Thoughts on Interaction Design

The first Service Design conference was a big success, at least in terms of attendance. It was sold out as I found out when I tried to register. Bugger….Anyway, I guess it is clear that I am interested in Service Design. After reading some really evangelistic articles of Service Design pioneers I expanded my search using Google. One of the things I quickly found out that it is perhaps not as new as we all may think. Sure, online services are relatively new and bring new challenges and opportunities. But wasn’t even the oldest profession in the world a ’service’? Perhaps it wasn’t designed by service designers but I guess it proofed its worth. Even more interesting is that I found a serious body of knowledge on service design and management with many books written such as for example ‘ITIL Service Design’. So what is going on here? Are we User Experience people again thinking that we have discovered a new area that we can claim only to find out ten years later that some other discipline has already covered it extensively? Read the rest of this entry »

Computer applications are not humans, they are ‘machines’, we all know that. Yet, they have a behavior, not always very human-like but it is a behavior. Applications show me things, they tell me things, they make sounds and they react in a certain way when I try to make them do something. We interact with each other as I react on what it tells me and vice versa. It is perhaps not always sophisticated behavior and it is perhaps better not compared to human behavior at all, but it somehow almost feels like you are interacting with a person.

So if we think about an application as a person, what kind of person would it be? Is it a rude person or a very gentle one? Is it a blunt person or very tactful person. Does it like me, or is it just doing what I asked? You may wonder why I ask all these questions. The main reason is that as a designer of an application we basically have the ability to determine what kind of ‘person’ the application will be and how it will behave. Read the rest of this entry »

I finally got myself an iPhone, …. and it is reeeaaally nice! Perhaps not the best phone on the market but using it is a real joy. One of the great things about it is that the interaction feels so smooth and sweet. It made me wonder what makes it so nice. One of the things I want to show you in this article is how this actually works in practice and what makes it such a good user experience. Have a look at this small video that shows what happens when you delete an email:

It is just a simple function that any email application has, but what is so special about the way it has been implemented on the iPhone? You have to look at the details of the interaction to understand it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently a colleague of mine who owns an iPhone showed me how you set an alarm on the iPhone. He was really liking it and so did I at first sight. I pulled out my own Nokia phone and compared it with the iPhone. My feeling was that the iPhone solution ‘felt’ better but that the Nokia solution may actually be better in terms of usability and effectiveness. Nonetheless, the iPhone seems to be a nice compromise between usability and fun that makes the end-result still interesting or even better than the Nokia solution. So is it a good thing to sacrifice usability over fun? Is that what ‘User Experience’ is all about?

Here are the two interfaces:

Let’s examine this case a bit further… Read the rest of this entry »

I bought a PS3 just when it came out last year. It is a really nice console and one of the things that really interest me is using it to play my movies. The interface is very media oriented as it shows ‘video’, ‘pictures’ and ‘music’ prominently in the main menu. I don’t really care much for the pictures and music menus though. I have my pictures on Picasaweb and my music is in iTunes. Why would I copy all of those to the PS3? Unless a future firmware update will allow me to connect to iTunes or to online photo galleries I guess I would never really start using it. Anyway, being able to play my movies is very useful and cool for me!

One very interesting feature that was delivered in the latest firmware update for the PS3 is the ability to play DivX movies. Great! Now I don’t have to re-code all my movies to MP4 anymore, since that was the only format it would play up until now. So now I can happily use the PS3 to what all my movies on my television. A media center should aways provide support for the most common formats per media type. I never understood why Sony only supported MP4 which is not very common yet. Nonetheless, even with DivX support there is still a lot of other stuff to improve in order to make the user experience really good. Here’s a couple of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, another blog. This time it will be my own personal blog. But don’t worry, no stories about my dog, children or my super sport car. Not only because I don’t have any of them, but because this blog will only feature stories about matters relating to Interaction Design or simply the use of things.

Every month I’ll try to write an article about something that caught my attention and I will discuss the interaction issues and provide my view on them. Perhaps I may occasionally provide ways to improve the interaction! We’ll see how it goes, for now I simply wish you happy readings.