for the Soviet goverment the institution licensed and managed Tetris and he received no loyalties at all for it. Goverment advertised the game under the slogan “From Russia with Love”.
The first version was developed on an Elektronika 60 computer and after that ported to an IBM PC. This last version “made its way to Budapest, where it was ported to various platforms and was “discovered” by a British software house named Andromeda. They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead”.
And all this happened behind the Iron Curtain when the KGB was watching any activity in the USSR that was attracting foreign visitors…
The nex video explains a little bit how it all happened, the first attempt to sell the videogame (YouTube, 0:58min):
At the end, Pajitnov, together with Vladimir Pokhilko, and HCI academic who helped him in developing the videogame, moved to the United States and founded the Tetris Company in Hawaii with Henk Rogers, a video game designer and entrepreneur, who won the license for Nintendo’s handheld and console versions of the computer game Tetris.
A complex history for one of the simplest videogames ever created, one of the ones such addictive that even got a category in mental dissorders (The Tetris hallucination) and drove companies to see how workers were much more less productive because of this addiction.
Video games have been revolutionized from the simple yet complex Tetris to modern music video game tournaments on the next guitar hero.
Emerging ambient devices give users a unique way of giving information without having to be in front of a screen. This kind of devices use contextual environment as the front-end. Interaction between device and user is minimal and cognitive efforts to understand information falls dramatically.
The following image is just an example: Ambient Umbrella “tells you” when it´s going to rain by glowing a soft light in the handle:
The company behind this kind of state of the art gadgets is Ambient Devices, and having a look at the team we can see brilliant minds such us Nicholas Negroponte or Richard Saul Wurman.
To me, the richness of this kind of products lies in how they´re designed to give information without paying attention to them. We don´t need to stop and start to understand the inputs we are getting from these devices. And this is really important nowadays: As NYT says “Since the 1990s, we’ve accepted multitasking without question. Virtually all of us spend part or most of our day either rapidly switching from one task to another or juggling two or more things at the same time“.
The challenge for Environmental Interaction Design is obvious: You´re not designing something to be showed on a screen, you´re designing something that will be running contextually on a handle, hanging on a fridge or wherever and above all, with a low level of user´s attention, always in a hurry.
The first and only orbital launch of the Soviet Shuttle Buran spacecraft occurred on 15 November 1988. Buran was also the name of the Space Program, created as an attempt to response to the U.S. Space Shuttle program.
The Buran spacecraft (Russian: Буран, “Snowstorm”), was designed following exactly the sames lines as the American Space Shuttle.
But not only the design of the Soviet spacecraft was the same, it would even use the same operational resources, being transported on the back of one of the biggest airplanes so far produced: The Antonov An-225 Mriya aircraft (as Americans did using the huge Boeing 747, the “Jumbo Jet”).
This is an image of the former Buran:
And this is another one of the Endeavour, one of the orbiters of the NASA´s Space Shuttle…
Due to lack of funds, after the first flight, the Soviet project was suspended. There were several attempts to maintain the space project, but it was finally cancelled in 1993 by former President, Mr. Boris Yeltsin.
Till now, there haven´t been relevant complaints from the Americans about the Soviet replica. Nowadays, the NASA’s Space Shuttle is running using different orbiters (Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour or TBD) as if nothing had happened.
This huge attempt to copy an existing design reminded me of some projects I worked for as an Interaction Designer, where it was put on the table the risk of being copied by others. Maybe we cannot compare a space program with a humble project related to interface design. But some ideas came to my mind and I found interesting to share them here:
As I already said before, these thoughts are inspired on my own experience. I suppose that there might be people who don´t agree with my position. I would be glad to hear from them too.
OT: I simply love to see the launch of these shuttles. The one below is the launch of the STS-115 Space Shuttle Atlantis, on 27th August 2006, at the Kennedy Space Center (Youtube Video, 2:13min). Maybe you might use it for your own inspiration:
La primera vez que ví el esquema que ilustra este post fue en la ceremonia de apertura del CHI2005, en Portland, OR. Esa mañana de abril, el recientemente fallecido Randy Pausch se dirigía hacia una multitud de inquietas mentes, ávidas por conocer más sobre computación, tecnología y HCI.
