General posts relating to user experience design.
Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University demonstrate body acoustics technology which can turn your skin into a touch screen. They call this “Skinput.” Clever name.
Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface (CHI 2010)
Check out this research from Microsoft (actually posted by TechFlash.com. They show devices and Guitar hero being operated by Electromyography (the same technology used to operate artificial limbs).
Clever applications – I think if they can make the “wearing” of such a device easy and inexpensive, we could eventually see this used in consumer products. The easy part is the idea, which now seems so obvious. The hard part is commercialization.
Google’s new Android Mobile operating system is getting a lot of positive press since it’s introduction. My group has an android phone for testing I plan to get my hands on soon.
One interesting innovation (related to typing) is called Swype. It’s a typing method that allows the user to slide the finger around the keyboard while software figures out what word they are trying to type. Here’s a video of Swype in action.
Contrast with the way apple enhances touch keyboards. The iPhone anticipated the next letters you are likely to type and invisibly makes the target for these keys larger. So, if you come close to hitting a likely key but hit the edge of it’s neighbor, it “knows” what you meant.
Both phones can sometimes be confused by ambiguous choices. Android is shown handling this in the video with a pop-up menu. iPhone tells you which word it is expecting, allowing you to hit space to auto-complete it. I don’t know if Android has auto-complete but they do have an easy way to correct a word by double clicking. The Apple solution doesn’t offer a simple correct (that I have yet discovered).
I hear this is supposed to be ready sometime this year, maybe by the Christmas season. It seems really cool, amazingly so but the video begins with the small print:
Product vision: actual features and functionality may vary.
I can believe they are working on this. What I cannot believe is that it works as well as shown in the video. I wish that had something that worked this well.
Project Natal for XBOX 360
Dr. Dobb’s has an interesting piece by Joel Eden on guidelines for designing touch=based systems.
Designing a good gesture or multi-touch based system is first and foremost about designing a good system that happens to be gesture or multi-touch based. Following a general overview of gesture, multi-touch, and multi-user systems, I explain in this article how you can leverage traditional UX designing for these new types of systems. Using four well-known user experience principles as a starting point — affordances, engagement, feedback, and not making people think — I explore how they can be applied to these new types of systems. Read more…
Some researchers in Finland are developing a touch screen for the blind. The screen displays braille characters by using vibrations. It sounds promising.
“It took some time for them to start reading, because this representation is totally different from anything else that they had previously used,” says Rantala. But once the volunteers were used to it, they were able to speed it up and read a character in as little as 1.25 seconds Read more…
Windows is revealing more details about their touch screen support in windows 7. The system is based on 10 interactions below. It looks fairly consistent with what we’ve seen from Jeff Han, Apple and others which is good as it starts to develop standards, allowing a transfer of learning to consumers.
- Tap and Double-tap – Touch and release to click. This is the most basic touch action. Can also double-tap to open files and folders. Tolerances are tuned to be larger than with a mouse. This works everywhere.
- Drag – Touch and slide your finger on screen. Like a dragging with a mouse, this moves icons around the desktop, moves windows, selects text (by dragging left or right), etc. This works everywhere.
- Scroll – Drag up or down on the content (not the scrollbar!) of scrollable window to scroll. This may sound basic, but it is the most used (and most useful – it’s a lot easier than targeting the scrollbar!) gesture in the beta according to our telemetry. You’ll notice details that make this a more natural interaction: the inertia if you toss the page and the little bounce when the end of the page is reached. Scrolling is one of the most common activities on the web and in email, and the ability to drag and toss the page is a perfect match for the strengths of touch (simple quick drags on screen). Scrolling is available with one or more fingers. This works in most applications that use standard scrollbars.
- Zoom – Pinch two fingers together or apart to zoom in or out on a document. This comes in handy when looking at photos or reading documents on a small laptop. This works in applications that support mouse wheel zooming.
- Two-Finger Tap – tapping with two fingers simultaneously zooms in about the center of the gesture or restores to the default zoom – great for zooming in on hyperlinks. Applications need to add code to support this.
- Rotate – Touch two spots on a digital photo and twist to rotate it just like a real photo. Applications need to add code to support this.
- Flicks – Flick left or right to navigate back and forward in a browser and other apps. This works in most applications that support back and forward.
- Press-and-hold – Hold your finger on screen for a moment and release after the animation to get a right-click. This works everywhere.
- Or, press-and-tap with a second finger – to get right-click, just like you would click the right button on a mouse or trackpad. This works everywhere.
Awkward name, awkward use cases. There may be uses for this concept but this video doesn’t show anything very compelling. I will say, it has an interesting design appearance.
Webdesigner Depot has a retrospective look at GUIs of operating systems since 1981. Having been around long enough to remember the days of command line user interface. I can appreciate such breakthrough designs such as the Xerox Star UI. As clunky as it looks by today’s standards, I was a revolution.
When I started working at Xerox in 1996, they were still using “Global View” UI on some computers. Although the system had been surpassed in many ways by other 1996 OSs, some of the “old-timers” at Xerox insisted there were many things about it that have not yet been equaled in ease of use in modern operating systems (such as file sharing and network printing). Unfortunately, I didn’t get to use the system and it wasn’t until they were gone I realized Global View was essentially the same as Star.
Another interesting note, at the time I was unaware of the advances in UI in the Unix world. Irix 3 in 1986 was well ahead of it’s time with greater color-depth and a more mature design than other more mainstream systems.
Over the years a range of GUI’s have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh, Windows, Linux, Symbian OS, and more.
We’ll be taking a look at the evolution of the interface designs of the major operating systems since the 80’s.
I should mention that this article showcases only the significant advances in GUI design (not operating system advances) and also not all of the graphical user interfaces and operating systems existing today. Read more…
If you’ve seen the movie Minority Report, you’ve been influenced by the gestural, wall-size projection screen used by the main character in one scene. This concept in development at MIT, takes this one step further allowing the screen to be projected anywhere and portable with the user.
I’m sure most if not all of this is vaporware but the concept is what’s inspiring.