El esquema es obra del polifacético Rich Gold, artista, compositor, diseñador, inventor, ponente y escritor, que dejó su rastro en compañías como Sega, Mattel y Xerox PARC (más concretamente en el RED, Research in Experimental Documents´ Lab). Y trata de explicar la esencia de cada una de estas ramas y cómo se relacionan unas con otras.
Interpretando el modelo de Rich en vertical, Arte y Diseño “moverían mentes”, mientras que Ciencia e Ingeniería “moverían moléculas”. Horizontalmente, Arte y Ciencia serían “universales”, constituidas por grupos específicos que generan patrones. Diseño e Ingeniería serían “específicas”, destinadas a satisfacer a “usuarios” y “clientes”. Según el modelo, Arte y Ciencia tendrían más en común que Diseño y Ciencia. Rich también se preocupa de definir las fronteras horizontales (a las que denomina Diseño e Ingeniería Especulativos), pero olvida las verticales (y aún no consigo asignarle un etiqueta adecuada. Igual ni existe…).
Curiosamente, estos cuatro elementos no eran ni más ni menos que los cuatro “sombreros” que Rich vistió a lo largo de su vida. En todos ellos además se manifiesta una variable común: La creatividad, la necesidad continua de hacer cosas, de innovar. De acuerdo con él, esta necesidad está en el corazón del mundo occidental, inexistente en otras culturas. Copiar cosas que ya existen es incluso delito, hay que estar siempre innovando. Para Rich, además, la creatividad no es simplemente hacer algo nuevo, sino “hacer algo nuevo que cree una nueva categoría, un nuevo género o un nuevo tipo de cosa”.
Profundizando un poco más sobre el tema y extrapolándolo a lo que más se habla en esta casa, en el mundo del HCI también portamos esos cuatro sombreros. Nuestro fin último es crear, innovar, romper el hielo ayudándonos de estos cuatro componentes: Arte, Ciencia, Diseño e Ingeniería. Maeda le dio una pequeña vuelta de tuerca al modelo: Arte/expresar, Ciencia/explorar, Diseño/comunicar, Ingeniería/inventar… ¿Al final no jugamos con estas cuatro variables?
Seguramente, el pasado profesional de Rich es mucho más rico que el de muchos de nosotros, pues no nos hemos dedicado a tantas cosas en una misma vida, pero me alegra saber que al menos nos dedicamos a una profesión donde uno se puede permitir el lujo de portar estos sombreros con dignidad.
Rich nunca consiguió publicar en vida su único libro, donde recogió parte de su pensamiento: “The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff“, pero finalmente vio la luz en 2007, publicado por el MIT Press.
A fecha de hoy ni siquiera tiene una humilde referencia en la Wikipedia.
Existe una fabulosa reseña del libro realizada por gente del equipo de UX de SAP, donde se han utilizado algunas referencias para escribir este post.
In Memoriam: Randy Paush (1960-2008), Rich Gold (1950-2003).
After 5 years of deep silence, one of the most talented Spanish Interaction Designers is writing again. And I am very happy to read him again.
Welcome back, Outsider.
An easy-to-use interface, nice screen transitions, minimal visual design, 3G connection and much more stuff… but something´s missing on the iPhone: Lack of customization.
One of the most important features of this kind of gadgets is to make it unique, personal, yours. Other mobile devices allow you to change everything: Keyboards, skins or hang small funny figures on the corners… On the iPhone you can add nice screensavers, and get it black, white or even red, but that´s all.
This is the only choice you have to make it different from the rest:
Do not put three in the same table or you´ll pick the wrong one for sure…
“By 2030, the population of the world will have increased by 2 billion (+33%). Every day, 190,000 new city-dwellers are added all over the world, 2 in every second. In the year 2030, 4.9 billion people will live in cities”.
“But not all cities are taking part in this competition. In the last 50 years, about 370 cities with more than 100,000 residents have temporarily or lastingly undergone population losses of more than 10%”.
The following video is part of a project called “Shrinking cities” and shows the evolution of this phenomenon with an intelligent use of time, mapping and quantitative data. I can´t believe the cities mentioned bellow have the “Shrinking disease”: Detroit, Manchester/Liverpool and Halle/Leipzig.
Enjoy it! (Vimeo / 7:22 min):
Via Digital Urban.
La conocida expresión “escucha a tus usuarios”, pilar central del diseño centrado en el usuario, puede llegar a tener su vertiente negativa, sobre todo en aplicaciones muy específicas.
Los tests con usuarios, una de las principales técnicas de este enfoque, se desarrollan en escenarios ad hoc, donde tus usuarios se ven “forzados” a comentar en voz alta y la necesidad no es real, sino figurada. De estas pruebas surgen opiniones, muchas veces condicionadas y, a veces, contradictorias. Cuanto más bases tus decisiones en los gustos de una determinada población menos apropiada será la solución adoptada para el resto.
¿Diseño centrado en el usuario o diseño centrado en la actividad?
Dependiendo del tipo de aplicación que estés definiendo, con el diseño centrado en la actividad podrás sacar conclusiones más interesantes a la hora de definir una interfaz.
Estudiar al detalle para qué actividad sirve la interfaz que estás desarrollando y cuáles son las tareas implícitas de dicha actividad es casi más importante que conocer a los usuarios que van a utilizarla. Conociendo en profundidad lo primero tienes prácticamente ganado lo segundo: Qué usuarios van a usar lo que estás definiendo.
Pero… ¿Qué es la actividad?
La actividad es muchas veces confundida con el término tarea. En realidad tarea es una subdivisión de la actividad. Podríamos decir que la actividad está compuesta por un conjunto de tareas. A su vez, estas tareas agrupan un conjunto de acciones y estas acciones están formadas por un conjunto de operaciones. La unión de tareas + acciones + operaciones da como resultado final la actividad desarrollada por el individuo.
En otras ocasiones ya hemos hablado de que no es lo mismo la tarea prescrita (la que se supone que tiene que desempeñar el usuario) que la tarea real (aquella que realmente desempeña, basada en la experiencia individual, con sus atajos, trucos, etc…) y este detalle también es necesario tenerlo muy en cuenta a la hora de abordar un diseño centrado en la actividad.
Un ejemplo.
Conducir un coche (actividad) engloba un conjunto de tareas (girar el volante, meter las marchas, frenar…). A su vez, cada una de estas tareas llevan implícitas un conjunto de acciones y operaciones (para frenar hay que levantar el pie del acelerador, apretar poco a poco el embrague, meter marchas más cortas… ).
Lo más curioso del ejemplo anterior es que la fabricación de estos coche no se basa en test con usuarios (Crash test dummies aparte). Es algo que ha ido evolucionando y mejorando a lo largo de los años, generación tras generación. Sin embargo, gracias al profundo conocimiento adquirido de la actividad los coches evolucionan y mejoran constantemente. Este tipo de diseño evolutivo, que va a pasando de generación en generación Norman lo denomina Folk Design.
Conclusiones.
En aplicaciones muy específicas tu interfaz no puede ser estática y simplemente adaptarse al “Libro de Estilo”. Tiene que ser una aplicación dinámica, vital, muy adaptada al conjunto de tareas que tus usuarios desarrollan en un entorno muy específico. Además de estar frente a una pantalla tus usuarios también realizan tareas paralelas, muchas veces apartados de dicha pantalla, de las que depende el éxito final de la actividad.
Christine Frederick en su libro “The Labor-Saving Kitchen” (1919) observó lo siguiente: “We find that work in the kitchen does not consist of independent, separate acts, but of a series of inter-related processes”.
Simplemente eliminando las palabras “in the kitchen” que Christine menciona en el texto anterior el enfoque es, si cabe, más potente, consolidando aún más su observación.
Quien quiera indagar más sobre el tema recomiendo una pausada lectura de los siguientes artículos, fuentes de inspiración de este post:
Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful (Don Norman)
HCD harmful? A Clarification (Don Norman)